Why Time Blocking Keeps Failing You

"It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope... Each letter was then extracted, unfolded, smoothed flat with the palm of his hand, and read with deliberate, unhurried precision. Only when one piece of correspondence was thoroughly digested and placed in its neat, appointed stack would he permit himself to move on to the next." That’s an extract from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot’s continuation novel, The Monogram Murders, which captures a part of Hercule Poirot’s morning routine with his letter-opening ritual. Something he did at the same time each day, at the breakfast table.  And it connects nicely with today’s episode. So let’s begin.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy Discover my Apple Productivity Programme Use the early-bird discount code caps27eb to get $25.00 off    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 | 434 Hello, and welcome to episode 434 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 begin, with Apple launching their latest operating systems last Monday, I have updated my Apple Productivity Course.  The course is not about tips and tricks; you can get all those on YouTube. This course is about helping you to build a 100% Apple productivity system that will keep you focused on what matters, when it matters and help keep and store important information so you know where to find it when you need it.  No subscriptions to third-party apps, just a simple set of productivity tools that do exactly what they were designed to do. Keep you on time and organised. I will put a link in the show notes to where you can learn more about this; if I may say so, fantastic course. Okay, on with the episode. Something that many people miss about time blocking is that it’s not just another way to organise your calendar. It’s actually a way to reframe how you approach your work. Over the last 26 years or so, certainly since the explosion of digital task managers, many people have become focused on the number of things they have to do.  Yet, that wasn’t always the case. For example, if you had to go into town to buy something, you would also naturally look for other things you may have to do while you were in town. Perhaps drop some dry cleaning off, or buy some stamps at the post office. You would do as many of these chores as you could in the time that you had available. I’ve spoken before about how the likes of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and CS Lewis had time set aside for dealing with their correspondence. It was never about how many letters they replied to. It was simply spending an hour or so each day writing replies.  If they didn’t get through their pile of letters in the time they had, they would leave what was left until the next day when they replied to their letters. Yet today, I find that so many people are stressed out and worried about the number of things they have on their lists and the size of their backlogs. Yet, it really doesn’t matter how many things you’ve got to do; if you’re like most people, you will have far more things than you will ever have the time to do anyway.  What really matters is how you use the time you have available to do the things that really matter.  That leads me nicely on to this week’s question. Unfortunately, the Mystery Podcast Voice is locked away in a room preparing for an important exam tomorrow, so once again, you’re stuck with me asking the question.  This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried organising my calendar and protecting time, as you call it, for doing my email and messages and focused work. Yet, I really struggle. I find I ignore the time blocks and then feel guilty at the end of the day because I didn’t get done what I wanted to do. What am I doing wrong?  Hi Jim, thank you for your question.  Well, the simple answer, and I know this will be a bit harsh, is that you are ignoring your protected time.  Time blocking only works if you respect the time blocks you set for yourself.  However, let me take you back to the opening of this podcast and the excerpt I shared from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot continuation novel.  “It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope…” The key part of this was “it was Hercule Poirot’s custom…” The key to succeeding with time blocking is consistency. If it was your custom to drink a cup of tea or coffee each morning when you wake up, it would never be something you would ignore. It’s your “custom” to drink tea or coffee when you wake up.  If someone dragged you out of bed for whatever reason, it would not be long before you were structuring your day mentally, wondering where you would get your morning tea or coffee.  As I write this script, my mother is currently at Dublin Airport waiting for a flight to Paris. She’s travelled through the night by bus and, on arrival at the airport, the first thing she did was to go and get herself a cup of tea. Why? Because it’s her “custom” to have tea first thing in the morning. And while it is not a normal day, she still follows her routine.  The most successful coaching clients I have are the ones who decide to protect the same time each day for doing their most important work.  Now, the CEOs among these clients find this easier, as they are in a position of authority and find saying “no” to interruptions easier than most.  One client of mine gets to his office at around 8:00 am and from 8:30 to 10 am he closes his office door and does the most pressing pieces of work he has that day.  Because he knows there will be no interruptions—everyone in his office knows not to interrupt him during this time—he can sit down and give 100% focus to the work he is doing.  And because he does this every day, none of his team ever considers interrupting him.  But time blocking goes beyond this.  I mentioned earlier that time blocking is not another cool way to organise your calendar. It’s a reframing exercise.  What I mean by this is that the purpose of time blocking is to say I have this large pile of work to do. I am going to work on it for the next two hours. When the two hours are up, I will stop.  It doesn’t matter whether there are twenty, thirty, fifty or a hundred things to do. You do as many as you can in the time that you have. Stop, and return to the pile the next time you have a time block for working on the pile.  Now there is an interesting shift that happens to your mind when you focus on the time you have rather than the number you have.  Let’s imagine you have twenty things to do and you have 90 minutes protected for doing them.  As you begin, you’re not that aware of the time. But once you go past sixty minutes and you see you only have 30 minutes left, your focus narrows. You tense up slightly, and you speed up.  It might have taken you an hour to do eleven tasks; I can promise you that if you have nine tasks left and only twenty-five minutes in which to do them, you will finish.  You become hyper-focused, blocking out all external distractions.  This is the reverse of what happens when you don’t have a time constraint. With no time constraint, you will let in all sorts of distractions.  Oh, I must check to see if those shoes have come back into stock. Oh, I’ll just message Jessica to see how her presentation went yesterday. Oh yeah, how did Arsenal get on last night in the FA Cup? I’d better go and refill my water bottle. And how much time do all these little things swallow up? Just those 4, if all you did was exactly what those four things said, that’ll be ten lost minutes, at least.  