Your Time, Your Way

"The mind is like water. When it's turbulent, it's hard to see. When it's calm, everything becomes clear." — Kobe Bryant  Kobe Bryant was definitely onto something when he spoke those words. If you’re not in control of your commitments and have no idea what needs to be done next, you’re going to be stressed. And stress, like turbulent water, makes it hard to see where you should be spending your time.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 395 Hello, and welcome to episode 395 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 point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around—work that will need to be done at some point anyway? Well, yes and no.  Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub.  It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix.  Today, it’s very different. Most of you listening to this podcast will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain.  And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem.  I remember when I worked in a law firm, I caught the bus home and often spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem. In the past, people would have looked forward to getting home to their families. When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy that time with your family and friends.  Today, it also means there’s no barrier—except our own willpower—to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night.  In the past, the factory gates were locked, or someone else was doing your job on the night shift. It wasn’t possible to work beyond your regular working hours. Time management was much easier. Not so today. And that nicely leads us to this week’s question. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, I’ve spent years struggling with time management, and it’s got to the point where I think there’s no point. As hard as I try, there’s always something that needs to be done, and I never get a chance to finish anything and end up with everything being urgent. Is there any point to all this time management and productivity stuff?   Hi Michael, thank you for your question.  In many respects, you might be right that managing time, or at least trying to, is a waste of time. (I think there might be a pun there)  As I alluded to, with knowledge work and the explosion of communication tools over the last few years, things that could have waited a day or two now seem to have to be dealt with immediately.  It’s not that the task is suddenly urgent; it’s a combination of people’s expectations and the delivery system.  The problem here is that no matter how fast the delivery system becomes—or other people’s expectations— we are human. We can still only do one thing at a time. That is not going to change in our lifetime.  And that’s where to start—understanding that you, as an individual, can only work on one thing at a time.  In other words, if you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first.  Now, you could come up with a complex, convoluted system for deciding which message to respond to first, or you could adopt a more straightforward first-in-first-out approach. Start with the oldest and work your way through your list of messages.  What are we talking about here—perhaps a ten-minute delay for you to get to a particular message? Does ten minutes really matter? You’re not trying to save someone’s life in an emergency room, are you?  Messages are often more time-sensitive than emails, and I find that responding to them between work sessions works best.  For instance, if you were to protect 9:30 to 11:30 am for focused work. That’s two hours where you are technically not available. Once you finish that session, check your messages and respond to any that require a response.  When I set these barriers of doing undisturbed, focused work for two hours a day, I used to panic every time my phone dinged. I felt I had to respond immediately. Of course, that was not true. It never was, and it’s still not true for any of us today.  It took a few weeks to wean myself off panicking every time a message came in, but the results were fantastic. My productivity went through the roof, leading to fewer urgent tasks.  Our brains are not good at handling interruptions to the flow of work. I’ve seen studies showing that even a minor interruption can take you up to 18 minutes to refocus and get back to where you were before.  Think about that for a moment. Even if you were taking ten minutes to refocus and getting an average of six interruptions per day, you’ve lost an hour. Or to put it into a better perspective, that’s 12 ½ per cent of your work day gone. Wasted. By responding to messages between work sessions, you avoid losing focus and get more work done in less time.  And it’s there that you will find fewer urgent tasks to do. Because you are getting more done in less time, you will be able to stay on top of projects and other work without getting too close to the deadline.  Another area that can make us feel that managing our time is a waste of time is focusing on the number of tasks rather than the time we have available. Again, this is linked to the fragility of being human. We are affected by how much sleep we get, our mood, and our diet.  Have a bad night’s sleep, then a fight with your kids over the breakfast table and a sugary doughnut as a midmorning snack, and you’re not going to get a lot of work done.  You have a sleep debt, you’re worked up by the argument, and that doughnut is going to give you a massive energy crash.  This is why estimating how long a task will take is challenging.  I’ve been writing a 1,000-word blog post every week for around ten years now. You’d think I would be able to estimate reasonably accurately how long writing 1,000 words would take after writing over 500 blog posts. Ha! No chance. Some days I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes, other days it can take me two hours.  The biggest effect on how long it will take me is sleep. If I get my seven hours, I know it’ll take me less than an hour. Less than six hours, and I’m struggling to do it in two hours.  A better approach is to allocate time for doing groups of linked tasks. For example, group all your actionable emails and set aside 40 to 60 minutes at the end of the day to deal with them.  This way, it doesn’t matter how many emails you have to act on; you do as many as you can in the time you have.  If you’re doing this every day, you’ll soon find you have no email backlogs. What amazes me is the people who try this for a few days and give up because their huge backlog of actionable emails is not getting significantly smaller. Well, of course not. If you’re starting with six hundred actionable emails, it’s going to take you a long time to get that under control.  What you could do is set aside a one-off period to get that backlog under control first. Then set a time each day to keep it under control.  Or make sure you have a “net-gain” with your responses. For instance, if you get 20 actionable emails in a day, respond to at least 21. That’s a net gain. If you do that consistently over a few weeks, your backlog of actionable emails will reduce significantly.  You’re not going to lose the holiday weight you gained in a few days. It might have only taken you a few days to gain that weight, but it’s going to take you a few weeks, if not months, to lose it. (Life’s tough, isn’t it?)  Most of the reasons why so many people quit making necessary changes, whether in their work or personal life, are linked to the initial difficulty of change.  All change is difficult at first. You’re changing. But soon that change becomes your norm, and then it becomes easy. It becomes “just what you do”.  There’s a time and place for the things you want to or must do. This is where your calendar comes into play.  Scheduling time for play, rest and exercise is just as important as scheduling meetings with your clients or boss. Trouble is, we don’t do that. We prioritise work over other essential things in our lives.  As Jim Rohn said, “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two” Ask yourself, where’s your boundary? If you don’t have one, you’re not managing time; you’re allowing time to manage you.  There are many ways you can take control of your calendar.  You could, for example, limit the number of hours you spend in meetings each week. If you work a typical 40-hour week, you could set the maximum time you spend in meetings at 15 hours. That will leave you with 25 hours dedicated to doing your work

Back in October, I gave you the five questions to ask yourself before 2026. In this special follow-up episode, I share with you what you can do with the list you have been building over the last two months.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 394 Hello, and welcome to episode 394 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.  Hopefully, you’ve started creating a list of things you want to change and or do in 2026. If not, it’s not too late.  If you missed that episode, the five questions are: What would you like to change about yourself? This question is focused on you, your habits—good and bad. What would you like to change about your lifestyle? This is about how you live, the material things, if you like, such as your home, car and other possessions that improve your lifestyle. What would you like to change about the way you work? The professional question. Perhaps you want to learn more about AI, or change jobs and work from home, or maybe go back to working in an office. What can you do to challenge yourself? What could you do that frightens you slightly? This question is designed to help you move out of your comfort zone.  What goals could you set for next year? Realistically, what could you accomplish next year that has alluded you?  The idea behind this exercise is to give you time to think a little deeper and discover where you are happy and where you feel things need to change.  Now, one thing you will find helpful is to go back to your Areas of Focus. There, you have your definitions of what family and relationships, health and fitness, career, lifestyle, self-development and others mean to you. Often, you will find that by reviewing these eight areas, you will find something you have neglected over the previous twelve months.  As I’ve been helping my coaching clients with this exercise, it’s surprising how many of them have discovered neglected areas. This is quite natural, given that once the year begins, we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day crises. Then we drift away from our good intentions.  In a perfect world, you would give yourself two months to reflect on these questions. To explore options and talk with your family. But don’t worry if you have not started yet. There’s still time to develop your thoughts and ideas. Now, some people have asked me where best to capture these ideas. Over the last two years, I’ve written these questions out in the back of my planning book. This book is always on or near my desk, and I have captured a lot more ideas this way than I ever did digitally.  So, my advice to you is: if you have not started this exercise, grab yourself a notebook, write the five questions as headings, and over the next few weeks, allow yourself to think about them and write down your ideas. Right now, it’s less about what you write out and more about just getting everything written. And there’s a very good reason for this.  If you do this exercise over a few weeks, what you will discover is that a theme will develop. Let me explain. Last year, I failed at getting back to fitness. During 2023, I reduced my exercise time to focus on writing Your Time Your Way. I also wasn’t very careful about what I ate, and as a consequence, my weight ballooned.  Last year was supposed to be the year I got back into shape, and I failed miserably.  So, last year, as I went through these questions and captured ideas, I soon found that health and fitness were common themes. This meant when I began 2025, my focus was to get back into shape and not repeat the mistakes I made in 2024.  And it worked. I went from touching 88 kilograms (around 195 pounds) in January to where I wanted it to be—80 kilograms (around 176 pounds) by the middle of July.  To do that, I needed to change a few habits. Moving more and locking in a consistent exercise time were the obvious ones, but I also looked at my diet and removed all processed foods, replacing them with natural foods—real vegetables, fruit, and fresh meat.  Given that around Christmas and the end of the year are quiet times for me, I reviewed my calendar and moved a few things around to accommodate my new routine.  Another example, I remember two years ago, a client of mine was struggling to grow her side business. It was causing her a lot of frustration.  One idea she wrote down was to work harder on her business in the evenings, but every time she looked at that, she felt that was unrealistic, given that she had two sons, one aged three and the other five.  As we were talking about this, I asked her if she’d spoken with her husband about him possibly taking responsibility for the kids a few nights a week so she could “disappear” and work in her business.  She hadn’t. So her “homework” that week was to discuss with her husband. The result was fantastic. He agreed to take full responsibility for the boys Monday through Friday, leaving her undisturbed time in the evening to work on her business.  Within six months, she was able to give up her full-time job and work solely on her own business. That reduced the need for her to work on her business in the evenings, and she returned to what many would describe as a normal work/life balance.  Yet none of this would have happened had she not spent some time thinking about the five questions. She would have carried on as before and become increasingly frustrated.  The theme she discovered was that she desperately wanted her side business to succeed, but to do so, she needed to spend more time on it. Time she thought she did not have.  As I’ve been going through my questions this year, I’ve seen a theme emerge: Less but better. Now I have a history with this quote from Dieter Rams, the celebrated industrial designer behind the German company Braun. He’s been one of my design heroes for many years, and his Ten Principles of Good Design philosophy is ingrained in my thinking about everything I produce. Less but better bleeds into every area of my life, not just my professional life. For example, I have added to do a big clothes throw-out at the end of the year, leaving myself only with quality clothing made entirely of natural fibres—cotton, leather and wool.  These clothes and shoes are often more expensive than their man-made fibre equivalents, but they are also generally of a higher quality and last considerably longer.  So own fewer clothes, boots, and shoes, but better-quality items.  On a professional front, we’ve all heard a lot about how AI may, or may not, change the way we work. There’s a lot of hype around at the moment, and it’s not easy to see what’s realistic and what is fantasy.  However, what’s real is that AI is here and not going away. So, what could you do to keep up to date on what AI can do?  Maybe you could take a course, read a book, or do some self-learning beyond using ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions you used to ask Google.  