Your Time, Your Way

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way.

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Script |428

Hello, and welcome to episode 428 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements. 

If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically. 

And this is important. 

Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”.

And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real

The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions. 

When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions. 

In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling. 

And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks. 

It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should. 

When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed. 

When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex. 

And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice. 

This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day? 

Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question. 

When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided. 

Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day. 

If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions. 

And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow. 

So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there. 

However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything. 

This is where routines, processes and rules come into play. 

Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions:

What deserves my attention?

What can wait?

What should I ignore?

What should I delegate?

When is “good enough” truly good enough?

If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves. 

And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up.

This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done. 

Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it. 

And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it. 

For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work. 

It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask. 

Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that. 

In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!) 

It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work. 

They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow. 

I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him. 

It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed. 

When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day. 

Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it. 

So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day.

Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make. 

For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done. 

It tells me that my workday is now finished.

There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed. 

That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that. 

And then there are your rules, or standards. 

Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to. 

For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time. 

Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait. 

For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can”

This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait. 

The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”. 

If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example. 

Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.”

What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloading your decision-making abilities, which in turn reduces the amount of mental fatigue and tiredness you experience at the end of the day. 

Daily planning the day before is a decision-reducing routine. When you plan the day before, it leaves you knowing exactly what you need to do when you begin the next day. No decisions to be made. You know exactly what needs to be done and when you will do it. 

You can then preserve your energy for the decisions that may need to be made if something changes and you have to decide what you will work on. The new circumstances. 

This is why NASA’s Mission Control in Houston in the 1960s practised every possible eventuality before any mission. It was this practice that enabled the brilliant people in Mission Control to get the Apollo 13 crew home safely in April 1970. They had practised that eventuality so many times that the decisions required were already made for them. 

So there you go, Fabian. I hope that has helped. 

Turn your daily planning into an end-of-day routine. Create a checklist to guide you (again reducing decisions). This daily planning will also help reduce the decisions you need to make the next day, which in turn will leave you feeling less exhausted at the end of the day. 

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

Don’t forget, my Productivity Academy is now open, and we have a date for our first live event. Sunday, 30 August. The topic will be where to start and a general Q&A session. Not to be missed. Joining now will give you plenty of time to do your homework before the session. 

I’ll leave the details of the Academy in the show notes for you. 

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

Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

 

Learn more about the Productivity Academy

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

Subscribe to my Substack 

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script |427

Hello, and welcome to episode 427 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity. 

In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier. 

This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated.

AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not. 

When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist. 

For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut. 

I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year. 

I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it. 

Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do. 

No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin. 

No need for AI to get involved. 

AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change. 

There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time. 

Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep. 

The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time. 

And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot. 

Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives.

Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive. 

As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning.

They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course. 

Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system. 

This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised.

Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed.

A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor. 

YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity. 

Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it. 

It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming.

I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday. 

On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree. 

I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people. 

And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit!

It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work. 

It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years. 

Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger. 

Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous.

And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different.

Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects. 

You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice. 

The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally. 

The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day.

This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain.

Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change.

They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges. 

My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me!

I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.”  the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned. 

All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years.

I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them. 

Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it.

So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you. 

I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations.

Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher. 

Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally.

The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you. 

It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving.

All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself. 

And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work. 

It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them. 

My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing. 

But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work. 

If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn.

The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice.

If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member. 

I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions. 

I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon. 

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.

What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

 

Learn more about the Time Sector System here

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

Subscribe to my Substack 

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script |426

Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes. 

And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time. 

Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days).

Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work.

I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office. 

Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home. 

I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s. 

In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen. 

It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you. 

If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot. 

Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool. 

So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus?

Hi Judy, thank you for your question.

There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication. 

Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done. 

Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do. 

Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics.

Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists. 

All great features. 

And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do. 

Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you. 

With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two.

With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer. 

Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise. 

But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day. 

When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day. 

For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete. 

If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do. 

However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work. 

Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have. 

One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task. 

Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday. 

On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day. 

I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates. 

Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day. 

This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work. 