But you know Jessica will reply, and you will feel obliged to reply to her reply, and now you’re in a full-blown conversation. You’re suddenly focused on trying to do your tasks and thinking of your replies to Jessica.  That’s why you should never begin a message thread just before sitting down to do some focused work. Do it when you’re finished, or else you’ll find yourself splitting your concentration and not doing either thing well.  Another mistake with time blocking is to block too much time in any given day.  Really, for time blocking to be effective, I would advise caution.  Two hours for focused work and another hour of admin and communications is a good balance. That leaves you with at least five hours where you can attend meetings, deal with sudden and unexpected emergencies and the regular daily workplace socialising. (And of course your mandatory mid-morning and afternoon tea breaks) I’ve seen people try and protect far too much time, which then leaves them with little to no flexibility. Days never go according to plan. Each day will throw something unexpected up. That could be a traffic jam, a colleague calling in sick, or Andy from the accounts cornering you in the staff canteen to tell you a bit of gossip.  Or your computer crashes, the Internet goes down, your boss calls an urgent meeting in 30 minutes in meeting room five—the one where they keep the difficult questions and uncomfortable chairs. You know the kind of meeting they can be.  I’ve found, after working with nearly 500 clients over the years, that the optimum time for time blocking is three hours a day. If you can get to that level and be consistent with your times, you’ll find that adopting time blocking techniques quickly becomes a custom you follow every day.  You don’t become more productive and better at managing time passively. It requires action. It’s up to you to decide whether you will shut off potential interruptions, say no to a spurious meeting request or allow yourself to be distracted by low-level things like checking football scores or shoe availability.  Yet the thing to always remember is that of all the things in your control each day, the one thing that will remain constant is the passing of time. Time does not recognise a vacuum. It continues whether you stare out the window wondering what to do next, scroll through the news or take a nap.  It’s fixed. All you have are your 24 hours each day.  The one variable you have is what you do each day. That remains your decision.  If you give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of each day to decide what your priorities will be tomorrow and what you will do in your protected time, you will find that, on the whole, you will get a lot of what you planned to do done.  I hope this has helped, Jim, and 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.   

How often do you take a mid-morning tea break? I mean a proper break, where you stop work for fifteen minutes or so mid-morning?  It turns out very few people do this these days. And if they do get themselves a cup of tea or coffee, it’s done on the go or at their desks while continuing to work.  Complete madness. Is it any wonder why so many people feel burnt out, exhausted and unable to spend any quality time with their nearest and dearest?  This week, we’re looking at why bringing back your mid-morning and afternoon breaks might be the most productive thing you could do.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Learn more about my private coaching programmes 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 | 433 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.  Back in the day, in traditional knowledge work jobs, most people had to be at their workplace by 9 AM. You would get a tea break mid-morning, usually around 11 or 11:15, then you would get a lunch break, probably 12:30 or 1 PM, then in the afternoon there'd be another tea break around 3:00 pm, and finally you would finish work, perhaps at 5:30 PM Our days were structured. Time anchors marked our day: start times, mid-morning breaks, lunchtimes, afternoon breaks, and when we finished work.  Over the last few years or so, and certainly since the pandemic, these natural time anchors have been disappearing. Working from home, having more flexible working times, and working across multiple different time zones have all accelerated the erosion of these natural breaks. But these time anchors mattered. They told your brain to take a rest. Today, because those time anchors have practically disappeared, we end up switching our attention from one problem to the next. To an email or a message, back to the report we’re supposed to finish today, then to the presentation due next week, a quick check of a project that we're working on to answer a question. It's just non-stop. No time for a tea break or sometimes even a lunch break.  Now, because there are no natural rhythms in our days, and no time anchors to give us a break, we end up feeling completely exhausted at the end of them. But it didn't just happen at work. We also had time anchors at home too. We would wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and sit down to watch our favourite TV shows at the same time.  We'd also eat our lunch, breakfast, and dinner at the same time. These were mini time anchors that told our brain to rest. When you remove those anchors, your brain doesn't know when to rest, and it just gets completely worn out. This week’s question is about why you feel so exhausted and tired, with no energy left to even decide what to have for dinner and what to do about it to bring some sense of calm back into your days So, without further ado. I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s Question, but she’s once again on one of her little holidays. So, I’m afraid you’re stuck with my voice this week.  This week’s question comes from Paul. Paul asks, hi Carl, I was recently promoted, and now my days just feel like a blur, and I struggle to see if I have done anything important or not. It just feels like I spend all day putting out other people’s fires. I rarely get time for a proper lunch break, and I feel completely worn out by the time I get home. What can I do to bring some focus back to my days? Hi Paul, thank you for your question.  To get us started, let’s step back in time a little.  Office work in the 1950s and 60s in the UK was pretty structured for most people. You were expected to arrive at your desk on time every day. Habitual lateness was a serious disciplinary offence.  Then there were recognised mid-morning and afternoon breaks, where we’d meet colleagues from other departments and talk football, cricket or what was on the TV last night. We rarely talked about work during those 15 minutes or so.  Those anchors were like shared signals. You started together, breaked together, and finished together. Now, everything is blurred. Remote work, flexible hours, global teams, all great in theory. But in practice, it means people are never really off.  And never really on either. It's just a permanent in-between. That mushiness can really wear you down. We’ve lost that daily rhythm. Even if it felt rigid, there was a kind of contained calm. A boundary around tasks. Now we just dip in and out all day. Messages, calls, emails all blending together. And this isn’t just nostalgia. In many ways, I was lucky to be a smoker in my early days of work. My breaks were a chance to grab a crafty cigarette, meet other smokers, and talk about our weekends and the crazy things we did.  