Now, this may overlap with your self-development focus. It’s certainly a fascinating topic to learn, and in doing so, you may find that you can save yourself a lot of time by creating a process that AI does automatically for you.  The reason many people struggle to find what they really want is that life gets in the way. Family and professional demands pull our attention all over the place, and when we do stop, we’re exhausted and just want to flop into the easy chair, open our phones, and scroll through social media or the news.  One or two days like that is no problem, but it can rapidly become a habit, and we drift far from where we want to be.  Having a plan or a goal for the year gives you a roadmap for when you do become distracted and perhaps a little lost. You can use your weekly planning sessions to review your year-long plan, or, if you’re doing well, review it every 3 to 6 months.  If you’ve been working on this since October, now’s the time to begin filtering down your list. If you’ve found a theme or a few connected ideas, these will likely be the ones you highlight as potential goals to set.  This brainstorming exercise will generate many ideas, which will be too many to accomplish in 12 months. What you want to be doing now is looking for the ones that excite you and, more importantly, are realistic goals for the next 12 months.  Remember, you don’t have to do all of what you wrote. You can keep this list in your digital notes by scanning your notebook pages into a note titled “Annual Planning 2025.” Then next October, you can come back to the list to see if you can move anything onto your 2027 list.  Over time, you create an extraordinary archive of ideas you’ve had over the years, and you will see how much you are accomplishing—you really are.  While I haven’t filtered down my list yet, I’m already excited about 2026. It’s going to be focused on less but with a lot more quality.  You will make decisions, experience setbacks and failures, and face frustrations, but by the end of 2026, I know you will be further ahead than you are today. And that’s what it’s all about.  Now go on and break open that notebook and ask yourself the five questions: What do you want to change about yourself? What do you want to change about your lifestyle? What would you like to change about the way you work? What can you do to challenge yourself? What goals could you set for next year? Good luck, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very product

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."  That’s a quote from one of my favourite people, and a friend of this podcast, Jim Rohn.  Listening to one of his lectures—for that is what they were—in 2017 changed my life, and I hope this episode will change yours. Let’s get started.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 393 Hello, and welcome to episode 393 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.  Discipline is unsustainable. You probably have discovered that. Yet there are many people we look at and see someone living what many would describe as a disciplined life. So how do they do it?  Well, I can promise you it’s not discipline. Discipline is like a rocket used when launching a spacecraft—it’s required initially to get the spacecraft off the ground, but once in orbit, the rocket can be discarded. Then the balance between forward velocity and the Earth’s gravitational pull maintains the spacecraft in orbit.  And that’s how these outwardly “disciplined” people do it. They decide what it is they want to accomplish—healthy eating, regular exercise, journal writing, daily and weekly planning, etc. And then they “launch”.  A lot of effort and focus is required initially, but after a few weeks, their forward velocity—or the habit—takes over and it becomes something they just do.  And you can do the same. And this week’s question is about how to go from an idea to turning that idea into something you will “just do”.  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 Anna. Anna asks, Hi Carl, for the last three or four years, I have done your Annual Planning exercise. And each year, I fail to accomplish the things I set out to do. I feel I don’t have the discipline to keep my commitments. There’s always something else that gets in the way. How do you help people start to live a more disciplined life?  Hi Anna, thank you for your question.  As I alluded to a moment ago, it’s not really about discipline. That’s a fuel that will run out eventually. Sure, it can get you started, but if you don’t develop the habit or routine over a few weeks, the consistency you want will slip away, and you’re back at square one.  The problem with discipline—and, for that matter, motivation—is that they rely on the human condition. For discipline, you need willpower. Willpower diminishes throughout the day.  You start with strong willpower, and as the day goes on, that power slowly wears down. But it is also dependent on how much sleep you got, whether you are in a good or bad mood, whether you are stressed or anxious, and the people around you.  You may have heard the advice to ditch your “toxic friends”. They are the ones who keep pulling you down to their level. If someone were attempting to give up smoking, the advice given is to stay away from their smoking friends.  If you surround yourself with people who hate exercise and you decide, for example, you want to take up the “from couch to 5K” programme, you’re not going to find a lot of support from the people you surround yourself with. They have become what is known as “toxic friends”.  Instead of thinking you need discipline to achieve the things you want to achieve, look at what you can do to make achieving your goals easier. Imagine you decided you wanted to read more books. Many people will set the goal to read a certain number of pages or chapters each day. This method requires immense discipline to maintain consistency.  You see, people often set these goals when they are rested, unstressed, and motivated. What you need to think about is what a realistic target would be if you were tired, unmotivated, and just wanted to curl up and scroll through your phone.  A better approach would be to set a time target. For example, one of my clients wanted to finish reading the pile of books in his home office this year. He had around thirty-five books he’d bought, and they were real books, not ebooks.  I suggested to him that he set a target of reading for 20 minutes every evening before going to bed. This, he felt, was realistic on days he was tired out.  Speaking to him last week, he said he had discovered that on most days he read for well over 45 minutes, and on some days he read for over an hour.  Over the course of 2025, he’s only missed two days—and those days were when he was at home, but was away on a business trip.  He finished reading the books by the end of August. He’s now buying books again and is confident he’ll stay on top of them.  What happened here was that my client set a realistic goal based on the worst-case scenario rather than the best-case scenario. On most days, he exceeded his set minimum, which meant he finished his goal well before the deadline.  Another factor in his success here was the set time in the evening before going to bed. That gave him an anchor point.  This is why I recommend that people who wish to write a journal do it in the morning rather than in the evening. You have more control over the morning than you do the evening. And it’s a great way to begin your day with a nice cup of tea or coffee, and a place to write down your thoughts and feelings before the day gets going.  You can add to your journal in the evening if you wish, but if you want to be consistent in writing, you will find that starting your day with your journal will help you write every day.  I remember back in July when we went to Ireland to see my parents. There were my wife and my parents-in-law, and we stayed at my wife’s aunt’s house the night before, since she lived close to the airport and our flight was early the next morning. Waking up at 4 am with everyone running around, making sure they had everything, didn’t feel appropriate for me to write my journal at that point. So I skipped it. However, by the time we got to the airport, went through security, and settled in to wait for our flight, I felt this urge to write. So, I found a small coffee shop, got a coffee and sat down to write.  The sense of relief I felt after writing my journal left me relaxed and ready for the long travels ahead.  There was no need for discipline or motivation. It had become something I do every morning, and when I don’t, something feels wrong.  And that’s what you are trying to do. Turning whatever it is you want to do consistently into your way of life.  This is why brushing your teeth when you wake up and before you go to bed is automatic. You learn to do it when you are young, and after a lot of nagging from your parents, it soon becomes automatic. The thought of going out in the morning without brushing your teeth probably leaves you horrified.  But if you stop and think about it, brushing your teeth in the morning is inconvenient. There’s a lot to do: get the kids ready for school, prepare their breakfast and get yourself ready. Three or four minutes in the bathroom, moving your arm from left to right… Argh! But you do it.  You don’t need motivation or discipline. You just do it. It’s a part of your life.  I was talking with a running friend of mine recently who wakes up at 6:00 am every morning, rain or shine, and goes out for his morning run at 6:30. I asked him if he ever considered staying in bed when the wind was howling outside and the rain was pouring down. He shuddered. The very thought of not going out for his morning run shocked him.  He doesn’t need discipline or motivation to get up and go for a run. His problem would be if the doctor told him to stay in bed for a few days. Then he’s really struggling because staying in bed is not his lifestyle.  All those people you look at and think, “Gosh, they are disciplined” —they never think they are. To them, whatever they do is just a part of their life.  I’m lucky because I have a dog. Dogs need exercise. They love walking. And Louis is no exception. It’s one of the highlights of his day. This means I need to find an hour each day to go for a walk with him. Yet, I don’t need any discipline to take him for his walk. It’s just something I do each day.  Similarly, at 4:30 pm, I do my exercise. 4:30 pm triggers the start of my evening routine. I exercise for an hour, take a shower, then go downstairs and cook dinner. I do this six days a week, with Saturday being the exception.  It never occurs to me not to go upstairs and exercise. If I’m not feeling great, I’ll do a lighter session; sometimes I may only do some stretching. But at 4:30, I know it’s time to stop work and exercise. It’s just what I do. It’s a part of my everyday routine.  Now, one more thing, Anna. A mistake many people make is trying to do too many things at once. When you do this, you are diluting yourself too much.  Remember, to accomplish anything, you will need some discipline and focus to begin with. You’re trying to do something that is not a part of your regular life, and it will feel uncomfortable at first.  I mentioned focus there because this is when you may need your calendar or task manager to nudge you for a few weeks—reminding you that you have something to do.  It’s easier to focus on one thing at a time. A trick I started using—and found very effective—was to divide the year into quarters and start one new thing each quarter. This gave me three months to develop the necessary habits to turn whatever it was I wanted to change into a solid habit.  There’s no r

  “When I was Leader of the Opposition in the UK and some time out from an election which we were expected to win, I visited President Clinton at the White House. As we began our set of meetings, he said: “Remind me to tell you something really important before you leave.”  I was greatly taken with this and assumed I was about to have some huge secret of state imparted to me.  As I was leaving, I reminded him. He looked at me very solemnly and said, “Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as a Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.”  I confess I was a little underwhelmed at the time. But he was right.”   That’s an extract from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s book. On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century. And it’s perfect for the theme of this week’s episode—finding time to do the important things.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 392 Hello, and welcome to episode 392 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 nice when our systems work. We follow our plans for the day and the week, and when we arrive at the end of the week and look back, 80% or more of what we set out to accomplish is crossed off. Unfortunately, those weeks are rare—even for the most productive of people. There are far too many unknowns that will pop up each day and week for us to consistently get what we plan to do, when we plan to do it, done.  But that doesn’t mean that productivity systems are a waste of time. They are not. A solid productivity system keeps you focused on what’s important to you and gives you a way to prioritise what matters most.  And it doesn’t matter where you are in life. You might be nearing retirement and in the early stages of preparing your business for sale, or you could be starting out on a university graduate programme.  There will always be things to do, some important, some less so. The key is to remain consistent with your system so you know each week, you are nudging the right things forward, even if you’re not getting everything done.  And that leads me to this week’s question, AND… The Mystery Podcast Voice is back! So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Serena. Serena asks, Hi Carl, I have implemented productivity systems to keep me on track with my academics as a graduate student, and they have worked well when I consistently followed the steps. The problem is that when I get stressed out, I fall behind on deadlines. When the weekends come, I just want to decompress and do nothing. What can I do to get back on track with the system and continue to practice good personal productivity practices? Hi Serena, thank you for your question.  When I was at university, we had four core subjects each semester. It was on these that we would be expected to write essays and be examined on at the end of the academic year.  This is nice because from an organisational standpoint, class times will be predefined for you. They would go onto your calendar. These become your weekly commitments.  And while you may not know the deadlines for the essays at the start of the semester, you will know roughly when they will be due. That would be the same with your exams; you may not know the precise date of the exams at the start of the academic year, but you will know roughly when they will be held.  This is often the same for many of you in the workplace. You may know which quarter a project deadline falls in, but you may not know exactly which date the deadline will be.  One thing you do know, though, is that there is a deadline. Now, whatever we are working on we all have four limitations to deal with. Time itself, there’s only 168 hours each week. The fact that you can only work on one thing at a time, our emotions—sometimes we’re just not “in the mood” —and, as humans, we get tired and need to take a break.  