Achieving Your Goals With Dr Kourosh Dini

Is self-discipline overrated? That’s what we’re looking at this week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 360 Hello, and welcome to episode 360 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. We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true?  Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there’s going to be a good chance you will fail.  There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he’s a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don’t need it.  There is a better way. It’s not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don’t need discipline to achieve these things.  Now, before we get to the question, Here’s a little reminder about this week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.  If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there’s a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register.  The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time.  For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions.  If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It’s your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you.  Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I’ve never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this. Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.  I’ve always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we’re at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.)  And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it’s often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there’s that underlying sense that it’s bad.  I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018.  In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined.  He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn’t discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn’t wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn’t in the mood to write, he still wrote.  Why? He didn’t need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit.  Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious.  You don’t need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It’s just what you do.  And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don’t think of it as discipline. It isn’t. It’s just what you do.  Take planning your day at the end of the day.  Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I’m still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today.  There was no discipline involved. I also had a great excuse. I’d been on the go since 8:30 am and it was 11:45 pm. I could easily have skipped it. Yet I didn’t. Why? Because that is what I do in the evening. I give myself five to ten minutes to plan the day.  I love the quote from Jim Rohn: “each day you get to choose between two pains. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline”. I know what happens if I don’t plan the day—the next day starts out of control. I have no focus and anything loud and “urgent” becomes the priority—even when it isn’t a priority.  Most people’s problems with time management and productivity is because they skip the five to ten minutes planning the day. If you don’t have a plan for the day, you will end up on someone else’s plan and they don’t care about how you feel—a bit harsh, I know, but it’s true.  For most things you don’t need discipline. It’s a choice. Do you scroll social media or read a book? Do you sit on the sofa watching TV or go out for a walk? Do you eat a chocolate bar or a banana? That’s nothing to do with discipline. It’s a choice. Reading a book is easy. Get a physical book, not an ebook, and place it on the coffee table near your favourite armchair or sofa. Then give yourself ten minutes each day to sit and read it. If you place a bookmark in the book, you can see the bookmark gradually falling to the bottom (the end of the book).  And as the book is on your coffee table, you will see it every time you sit down. More often than not, you will read more than ten minutes.  Ultimately, those people you think are living a “disciplined life” just have certain habits. Getting up early and writing a journal is a habit. It doesn’t need discipline if it’s a habit.  My wife writes her journal every evening before she goes to bed. She uses Day One, the digital journal, and writes on her laptop. She sits on the sofa, opens her laptop and writes. Some days she’ll only write for five minutes. Other days she’ll write of over an hour. For her she sees it as winding down at the end of the day. Absolutely no discipline is involved.  It would be strange not seeing her on the sofa writing a journal. Yet for many sitting down to write a journal requires discipline. Ask my wife if writing her journal requires discipline and she’ll laugh at you.  You don’t need discipline if you have the right habits.  How do you develop habits. Well, firstly I would recommend you read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book.  Secondly, identify the habit you want to develop. I always suggest your morning routines are a good place to e to start. These are the easiest kind of habits to develop. What would you like to do first thing in the morning?  You may want to read, meditate, exercise or write a journal. Pick one thing.  For example, if you choose to write a journal, start by making yourself your favourite morning drink, then sit down somewhere comfortable and begin writing. Give yourself five to ten minutes to write.  You can help yourself by putting your journal next to your kettle or coffee maker before you go to bed. That way when you wake up, turn on the kettle you see your journal there waiting for you.  Something James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits is to reduce the friction. This is akin to those who wish to exercise in the morning, putting out their exercise clothes next to their bed before going to bed. It reduces the friction of choosing what to wear. I think of this as minimising the risk of finding an excuse.  These are all great tips. Yet, the disciplined life that Charles Aznavour lived didn’t need tricks. It appeared disciplined, yet it was just how he lived his life. And that’s the goal here; to build daily habits that are effortless because that is what you do.  Most people eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time? Why? It’s because that’s what they do. When I commuted to the office, I would catch the 8:05 bus each morning. I knew what time to leave the house because I knew how long it would take to walk to the bus stop. It was simply what I did.  I should give you one little tip I’ve used in the past. If, say, I want to read a book each evening but find myself watching TV instead, what I will do is tell myself I must read for ten minutes before rewarding myself with turning on the TV. The advantage of this little trick is you still get to do the thing you want to do—watch TV—but you also get to do the other thing you struggle doing. Eventually, it just becomes a habit. Watching TV without reading becomes uncomfortable.  So there you go, Ryan. It’s not really about being disciplined. It’s more about choosing what you want to do and carrying it through.  Your calendar can help you there. Remember the saying, what goes on your calendar gets done. With this, the key is if you don’t or cannot do something you must remove it from your calendar. That act of moving it from your calendar reminds you about you haven’t done. It acts a good incentive.  If, for example, you schedule going for a walk after lunch, but keep skipping it, because you are removing it every day, you will begin asking yourself what’s wrong and re-assess things. Perhaps you will be more consistent if you go for your walk in the morning or evening.  I hope that has helped, Ryan. Think about what you want to do, when you want to do it and do it. Sooner rather later it will be just what you do.  Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The first session is on Friday evening, it will be something you will never regret.  Thank you for your question Ryan and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