I remember, as a salesperson, always heading out back for a cigarette after each appointment. It was a chance to reset after a meeting with a customer and prepare myself for the next appointment.  And while the phenomenon called “attention residue” wasn’t recognised in the early 90s, we now know that our brains don’t simply turn off from one context to the next; we tend to think through what happened, perhaps plan out when we will do what we committed to, and process our emotions.  And as a salesperson, there were often a lot of emotions, usually around frustration and disappointment—I wasn’t a great salesperson.   Our new way of working carries a real cognitive cost with all that context switching. There’s no time to reset or deal with that inevitable attention residue. Without natural breaks in the day, your brain never gets to rest or reset. You might think, “Oh, I'm being flexible”, but what your nervous system feels is a constant low-level of anxiety.  It's like eating all day but never having a proper meal. You're full, but unsatisfied and somehow exhausted. So, Paul, to get things back under control, recognise that you do need to give your brain a chance to catch up. It needs a break and time to reset so you can start the next task or meeting prepared.  Now, we’re not talking about a lot of time. Ten to fifteen minutes; that’s all you need. I was recently working with a new client, and she shared her calendar with me. From the moment she began work on Monday morning, she was in back-to-back meetings.  There was no break or buffer time between meetings.  We discovered that all these meetings had consequences. There was no time to prepare for future meetings, and because she never got a break, by the time the meetings were over, usually around 3:30 pm, she was so exhausted that all she did was read through her emails and messages.  She just didn’t have the energy to think about replying to any of them.  The solution was to enforce a ten-minute break between meetings, a 30-minute mid-morning buffer break and a proper lunch break.  While this ultimately reduced the number of meetings she attended each day, it also reduced her exhaustion and gave her energy later in the day to think and respond to emails and messages.  When I spoke to her last week, I asked her if she felt she needed to add more meetings back into her day, and she laughed before replying, “Not a chance!” She is getting more work done, feeling less tired, and has time to read through the next day’s meeting agendas.  It is often a case of taking one step back to move two steps forward. Remove one meeting a day to free up time and allow your brain to catch up with everything coming at you.  A lot of this comes back to the principles I teach in my Quiet Productivity Method programme. Slowing down produces better results, allows for better thinking, and that leads to fewer mistakes.  If you watch interviews with CEOs of large companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, they all seem so relaxed and laid-back.  These people run huge companies, yet you sense that if a catastrophe were to occur at any of them, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or, until recently, Tim Cook would calmly assess what happened before offering a calm, well-thought-out response.  And yet, if you were to search for the daily routine of these CEOs, you’d find a well-structured day with plenty of breaks, including lunch breaks that avoid talking shop and plenty of quiet thinking time.  Another tip I can give you here is to use pen and paper to map out your day.  You don’t need anything as sophisticated as a Franklin Planner or Bullet Journal, a simple A5 notebook would do.  Before you end the day, give yourself 5 to 10 minutes to draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left, write out your appointments for tomorrow, and on the right, list out the tasks you need to or should do. By writing your appointments first, you can see how much time you have available for doing tasks.  If you had six hours of meetings, took a 1-hour lunch break, and had at least 10 minutes between meetings, you would likely have only 30 minutes for tasks.  You’d see that and would design a day that reflects that.  That’s often the problem with a 100% digital system. You get lulled into believing you can do more than is possible, and you end up frustrated and disappointed by what you can actually do.  There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the way digital systems are designed. You can throw 1000s of tasks in there without any problems at all.  Your problems start when you decide you need to do those tasks and you realise there’s no time to do them.  This is why, in my recent YouTube video, I talked about why I keep coming back to a Franklin Planner. It stops me from being overly ambitious, and I have a simple record of what I got done each day.  I jokingly tell people who ask why I use such an antiquated planner—the Franklin Planner’s nearly 50 years old now—that my planner keeps me sane. And it does.  It alerts me very quickly if I am trying to do too much in one day.  One final bit of advice I can give you, Paul, is something that recently worked well with a client of mine who had a similar problem with fire-fighting all day.  He was very sceptical about time blocking, believing he had to be available for his team in case they needed him urgently.  The truth was he’d accidentally trained his team to come to him with all sorts of problems that didn’t need his input. So, we tested blocking 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning to do his most important work of the day.  The caveat here was that he told his team that if they needed him, they had to come to him before 9:30; otherwise, it would have to wait until after 11:00.  The first week was challenging, and people tried to interrupt. But the second week he began to see some serious results.  He began getting his work done; backlogs disappeared, and his team began respecting his time. Fewer fires, fewer interruptions and a lot less stress.  Often, the fix for our time management problems is a lot simpler than we may imagine.  Give your brain a chance to rest and reset between meetings and sessions of work (you only need 10 to 15 minutes), protect time for your most important work, and ensure you have a 10- to 15-minute buffer between meetings.  And remember, you may be able to rush from one problem to the next. But your brain is not quite as fast. It needs time to process your thoughts and emotions. Give it a chance.  And take a tea break and your lunch break. Not doing so will leave you exhausted and worn out at the end of the day.  By the way, I can recommend a nice cup of Yorkshire Tea mid-morning and in the afternoon. It’ll leave you feeling refreshed and ready for anything.  Thank you, Paul, 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 the top 5 pain points with time management and productivity that over 400 of my past and current coaching clients have faced?  The results may, or may not, surprise you.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   You can learn more about the Planning Course here Use the coupon code: planning26   Learn more about the Productivity Academy Learn more about my private coaching programmes 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 | 432 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.   