There’s nothing we can do about these four limitations.  You can “optimise” the human things though, ensuring you get sufficient sleep being the obvious one, and becoming as stoical as you can be in any given emotional situation (a lot easier said than done)  Given that one of the “fixed” limitations is time itself, the first place to lock down is your calendar. As you will likely know when your lectures will be, the area where your calendar becomes powerful is locking down your personal study times.  For example, if you have a two hour lecture on a Monday morning, and a second two hour lecture in the afternoon, there’s going to be a gap somewhere in the day that will give you an hour or two “free”.  My wife’s currently back at university, and on Wednesdays she has a lecture from 9:10 am to 11:00am. Her next lecture begins at 4:00 pm and runs until 5:50 pm. For her, Wednesdays are her study and homework days.  There’s a five hour gap between lectures and so she can go somewhere quiet and study for the next test (they love tests at my wife’s university)  She calls Wednesday her study day. She’ll often do another two hours of studying after dinner on a Wednesday too.  This goes to something called “theming”. Theming given days for specific activities.  We all do this to a certain degree. For many of you, Monday to Friday are work days and weekends are rest days. But you can go further.  I do this with my week. Monday and Tuesday are writing days, Wednesday is audio/visual day, and Saturday mornings are my planning and admin mornings.  This does not mean all I do on those days is write or record videos and podcasts; it means that the bulk of what I do on those days is in line with that day’s theme.  This goes back to the limitation of being able to do only one thing at a time. However, if you know that on a Tuesday you will study a particular subject, the only decision you will need to make is what you will study. This means you avoid being overwhelmed by choice.  It’s Tuesday, so it’s anatomy day. That’s your theme, you study anatomy, for example. Now, if you find yourself falling behind, there are a number of things you can do. The most effectively one is to stop. Grab a piece of paper, a pen or pencil, and a highlighter, and write down everything you have fallen behind on.  Use the highlighter to highlight the most important items and start with them.  Then open your calendar and protect time for doing that work. Remember, you can only work on one thing at a time, so pick one and start. It’s surprising that once you make a start on something, anything, how the anxiety and stress begin to fall away.  Many of my coaching clients have found that going back to their calendars and blocking two or three hours in the evening or on weekends to “catch up” also relieves stress and anxiety.  I know not taking work home with you is something many people strictly adhere to, but if not taking work home with you is causing untold amounts of stress and anxiety, leaving you with poor-quality sleep and emotions all over the place, perhaps that strict rule may be more damaging to your long-term health, than sacrificing two or three hours on a weekend to catch-up. The thing is, you don’t have to do this every night or every weekend. It only comes into play when you identify a backlog or you feel you are seriously behind with something.  What you will find is the decision to work on something at a particular time, instantly takes the pressure off you. (Of course, you do need to carry through with your commitment to yourself to do the work at the time you set). Another thing you can do with your calendar is to reserve some time each week as “catch up” time. Personally, I do this on a Saturday morning. The house is quiet and I have complete control over what I do at that time.  You don’t need to do this Saturday mornings. Many people I work with block Friday afternoons to catch up on work they are behind on, their communications, and admin. Of course this will depend on your lecture times.  If you have lectures on a Friday afternoon, there’s likely to be another day in the week when you have a block of time you could designate as your catch-up time.  It’s this “catch-up” time that gives you the peace of mind knowing that you have time at some point in the week to catch up.  The benefit of having these blocks of time for study, research, and catching up is that you start the week knowing you have enough time, and all you need to do is respect your calendar.  Now, I know that if you haven’t used your calendar as your primary productivity tool before and rarely use it to plan your day, it’s going to be challenging to develop the habit initially. All positive habits are difficult at first. You have to focus on it, and it’s easy to forget. However, there are two ways to build this habit.  The first is to set aside five to ten minutes at the end of the day to open your calendar and look at what you are committed to the next day. Then mentally plot out when you will do what needs to be done.  The second is to do it in the morning; however, I’ve found the most effective way (and the least stress-inducing) is to do it before you end your day.  As an aside, talking to a couple of my longer-term clients recently, they both mentioned that the best thing they ever did was to set aside five to ten minutes after dinner to plan

"Prioritise what matters. You can't be everywhere, do everything, and have everything!" That’s a quote from Oprah Winfrey, and it captures the essence of this week’s question.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 391 Hello, and welcome to episode 391 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.  You arrive at your desk, open up your Teams messages or email, and your screen fills with line after line of unread (and read) messages. One message grabs your attention, it’s from your boss and you feel compelled to open it.  And from that one action, your whole day is destroyed.  And while I am sure that message from your boss was important and potentially urgent, but did it really warrant destroying your day?  That scenario is happening every day to millions of people, and it makes deciding what your priorities are for the day practically impossible.  So, what can you do to ensure you are acting on your priorities and not being distracted by what appears to be both urgent and important? Giving some reflection, putting aside that so-called urgent message might actually be the best thing you can do.  So, with that said, let me read out this week’s question (The Mystery Podcast Voice is on holiday this week).  This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, hi Carl, I really struggle to decide what I should be working on each day. My work is very dynamic; a lot can be thrown at me each day, and whenever I plan my week or day, none of it ever gets done. What’s the best way to prioritise?  Hi Michael, thank you for your question. In many ways, what you describe is what I see as the curse of the modern world. The incredible advances in technology have enabled us to do seemingly impossible things, yet they have also sped everything up.  I remember just twenty-three years ago when I worked in a Law office in the UK, and if we received a letter (remember them?) from another lawyer, we effectively had around twenty-four hours to compose our response—even if what was being asked was urgent.  We relied on the postal service, and no matter how fast we responded to that letter, it would not leave our office until 4:00 pm at the earliest on that day.  And if we missed the 4:00 pm deadline, tough. It would have to wait until 4:00 pm the next day—which incidentally gave us a wonderful excuse for anything arriving late.  The expectations from the “other side”, as we called them, were that they would receive the reply two days later.  Today, just twenty-three years later, those two days seem to have fallen to just two minutes. What went wrong?  The problem is that no matter how well planned our days and weeks may be, owing to others’ expectations, we are “expected” to respond within hours, sometimes minutes, not days. This has blurred the line between what we know is important and what is simply urgent noise.  This is why it’s more critical today to be absolutely clear about what is important to you. And I emphasise the words “to you”.  What’s important to you is not necessarily important to another person. When someone requires you to do something for them urgently, it’s urgent to them, not necessarily to you.  You may have twenty similar urgent requests waiting for you. You are expected to decide what is the most urgent. That’s an almost impossible decision to make—if you don’t know what’s important to you. So, the important place to start, Michael, is to establish your areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you, and they are based on eight areas: Family and relationships Health and fitness Finances Career and business Lifestyle and life experiences Self development Spirituality And your life’s purpose.  The first step is to define what each one means to you and then pull out what action steps you need to take to keep everything in balance.  These are the higher-level priorities in your life.  There’s a little more to it than that, and if you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, you can download my free Areas of Focus Workbook from my website; the link is in the show notes.  Next, what is your core work? This is the work you are employed to do.  Now, most people can describe their jobs. For example, I’m an architect, a doctor, a nurse, a bricklayer, a teacher, or a TV presenter. Yet, there’s another step here. What does doing what you do look like at a task level?  I know what architects do—they design buildings—but I don’t know what they do at a task level.  I’ve seen building blueprints, so I guess they create those, but I don’t know how they do that. Is it with a pencil and a ruler, or is it done on a computer?  Those tasks that you identify as being critical to the work you are employed to do will always form your priorities each day when at work.  After all, if you are not doing the work you were hired to do, you’re not likely to be in your job for very long.  Now this makes your life a little easier. Once you know what you need to do each day, or week, for your job, you will also be able to make a reasonably accurate estimate how long each of those tasks will take you.  This will tell you how much time you need to perform your work each week.  Now, you can only work with averages here. There are some external factors that could throw off your timings. Things such as poor sleep or a crisis at work.  Yet, on the whole, you’ll find you manage to get all the essential work done each week.  Now the clever part is to protect time for doing your most important work.  I’ve found that if you can dedicate two hours each morning to your critical work for the day, you will be on top by the end of the week.  From a professional perspective, if you are writing off two hours a day for doing your most important work, that still leaves you with around six hours to deal with anything else.  I grew up on a farm. It was an arable farm with some animals. Each harvest time, when it was time to combine the corn fields, my father would never entertain the thought of meeting with the bank manager, tax inspector or representatives from the seed company.  And to make things more complicated, my father farmed in the UK, which has notoriously unpredictable weather. When the corn was ready and the weather was dry, it was out! Out! Out!  I remember my mother frequently calling dentists, doctors, the bank, and anyone else my father was scheduled to see to cancel appointments.  Harvesting the crops was core work. Nothing got in the way of bringing the barley and wheat in.  And that’s the approach you need to have with your core work. No matter who requests your time, when it’s time to get on with your core work, it’s no. No, No. Come back in an hour and I’ll be able to help you.  Now, I began by telling you to establish your areas of focus. Because these are the higher-level areas of your life, it’s important to adopt the same approach to protecting time for the things that matter. For example, I have many clients who prioritise being home in time for dinner with their spouse or partner and kids. This means if the family sits down for dinner at seven and it takes thirty minutes to get home, then no matter what, you leave the office at 6:00 to 6:15 pm.  It’s a non-negotiable. The good thing about this kind of constraint is that it invokes Parkinson’s Law, that is where the work will fill up the time available.  If I have thirty minutes to finish writing this script, I’m certain I will do it. Similarly, if I had ninety minutes it would take me precisely ninety minutes. It’s a weird law that works.  The sense of time pressure focuses your brain to filter out what would usually distracts you.  When it comes to priorities, knowing what is most important to you makes deciding what to work on first much easier.  Now, imagine you had ten pieces of work to complete, all equally important, urgent, and connected to your core work. How would you decide? Well, your only option is to follow the principle of first in, first out. Begin with the oldest one and work from there.  Incidentally, I suggest you do the same with your actionable email. Begin by replying to the oldest first. In Outlook and Apple Mail, you can reverse the order of messages in each folder. By default, these will show you the newest at the top. Change that to show you the oldest first.  That might be a little uncomfortable at first because it will remind you how far behind you are with your email. But stick with it. You will soon find that your response times to emails speed up without any extra effort.  Another level you may wish to add here is to create some “if this… Then that” rules.  For example, if there are certain people whom you know you must respond to immediately, then apply a rule. “If I get a request from X, then I will prioritise that request” However, be careful with that one. It’s easy to take the easy way out and add bosses, supervisors and pretty much anyone to this list.  For me, there are only two people: my wife and my mother, I would do that for. That’s because my Family and relationships are the most important area for me. (And because my father doesn’t have a phone, hahaha)  At a work level, I will prioritise anything related to money or lost passwords. I know how concerned people are about money—they bought the wrong course, or a refund needs processi