In this week’s episode, what’s the best way to manage projects?  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 359 Hello, and welcome to episode 359 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. From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty.  In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is.  This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done’s author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted.  At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more. Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there’s a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such.  And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do. Before we get to the heart of today’s podcast, it’s important that I clear this misunderstanding up.  If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues.  You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context.  Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access.  In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next.  Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose.  The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects.  So, now you have the background, I think it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together? Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.  I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not.  Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media.  That’s seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I’d waste hours just organising it.  A podcast episode is something I do every week. It’s not a project. It’s just part of my work.  Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script.  Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it.  The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That’s it.  I don’t need a project folder for any of this.  There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it.  So, there in essence you have all three tools working together.  I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for.  My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast. My calendar protects enough time each week to ensure I get each part of the process completed.  If you want to simplify things I would suggest looking at how you define a project.  In my eyes, a project is something unique, something you either have not done before or rarely ever do. Typical projects would be: Moving house Buying a new car Planning a vacation Setting up a new payroll system Starting a business Finding a new job Doing the work you are employed to do is not a project—well not unless you are a project manager. An advertising agency isn’t going to treat each new client as a “project”. An advertising agency creates advertising campaigns every day.  The graphic designer has a list of designs they are working on and when they begin their day they only need to choose which campaign they will work on that day.  Designing is their job.  The same goes for the copywriter. When they begin their day they choose which campaign to work on and that is dictated by when the next client meeting is. What is the work you are employed to do?  A teacher doesn’t treat each new class as a project. They have a process or system for preparing their materials and when the teaching time begins they teach.  It’s possible that a lot of your work does require a place to keep meeting notes, plans and links to documents you may be working on. That’s what your notes app is for.  Your notes app has replaced the filing cabinet today. Filing cabinets were static—they never moved. Your digital notes app can go with you wherever you go.  If you do have any projects, that is where the information and resources go.  All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you should be working on today.  You may have tasks like: Work on new payroll system project Finish proposal for Universal Exports Follow up Mr Oddjob at Auric Enterprises Clear Action This Day folder Your calendar tells you if your task list for the day is realistic. If you have six hours of meetings today and you plan to work on your payroll project and finish the proposal for Universal Exports, you’re likely being a little ambitious.  You calendar tells you if you have time to do the things you’d like to do that day.  You can go further, though and use your calendar to protect time for doing your key work.  If, for example, you want to (or need to) spend two hours working on the Universal Exports proposal, then you can block time on your calendar for doing that work. There might be some time sensitivity involved there. Getting the proposal to Universal Exports might be the most important thing you need to do that day. That would be flagged in your task manager as a non-negotiable task that day.  The daily and weekly planning is where I would decide what I will be working on that day or week.  The planning sessions are where you can step back and look at the bigger landscape of what you have to do and decide where you will put your time that day.  Right now, I do have a project. I am in the process of recording the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. This is not something I can sit down a real off as a single task.  I need to book the recording studio and sound engineer and my voice will only last for around 3 hours before I begin sounding like an out of tune frog.  The only thing I need in my system each week is when I need to be at the recording studio. Currently that is Wednesday nights at 7:30. We record until 10:30 pm. I don’t need a task for any of that. That’s on my calendar.  The next day, the sound engineer sends me the recordings and I go through them to make sure everything sounds right. I have a task in my task manager that pops up each Thursday reminding me to review that previous day’s recordings.  I have a project folder for the Your Time, Your Way book. That contains all my notes, meeting notes and any information I may need. Right now, though, I don’t need to reference that. I just need to turn up at the recording studio on Wednesday nights, record the audiobook and review the recordings the next day.  The important thing is not to confuse your core work with projects. Core work is the work you are employed to do. Designers design, teachers teach, managers manage, truck drivers drive a truck.  All you need is a list of tasks you want to complete each day and get on and complete as many as you can. The majority of those tasks will be related to your core work. A project, on the other hand, is something unique, often outside of your core work, that needs additional time for doing. You may need to utilise your unique skills to complete that project, you may only have a small say in the project. Either way, on a day to day basis, the only thing you need to decide is what your next task is and do that.  This year is the fifth anniversary of the Time Sector System course. I am currently in the process of re-recording and updating that course.  Is it a project or just part of my core work.  I know from experience that if I treat it as a project things will get complicated.  Yet, I’ve create many courses over the years. I know the process.  For an update, it’s to review and update the course outline. Then schedule time on my calendar for recording and editing it. There will be some additional tasks related to marketing, but I am not there yet. I’m recording, so the driver is my calendar.  Hopefully that has helped, Benjamin. The key is to simplify things as much as possible. Try to avoid creating projects and instead ask if there is a process you can follow. Most things you frequently do has a process.  Processes speed everything up. As the Formula 1 season is about to start, I’m reminded of one of the sports best leaders, Ross Brawn’s comment on running a team.  The new car for the new season is never considered a project. It’s a process. There’s a time to begin work on the new car, there’s a time to test the new car, etc. Yet none of that is considered a project. Aerodynamicists do the aerodynamics. Engineers work on the chassis and engine and the logistics people work on the logistics. It’s what they do every day.  Yet, building a new wind tunnel, or engineering factory, that would be a project. These “projects” are rare and need specialist inputs.  Don’t forget, we’re two weeks away from the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025. This is your opportunity to take a live workshop with me where I help you to create and build your very own productivity system, A system that works for you.  Thank you Benjamin for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 358 Hello, and welcome to episode 358 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. Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years.  If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.  It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.  This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.  Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.  On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.  In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.  Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.  Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.   Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.  I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.  However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.  Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.  The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.  What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”?  It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.  Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.  The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too). If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.  It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.  The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.  When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.  If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.  And let’s be honest, if someone’s been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they’re not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.  If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.  The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won’t do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating. I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn’t produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.  You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.  