An overflowing task manager and a crowded-out calendar are rarely ever caused by using the wrong tools. The problem happened well before you entered the task or added the appointment to your task manager or calendar.  And that’s what we’re looking at this week.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about my Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived    Apollo 13 Lunar Module Start-up Procedures   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 |431 Hello, and welcome to episode 431 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 were to look at your appointments for tomorrow right now, how much time do you have that is not already committed? Two, three, four hours?  Now look at your task manager: how many tasks are overdue or scheduled for tomorrow?  In the uncommitted time you have tomorrow, are you confident you can complete all those tasks?  Most people who do this little exercise, if they are being honest with themselves, will answer “no chance”.  And this is the top reason why so many people are struggling with time management and productivity today. And there is a word for it: Overcommitted.  It’s not the tools they use or any other complex reason. It’s simply because they’ve allowed themselves to become overcommitted.  This week, I’m looking at how this happens and what you can do to unravel the problem so you are operating within your natural capacity, not overworked or under pressure, and not feeling like you are sinking under the weight of unrealistic deadlines and commitments.  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 Douglas. Douglas asks, “Hi, Carl, I know you tell people to keep their task manager clean and tight, but I find that impossible. I’m collecting 20 or more things into my inbox each day; I often have 4 or 5 hours of meetings, and I have to deal with at least 130 emails and messages each day. How would you get all that under control?” Hi Douglas, thank you for your question.  I did some quick maths on the numbers you provided and noticed that if you are collecting, on average, 25 new tasks a day, have 130 emails and messages to deal with and only have 3 ½ hours of non-meeting time each day, that would mean you would have only 1 minute and 13 seconds to spend on each item.  Yet those numbers assume you are not taking time for lunch or coffee or a glass of water. If you were to include a 30-minute lunch break and 15 minutes to get water and coffee each day, that would leave you with less than a minute available for each email, message, and task.  Is that realistic?  Based on that quick calculation, the issue here is one of capacity. You’ve no capacity left. All that’s needed to completely destroy your day is an urgent, last-minute meeting request, an issue that prevents you from doing any of your planned work or simply an IT problem that doesn’t allow you to do the work you planned.  I can assure you, Douglas, you are not alone here.  There are millions of people all around the world struggling with the same thing. They’re overcommitted.  Which is why it’s completely irrelevant what tools you’re using.  The first thing I would advise someone in this situation is to do the maths I did above. Now, I know I do not have all the information. I don’t know what work you do, your position in the company, or whether you lead a team.  But what I do know is you’ve gone beyond your natural capacity, and now you will be building up enormous backlogs. You will be struggling to meet your deadlines, and I bet when you get home you’re exhausted.  This exercise will tell you how much capacity you have.  If the meetings you attend each day are non-negotiable, you will need to find a way to reduce the number of tasks you receive. Which means you will likely have to do something uncomfortable.  Reject requests.  Now I know this is very hard to do. Nobody likes disappointing someone. But the choice is: either you disappoint them when they ask, or you disappoint them when you cannot deliver what you promised on time. And I think failing to deliver on your commitments is the bigger disappointment. Think of it this way. If you say no and they ask someone else who can deliver, then you’ve actually helped them.  Sure, your pride may be slightly hurt, but this isn’t about your pride. This is about setting yourself realistic expectations on what you can and cannot do.  However, there is another possible solution. Cap your daily meetings. If, when you do the little exercise on how much non-committed time you have, you realise that you will need four hours of meeting-free time each day, then you cap your meeting time at 3 hours per day.  This will then leave you with 4 or 5 hours for your tasks.  Now there are various ways to do this. You could use a calendar service such as Calendly or Acuity to open blocks of time for people to schedule meetings with you, or you could tell people that you’ve reached your meeting limit for the day and ask if you could meet on another day.  You will be surprised how accommodating people can be.  Another consideration is to reduce the meeting times to 30 minutes. This has the added advantage that people will get to the point much faster, and you’ll find you still cover everything that needs to be covered.  I’ve learned many things over the years I’ve been coaching and helping people with their time management and productivity, but one of those lessons stands out: Every “yes” has an invisible “no”.  In other words, every time you accept another commitment, whether it is a meeting or a piece of work, you are saying no to something else you could have done with that time.  But it goes beyond that. Meetings have a nasty habit of generating more commitments. Another meeting, more emails and tasks, for example.  And pieces of work generate what Cal Newport calls “admin costs”; these are the little extra tasks, such as finding information, following up, and answering questions. They are the invisible “nos” rarely ever considered.  So in your situation, Douglas, there are a few questions to ask yourself: Do all your regular meetings require your presence? If not, perhaps you could drop one or two of them. If you can, don’t allow the saved time to be replaced by other meetings. Protect that time. Save it for the things you have prioritised.  The goal here is to gradually withdraw from these meetings.  If you manage a team, perhaps you could delegate attendance at some of these meetings to one of your team members. They can then report back to you with a summary of what happened.  What are you collecting? You mentioned that you collect around 20 new items on average each day. That seems like a lot. What are you collecting?  There are some things that will need to be collected; you may need to contact someone for information or organise the purchase of new equipment.  