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." That’s a famous quote from Groucho Marx and encapsulates perfectly what this episode is about You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 390 Hello, and welcome to episode 390 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  I’ve been coaching people one-on-one for seven years, and in that time, I picked up some ideas that, when adopted by clients, almost always guarantee they will transform their time management and productivity.  None of these ideas is revolutionary, which isn’t surprising since people have long struggled with time management and productivity issues.  Our attitude to time and the expectations of others has changed, but the amount of time we have hasn’t.  Technology, rather than helping us to do more in less time, has elevated the amount we are expected to do.  Fifty years ago, we might have received thirty letters; today, technology has elevated the number of digital letters and messages we receive into the hundreds. And while we may be quicker at responding, we’re not realistically able to respond to hundreds of emails and messages each day and still produce work.  (Even though I know a number of you are trying) It goes back to what I wrote and spoke about two or three years ago, fashions may change, but the principles don’t.  AI and ChatGPT are all the rage today. If you’ve gone down that rabbit hole, you will have been blown away by what it can do. It’s incredible.  Yet what is it doing? It is making some parts of our work faster. Yet, most people still don’t have enough time to do all their work. What’s happening?  Well, telling everyone that you can now produce a sales review presentation in less than twenty minutes with the help of ChatGPT means you are now expected to create more presentations.  That sales review presentation may have taken you two days before, but now, if you can do it in twenty minutes, boom! Your boss can give you more work to do!  So what are the traits, best practices and ideas that do work that the people who have seen a massive increase in their time management and productivity follow?  Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question. 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 Lauren. Lauren asks, “Hi Carl, I know you have been coaching people for a long time, and I am curious to know what the most productive people you meet do that is different from those less successful at it.”  Hi Lauren, thank you for your question.  As I eluded to, the most productive people I’ve coached follow principles, not fashions, and are ruthless with their time allocation.  Those principles are to collect everything, process what you gathered, eliminate unnecessary things, and allocate time for doing what’s left.  But it goes a little deeper than that.  First, you need to know what is important to you. That relates to your Areas of Focus. Those are the eight areas of life we all share but will define and prioritise differently.  Things like, your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness and self-development.  Knowing what these mean to you and what priority they are in your life goes a long way to helping you to build productive days.  Almost every client of mine that has significantly improved their time management have gone through the Areas of Focus exercise and defined each one.  The second part to this is to be clear about what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do.  What I found interesting is that my YouTube Short video with the fewest views is the one asking the question: What are you employed to do?”  That doesn’t surprise me. Going through and defining your Areas of Focus and core work is not sexy. Quick fixes, new tools and apps are the sexy things, yet none of those will ever help you regain control of your time.  Sure, they are fun, exciting and interesting to explore. But they are distractions that will never help you be better at managing your time.  (I learned that one the hard way. I used to waste so much time each week playing with new apps, programmes and tools)  Speaking of tools, I have noticed that the most productive people use simple tools. Often it’s Microsoft ToDo or Apple’s Reminders. Quite a few use Todoist, but I suspect that’s because I have done nearly four hundred videos on Todoist and many of my clients found me through YouTube.  People who struggle the most are using project management tools like ClickUp or Monday.com. Those types of tools require far too much maintenance to keep them up-to-date and that takes time away from you doing the work you are organising.  It’s as the old saying goes, you’re trying to crack a nut by using a sledge hammer.  But, the stand out change that people make that has the biggest impact on their time management and overall productivity is they get ruthless with their time allocation.  And I mean ruthless.  For example, one long term client, now a senior executive in his company, will not allow any meetings on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. Those times are blocked on his calendar.  He uses that time for doing his most important work for that week.  Three hours Monday morning and three hours Friday afternoon. That’s six hours he knows will not be interrupted and so he can confidently allocate work to those times. I remember when we first started. He was all over the place. He had meetings lined up Monday through Friday and couldn’t even find a hour to quietly get on with his work.  His default answer to any request was “yes” and it was destroying him.  Now, not only does he have greater respect for his own time, his colleagues also do. Nobody even bothers to ask for a meeting on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon because they know he will say no.  The key here is to get control of your calendar. (Another principle). If you’re not in control there, it doesn’t matter what you do elsewhere because you’ve lost control in the one area that determines what you do and when.  Everyone will be different here.  I have one client who’s a surgeon and a professor. She has to divide her time between the operating room and the classroom.  Her surgery hours are fixed. So, she knows she will be in the operating room on a Tuesday and Thursday. Her teaching hours vary according to each semester, but once the academic year begins, her lecture times are fixed.  These times are locked into her calendar. But she goes further. She knows that she will have to meet with patients and students. So, Wednesdays are dedicated for patients. She will visit the patients she will be operating on the next day and deal with any out-patient clinics on a Wednesday.  So three days a week are dedicated to her role as a surgeon.  She will do her academic work on Mondays and Fridays. Most of her lectures are in the mornings, and she will stay in her office in the afternoons so she’s available for students if they need her.  What she has done is to become ruthless with how she allocates her time each week. Her calendar is sacred territory.  She does open Saturday mornings during exam times so students can access her if needed, and she can do any outstanding admin work in between.  What got her back in control was taking back control of her calendar and saying “no” to requests that did not fit in with her priorities.  And this is where it’s hard for most people. Getting control of their calendar. The easy part is organising and reorganising your task manager. Really all you are doing there is moving things around.  When it comes to getting control of your calendar you have to interact with other people and that means in some instances you will need to say No.  And there human nature will challenge us. We’re wired to “please people”. So saying “no, I cannot meet with you” is tough. It’s easier to find an excuse why you are different to everyone else.  Yet, you don’t have to say no. You can use services such as Calendly, that lets you pick times you will be available for meetings and all you need do is share your unique link with people requesting a meeting with you. They can then choose a time that works for them without all the hassle of trying to find a time.  Technology has conditioned us to become comfortable with automated systems. There’s little to no pushback these days. In fact I’d go as far as to say that people much prefer to choose their appointment time from an online booking service.  Another long-time client of mine is a financial advisor. He adopted Calendly for his clients to use to book a call with him.  He was expecting a lot of pushback from his clients. Instead he got a lot of compliments. They loved it. They could book a time to talk with him from the comfort of their own sofa late at night without having to call or message him during “office hours”. Now, whenever he gets a message or email requesting a meeting, he sends them the link to his booking service.  This means he’s in complete control of his time. He can open or close meeting time slots during his weekly planning sessions, and he knows when he will be meeting clients so he can be better prepared for the meeting.  And speaking of weekly planning. This is possibly the number one idea that brin

Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin planner, once said: "When your daily activities are in concert with your highest priorities, you have a credible claim to inner peace."  And that nicely begins this week’s episode: what I’ve learned from my time with the Franklin Planner over the last twelve months.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 389 Hello, and welcome to episode 389 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.  Between October and the end of December, I like to experiment with different time management and productivity tools to see what I can learn and discover about managing my work. Last year, I chose the Franklin Planner. That has been a revelation. It allowed me to revisit how I managed my time and work while working in a high-pressure work environment with rapidly changing priorities and a constant supply of crises each day.  In this week’s episode, I want to share what I learned from the experiment with the Franklin Planner and how it has changed how I manage my work and time.  I was first introduced to the Franklin Planner back in 1992. My former boss, Andrew, inspired me to start using it. At that time, I also read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, which was a book written to introduce the planner.A From 1992 to 2009, I religiously used the Franklin Planner to manage not just my work, but my life.  I remember writing in my planner the first time I had the idea of coming to Korea, and then turning it into a project in the back of the planner. All my fears, concerns and excitements were written in there. Twenty-three years later, I still look back on that decision to come to Korea as being the best decision I’ve ever made.  For those unfamiliar with the Franklin Planner, let’s start with the idea behind it.  When you first receive your Franklin Planner, you are encouraged to write out your “governing values”. These are the things that are important to you—values such as honesty, integrity, how you treat others and your family.  From these, you can determine your performance against what is important to you and set goals based on that. This is where I got the inspiration for my areas of focus. We all share eight areas of life, which we define and prioritise differently.  These eight are: family and relationships, Career or business, health and fitness, self-development, finances, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality and life’s purpose.  It’s these governing values that become the foundations of your system with the Franklin Planner.  Once you have established your governing values, you can begin using the daily pages. On the left, you have a prioritised task list. Next to that, you have your schedule for the day, and on the right-hand page, you have a space to collect notes.  What became immediately obvious to me when I been using the Franklin Planner, was the way it forced me to stop and think.  The act of handwriting what I decided were my most important tasks for the day slowed me down and got me thinking about what was genuinely important.  With digital systems, it’s all too easy to add random dates to a task, hoping that by some miracle you will find the time to do it. And I know some of you add random dates because you’re afraid of forgetting about the task, even though the task does not need to be done on the date you assigned it.  With the Franklin Planner, you stop doing that. You become more intentional about what you will do each day, which ensures that you are focused on the important tasks.  What I noticed was that I became much better at prioritising.  It becomes annoying to rewrite a task day after day because you didn’t do it. So you either delete it or you do it.  With digital systems, it’s easy to give up and move the task to another random day. And when that day comes, you don’t do it again, so push it off again and again.  The other related lesson from the Franklin Planner was that you become hyper-aware of what you can realistically do each day.  Because you write out your appointments for the day first, you can see, in plain sight, just how much time you have for doing tasks.  If you’ve got seven hours of meetings, a concert to go to, and you want to fit in a thirty-minute exercise session, you will instantly see that you won’t have much time to do tasks.  With digital systems, all your tasks are hidden and given that most people don’t manage their calendars particularly well and have multiple events in the same time slot, it’s difficult to see where the important events and tasks are. Not so with the Franklin Planner. You won’t be able to over-schedule yourself. Writing out your commitments each day ensures you don’t overcommit.  I did discover some redundancies with the Planner, though. One of which was the monthly calendar tabs in your planner.  The digital calendar is superb. If an appointment is rescheduled, it’s easy to drag and drop it to the new date and time. In the Franklin Planner, you would need to Tippex or cross out the appointment and rewrite it on the new date.  Although if you want to retain complete control over your calendar, the Franklin Planner would be a better option. Nobody would be able to add an appointment to your calendar, and you would have to go through you first to schedule anything with you.  I did find a useful way to use the monthly calendar tabs, though. Each month, I write out my goals and the projects I expect to complete that month. This has been very useful when doing my weekly planning, as it gives me a central place free from the distractions of other goals and projects.  A great way to stay focused on what you have decided is important in that month.  Another feature of the Franklin Planner is the way you reference information you collect. When you write a note in the daily notes area, each note is assigned a number.  For example, the first note you write is given the number 1, and the next is number 2. This then gives you a simple way to retrieve information you may have written. At the beginning of each monthly tab, you have a sheet called the “Index”. If you want to find the note you made, all you need to do is write the date you wrote the note and its number. For example, 19-10/1 would refer to the first note you made on the 19th October.  It’s a wonderful retrieval system and one I found very useful when planning the month or the week.  But the biggest takeaway for me was the way the Franklin Planner slowed me down and got me to think about how I was using my time. Planning the day by writing out my appointments first to see how much time I had left after them to do my tasks forced me to get realistic about what I could do that day.  For example, yesterday, I took my mother to the airport. The airport is about a four-hour drive each way. This meant I was away for at least eight hours, and I could see that on my calendar for the day. It meant I had very little time to do tasks, which I could see when I did my daily planning the evening before.  It really focused me on getting the critical work done before we set off because traffic conditions are unpredictable, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance when I got back, just in case I was delayed.  Sure, you can do that digitally, but because all our tasks are in our digital systems, it can become overwhelming and stressful looking at hundreds of tasks trying to decide which ones must be done that day.  With the Franklin Planner, you effectively have a blank slate each day to choose what you must do. Taking ten minutes away from your screen and really thinking about what is important for the day can do incredible things for your focus.  Oh, and I should mention that the dopamine hit you get from crossing off a task by hand is way more powerful than a digital click.  So what has this experiment with the Franklin Planner changed about my system as a whole?  Well, the first thing is I’ve started to add to my journal the two most important tasks of the day. I write my journal by hand each morning, and I’ve always tracked my morning routine habit and my exercise in there. Now I write out my two most important tasks.  Again, what this has done is to get me focused on the day.  My daily planning has changed, too. Now, I start by looking at my calendar for the next day’s appointments before I curate my list of tasks for the day.  For example, today I have seven hours of meetings. When I did my planning last night, I saw that and realised the only thing I would be able to do today was this podcast.  In the past, I would have ignored all that and begun the day with ten to fifteen tasks and seven hours of meetings. Those days were broken before they started. There was no way I would do all that in one day.  Will I continue with the Planner? That’s a difficult one to answer.  The areas where the planner has helped me can be replicated with a regular desk diary. I did not find that I added that many notes to the daily notes field. I carry a pocket notebook with me for random thoughts, and I like the randomness of that.  Meeting notes, project, and content ideas go directly into my digital notes system, and I have a paper-based planning book where I plan out my bigger projects, weekly plans, and YouTube videos.  And the “deal-breaker’ for me has been the poor quality of