Doing the work is the only way the work will get done. So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.  For that, you don’t need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.  I’ve always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.  If you Google Albert Einstein’s desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos’ desk from the early days of Amazon, you’ll see something very similar.  These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.  Sadly, unproductive people don’t achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I’ll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.  A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.  The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.  The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.  The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.  Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.  Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.  For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.  Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.  I don’t need a lot of tools to to do that.  A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.  I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I’ve been using for almost 16 years now.  And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.  Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.  The tools I use I’ve used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that’s good because I’m not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.  If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.  If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph. If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide.  If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car.  If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.  Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.  So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don’t need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.  You just need time protected to get the work done.  Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more). It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 357 Hello, and welcome to episode 356 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 is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth’s atmosphere and safely back to earth.  All they had to play with was 16 amps; that’s it. Sixteen amps isn’t enough to boil a kettle. And we’re talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely. In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It’s painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit. We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days. Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that’s it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you. The problem is you don’t have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won’t be operating at your most productive.  This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they’re going and what weather conditions to expect. Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they’ve done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them.  This week’s question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It’s never-ending and I don’t have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything? Hi Tina, thank you for your question.  There’s an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor.  There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don’t have time, it’s not going to get done.  Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables.  For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early.  When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I’ve already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it.  One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm.  I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of: This Week Next Week This Month Next Month Long-Term and on Hold.  When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it?  The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task.  Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together.  For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows.  The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning.  Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination.  When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It was a non-negotiable part of their week.  And if you think about it, you don’t pop out to the supermarket to buy food individually. It’s not like you run out of broccoli and go to the supermarket to buy only broccoli. You would add broccoli to your shopping list and buy it when you do your grocery shopping.  Well, we can adopt the same principle here.  Like most people, I get email every day. The problem is, you and I have no idea how many emails we will get. It’s a random number. This makes it practically impossible to know before the day starts what you will need to do.  However, what you can do is have a set amount of time to deal with your actionable email each day.  I have a process. Before the day starts I clear my inbox, filtering out the stuff I don’t need and archiving things I may need. The actionable email goes into an Action This Day folder in my email app and later in the day I dedicate an hour for clearing that folder.  I have my Action This Day folder set up so the oldest email is at the top of the list and I start there. It doesn’t matter if I have fifty or eighty actionable emails. I give myself an hour work on it and once the hour is up I stop.  I repeat this every day, so my emails are not backlogging. Most days I can clear them all, some days I cannot. But as I always begin with the oldest email, nobody will be waiting more than 24 hours for a reply.  This means it really doesn’t matter how many messages I get each day. While I can’t predict how many I will get each day, I have been able to pin down how long I spend on it each day (around an hour and twenty minutes) and that’s it.  Another thing you can do is to default all new tasks to next week, not this week. It’s tempting to throw everything into this week, but if everything goes into this week, you’re going to be swamped.  Much of what we are asked to do doesn’t need to be done straight away. It can wait. The advantage of waiting is many things end up sorting themselves out.  There’s a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yikzak Shamir, who would take every letter, memo and document he received and put it on a pile on a side table. He wouldn’t look at it for a week or ten days.  When he did go through the pile, he found 90% of what he was being asked to sort out had sorted itself out and the remaining 10% needed his attention.  Of course, today not touching something for a week to ten days might not be practical, but it does highlight another issue we find ourselves in—rushing to do something that if left alone will sort itself out.  The final piece of this puzzle, is how you organise your day. This is where your calendar takes priority and where the time limit comes to play.  We have twenty-four hours. From that we need to sleep, eat and take care of our personal hygiene. That’s going to take up around nine to ten hours of your day. So, in reality you have around fourteen hours to play with.  Where will you do your most important work? This is where your calendar comes in.  Most of us have meetings and often we have no control over when those will be. However, what you can do is block your calendar for doing your most important work.  For example, you could protect two hours in the morning for doing your critical work. And then an hour in the afternoon for dealing with your communications—the action this day folder.  That’s only three hours. If you’re working a typical eight hour day, that still leaves you with five hours for meetings snd other stuff that may need to be done.  If you can consistently follow that practice, you’ll soon see a lot of that work that’s piling up getting done.  One thing to keep in mind is the work will never stop.  There’s a story that on Queen Elizabeth’s final day, she still had to deal with her official documents and messages. It’s likely you will too. Stuff to do will never stop coming.  All you have are your resources and of those time is the most limited. The question is—how much time are you will to give to those tasks?  So, Tina, the best advice I can give you is to sort your tasks by when you will do them. This week, next week, later this month or next month.  From there, categorise your tasks into the type of work involved. That could be Writing time, communications, admin, chores etc.  Then. Look at your calendar and see where you can protect time for doing that work.  And that’s it. If you are consistent in following your calendar, you will find the right things are getting done on time and you’ll feel a lot less frazzled and overwhelmed.  Thank you, Tina for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.   