But if you are collecting emails to respond to and articles to read, then your task manager is not the best place for them. Emails and messages have their own self-contained apps. Keep everything within these walls. For instance, if you have a Slack message to reply to but need to think about it first, flag the message. Or you can use Claude or ChatGPT to find all your unresponded messages for today. You could even set this up as an automation  With email, it’s easier. You can create an Action folder for emails you need to respond to and drop them in there. Then give yourself some time later in the day to respond to them.  The goal here is to reduce the pressure on your capacity, and one of the fastest ways to do that is to reduce friction points.  For example, if you get an email you feel you should respond to and then move it to your task manager, that’s a lot of additional time—remember “admin cost”? It’s far faster to drag and drop it into an Action folder.  A great question to ask yourself is: What has to come out of my week to make it more realistic?  Juggling your current commitments around, fiddling with your task manager or trying new tools is not addressing the real issue.  The real issue is a capacity one. You’re trying to do far more than you can do. You won’t find the solution until you address that.  I would begin with: How much time do you need to stay on top of your work? That could be an extra five or six hours a week. Now you have something tangible to work with.  For those of you who have watched the film Apollo 13, there’s a scene where the character Ken Mattingly is in the lunar module flight simulator, and they are trying to find a start-up procedure that would not draw more than 20 amps.  This meant they had to find out what they could turn on and what they could not.  After hours of testing, they finally had a start-up procedure that draws just under 20 amps.  I will put a link to the clip in the show notes, as it is a great illustration of what we sometimes have to do with the time we have. It’s finite, and often the only things we can do are the essentials. There’s no time for the “would like to do” or low-value tasks.  In many ways, an issue we all share is that we think time is infinite, when it’s the opposite. It’s finite, and how we allocate our time each day is largely our choice.  The key is understanding that there are always trade-offs and consequences when we allocate our time. If we say yes to one thing, we say no to another, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.  As I am writing this script, I am not responding to an urgent email or talking with my family. Equally, when I am chatting with my wife, I am not writing feedback for my coaching clients.  So, Douglas, look at your calendar. How are you allocating your time each week? What can you remove to free up time for the things you want to spend it on?  It won’t be easy, and you will feel uncomfortable doing it. However, I can assure you that it is possible and when you have done it, you will feel lighter, more focused and appreciate your time in ways you’ve never considered. Plus, the bonus is that other people will begin respecting your time more than they do today.  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.   

Have you ever wondered if your time management and productivity issues might not be about the amount of work you have to do, but rather the way you think about that work?  That’s what we’re looking at today.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |430 Hello, and welcome to episode 430 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.  Since I began helping people directly with time management and productivity, I would say that around 60% of people’s struggles come down to the way they organise their work, around 35% come down to the way they think about it, and only 5% come down to the volume of work coming in.  Talk to practically anyone today, and they will tell you they are busy. It’s almost like a badge of honour.  The number one reason people say they don’t exercise is that they don’t have enough time. Is that really true, or is it that they value doing something else more?  I’m reminded of something the legendary Jim Rohn used to say: “Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?” If I look at my to-do list right now, I guess I am busy. I have this script, a newsletter and a long-form article to write. I also have to record three YouTube Shorts videos, edit them and record this podcast.  I have around five pieces of feedback to write for my coaching clients, do my exercise, take Louis for a walk, and cook dinner.  Yet, I don’t feel busy. The reason is that I understand that it doesn’t all have to be done today. All I have to do is decide what can be done today and do that.  The truth is, we all have far more to do than we can do at any one time. And equally true is that it doesn’t have to be done right now or even today.  So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who is always busy and never has time to do their most important work?  Hi Elaine, love the question. Short and sweet.  I would first refer you to the Jim Rohn question ” Busy doing what?”  If you feel constantly busy from the moment you wake up until you go to bed, the first thing I would suggest is to look at what you are doing during your waking hours.  Write down what you are doing over a period of 48 hours or so. Not just your professional work, but your personal things too.  I would also add that you write out what you would prefer to be doing instead. Write these down side by side. Draw a vertical line down the middle of a page, and on the left write what you spend your days doing, and on the right what you would prefer to be doing instead.  Be completely honest. If you discover, for example, that you spend 90 minutes a day on social media and a further 2 hours watching TV, write that down.  You’re not going to necessarily remove those. Instead, what you want to be asking yourself is whether spending time on the activities you currently spend time on is worthwhile.  Initially, you will try to justify spending time on these activities. This is the same response we have when someone challenges one of our opinions. Our natural instinct is to defend ourselves.  When you first write down these activities. Don’t judge. Just write them down. All you want to know is precisely where your time goes.  I’ve found that if you leave it for a few days and come back to it, you will begin to look at things a little more objectively. Instead of trying to justify the expense of your time, you begin to ask questions such as: Do I really need to do that? And is this regular event I attend worth all the extra work it produces?  Often, the problem for many people is that everything they want to do requires time. Just sitting and thinking requires time, as does making a cup of coffee. Time never stands still.  