“I used to say, ‘I sure hope things will change, ' then I learned that the only way things are going to change for me is when I change." That’s a quote from the wonderful Jim Rohn. A strong proponent of developing a plan for your life, and a part of that is creating a strong plan for the new year.  In this special episode, I’ll walk you through the steps for the Annual Planning Season, which began on October 1st.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 388 Hello, and welcome to episode 388 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.  A mistake I used to make was to come up with some ideas about what I would like to change in the new year in that gap between Christmas and the New Year.  The only reason I ever did that was because my friends were asking, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” I never really had any, so I used to quickly think up some cool-sounding ideas and say that was what I was going to do.  And yet, it wasn’t always like that.  When I was a competitive athlete in my teens, each year in December, I would sit down with my coach and plan what we would achieve the following year.  What times we were going for and which races were to be the “big ones”.  I still remember the year I broke 2 minutes for the 800 metres and 4 minutes for the 1,500 metres. We knew I was close, having ended the previous year at 2 minutes 3 seconds for the 800 and 4 minutes 6 seconds for the 1,500.  All that was needed was a good, strong winter and pre-season training. I remember going into 1986 in one of the most positive frames of mind ever.  Then, when I stopped running competitively—one of my biggest regrets—I stopped planning the year. And that coincided with my not achieving very much.  I drifted from one job to another. Had no idea what I wanted to do, and I remember feeling unfulfilled and lost.  Fortunately, I rediscovered annual planning. The sitting down and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish. It was that restart that resulted in me coming to Korea, and discovering my passion—teaching.  Everything I have achieved over the last 23 years can be traced back to following my annual planning method.  From finding a career I loved, to getting married and moving to the East Coast of Korea—one of the most beautiful places in the world—and starting the company I run today, now employing four people.  All of these ideas began with the annual planning method. So, what is the annual planning method? Well, it’s five simple questions you ask yourself and give some thought to over two months—October and November.  Those five questions are: What would you like to change about yourself? What would you like to change about your lifestyle? What would you like to change about the way you work? What could you do to challenge yourself? What goals would you like to achieve?  Let me explain the kind of things you can think about. What would you like to change about yourself? This is about you. Your current habits and routines. Are these delivering the results you want?  When I sat down to write Your Time, Your Way, I knew I had to sacrifice some exercise time in order to write. I was okay with that, and I also knew a consequence of reducing my exercise time would be a gain in weight. Two years later, I had gained eight kilograms (about 17 ½ pounds)! Not good. If my weight exceeds 83 kilograms, I feel sluggish and quickly become tired.  So, in my planning last year, I made it a non-negotiable to get my weight back to my regular weight of 80 kilograms (about 176 pounds or 12 ½ stone)  Today, as I write this, my weight is 80.5 kgs. Well within my weight window.  That all started with asking myself, “What do I want to change about myself?” The answer was to get back into my regular exercise routine.  So, what would you like to change about yourself? Are you doing things that are not contributing to the results you want? Are you not consistently planning your days or weeks?  Are you not moving enough? Are you spending too much time sitting down in front of a screen and not enough time in nature?  Another one is how you dress. The pandemic saw a collapse in the way people dressed. This may not interest you, but perhaps you’d like to dress better when you go out. What could you do to improve your dress sense?  Maybe you’d like to begin journaling or meditation. Write anything you consider down. You’re not committing to anything yet; you’re brainstorming ideas. The commitments you make come in December. October and November are all about developing ideas and going deep.  The next question, “What do I want to change about my lifestyle?” Is about how you live your life every day. Is your house a mess? Do you leave your bed unmade when you get up in the morning? What about your car? Is it a garbage can on wheels?  Perhaps you’d like to come home to a clean home at the end of the day? If so, what could you do to change things? One idea that my wife and I had at the end of 2019 was to move to the East Coast of Korea. To do that, we knew we’d have to finally get a car. Living in Seoul, the capital city, with its superb public transport system, meant that having a car was not a high priority for us.  Yet, for us to get out of Seoul and live in a cleaner, quieter city, we needed to explore Korea. So, that became the plan: to buy a car and begin exploring possible places to live.  By the end of 2020, we had a car and moved to the East Coast.  That change brought some tremendously positive changes in our lives.  Yet, I know that had we not sat down to talk about our future plans, we’d still be living in a crowded, noisy, polluted city. Seoul is a great city, don’t get me wrong, but with 11 million people sharing it, you can imagine how noisy and crowded it can be.  Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do relating to your lifestyle that you’ve never considered what you need to do to make happen? Write that down.  What would you like to change about the way you work? A great question if you’ve found yourself stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling dead inside.  Some people I know have decided to completely change their careers when answering this question, while others have started their own businesses.  It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, though. Perhaps you don’t like the structure you have in place to do your work. It could be a tools thing, too. Do you need to upgrade the way you manage your tasks and projects? What about your workspace? Does it need an overhaul? I’ve done that a few times. Does your current workspace feel sterile and cold? Could you change your desk or your chair?  If you work from home, can you do anything to make your workspace more stimulating? Perhaps move your desk nearer a window or change the lighting?  All these ideas can lead to some fantastic changes. However, you do need time to think things through, and that’s what October and November are for.  The fourth question is What can you do to challenge yourself? This question is there because often we get stuck in our comfort zones. We become afraid to change anything because we fear what those changes may bring. Yet, if you’re not challenging yourself, you soon find yourself trapped in stagnation. Physical challenges are a great place to start. If you feel you’ve become a little too sedentary, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a park run in March.  Or for those of you who are more ambitious, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a triathlon or a full marathon in 2026.  What about going back to school and getting a degree? One such challenge that comes up each year on my list is to do a master’s in contemporary British history. I’m sure it will be on my list this year, too.  Think of the things that frighten you. Is there anything you could do to overcome that fear?  The final question is What goals would you like to achieve in 2026?  There’s a reason this is the final question. That’s because after you’ve thought about the previous four questions, you’re more likely to think about how you can measure success in the changes you want to make.  One such goal my wife and I have already added is to have a big savings goal in 2026. This will affect both our spending habits—no more fountain pen purchases for me (oh no!) We haven’t settled on an amount yet, but we’re thinking about it.  Perhaps you want to set the goal of getting a promotion next year or finally starting that business you’ve been thinking about for years.  Or it could simply be a bad habit that you want to stop. Doom scrolling, the new smoking bad habit, or going to bed earlier. What about reading books? How many would you like to read in 2026?  The purpose of these questions is to get you to think. Think about what you want out of life.  You are amazing, and there’s so much you could do. Yet, you will only be able to do those incredible things if you externalise them and begin to think about how you could make them happen.  The best place to keep this list of questions is in a paper notebook. I used to do this digitally, but found I was too easily distracted when trying to write them out on my iPad or phone.  When I switched to writing these questions out in my Planning Book—an A4 notebook where I keep all my initial project plans, weekly planning sessions, and YouTube video plans—I found

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” That is possibly one of Stephen Covey’s most famous quotes. It’s at the heart of almost all time management and productivity advice today. It addresses one of the biggest challenges today—the cycle of focusing on the urgent at the expense of working on the important. If you focus on the urgent, all you get is more urgent stuff. If you focus on the important, you reduce the urgent stuff.  It’s all about priorities, and that’s what we’re looking at today.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 387 Hello, and welcome to episode 387 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 are two natural laws of time management and productivity that, for one reason or another, are frequently forgotten, and yet they are immutable and permanent, and you or I cannot change them. They are: You can only do one thing at a time, and anything you do requires time.  When you understand this and internalise it, you can create a solid time management and productivity system based on your needs and what you consider important.  This doesn’t change at any time in your life. When we are young and dependent on our parents, these natural laws still hold true.  These laws are still then when we retire from the workforce and perhaps gain a little more agency over our time. You can take the time to landscape your garden and travel the world, yet you cannot do both simultaneously.  Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to hire a landscape gardener to do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, you will still need time to plan what you want done and find the right landscaper.  What this means is every day you have a puzzle to solve. What to do with the time you have available that day.  And the secret to getting good at solving this daily puzzle is to know what your priorities are. And that is where a little foresight and thought can help you quickly make the right decisions.  And that neatly brings us to this week’s question, which means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.  This week’s question comes from Mel. Mel asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and would love to know your thoughts on prioritising your day. I have family commitments and work full-time, and I often struggle to fit everything in. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Hi Mel, Thank you for your question.  I must confess it took me many years to understand these natural laws. Like most people, I felt I could get anything done on time, that I had plenty of time to fit in more meetings, accept more demands on my time, and still have time to spend with my family and friends.  Yet, I never managed to accept more meetings and requests, meet my commitments, and spend quality time with the people I cared about.  I found myself working until 2:00 am most days and starting earlier and earlier each day to keep my promises.  And, like most people, I thought all I needed to do was to find another productivity tool. A new app would surely solve my time problems.  This was at the height of the “hustle culture” trend ten to fifteen years ago. It was all about working more and more hours. I fell into the trap of believing that to be successful, all I had to do was throw more hours at the problem.  Well, that didn’t work out. All that happened was I felt tired all day, and my productivity fell like a brick.  It felt good to work until one or two in the morning. I felt I was doing what I needed to do to be successful. Yet, I conveniently forgot I was having to take naps throughout the day, and when I was awake, I procrastinated like I was in the Olympic procrastination final.  And all those new tools I was constantly downloading, looking for the Holy Grail of productivity apps, meant I had tasks, events and information all over the place, which required a lot of wasted time trying to find where I had put the latest world-changing idea.  What I was doing was violating the laws of time.  You can only do one thing at a time, and everything you do requires time.  