This week, Dr. Kourosh Dini returns to the podcast to discuss how we can ensure that the goals we set are achieved.    Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Should you take up journaling, and if you do, will it help you with your time management and productivity? That’s what we’re exploring this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 355 Hello, and welcome to episode 355 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. This year is the 10th anniversary since I took up consistent journaling. And it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever taken up.  Not only is it one of the most therapeutic things you can do, it’s also one of the best ways to organise your thoughts, work your way through problems and vent your anger towards those who really wind you up.  Over the years, I’ve also found that journaling has helped me to achieve my goals because each day I am writing about how I am doing and if I find myself making excusing, the act of writing out my excuses exposes them for what they really are—excuses.  So, this week, I’ve chosen a question related to journaling and I hope it will inspire you to invest in a quality notebook and pen and start doing it yourself. And if I can inspire just one of you to take it up and become a Samuel Pepys, I’ll be very happy.  So, to kick ups off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about your journaling habit numerous times. Do you think writing a journal has helped or hindered your productivity?  Hi Tom, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, I can say with certainty that journaling has contributed to my overall productivity.  To explain further, I write in my journal every morning, no matter where I am. And one of the things I always write down is my two objective tasks for the day. Those objectives are the two non-negotiable tasks for the day and by writing them down at the top of my journal entry, I have a way of ensuring I did them when I write my journal the next day,  But more powerfully, writing them down each morning focuses my mind on what needs to be done and how and when I will do them.  Those tasks are also in my task manager, but it’s the act of writing them out by hand that gives me the focus.  Writing a journal is much more than being an aid to productivity. It’s also a form of therapy.  Like most people, I feel frustrated, overwhelmed and stressed at times. Those feelings need an outlet. A negative way to do that is to get angry, shout, and scream. Sure, that blows off steam, but it also transfers your negative feelings to others—your colleagues and family. Not great.  Instead, if you have a way to write about these things, you start to find ways to solve whatever the underlying issues are. Writing slows down your thinking, and if you were to step back and analyse why you sometimes feel stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed, it is because you feel—incorrectly—everything has to be done right now.  That slowing down helps to bring back some perspective and you can decide when you will do something and what can be left until another day.  When it comes to achieving your goals, a journal is perhaps the best way to track progress. It can also help you establish new, positive habits. When I developed my morning routines around eight years ago, I chose to track them in my journal. I always draw a margin on left of the page, and I list out the six items I do as part of my morning routine: make coffee, wash face and teeth, drink lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and do my shoulder stretches.  I write them down at the top of my journal entry for the day in the margin. And, for the dopamine hit, I check them off too.  I exercise in the late afternoon and, again, I will write out what I did in the margin of my journal.  Now, I could spend a lot of money on habit-tracking apps, but with my journal, I’ve found no need. I have my record and can review it at any time.  Over the years, I’ve been asked what I write about and if I use any prompts. The answer is no. Well, apart from writing out my objectives for the day.  Now, prompts can be helpful when you first start—you can think about them as those little stabilisers we put on kids’ bikes to help them learn to ride. Sooner or later you want to take them off so you can experience the freedom of riding freely.  I write whatever’s on my mind that morning. If everything’s going great I write about that. If things are not so great I write about it and why I think things are not going as well as I want them to. I often find as I am writing about an issue, a solution begins to form in my mind and I will continue writing.  If a task comes from that solution, I can put that in its appropriate place later.  As a general rule, I will write for around fifteen minutes. However, if I don’t have much to write about, I will give it ten minutes. The weather’s a good subject to write about when you have little to write.  If there’s a lot on my mind, I’ll keep going until I’ve emptied my thoughts. That’s very rarely more than thirty minutes, though. Over the years, I’ve tried both analogue journaling—with pen and paper and digital journaling using an app called Day One.  On balance, I’ve found that pen and paper journaling works best.  I spend most of my working time in front of a screen. I type a lot. So, opening up a nice notebook and picking up a fountain pen is a lovely break from the constant screen time. It also feels a lot less rushed and more relaxing.  One thing I noticed when I was writing my journal in Day One—a popular digital journal—was I never went back to my old entries. I read enough typed documents on screen all day. I have no desire to read through more, even if it’s my journal.  I keep my old paper journals on my bookshelf and often skim through pages when waiting for a call to start. It’s incredibly nostalgic and leaves you realising you have accomplished a lot.  I was recently asked if I am worried about people reading my journals. Hahaha, that’s the point.  One of the inspirations for me to start writing a journal was how the journals of people like Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are still around.  These journals were written hundreds of years ago and, in the case of Samuel Pepys, are a snapshot of how we lived in the 17th Century.  Pepys was very open about what he did. Some good things and a lot of bad things. But does he care we are reading them today? Of course not. He’s been dead for 320 years.  I have the same attitude. I’ve nothing to hide from my wife, and the journals are kept in my study—home office. If I lost my journal when travelling, so be it. There’s nothing scandalous in there—well, not yet anyway hahaha. There are a few tips I would share with you if you are thinking about journaling. Start on paper. Buy yourself a nice notebook. You’ll find bound notebooks with a hard cover are best. Choose A5 or B5 size. You’ll find an A4 notebook a little daunting at first.  Hardback notebooks will last a long time, and the hardcover will protect the pages better than a soft cover.  I would also suggest investing in a fountain pen. You can pick up a refillable one for less than $20 these days. Lamy Safaris are excellent pens, and so are the Pilot Metropolitans and Platinum Preppys.  If you invest in a fountain pen, ensure the paper you buy is fountain pen-friendly. Rhodia Web-books and Clairefontaine notebooks are good choices, as are many Japanese notebooks such as Midori’s MD notebooks.  When you start journaling, think of it as if you were meeting a stranger for the first time. You will naturally be a little reserved at first. You might only write about the weather and perhaps what you did yesterday.  As long as you remain consistent with it, you will soon open up. You’ll start writing a few thoughts and feelings after a few weeks. Let it roll and don’t hold back.  I would also recommend writing in the morning. You will likely be much more consistent that way. Evening times can be difficult because you will sometimes be tired. You may even have had a few too many G’nTs, and you won’t write.  Tie writing your journal to your morning routines. You don’t have to write for long. Give yourself ten minutes.  And if you want to be more focused, after writing the date at the top, write out your two must-do tasks for the day. That way, you have a method to hold yourself accountable. If, for whatever reason, you didn’t do your must-do tasks, dedicate a sentence or two to writing about why you didn’t do them.  This helps you because over time you may see a pattern developing. You might discover that afternoons are terrible for doing your focused work because your boss always wants to have meetings then. You can then use that information to change your structure.  If you draw a margin on the page, you can use the margin to track other data such as a food log, exercise and even your energy levels. I track my weight there. Each Wednesday, I weigh myself and write my weight in the margin (in a different coloured ink).  And there you go, Tom. Yes, journaling has helped me to be more productive. It slows me down and gets me to think better, leading to better focus on the day ahead. It also gives me a place to consider new ideas and play around with possible solutions.  I hope this episode has inspired some of you to start journaling. It’s a fantastic way to bring perspective on chaotic days and weeks. It also slows you down—always a good thing in a fast-paced world, and gives you a place to express your thoughts.  And who knows, you may be the next Samuel Pepys or Leonardo Da Vinci in three-hundred years or so.  Thank you, Tom, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.   

Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I’m going to share with you a few ways to change that.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 354 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. What’s the rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes.  It’s easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category.  The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making. I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk.  That’s an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level.  That’s the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive? Hi Richard, thank you for your question. One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done.  While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues.  The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else.  For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else.  In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn’t trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office. If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted.  Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers.  This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex.  Today, we often don’t feel we have that time. The truth is you do.  One thing I’ve learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They’re snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you’ve just given them more work to do today. You’re not going to be their favourite person.  One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules.  Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible.  There’s no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I’ve lost twenty minutes.  No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I’ve applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes.  Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email’s Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”.  It’s a process I repeat every day, and it’s ensured I never have an overwhelming backlog in email at any time.  Now, I do have some rules. For example, anything involving money, whether that is issuing a refund, or sorting out a discount code, I will deal with as soon as I see the issue—people are sensitive when it comes to money.  Also, questions from my Membership Community have priority as well as people who may have forgotten their password or are experiencing other difficulties getting into their learning centre dashboard.  Fortunately, these instances are rare. Perhaps three or four a month.  You can also apply rules for your core work—the work you are employed to do. Because your core work is work you have to do regularly, it’s easy to set up processes to do the work.  Once you have a process set up, you can protect the time on your calendar to ensure you have the time to do the work.  Because a process is something you repeat, you soon get fast at doing it. It’s a human form of automation. If you can fix it for the same time and day, it gets even better because you can start to accurately predict how long it will take you. And your colleagues learn your routines and will leave you alone.  My wife knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 every morning, I am doing my creative work and to leave me alone. That took a lot of training hahaha. There is a trick I learned from former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992, so before the proliferation of email and instant messages.  Whenever a letter or memo came into his office, he would move it to the side and leave it there for a week or ten days. What he discovered was that 90% of what had come in had resolved itself. The ten percent that was left was where he needed to apply his attention.  Rushing to respond or complete a piece of work often leads to unnecessary work. How many times have you responded to an email a few days after receiving it, only to be told the issue has been resolved?  Now you may not be able to sit on something today for a week, but it is possible to pause for 24 hours. All you need is a little confidence in yourself.  Slowing down is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have.  I remember when I used to pounce on an email from a student asking for help logging into their account, only to find a subsequent email come in telling me they had resolved their issue.  Now I wait an hour before responding. That way if a student does resolve their issue I am not wasting precious time resetting passwords that don’t need to be done.  I’m reminded of this question: What the rush? With 2025 goals.  It doesn’t matter what you have done on the 31st January. A 2025 goal is about what you have accomplished on the 31st December. The start will always be messy and inconsistent.  It’s likely you original ideas don’t work, but with a little patience and a few adjustments you will find the right strategy. The result you want will come on 31st December, not 31 January. You have plenty of time.  This idea of slowing down is at the heart of the Time Sector System. In the course, I recommend you default all new inputs to your Next Week folder. Something would have to be genuinely urgent to go into the This Week folder.  By applying the default to your Next Week folder, when you do the weekly planning it’s fantastic to discover that thirty to forty percent of what’s in there no longer needs to be done.  My wife is a get it done now person. Everything is urgent, even when it’s not. Out accountant in Korea is the opposite. Our accountant will ask us for the bank and credit card statements around six weeks before she needs them. When my wife receives that message, everything stops, and she rushes around trying to collect everything together in one afternoon. It leaves her exhausted, and inevitably, something’s missed, and she then has to repeat the stress the following week.  You want to be like our accountant. Work from your calendar, and ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to collect information. You don’t need to rush around panicking then.  Slow down, protect sufficient time for the bigger tasks and default all new tasks to next week. You will find you have less to do, and what you do have to do can be done slowly, more meticulously and with fewer mistakes.  Thank you, Edward, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, how to reduce procrastination and why you don’t want to completely remove it.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 353 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. We recently asked what’s the biggest thing that ruins your productivity on my YouTube community page. 58% of participants said procrastination.  In a way, that doesn’t surprise me. When you see the statistics on how many people spend time planning their days and weeks, I am actually surprised that the number isn’t higher. I’ll explain shortly. Now, procrastination has been around for a very long time. Leonardo Da Vinci only managed to finish a small number of paintings. Of the twenty paintings attributed to him, around five were finished.  Leonardo was a serial procrastinator. Yet, it was that procrastination that led to many of his inventions. If he had not procrastinated as much as he did, we would have many more of his paintings but very few of his notebooks full of drawings and diagrams.  The good news is, there are a few practices you can do that will reduce procrastination and enable you to be more internal about your days.  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 Carlos. Carlos asks, Hi Carl, what advice do you have for overcoming procrastination? Hi Carlos, thank you for your question.  As I alluded to, procrastination and daily and weekly planning are linked. When you are clear about what needs to be accomplished you will procrastinate less.  The problem when you have no plan is you waste a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be done. And then, it’s likely you will pick the easiest thing to do in the hope it will get you started.  It’s true, you will get started, but you will be doing low value tasks leaving behind the higher value ones. The ones you don’t know what needs to be done or what the first action is because you don’t have a plan.  And that leaves you at the end of the day looking at a list of important, high value things you didn’t do.  One way to overcome this is to be very clear about what the next action is. In my next YouTube video, coming out on Thursday, I explain why “think about” tasks are not really tasks and will be the ones you will sacrifice the moment your day becomes busy.  