And the problem with time, or rather, the way we measure time, is that we have 24 hours each day. That’s the one immovable part we have to deal with each day, but at least that gives us one constant. That can be worked with. If you were to study the habits and routines of highly productive people, you would notice that they all have strong barriers between the three basics of their lives.  There’s time for work, time for family and social life, and time for self.  There’s no discipline involved. It’s just a strict division of time between the three.  Their wake-up time is consistent. For example, if they wake up at 7:30 am, they wake up at that time every day, including weekends. Then they do something that I find most unproductive people don’t do. They follow the same routine.  It’s their morning routine.  Morning routines are interesting because each person’s is different.  Yet, the most stressed-out, overwhelmed and exhausted people I work with have no morning routine. They crawl out of bed, rush out the door and start on their work. There’s no moment for themselves.  These are the people who immediately pick up their phones to check for messages and start replying.  No tea or coffee or even a bathroom break. Just open eyes, open phone, start the workday.  Think about what’s happening there. You come into the conscious world, and before anything else, you allow other people’s priorities to take control of your day.  And if you have young kids, when you leave the bedroom, your kids need attention; perhaps you need to get them ready for school, make their breakfast, all this with a brain full of all those messages you just read from your phone before you left the bedroom.  One of my favourite YouTube channels is Harry’s Garage. The channel is about cars, and Harry often reviews very expensive Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Range Rovers, and Aston Martins.  These are highly tuned performance cars, yet Harry will always remind us that when you start a car cold, before you can put it through its paces, you need to give it time to reach optimal operating temperature.  Funnily enough, that’s the same for you and me. You’re not going to be at your best the moment you wake up, which means any decision you make first thing is unlikely to be the best decision you make.  So, try starting your day slowly. Give yourself thirty minutes and make sure those thirty minutes are focused on you.  When it comes to work, set a strict start time for yourself.  So, to keep the examples in line, let’s imagine you start your work at 9:00 am. Then do not consider work before then. That may take a little adjusting to, but if you develop a strong set of morning routines, you won’t be thinking about work until it’s time for work.  Then, here’s a trick. Do not allow anything to be scheduled for the first 30 minutes of your day. This is your getting a heads up on the day time. It’s when you can say hello and chat with your co-workers, deal with any emergencies and check to make sure there are no fires lurking in your inbox.  Those thirty minutes are also a great time to review your plan for the day.  Now, when I say “plan,” I simply mean making sure you know where your appointments are and what your must-do tasks for the day are. It’s a simple two-minute review and gives you time to map out your day.  Mapping out your day is just about deciding when you will do your must-do tasks. Your meetings are fixed, so what you are looking for is the gaps in between and deciding what you will do in those gaps.  Now here’s the thing: just as it’s important to have a strict start time, there also needs to be a strict closing time for work.  Let’s imagine that you set 6:00 pm as your end-of-work time; this means that around 5:50 pm, you stop what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and reschedule anything you didn’t get to.  Then look at what you have on your calendar for tomorrow, and decide on your two must-do tasks. That’s it. Done.  Then it’s family and social time.  Now, as you listen to these words, it may sound like a lot. But is it? What you are doing is automating as much as you can so you are not rushing around trying to decide what to do next. It’s all this decision-making that’s mentally exhausting you.  If you can automate these decisions by having a morning routine, a work closing-down sequence, and mapping out your workday, you’ll find that you feel less busy, more in control and much less tired at the end of the day.  We feel so busy all the time because we tend to look at long lists of things to do. For example, if you look at your Slack messages or email, you are looking at each individual message. It’s natural. It’s a long list of stuff you feel you must attend to.  Yet, if you were to treat your Slack or Teams messages and email as one task, all you need to decide is when you will handle them.  For example, if you decide that at 4:30 pm you will work on your messages and spend an hour on them, then it doesn’t matter how many messages you have in there. You will respond to as many as you can.  Another quick tip: start with the oldest first. These can often be dealt with much faster than messages that have just come in. Don’t worry, if you stay consistent with this, you’ll soon find yourself getting back on top of them.  Now, for those of you who tend to procrastinate, the science behind it is fascinating. Procrastination is a perfectly normal human reaction. It has nothing to do with laziness or any other human condition. It’s actually what psychologists call an “emotional regulation response”. When you look at a long report or a messy inbox, your brain sees a threat. It anticipates boredom, failure, or making a fool of yourself. And so your brain sets off an alarm to protect you.  And how does it protect you? By pushing you towards easier tasks. Cleaning your desk or looking at social media, for example. (Or, in my case, cleaning a fountain pen and refilling it)  Incredibly productive people aren’t immune to these negative emotions. Instead, what they have done is build systems and processes to do their work. “It’s 4:30 pm, time to do my communications.” Oh, it’s time to work on that report”.  These systems make it extremely difficult to not do the work.  This is why putting in place strict barriers around your personal, social and professional life works. You are not allowing your brain to set off an emotional response. You turn up, you know what to do and do it.  And this planning does not take much time. Planning the day may take 5 minutes; reviewing your plan in the first 30 minutes of your workday may take 2 minutes. That’s it.  Then you follow your plan. Sure, there will be interruptions, distractions and other people’s emergencies. Deal with them as best you can, then get back to your plan. If you have to revise your plan, do so. This does not mean you’ve failed. All it means is you’ve adjusted your plan.  I hope that helps, Elaine. 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.   