The lightbulb moment was realising that I had a limited amount of time each day, which meant that if I was to get the most important things done each day, I needed to know the most important things.  Here’s what’s important to you. The promises you make to other people, particularly those you make to the people closest to you.  And it doesn’t matter who you are. Anything you promise you will do for another person becomes a priority.  On a personal level, this means if you promise your daughter that you will take her to the theme park on Sunday, you don’t look for ways to get out of it because your boss asked you to finish a report and have it on her desk Monday at 8:30 am.  You take your daughter to the theme park, and you negotiate with your boss. If your boss won’t negotiate, you find a way to finish the report before Sunday, so when you do take your daughter to the theme park, you are 100% committed and present.  Meetings you have committed to are a promise. It’s a promise that you will be in a given place at a specific time. Once you have confirmed the meeting, you’re committed and, except for exceptional circumstances—illness, for example—you turn up on time.  When you treat your promises as a commitment you cannot break, you start to see that your time is limited.  It’s limited because no matter what, you get twenty-four hours a day, and that’s it.  Now, it’s a little more complicated than that. We are human beings, and an inconvenient truth about being human is that we need a certain amount of sleep each day to perform. Without enough sleep, you will discover what I discovered when I was all in on the hustle culture: Your productivity drops significantly.  You might think you are working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Yet, your output will have dropped, and your results will only be as if you have been working eight to ten hours.  There are other factors too. A poor diet and a lack of movement will also significantly lower your performance and overall productivity.  In the end, when you think you can fit everything in and continue to say yes to every request, “Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash”, as Stinger said to Maverick in the movie Top Gun.  You will quickly find you’re making promises you cannot keep because you’re constantly tired, not in the mood and letting the people around you down.  Prioritising your day starts with you. The first thirty minutes of the day should be focused on you and the things you enjoy. That could be a freshly brewed cup of tea, ten minutes of meditation, a few light stretches, or a few moments writing your thoughts down in a journal.  I know many of you may have young kids; if they are waking up with you, could you engage in some quiet activities that involve them? Perhaps you could sit quietly together and read a real book or do some light exercise together.  Next, come your confirmed appointments. When are they, and where do you need to be? These appointments give you structure to your day. You’ve committed to them, so you are now obliged to turn up on time.  Then comes your core work—the work you are employed to do. What is that, and what does that look like at a task level? In other words, what does doing the work you were employed to do look like? Finally, from a work perspective, comes everything else. The work you volunteered for, the emails and admin and any other non-core work activities you may have said yes to.  One way to look at your day is how your grandparents would have seen their days. There’s work time and then there’s home time. When at work, your priorities are your work promises and commitments. When at home, your priorities are your family and friends.  As Jim Rohn said: "When you work, work; when you play, play. Don't play at work, and don't work at play. Make best use of your time" A simple philosophy and one that works superbly well today.  I’ve found that a simple daily planning sequence helps people to focus on the right things at the right time.  First, review your appointments for the day. This gives you a good idea of your available time for everything else. Second, look at your list of tasks for today and curate it based on how much time you have left after your meetings. It’s no good thinking you will get ten or more tasks done today if you have seven hours of meetings. That won’t happen.  Yet, on days when you have one or two meetings, you can schedule more tasks.  Finally, prioritise the list of tasks. For non-core work tasks, you can prioritise based on time sensitivity and your promises.  If you told a client or colleague you would complete the work they asked you to do by Friday, and today is Thursday, that task would be your priority. You made a promise, and your integrity is at stake. If you fail to meet the deadline, you don’t keep your promise, your client or colleague has every right to question your integrity and reliability.  One more idea you could adopt, Mel, is to think elimination, not accumulation.  It’s easier today to collect stuff than it’s ever been. We see something online we’d like to buy and send the link to our task managers. Someone recommends a book, send it to your task manager.  This results in a task manager stuffed with promises you’ve made to

I want to begin today’s episode by thanking you for listening to this podcast. Earlier this week, this podcast surpassed one million downloads.  For context, that puts this podcast in the top 3 to 5 percent of the productivity and time management niche.  So, thank you. I do this for you, and for all of you who have sent in questions for answering. You keep me on my toes and challenge me every week. For that, I am eternally grateful. Thank you. You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 386 Hello, and welcome to episode 386 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 week’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement.  How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment?  The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave?  It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is.  I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day.  From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions.  Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison. Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted.  Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards.  If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart.  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 Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position?  Thank you, Jan for your question. One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite.  The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately.  It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature.  Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute.  Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not.  A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently. Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair. Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar. All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them.  One thing we did have, which I notice many companies do not, is a clear list of priorities.  Take for example my priorities for handling email.  Anything to do with money or forgotten passwords are things I will deal with immediately I see the email. Sorting them out doesn’t take long—five minutes for most—but I understand how frustrating it can be waiting to get a response.  Everything else has a 24 hour response cycle.  It’s rare I will get either of those two emergencies—perhaps one or two a month—but when they do happen, it’s automatic for me to immediately jump into action and deal with them.  And that’s one of the first things I would recommend you do, Jan. Categorise the requests you get and put in place some rules for dealing with them.  What are genuine emergencies? What are not?  I know if you are new to your company, there will be a period where you will need to learn what’s urgent and what’s not. That’s where experience and knowledge comes into play.  Given time, you will be able to analyse the types of requests you are getting and learn the patterns. There will be some people you work with that expect immediate responses. Is that a people issue or a genuine problem issue.  Some people have become conditioned to expect an immediate response. With these people it might be prudent to slowly change their conditioning by gradually reducing your response time.  Now, of course, you may not be able to do with people in higher positions than you but for others you may be able to do so.  In Your Time, Your Way, I wrote about how emergency room medical staff use the medical triage method. Each patient is assessed against a scale or urgency.  A Level 1 needs immediate attention and their condition is life-threatening, Level 2 is urgent attention required as their is potentially a threat to life, Level 3 requires timely intervention but life is not threatened, Level 4 is less urgent, and Level 5 can wait for care. You can use this approach when you are dealing with customer care or IT issues.  Monitor the requests you get over a week or so and grade them. You may not need five levels, three or four levels would be sufficient. For example: A Level one request requires immediate attention. A Level two request requires attention within two hours A Level three request can be dealt with within the day And a Level four can be ignored.  You will need to be careful not to treat everything as a Level One. If everything was a level one, then nothing would be urgent because everything was.  One of the great things about this kind of approach is there’s no hesitation. You know exactly what to do. If something is urgent, for example, the whole company’s system goes down or there is a security breach, everything stops until the issue is resolved.  Hopefully, this kind of emergency won’t happen often. If it does, then there’s likely to be a problem in the company’s systems that need fixing and that would need to be escalated to the relevant person.  The next problem in these circumstances is that you may feel obligated to be constantly watching your email and internal messaging system. If you want to be able to get on and do your work, that’s going to be a no no.  You cannot do both. There has to be some flexibility.  What I’ve found helpful for many of my coaching clients is to protect the first thirty minutes of their work day for going through all their communication channels to see what’s happening.  This way, you can deal with any immediate problems before they destroy your day.  Then the next hour (or two if you dare), you do your focused work.  You can then check your messages and emails once you have finished your focused work. It’s only one hour.  If you’ve never done this before, I should warn you that it will be scary. You’re likely to have become used to being reactive, and changing that to being proactive by focusing on your most important work for the day for an hour or so, can be deeply uncomfortable at first.  Here you will need to be persistent. It gets easier, and your confidence grows with time.  I used to be always checking my mail for “problems”. It was horrible. It took me several weeks to become comfortable turning off all communication systems for two hours while I got on and did my most important work for the day.  But it was worth it. For one thing, I began understand that most things were not really urgent and as long as I responded within twenty-four hours people were happy.  For you, you may need to respond faster than that. But it’s unlikely that you will need to be responding immediately to everything. You’ve got to remember that no matter what work you do there is always a limited resource—time. You get twenty-four hours each day and that’s it. No more and no less. And while you can expand that to a week, that still only gives you 168 hours.  However, careful management of that time can help to reduce many emergencies. Ruthlessly protecting one or two hours a day for your most important work, for example, ensures

"The real magic lies at the intersection between eating, moving, and sleeping. If you can do all three well, it will improve your daily energy and your odds of living a long, healthy life,"  That’s a quote from Tom Rath, author of Eat Move Sleep. The three most important factors in you becoming more productive, focused and motivated each day. You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 385 Hello, and welcome to episode 385 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.  Don’t skip the basics. For me, this was a hard lesson to learn. I used to stay up late to finish work or watch TV. I’d skip my exercise or allow myself to get involved in meetings I didn’t really need to attend—just to feel a part of something.  And I would eat rubbish—cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and rice or fries for lunch and pizza for dinner.  And I felt it. I was tired, unproductive, and did not know where I was going. My weight kept going up and up, and every day felt like a drudge. I would wake up, feel horrible, go to work, come home, collapse onto the sofa, turn on the TV, and escape the real world.  It was easy to blame everyone else. My boss, my colleagues, my customers, the weather, where I lived, the company, etc.  Yet, it wasn’t anyone else’s fault. It was mine.  I had allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. That was a choice.  I cannot say there was a particular moment that changed me. It was more a gradual change.  What I learned, though, was that creating an enjoyable, exciting, and fulfilling life started with getting the basics right.  And that is what this week’ question is all about. What are the basics, and why do they matter? 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 Ali. Ali asks, hi Carl, my life’s a mess. I stay up all night watching TV or YouTube videos, and then wake up late and have to rush to get to work. Then at work I feel tired and unmotivated all day. What can I do to have some better habits?  Hi Ali, thank you for your question.  The first step would be to read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book, that explains how habits work, how to create your own and does all that in a simple step by step approach.  The next step is to understand some time tested basics. One of the many reasons why anyone would feel demotivated about the day is they are not clear on what is important to them.  Not everyone wants to be supremely fit and sporty and that’s fine. You don’t have to be. But it’s equally true no one wants to die prematurely.  As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement address in 2006 "No one wants to die... even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there" To find your purpose, or simply the motivation to jump out of bed each morning go through the Areas of Focus workbook. It’s free and you can download it from my website.  This will give you the eight areas of life that should be in balance.  Those eight are: Family and relationships Career or business Health and fitness Finance Lifestyle and life experiences Self development Spirituality Life’s purpose Now, when I say in balance, it means defining what each one means to you. For example, for your finances area of focus could be something as simple as “I live within my means and not over spend on trivial things” or your lifestyle and life experiences could be “I live in a clean and tidy home”. Getting these eight basics of life in balance will give you some purpose each day. Living in a clean and tidy home may mean that before you leave to go to work, you make your bed and wash the dishes.  