The reason why these get put off is because it’s not clear what the real action is. For example, if I had a task like “think about what to buy mum for her birthday”, I would procrastinate. It’s too much effort and is not the real task.  The real task might be to talk to my brother and sister about what they re getting my mum. Or I could talk to my father and ask him what he thinks she would like.  Which task would you most likely do: Think about what to buy mum for her birthday, or, call my brother and ask him what he’s getting mum for her birthday?  One is actionable the other is wishy washy. The wishy washy task is the one you will procrastinate on.  You will procrastinate because it’s not clear what needs to be done.  This is where planning comes in. When you have a plan for the day and are clear about what needs to be done, you will be less likely to procrastinate because your brain is subconsciously planning ahead for you. You’re doing one task and your brain is thinking, subconsciously, about what you will do next and how to complete the task.  This prevents your brain from going offline and procrastinating.  However, when you don’t have a plan for the day, none of that happens. Instead, you procrastinate. You are always on the lookout for something interesting to do, and anything that does not fit the mood you’re in will be skipped for something more interesting.  So, the first practice to develop is to plan your day. This does not take a long time. It can be done in five minutes. And the ideal time for maximum procrastination protection is to do it before you finish the day.  There’s something more intentional about starting your day knowing exactly what it is you want to get accomplished.  Now, there is a caveat here. If you are an early riser, you can do your planning for the day as part of your morning routine. After all, it’s only five minutes.  So how do you effectively plan your day? Step one. Look at your appointments for the day. How much time do you have left after your meetings and meal breaks? Step two is to look at your task list and choose actionable tasks that you can do in the time you have available.  Step three is to prioritise those tasks. Which ones are your non-negotiables? The ones that must be done today?  And that’s it.  To give you an example, Today, I have six hours of meetings. I also need to take Louis to his groomers for his haircut. In total, I have around seven and a half hours of commitments today.  That leaves me with around two hours for everything else. This means, the only task I can confidently complete today is this podcast script. So that’s what I have on my list of tasks.  There’s no point in me having twenty tasks on my to-do list. It would be impossible to do them all in two hours.  Now if I began the day with twenty tasks and seven and half hours of commitments, I would waste so much time trying to decide what to do—ie procrastinate. No! The only thing that matters is getting this script completed.  So, that’s my plan for the day.  Now there are other factors involved in procrastination. If you are sleep deprived, for example, you’re not going to be focused and you will procrastinate. All those shiny objects, social media feeds and click bait news will be attractive. Your brain’s tired and it won’t want to be doing anything that requires thought or creativity.  Similarly, if you eat a high carbohydrate lunch, you’re going to find staying on task in the afternoon challenging. The insulin spike that results in you feeling groggy and tired will cause you to procrastinate.  I would also add that if you are not moving enough you will catch yourself procrastinating. A good tip here is to get up after each session of work or meeting and go for a walk around your workplace for ten minutes.  While you’re walking, think about your next task and how you will do it. You will find when you settle down to get back to work, you are more focused and ready to go.  None of these reasons mean you are a serial procrastinator. It just means you’re tired. Fix that issue first. Get enough sleep, be careful what you eat at lunch time and make sure you move for ten minutes between sessions of work.  Do those four things: plan you day, get enough sleep, avoid carbs for lunch and move and you will see a significant reduction in the procrastination.  Now when talking about procrastination, we do have to be careful. Sometimes procrastination can be a good thing.  I mentioned Leonardo Da Vinci earlier. His procrastination is what led him to invent things hundreds of years before anyone else thought about them.  You see procrastination is really all about exploring ideas. The trouble today is there are far too many things we can procrastinate on.  You’re thinking about your summer holidays and remember you need to buy a new suitcase. So, you head online and search luggage. Yet, it’s eight months before you go on your holiday. You don’t need to buy or research new luggage now. Yet, that’s more interesting than whatever else you should be doing.  And because it’s so easy to do a Google search, you do that.  Now, had you added a task to research new luggage and added it to your long-term and on hold folder, it’s unlikely you would be thinking about luggage today. It collected, processed and in your system.  There’s a time for procrastination—the exploration of ideas, but it needs to be controlled.  A tip here is to keep a part of your day as free as you can. For instance, you could try to keep your afternoons as free as possible so if you do slip into procrastination, you’ve got your most important work done in the morning and your procrastination can be made useful.  This means when you plan your day, you make sure your most important work gets done in the morning.  Which comes back to ensuring you have a plan for your day.  So you don’t want to be eliminating procrastination completely. It’s your creative brain wanting to explore. It’s more a case of controlling it.  Which means it’s a good idea to monitor when you procrastinate. When I’ve done this, I find I procrastinate most in the early afternoons. Knowing this, I have designed my schedule to allow me time to take Louis for his walk. I know my brain wants to explore ideas at that time. What better way to do it than to be walking in nature and thinking about all these distractions and ideas?  What it comes down to is having a realistic plan for the day. If you find yourself staring at an impossible day, you will inevitably procrastinate. Then you will get annoyed with yourself. Yet, you can fix it. Be very clear about what your non-negotiable tasks for the day are.  Your brain will then take over and give you that sense of urgency to get the non-negotiable tasks done.  I’ve never been a fan of website blockers or forcing yourself to turn off your devices. I find those become a distraction in themselves because you are now worried about what you are missing.  What I’ve found works for my clients is to have that plan, be aware of how tired you are and if you are tired, take a nap, if you can, or get up and go for a walk. That way you softly remove the temptation to procrastinate and once back you can get on with your high-value work. I hope that has helped, Carlos. 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.  