When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off. Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat.  Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week?  Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |429 Hello, and welcome to episode 429 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 was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did.  It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days.  Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness.  And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm.  To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about.  So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails. Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.  This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars.  That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them.  The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar.  You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours.  Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day.  So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar.  However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage.  Let’s break this down. When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment? If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar.  This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point.  So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity.  Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity.  Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself.  A one-hour meeting, for example, often requires some preparation time, and then you need to be in the place where the meeting is being held, even if it’s an online meeting.  I do my coaching calls using Zoom, and for each session, there is at least fifteen minutes of prep time and 2 or 3 minutes to set up the computer for the call.  Today, I have four coaching calls; that means I need to find an additional hour beyond the four hours of calls. It’s not four hours; it’s five.  You might think the proposal you must send today will only take thirty minutes to finish, but that does not take into account interruptions, the possibility that you need to ask someone for further information, and then have to wait for them to come back to you before you can finish.  There’s a good chance that your thirty minutes turn into 90 minutes.  What all this means is that if your calendar is packed with meetings and time blocks without any buffer time, you’re going to go beyond your capacity for the day.  This relates to the difficulty we all have predicting how long a task will take. We don’t know. Not with any degree of accuracy.  And that’s because each day is different, with different distractions, emergencies and interruptions.  For me, recording and preparing a YouTube video generally takes six hours. Yet, yesterday it took me eight.  I have a process for making my videos that I’ve developed over ten years, and I create a video every week. You would have thought by now I would be able to predict with accuracy how long a video would take to prepare. Not a chance.  My wife was at home yesterday; there was an unexpected issue with one of the tools I use for making videos, and in the middle of making the video, there was an urgent message I needed to respond to.  None of those disruptions was predictable. Yet they happened despite all the safeguards I have on my calendar and in my processes.  The job still got done; the video was finished and handed over to my video editor for cleanup and polishing.  Yet because of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, the one task I had to get done yesterday was the video. Nothing else mattered.  What all this means is that it’s important to be in control of your calendar and be self-aware enough to know your capacity. If you don’t know where your limit is, you’ll be like a fuel tank with no air pocket. You’ll burst or, worse, explode.  Not in a literal sense, but you’ll exhaust yourself, make more mistakes that need rectifying later (more pressure on your capacity) and miss deadlines, which is not great for your promotional prospects or for your business’s reputation.  Unfortunately, the solution to this is not easy. It can go against all your human instincts to be helpful and courteous to other people.  The first step is to look at your regular meetings. Ask: How did that meeting come into your life?   Some meetings are unavoidable. A weekly team meeting where everyone updates the boss on their project progress, discusses progress on various proposals, sales or other work, and alerts colleagues of any unforeseen issues or delays.  Yet, there will be other meetings where, when you ask yourself how they got into your life, you realise it was because you tried to be nice to someone, but a meeting that brings you or the other attendees no real value.  These meetings should be removed.  One-to-ones with your team members or boss may also be important meetings, as they add value to theirs and your work.  Really, what you are doing is a meeting audit. Do you really have to be in all these meetings? Given that you are in a leadership position, you may be able to delegate some of these meetings to your team. This is great, as it helps them develop their skills, removes a commitment from your calendar, and you only need a short summary from your team member about what happened.  Next up, I would suggest putting a cap on your meetings each week. But before you do that, ask how much time, on average, do you need for strategic thinking and doing your important focused work?  How much time, again on average, do you need each day to deal with your communications?  I say “on average” because you can only work on averages. You will be interrupted; there will be days when your energy levels will be low, and conversely, there will be days with no distractions or interruptions, you’re feeling great, and you can get a lot of work done.  For example, I allow six hours for doing my videos each week. Yet, some weeks it takes me four; others, like yesterday, it can take eight. The important thing is that when the week began, I knew how much time I needed for the important work I needed to do that week.  Once you know how much time each week you want for your deeper, focused work and handling your communications, that will tell you how much time you have left for meetings and other appointments.  However, don’t be tempted to fill all that time with meetings. Hold back. There will inevitably be some emergencies that require an ad hoc meeting. Protect time for those.  So, let’s say you need 12 hours a week for your strategy work, admin and communications; that leaves you with around 28 hours for meetings.  Remember, though, you will likely want an hour for lunch, so that reduces it to 23 hours. I would push back further and limit meeting time to 15 hours a week. That becomes your cap.  Once you reach fifteen hours of meetings for the week, then you push any new requests to the following week.  I know this can be difficult to do at first. It’s more so if you’ve always said yes to meetings in the past. Suddenly declining meeting requests can cause some surprise from your colleagues.  But think about the consequences. Every thirty-minute meeting you accept, that’s thirty minutes you cannot work on anything else. Remember, there’s also the admin cost of accepting that meeting, which will likely steal a further 15 minutes from you.  A question I teach my coaching clients to ask themselves when considering a meeting is: What are the consequences of accepting this meeting request? Another question to ask yourself is: What would happen to my email and messages backlog if I were to spend thirty minutes or more each day dedicated to working on it?  You’ll be surprised how easy it is to stay on top of it if you have a dedicated block of time for responding to your actionable emails. Sure, there’ll likely be a backlog at first, but this is where consistency soon clears any backlog.  So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps. Find your limit, limit your meetings per week and protect time for the important parts of your work.  I know, simple in theory, but difficult to do. You don’t have to do all this immediately; you can gradually reduce your meetings per week and slowly build up your strategy and thinking time.  Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.  And just a reminder, if you want to learn realistic, practical methods for getting the most out of your time both professionally and personally, then I have places available in my brand new Productivity Academy. I will put the details of this in the show notes for you. I’d love to welcome you there.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |428 Hello, and welcome to episode 428 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 this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements.  If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically.  And this is important.  Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”. And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions.  When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions.  In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling.  And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks.  It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should.  When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed.  When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex.  And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice.  This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day?  Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question.  When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided.  Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day.  If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions.  And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow.  So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there.  However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything.  This is where routines, processes and rules come into play.  Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions: What deserves my attention? What can wait? What should I ignore? What should I delegate? When is “good enough” truly good enough? If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves.  And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up. This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done.  Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it.  And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it.  For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work.  It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask.  Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that.  In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!)  It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work.  They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow.  I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him.  It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed.  When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day.  Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it.  So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day. Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make.  For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done.  It tells me that my workday is now finished. There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed.  That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that.  And then there are your rules, or standards.  Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to.  For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time.  Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait.  For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can” This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait.  The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”.  If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example.  Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.” What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloading your decision-making abilities, which in turn reduces the amount of mental fatigue and tiredness you experience at the end of the day.  Daily planning the day before is a decision-reducing routine. When you plan the day before, it leaves you knowing exactly what you need to do when you begin the next day. No decisions to be made. You know exactly what needs to be done and when you will do it.  