To keep your finances in check, you may decide to do a weekly or monthly budget to track how you are spending your money.  That becomes a habit. It’s a must-do.  None of these takes a lot of time, but they help to keep your areas of focus in balance.  Now onto another important factor. One of the things I’ve noticed about highly motivated and successful people is they have some structure in their lives.  They wake up at the same time each day, they follow a morning routine and have some structure for the rest of the day. That could be exercising at the same time each day or just going for a walk at the end of the day to decompress. Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, starts his day with an extremely early wake-up, around 3:45 AM, to read emails from customers and employees before heading to the gym for an hour of exercise. He eats a healthy breakfast, gets coffee, and then begins his workday. I recently wrote about Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie detective in many of her novels in my weekly newsletter.  Poirot was obsessive, it’s true. He was immaculately turned out at all times. Yet he had structure to his days. Breakfast was at the same time each day and he had his famous tisane (a kind of herbal drink) served in the same glass.  What draws me to Poirot is that fastidiousness. Nothing was rushed. The only things that ever bothered him was if his routines were interrupted. Perhaps not a good thing, but it did enable him to have a purpose each day. If he was taking a holiday, he refused to entertain any work. He was resting his “little grey cells” and that was the purpose of the holiday.  When he was working he was engaged completely. He actions were methodical and deliberate. I know Poirot is a fictional character, but in fictional characters there’s always a grain of truth somewhere.  Perhaps Poirot’s obsessiveness for order and structure, was motivated by someone somewhere.  The one thing I’ve learned is if you’re not getting the basics right, then everything else falls apart. The basics are your daily routines. Your sleep schedule, what and when you eat and stepping away from screens and moving.  They are not difficult to do, but without one essential ingredient, you won’t do them. That ingredient is self-discipline.  You need discipline to get out of bed on a cold, wet morning. You need discipline to say no to that plate of unhealthy food, and you need discipline to turn off the TV and go to bed at the right time.  I often shy away from advising people to develop their self-discipline because it’s hard to do. And these days I find many people have simply given up and just tell themselves they have no self-discipline and that they never have had.  They will look back in their lives to find examples and use that to prove it to themselves. Ignoring the fact that there will also have been examples of them being disciplined.  It’s complete rubbish for anyone to say they lack self-discipline. It’s innate and inside all of us. But, like a muscle, if you don’t use it, it will weaken. But never disappear entirely.  Strengthening your self-discipline isn’t particularly difficult. As Admiral McRaven said in his Texas University Commencement address—begin the day by making your bed. Is that so difficult? It’s one thing, but it’s the start of strengthening your self discipline.  Now you mentioned that you want better habits. What would you consider to be “better habits”?  That would be the place to start.  I’ve never been a good sleeper—as a consequence I fell into the trap of believing it was “just the way I was wired”. Of course, that’s not true.  In January I made a commitment to myself I would be in bed no later than midnight. It was a struggle, but I persisted. Now, nine months later, I’m in bed consistently at midnight and my sleep is better than ever.  It took a bit of self-discipline for the first week or two, but soon it was a habit.  Changing your sleep habit is straight forward. Calculate how much sleep you need, then decide what time you want to wake up, and work backwards.  So, if you discover that you need seven hours sleep and you want to wake up at 7:00 am, then you need to be in bed by 11:30 pm. (It’s not like we instantly fall asleep when we get into bed)  Another thing you mentioned, Ali, is you lack motivation at work. That may be a bigger issue. If work is demotivating you, it’s also draining you of purpose. That’s where I would spend some time analysing. When your purpose is drained, that has a big effect on your mental energy.  What is it about your work that is demotivating?  If it’s just a stage—we all go through that at times—what can you do to find some purpose. Perhaps you could set yourself a target. Sell X amount of products, solve a particularly difficult problem for your team or do something to improve your own workflows and processes. If it’s bigger than that and it’s about the job itself, then it may be time to begin looking at alternative jobs. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your current job, what it means is you begin looking at alternatives.  What kind of work would motivate you?  It’s perfectly okay to accept that you made a mistake in your choice of career. That does not mean you are stuck with that mistake. You can change careers at any time. I’ve been a hotel manager, car salesperson, a lawyer and teacher.  The hardest part for me was accepting that the legal profession was not for me. I’d spent six years in school and training, but after graduating and working in a law office, I soon found myself hating it.  I felt I was in a day release prison. I had to sign in at 9:00 each morning and was not allowed to leave until 5:30 pm. During that time it felt I was chained to a desk only being allowed to move to

Let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble upon the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there’s not enough time to get everything done that you’re convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done. That’s a quote by Andy Stanley, an author and church leader and perfectly captures the topic of this week’s episode. Enjoy.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 384 Hello, and welcome to episode 384 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 easy to create a productivity system on paper, working with theories and concepts. The challenging part comes when that system is confronted with real-life events.  The upset customer who demands immediate action, a colleague off work sick and a boss who thinks you can drop everything and work on their latest wheeze.  It’s not that these productivity systems don’t work, they do, it’s that a system is only as good as the person adopting it is willing to slow down and consider how important the demand in front of them really is.  It’s also understanding what you have control of and what you don’t.  You don’t have control over whether your daughter’s after-school class is cancelled at short notice or not. You do have control over putting in place a contingency in case it happens.  In the real world, things change fast. An urgent email you received at 9:15 a.m. Is resolved on its own by 9:28 a.m. A meeting you spent all weekend preparing for get’s cancelled two hours before it’s due to begin. The list is endless.  Yet, having some kind of system still helps you.  And that’s what this week’s question is about. How to use a productivity system in a fast moving, chaotic world.  And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, hi Carl, how would you advise someone that is struggling to set up a system because their work is always changing. My customers expect me to be available all the time and my boss keeps calling meetings without any notice. I never have any time to do my work.  Hi Alan. Thank you for your question.  I think it was Jim Rohn that taught me to understand that there are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. Obvious ones would be the weather, or a train breaking down that prevents you from getting into work on time.  Yet, there are also things like phone calls and urgent messages that can significantly change your plans for the day.  This is what I suppose we call life. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our plans.  However, it’s always been like that. Life has always been unpredictable and yet many people have managed to deal with it.  There are a number of things you can do that will help you to stay on track, yet have the space and time to deal with the unexpected when they occur.  The first one is when planning the week, don’t focus on tasks, focus on objectives.  What I mean by this is when you focus on scheduling tasks for the week, it’s likely 60% or more will not get done. Either you don’t have the time or things change and they no longer need to be done.  Too much can change over seven days.  I’ve seen people carefully schedule out an exercise plan for the week, only to pick up a calf strain on Tuesday that prevents them from doing any more running for the rest of the week.  Yet, had they set the objective to exercise four times that week, the calf strain would be a minor inconvenience and perhaps to fulfil their exercise objective they could go swimming or to the gym and do non-leg exercises instead.  Similarly in the work environment, if you were to plan out a project’s tasks for the week, and you keep getting pulled into a last minute “urgent” meetings, the chances are by the end of the week you will have done practically none of the tasks you scheduled for yourself.  If you had instead set the objective of doing some work on the project, you would give yourself more flexibility to choose what to do given the changing circumstances of your week.  This way, although you may have only done three things on the project you still completed your objective. That’s a win.  Had you set yourself up to complete ten tasks on the project and only done three, you would consider that a failure and feel planning the week is a waste of time.  It’s as if all you are doing in a weekly planning session is scheduling tasks you won’t do. Which then makes it feel like a waste of time. But It’s not a waste of time if you are setting yourself realistic objectives based on what your calendar says you have time for.  Tasks are assigned at a daily level.  When you assign your tasks at a daily level you can take into account the changing nature of the week.  I’ve had clients have their complete week destroyed because of a crisis with a client in another country. They go into work with one expectation and by 11:00 am they are driving to the airport to catch a flight to the other side of the world to resolve a crisis.  This is why weekly and daily planning go hand in hand.  Another tip I would recommend is to avoid scheduling anything for the first thirty minutes of your work day.  Use that time to get a heads up on the day.  Go through your messages and emails to see what is happening.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should not check your email or messages in the morning. That to me is a ridiculous idea. When you stop yourself from processing your messages, you start to worry that there might be something in there that is important.  That worry causes distraction and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.  The chances that there is a crisis that needs your urgent attention is slim and if there is a crisis that needs your attention better to know about it early so you have time to slow down and consider the best steps to resolve it.  But more importantly, those first thirty minutes gives you a chance to get a feel for the day, confirm your plan and decide when best to do whatever work you had decided to do that day.  To give you an example. I woke early this morning for a meeting at 8:00 am. I did my morning routines, and as I was preparing for the meeting, I got a text message informing me that the meeting had been cancelled.  That gave me back an hour I had not planned for.  So, I looked at my plan for the day and decided that the best use of that hour would be to begin writing this podcast script. Doing that would take the pressure off the rest of the day and give me a chance to bring forward other work.  All this does not mean having a system is pointless. Having a system means you can switch focus quickly and you know where to look to make better decisions on what to work on next.  For example, having a quick and simple way to collect stuff is a no-brainer. A paper notebook open on your desk with a pencil ready to go allows you to quickly jot something down when on a call or in the middle of doing something else.  Making sure that your phone and computers are set up for quick capture is also important. Ideas and requests can happen at any time. Being able to collect those ideas with the minimum of fuss is important. Then, allowing yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day for processing what you collected so you can delete the unnecessary and ensure that what is left is either scheduled or dealt with.  This is why I urge everyone to take the free COD course. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it’s the foundations of every solid productivity system.  I’ll put a link in the show notes for you if you haven’t taken the course yet.  Another thing you can do, which is linked to the first thirty minutes of your day is to mentally map out when you will do something. This is where you use the power of “implementation Intentions”.  This is where you used an “if this, then that formula”  If it’s 2:00 pm then I will spend an hour clearing my actionable email. If it’s 5:30 pm, I will stop and plan tomorrow for ten minutes.  I like to use the first thirty minutes of the day to review my calendar and then visualise the different times in the day what I will be doing at that time.  It really helps to get you focused and prevents you from getting involved in things you do not need to be involved in.  Don’t be too strict with yourself. If you planned to respond to your actionable emails at 2:00 pm and it’s now 2:20 pm, it doesn’t matter. Just start going through your actionable emails. Whether you spend an hour or forty minutes on this activity isn’t the issue. What matters in you spent some time doing it.  Being consistent and allowing yourself to get back on track is what really matters. When it comes to things like emails and messages and daily admin, it’s never going to be about clearing everything in one day. It’s always about spending some time doing it daily.  If you’re just starting out on an exercise programme, it’s not really about the quality of your workout initially, It’s about spending time doing exercise. Getting fit and healthy doesn’t happen with one workout. It’s an accumulation of many workouts done consistently over a period of time that results in your increased physical fitness.  A final point is if you work in a dynami