What happened to my 2020/21 minimalist project, and where am I today? That’s the question I am answering today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 352 Hello, and welcome to episode 352 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. Towards the end of 2019, I decided that in 2020, I would go all in on a minimalist project. I had played around with it for a number of years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I formally turned it into a project and began the process of clearing out a lot of stuff I had collected that was no longer benefiting me.  And yes, four or five years ago, minimalism was a thing. Everyone was talking about it, and there were thousands of videos of people showcasing how bare and minimal their workspaces were.  It was a trend, and while that trend appears to be forgotten, I learned many things that I still practice today.  So, it was a nice surprise to find a question about it in my inbox a few weeks ago. I realised it was a good time to tell you about what I learned and what I am still practising today.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question… Which I realise I’ve already told you.  This week’s question comes from Milos. Milos asks, hi Carl, I remember a few years ago, you mentioned that you were about to start a minimalist project. How did it go, and are you still a minimalist? Hi Milos, thank you for your wonderful question.  Like most projects, or goals, designed to change how you do things, once you complete them, it’s easy to forget you ever did them. My minimalist project was such a project.  I changed a lot of things that I do automatically today, so your question caused me to reminisce on how things used to be.  I should point out that I wasn’t into extreme consumerism. I would replace my phone, iPads and computers when they stopped functioning in a way I needed them to do.  For example, my old Intel computer became very slow over a year when Apple switched from Intel chips to their M series. So much so that it took up to an hour to render a fifteen-minute YouTube video. When I changed my computer to an M series one, that time came down to around six minutes.  However, I think I am a bit of a hoarder, and I had boxes of old papers from my teaching days I no longer needed. I was always reluctant to throw away old clothes, believing one day I might regain the weight I had lost and would require those bigger sizes again.  My wardrobe, drawers and other cupboards were full of stuff I no longer needed and would never need again.  So that was where the project began. Clearing out old clothes and papers I no longer needed.  As with all endeavours like this, I did go a little extreme. My desk, for instance, was stripped of its soul—well, it felt like it. All I had on there was my computer, keyboard and trackpad. I found it became an uninspiring place to work.  So, gradually, I added some things back. An analogue clock—a tool I use to prevent time blindness when I get into a focused zone and a few little mementoes to bring some character back.  The biggest part of the project was clearing out drawers, cupboards and my wardrobe. That was liberating and I was surprised how much space I had once everything was cleared and either thrown away or taken to the recycling.  I moved house at the end of 2021, and that was an opportunity to complete the project—well, the clearing out of the old part of the project. However, the biggest change was in the way I approached purchasing.  I stopped buying electronic gadgets. I am in the Apple ecosystem and Apple’s products, on the whole, last a long time. For example, I have an iPad mini for reading ebooks, magazines and the newspaper. I’ve had the same iPad mini for the last five years. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon.  Another change was to apply some rules to my purchasing. This was inspired from how the British gentry in the early 1900s approached buying clothes and personal consumption items.  In the 1920s (and 30s), aristocrats bought clothes and necessities once. For instance, a young aristocrat would purchase a set of luggage that would last a lifetime.  If something broke or the leather tore, they would fix it. A new suitcase was not necessary.  These repairs added character and gave these items a unique look. It was also a much more environmentally friendly way to treat possessions than we do today—throwing away items once they are either out of date or have a minor problem and buying new ones.  It’s easy to tell ourselves that life was much simpler in those days. It wasn’t. People had just as many problems as we do today. They did not have the conveniences we have: no food delivery services, no Google or ChatGTP to find something out instantly, and no technology to make doing our work better and faster.  The clothing rule I applied was built around the principle of less is better. This translated into buying better quality and less of it. It also allowed me to apply a rule of only buying natural fibres. So that meant mainly cotton and wool.  I do have some un-natural fibre clothing. My exercise gear and a heavy winter coat, for example—it gets very cold in Korea. But apart from that, I stick to natural fibres.  Much of what I do today is inspired by the pre-consumerism days. Only buy what you need and buy the best quality you can afford.  I also learned something from Winston Churchill. Choose your suppliers. What this means is you use the same stores to buy your clothes and anything else you may need.  Winston Churchill, for instance bought all his suits from H W Poole—a London tailor in Savile Row. His shirts were bought at Turnbull and Asser, and his iconic cigars came from James Fox.  If you think about that for a moment, if you use the same suppliers for all your clothing and other things, you know your sizes and precisely what you want, which means you don’t need to research or waste a lot of time trying to find what you want. You reduce the paradox of choice and get back to living life.  Now, I cannot afford to buy suits from H W Poole or shirts from Turnbull and Asser, but I do have my own favourite suppliers.  I buy socks from Peper Harow, my sweaters from N Peal and Cordings of Piccadilly and coats from Barbour. Yes, they are expensive, but the clothing last a very long time and are all made from either cotton or wool.  Another lesson I learned from my minimalist project was the importance of rules and routines.  If you’ve read Around The World In Eighty Days or the books by P G Wodehouse and his characters Jeeves and Wooster, you may have noticed the main characters had strict rules and routines. Wake up times and when they expected their morning cup of tea. Dinner time was a social occasion with pre-dinner drinks and formal clothing.  Perhaps part of the reason for the increase in mental health issues today is because we no longer have these important daily rituals. It’s all go go go. No time to stop and appreciate sitting around a table with family and friends or going out for a daily walk, or even doing what in Around The World in Eighty days is called your “toilet”—which means washing and bathing.  These were deliberate activities, not rushed or forced. It was just what you naturally did each day.  There was a time for everything.  Another area of this period that has fascinated me was the way people approached writing and replying to letters. This was considered a joy and most people spent time each day doing it.  And there was a mix of personal and business letters that needed to be done and the volume was comparable to what we receive in emails and messages today.  The biggest difference was rather feeling they had to reply to everything each day, they focused on the amount of time they had available to write. I have adopted this approach myself. I don’t look at how many emails I need to reply to, I look at how much time I have and once that time is up, I stop.  If you do that every day, you will remain on top of your communications reasonably consistently.  I often hear about people doing a digital detox. One change I made, was to again take inspiration from the 1920s and 30s. In those days people bought their favourite newspaper and read the whole paper.  Now, many successful people still do this today. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase Bank and Warren Buffett for instance. They subscribe to their favourite newspapers and allocate time each day to read them.  This stops you from getting caught up in clip bait headlines and being “triggered” by low quality reporting.  So now I read the same newspaper every day and only look through my social media later in the evening when I have finished my day.  So the lessons I learned was to buy less stuff but better quality. That’s ensured my wardrobe is clean and not over-stuffed with clothes I won’t wear.  I have also structured my days better. There’s a time for doing my communications, eating with family and friends, and my favourite of all, going out for what we call our family walk. That’s with my wife and little Louis. He loves it, and my wife and I get some quality time most days.  All of this was inspired from reading history books and biographies and realising that minimalism isn’t about stripping everything out of your life so all you are left with is a soulless screen. It’s about removing things that no longer serve you, and leaving the things that mean something to you and living life by a set of rules you set yourself.  I hope that has answered your question, Milos. Thank you for asking it and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.   