You can then preserve your energy for the decisions that may need to be made if something changes and you have to decide what you will work on. The new circumstances.  This is why NASA’s Mission Control in Houston in the 1960s practised every possible eventuality before any mission. It was this practice that enabled the brilliant people in Mission Control to get the Apollo 13 crew home safely in April 1970. They had practised that eventuality so many times that the decisions required were already made for them.  So there you go, Fabian. I hope that has helped.  Turn your daily planning into an end-of-day routine. Create a checklist to guide you (again reducing decisions). This daily planning will also help reduce the decisions you need to make the next day, which in turn will leave you feeling less exhausted at the end of the day.  Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.  Don’t forget, my Productivity Academy is now open, and we have a date for our first live event. Sunday, 30 August. The topic will be where to start and a general Q&A session. Not to be missed. Joining now will give you plenty of time to do your homework before the session.  I’ll leave the details of the Academy in the show notes for you.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy 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 |427 Hello, and welcome to episode 427 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.  Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity.  In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier.  This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated. AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not.  When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist.  For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut.  I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year.  I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it.  Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do.  No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin.  No need for AI to get involved.  AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change.  There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time.  Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep.  The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time.  And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot.  Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives. Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive.  As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning. They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course.  Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system.  This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised. Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed. A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor.  YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity.  Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it.  It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming. I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday.  On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree.  I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people.  And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit! It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work.  It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years.  Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger.  Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous. And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different. Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects.  You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice.  The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally.  The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day. This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain. Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change. They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges.  My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me! I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.”  the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned.  All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years. I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them.  Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it. So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you.  I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations. Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher.  Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally. The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you.  It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving. All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself.  And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work.  It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them.  My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing.  But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work.  If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn. The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice. If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member.  I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.  I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon.  Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.   

What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Time Sector System here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |426 Hello, and welcome to episode 426 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 were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes.  And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time.  Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days). Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work. I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office.  Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home.  I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s.  In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen.  It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you.  If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot.  Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool.  So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus? Hi Judy, thank you for your question. There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication.  Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done.  Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do.  Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics. Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists.  All great features.  And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do.  Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you.  With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two. With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer.  Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise.  But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.  When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day.  For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete.  If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do.  However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work.  Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have.  One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task.  Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday.  On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day.  I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates.  Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day.  This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work.  With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted.  Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier.  I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45.  I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did.  So where should a task list fit into your overall system?  Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it.  If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month.  On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin.  Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work.  That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes.  This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you. If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable.  The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work.  I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away.  This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else.  I hope that has helped, Judy. 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.   

The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."  Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life.  No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences.  A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill.  These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day.  Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for.  In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through.  Let’s go. 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 Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.   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 |425 Hello, and welcome to episode 425 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.  Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative.  They usually go something like: “Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster”  Well, was is a disaster?  Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned.  It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster.  The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan.  And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events. But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again.  This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?” Hi Will,  Thank you for your question.  Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week.  You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that.  The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has.  There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too.  We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week.  There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting.  None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate.  If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story.  One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with. For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script.  Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording.  Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer.  This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life:  Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work) Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally. Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc.  And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered.  Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week.  I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you. The next idea is related to your daily planning.  Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan.  Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon.  Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning.  That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have.  And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning.  Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing.  It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down.  You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep.  And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets.  Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day?  This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down.  The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop.  Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do. Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day.  You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left.  For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes.  Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow. What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that.  I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work.  Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time.  So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting.  So there you go, Will. I hope that has helped. 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.