With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted. 

Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier. 

I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45. 

I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did. 

So where should a task list fit into your overall system? 

Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it. 

If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month. 

On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin. 

Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work. 

That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes. 

This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you.

If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable. 

The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work. 

I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away. 

This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else. 

I hope that has helped, Judy. Thank you for your question. 

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

The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up." 

Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life. 

No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences. 

A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill. 

These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day. 

Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for. 

In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through. 

Let’s go.

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Script |425

Hello, and welcome to episode 425 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative. 

They usually go something like:

“Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster” 

Well, was is a disaster? 

Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned. 

It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster. 

The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan. 

And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events.

But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again. 

This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?”

Hi Will, 

Thank you for your question. 

Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week. 

You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that. 

The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has. 

There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too. 

We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week. 

There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting. 

None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate. 

If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story. 

One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with.

For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script. 

Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording. 

Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer. 

This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life: 

Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work)

Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally.

Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc. 

And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered. 

Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week. 

I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you.

The next idea is related to your daily planning. 

Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan. 

Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise

That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon. 

Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning. 

That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have. 

And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning. 

Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing. 

It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down. 

You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep. 

And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets. 

Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day? 

This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down. 

The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop. 

Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do.

Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day. 

You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left. 

For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes. 

Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow.

What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that. 

I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work. 

Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time. 

So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting. 

So there you go, Will. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. 

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

Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said:

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."

And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want.

This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want. 

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Learn more about the Perfect Week Calendar

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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Carl’s YouTube Channel

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script |424

Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do? 

And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything. 

In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once. 

This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day. 

And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep. 

In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness. 

I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints.

This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be. 

Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes. 

What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked. 

I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had. 

Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!)

So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week?

Hi Scott, thank you for your question. 

I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it. 

This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them. 

Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this. 

This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between. 

What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic. 

I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days.

Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day. 

Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them. 

Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden. 

During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family. 

Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours. 

Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus. 

One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one. 

This walk invariably took place just before lunch. 

Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend. 

Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business. 

If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend. 

What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend. 

There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it. 

I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4. 

Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it. 

There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds. 

What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night. 

Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do.

Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day. 

What has changed is we have far more options than they had. 

And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have. 

The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed. 

If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible? 

If not, what would you do instead after dinner? 

Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead? 

One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life. 

Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin.

I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally. Reading a book does the opposite. 

I’ve noticed that with my team too. 

We don’t have any regulated work times in the company. People can work whenever they feel like it. My Marketing Manager likes to do her work early in the morning; my video editor prefers the evenings. 

We work on timelines. For example, I supply my video editor with that week’s videos on a Wednesday afternoon, and she has until Sunday evening to complete the edits. 

As the boss, the only thing I care about is receiving the edited videos no later than Sunday evening. 

The final issue most people face is wanting to do too much. 

Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, we learn that Lord Peter had two hobbies. Playing the piano and collecting books. When he’s had an exhausting day or was stressed about something, he would either pick up a book or play the piano. They were his go-to relaxation methods. 

What do we do today? We get ourselves stressed out because we want to learn to play the violin, take up pickleball, go to the movies with our friends or our partner, learn to cook, clean out the wardrobe, redecorate the bedroom, read more books, and write in a journal every day. 

Well, you can do any of those things, just not all of them all at the same time. 

The problem is when we are faced with too many choices, we end up doing none of them. Instead, we’ll end up crashed in an armchair scrolling. 

One thing you can do if you have multiple things you want to do is divide them into seasons. 

For example, if gardening is something you want to do, you could spend your time gardening on longer, warmer days. On the colder, shorter days, you could switch to indoor activities. 

So Scott, first I would suggest doing the “perfect Week” calendar. That will tell you how much time you actually have for all the things you want to do. 

Then be a little more flexible with how you divide your time in the day. Squeezing all your work tasks into a single 8-hour slot is exhausting. Try to break up your day with longer breaks. I know not everyone can do that, but it is something worth trying if you can. You’ll be a lot less exhausted in the evenings. 

Finally, be realistic about what you want to do. Remember you can do anything, but you cannot do everything. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.