What one thing could you do this month that would transform your productivity? That’s what I’m answering this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 351 Hello, and welcome to episode 351 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. It’s one of the strange quirks of human nature to overcomplicate things. This is particularly so when things start to go wrong.  In my favourite sport, rugby league—as in most team-based ball sports—the basics of winning a game are possession of the ball and territory. If you can consistently complete your sets in your opponent’s half of the field, you will likely win the game.  Drop the ball or give away silly penalties by overcomplicating moves, and you’ll make it very difficult to win the game.  Teams that lack confidence are particularly guilty of these mistakes. Watch any winning team, and you will see they stick to the basics and never panic when they go a try or goal behind.  You can see this in any workplace, too. Those people who rarely appear stressed or overwhelmed stick to the basics. They have processes for getting their core work done—the work they are employed to do.  Top salespeople dedicate time daily to prospecting and following up with their customers. CEOs ensure they have time for meeting with their leadership team weekly so they are aware of what’s going on and know where the potential issues are.  So, what can you do to ensure you stick to the basics each day to avoid those pernicious backlogs?  Well, before I answer that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from George. George asks, hi Carl, are there any strategies you know of that guarantees someone will always be on top of their work? Hi George, thank you for your question. I’ve always found it fascinating to look at occupations where mistakes can lead to a loss of life—airline pilots and surgeons, for example.  Before any flight, a pilot goes through a checklist to ensure the plane is in working order. They check the weather and the weight of the cargo—both of which can affect how the aircraft will fly.  They calculate the speed they need to reach before taking off and plot their flight path to avoid storms or dangerous weather fronts.  No pilot would ever consider not doing these checks. Indeed, not doing them would be an act of gross negligence and could potentially be career-ending.  Similarly, surgeons follow a checklist. They check the patient’s name, the type of surgery being carried out, and, if necessary, which side they will be operating on. They also check the patient’s blood pressure and other measurements.  Again, failure to do so would be considered gross negligence, and a doctor could be fired for not doing them.  Now, perhaps lives do not depend on you doing your job correctly, but approaching your work in the same way a pilot or surgeon does can ensure that your work gets done without missing essential tasks.  The first step is to identify your core work. The work you are employed to do at a micro-level. For example, if you manage a team of people, what do you need to do at a task level to manage your team?  That could be to prepare for and hold a weekly team meeting. It may involve setting aside time each month for a thirty-minute one-to-one session with each team member. That would translate into weekly tasks for preparing for the team meeting and scheduling appointments with your team.  A journalist’s core work may be to research a story and then write the story before the deadline. Imagine their deadline is 1 pm on Thursday; then the journalist could ensure sufficient time is protected before Thursday to get the story written and submitted before the deadline.  What are your core work tasks?  Next comes the all important communications and admin tasks. We all have them. The problem with these tasks is we cannot accurately estimate how much will come in.  Each morning, when I start my day, I have no idea how many emails I will have. Some days, it’s 80; other days, it can be as high as 150. Yet, one thing I can guarantee is that I will have email to deal with.  So, I protect an hour a day for dealing with communications. This way, I know that no backlogs will ever build, and nobody is waiting longer than 24 hours for my response.  Somedays, I need the whole hour; I may only need thirty minutes on other days. Yet I still protect an hour.  It’s no good “hoping” you will find the time to respond to your communications. You won’t find the time, and if you do not have a consistent amount of time to do it, backlogs will soon build.  You mentioned strategies, George, and the strategy is ensuring you have enough time protected for the key work you need to do.  This may mean you need to cap your meetings each week. Now, I know whenever I mention this, people recoil in fear. Yet, if you work an average of forty hours a week and spend thirty hours in meetings, how will you ever get your work done? How will you prevent backlogs?  Let me give you an example how being strategic with your time. I limit my coaching hours to twenty each week. Think of my coaching sessions as meetings. Following each session, I write feedback, which takes an average of twenty minutes to write.  I know I can dedicate an hour each day to writing feedback, so my limit is three feedbacks per day. That works out at twenty-one per week.  If I allow more than twenty hours for coaching sessions in a week, I will either have to reduce my other work or work longer hours. It would not be sustainable. While the money would be good, my health and effectiveness would suffer. So, it would only be a short-term benefit.  I’ve learned over the years that the only thing you control is what you do in the time you have each day. You cannot control time itself. That is fixed. When you realise that you see that you can only build strategies around what you do, that means getting comfortable saying no. You cannot say no to your boss and your customers, right? Well, yes and no.  You see, it comes back to that time issue. Twenty-four hours. That’s it. Now, if you are happy using all twenty-four hours running around for your boss and customers, that’s fine. But if you accept that, I would suggest you gain some self-respect.  I know that might be a bit harsh. But you are a valuable person. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has the right to demand all twenty-four hours of your time.  Sometimes, you do need to say no. You cannot do everything because everything takes time. The question then becomes how much time are you willing to to give to your boss and customers?  Let me give you an example. I protect two hours each day doing my focused work. Work that ultimately benefits my clients and customers. I also protect an hour for communications and thirty minutes for admin. In total, I protect three-and-a-half hours a day for meaningful work.  If I were working a typical eight-hour day, that means I still have four-and-a-half hours available for my boss, customers and clients.  Would four and a half hours be enough for you?  The “guarantee” that puts you on top of your work is consistency with your strategy.  Over the last few days, I’ve travelled back to Korea from Ireland. Door to door, it’s a thirty-hour trip. We set off at 2:00 am on Sunday from the west coast of Ireland and arrived back at our home around 30 hours later.  Between checking in, waiting for flights and flying, I stayed on top of my email and admin. The last thing I wanted when I got back home was a backlog of stuff to do.  Then, after some sleep, I went into my office and spent around three hours catching up with everything else.  Had I ignored my messages and admin, I could have lost a whole day trying to catch up. No, thank you. I’ll take advantage of the downtime when travelling to stay consistent.  By the way, a quick tip David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) gave me a few years ago is to block the whole of your first day back to catch up. If it’s a short trip, you can get away with half a day, but a whole day is always better.  Whatever work you do, there will always be tasks that are core to what you do. Those tasks need to be embedded into your days and weeks as must-do tasks. Must-do tasks are non-negotiable. Because they are non-negotiable, you allow no one—not your boss or customers—to steal that time from you.  Offer alternative times and days, but never negotiate on your core work times.  That’s the only strategy that’s ever worked and will be the only one that will work in the future.  Whatever industry you look at, the top performers know this and stick to it. It’s not just industries either. Top athletes, elite soldiers, and entertainers remain at the top of their field by being consistent with the basics—their core work.  So, spend a little time establishing your core work—the micro-level tasks you need to perform to stay on top of your work. Then, protect time for doing that work. Fix it in your calendar, and never ever let anyone steal that time away from you.  I hope that helps, George. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive New Year.