“I'm not gifted. I'm not smarter than everybody else. I'm not stronger. I just have the ability to stick to a plan and not quit.” That’s a quote from Jonny Kim. A Navy SEAL, Harvard educated medical doctor and NASA Astronaut. All of which was achieved before he was thirty five.  Now the key part to that quote is “the ability to stick to a plan and not quit” And that’s the topic of this week’s podcast. You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 383 Hello, and welcome to episode 383 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 took me many years to learn that the best things in life never happen by accident. They are the products of slow steady work. Becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not about making a decision in middle school and then miraculously ten years later you’re performing in the Supreme Court or surgery in a top hospital.  It takes years of slow steady study, experiencing ups and downs and frequently wanting to quit because it’s hard.  Yet that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s hard because as human beings we thrive when we have a goal that requires us to work hard consistently.  Jonny Kim is remarkable because he did three incredibly hard things. Yet, to achieve all of them required him to follow a simple process of study and preparation. It wasn’t impossible. All it took was a steely determination to achieve these things, being consistent and, to take control of his calendar.  And that’s what this week’ question is all about. How to do the the hard things consistently so you start to see progress.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Joe. Joe asks, hi Carl, the one thing I find incredibly hard to be is consistent. I’m great at setting up task managers and notes apps, but after a few days, I stop following the system. How do you stay consistent? Hi Joe, thank you for your question.  There could be two parts to this. The first is what I call the “Shiny Object Syndrome”. This is where you see every new tool on YouTube or in a newsletter as something that promises to solve all your productivity and time management problems.  We all go through this phase. In many ways, I think it’s important to do so. This way you learn the limitations of tools and find out, the hard way, that no tool will ever do the work for you.  You also discover that the more addictive the tool (I believe they call it “sticky”), the less work you will do.  For me, Notion was a classic example of that. When Notion first came onto my radar around 2018, I was fascinated. I downloaded the app and began setting it up. It was exciting. Far more editable than Evernote or Apple Notes.  There were all these cool things you could do with it. Change the font, the colours, the background, create increasingly more complex dashboards and so on.  On that first day, I spent eight hours “setting it up”. It was later that evening I realised that if I were to use Notion I would never get any work done. I’d always want to play with it and try and get it to show me what I wanted to see, when I wanted to see it. A goal I was never likely to achieve.  So, I deleted the app.  It came down to one very simple thing. Do I want tools that will help me do my work or not?  Well, the answer was I wanted tools that got me to work fast. And that was not going to be Notion.  The tools that best promote solid work are boring. They have no flamboyant features. They just do what they are meant to do. In other words they are so featureless the only thing you can do is get on and do the work.  I rather envy those people who have the time to be constantly changing their apps. I know from experience that transferring everything to a new app takes time. And then there’s the learning curve, although I suspect that’s where the dopamine hits come from.  I certainly don’t have the time to do that. I’d prefer to spend my free time with my family, walking or playing with Louis or reading books.  The other area where a lack of consistency comes in is when you have no processes for doing your regular work.  Humans work best when they follow a pattern.  If you’ve ever learned to ride a bicycle, you will remember it was difficult at first. You were wobbly, probably fell off. Yet, if you persisted, today riding a bicycle doesn’t require a thought. You jump on and off you go.  There’s an illustration that Tony Robbins talks about. When a child learns to walk it’s a painfully slow experience. There’s the crawling, the pulling itself up on a chair, the inevitable first step and the constant falling over.  Yet, no parent would ever say stop! Give up. You’ll never be able to walk.  We persist and after a few days or weeks the child is walking everywhere.  If you want to be consistent with something, there will inevitably be a period of a few weeks or months where things don’t go smoothly. Mistakes are made, plenty of falls and a lot of frustration.  That’s the initial learning curve. We all have to go through it.  Recently, I updated my iPad to the new operating system. I do this annually to get to know what’s new in preparation for updating my Apple Productivity Course.  This year, Apple has significantly changed the design of the operating system. It’s slick, fast and very different to what I am used to. Now, each morning, I clear my email inbox on my iPad. I’ve done this for years and it’s automatic. Write my journal, then grab my iPad and clear the inbox.  Over the last few days I’ve felt a little frustration. The layout of Apple Mail has changed and buttons have moved. For two days I was trying to get rid of the sidebar (a new feature). I done that now and after a week, I’m beginning to get used to the new layout.  The issue here is that those changes slowed down my processing speed. This in turn threw out my routine a little.  It reminded me why changing apps all the time destroys ones productivity. But more importantly it reminded me that consistently following processes ensures speed—which ultimately is what reduces the time required to do the work.  The problem with following routines and processes is that doing so can be boring. Yet, anything worthwhile is going to be boring at times.  But boring is good for your brain. It doesn’t have to think too much and it gives it a chance to relax.  Constant stimulation, problem solving, learning to use new apps, messing around with routines and processes that work may be exciting (dopamine hits), but they don’t get the work done.  This one of the reasons why having a regular morning routine is a great way to start the day. By following a set routine every morning from the moment you wake up, allows you to do healthy things that do not require a lot of thought.  A morning routine could be making yourself a cup of coffee, doing some stretches, brushing your teeth and taking a shower.  Or it could be a little more with meditation, journal writing or exercise. These are your morning routines, so you get to choose what you do. All that matters is that whatever you choose to be your morning routine, you consistently do it. Every morning (including weekends)  Another way to bring consistency into your life is to put some stakes in the ground. In other words, build some structure around your day based on meal times, for example.  I do the family’s laundry when I go down to cook dinner. The washing machine is in the area of the kitchen, so it seems natural to take down the laundry and do the washing while I cook dinner. Once dinner is done, the washing is finished and ready to be hung up. (I refuse to use a dryer as it destroys clothes).  With work, I try to protect 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. each day for doing the most important work of the day. It’s not always possible, sometimes I need to be in a meeting, but I will fight tooth and nail to protect that time where possible.  It took a year or so to consistently protect that time, but now, even my wife respects it. She knows not to disturb me when I am doing my focused work.  It’s just two hours a day. That still leaves me with six hours for emergencies, customer queries and team requests.  You can also do this with your communications and daily admin. If you were to protect the same time each day to respond to your actionable emails and do whatever admin is required it makes things so much easier for you. If, you were to choose 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. For your communication and admin time, and got serious about protecting that time each day, after a few weeks it would feel very strange if you were not doing it.  This is how Jonny Kim managed to do what most people would consider impossible. It wasn’t because he was smarter than anyone else. He never graduated top of his class. Instead it was down to ruthlessly protecting time to study and train.  It’s how averagely talented athletes win Olympic gold medals. They prioritise the small things. The long boring runs, the hours in the gym, or practicing their serve over and over again.  It’s boring, yes. But it gets results, every time.  And yet, if you were to look at how much time you spent on these routines, it’s tiny. Out of twenty-four hours, you’re using two to four hours a day on doing the basics.  It’s when you don’t do that, that you need to find eight to twelve hours just to catch up. And because you don’t have a regular process for doing the work, it’s s

"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." That’s a quote by former GE CEO, Jack Welch. This week’s episode is about finding balance in our lives.    You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 382 Hello, and welcome to episode 382 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 always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar.  I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974.  In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse.  Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends. Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home.  Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries.  Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes.  Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way.  This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss.  So, to get into the how, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance?  Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question. One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week. Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends?  Add these to your calendar. Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work.  Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible.  You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours.  Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night.  This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went.  After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home.  During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game.  If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game.  That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable.  And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable.  Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar.  Task managers and notes apps can collect a lot of stuff. Ideas, things to do, future projects, meeting notes. The list is infinite. Yet, the time you have is not infinite. It’s limited. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours.  Part of the reason many feel there is no balance in their lives is they’ve allowed task managers to become their primary time management tool.  If you look at your task manager, it’s just a list of things you either have to do or would like to do. There’s no time frame. Some of the things on there will be important and time sensitive. However, a lot won’t be. And when you scroll through the list, all you see are things to do.  It numbs the mind and makes you feel you have no time to rest. The difference between today and the 1970s is what we are prioritising.  Because in the 1970s the only productivity or time management tools we had were desk or pocket diaries and notebooks, the only tool we looked at when asked to do something was our diaries.  This meant we would instantly see a conflict and would be able to say “No, sorry I cannot do that on that day”.  Today, when we are asked to do something we add to our task manager-after all, it’s easier to add it there than to open up our calendar app, and look at what we are committed to.  If you have on your calendar a regular aerobics class on a Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. And you’re asked to attend a meeting at 4:30 p.m. You’d more likely say you cannot attend that meeting if all you had is your calendar to look at.  Today, we don’t do that. We say “yes, okay” then later realise we’’ll struggle to get to our class.  I remember when I was at university, my finish time at work was 5:30 p.m. and my lectures began at 6:00 p.m. There was no way I would accept a meeting request on a Tuesday or Thursday after 3:30 p.m.  It took me twenty minutes to get to my university from the office.  Attending university was a non-negotiable for me. Meetings with colleagues could be arranged either earlier in the day or the next.  This is why you cannot afford to leave things to chance if you want to bring balance into your life. If something is important to you, you need to be intentional about it.  But there’s another important consideration and that is flexibility. Balance is about being flexible.  Most nights, I finish my coaching calls around 11:00 p.m. Now it would be very tempting for me to quit and flop down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch something. Yet, reading real books is something I get a great deal of pleasure from. So, before I consider turning on the TV, I grab my book, go through to the living room and read for twenty minutes or so.  It’s wonderfully relaxing—much more so than trying to find something to watch TV.  Yet, if there is something I do want to watch on TV, I’ll skip the book and watch the TV show.  There are sometimes when for one reason or another, I have not cleared my actionable email. If all I have is the hour after my calls finish to do it, then I’ll spend thirty minutes or so clearing as many emails as I can.  Doing my email late is far better than having to try and find additional time the next day.  On Wednesday this week, my wife asked me if I would go with her and her parents on a little trip to the mountains that afternoon.  I had not planned for it, but said if I could have the morning to record my YouTube videos and get my Learning Note out, I would love to go.  I knew I would have to edit the videos when I got back that evening, but spending time with my family was important. So, that’s what I did.  We had a lovely afternoon in the mountains and I got my videos edited.  As I sat down to read my book on Wednesday night, I had a little smile on my face because the day had been fantastic, and all my important work had been done.  Creating balance in life is not about adding more and more stuff to do in a task manager. It’s about how you are allocating your time each day.  What is important to you? That’s what goes on your calendar. There’s a time when you can sit down at your desk and do work. But there’s also time when you need to stop, relax and spend time with the people you care about, or do your exercise, play with your kids or walk your dog.  Everything you want to do requires time. Yet, time is the one thing in your life that is limited.  You can accept thousands of tasks, and have hundreds of ideas to do things but none of those will happen if you do not have the time to do them.  That’s why I advocate managing your work by when you will do it, rather than managing endless lists of tasks. When you focus more on your available time to do stuff, you begin eliminating more of the low-value stuff and begin to appreciate your time more.  There are thousands of things you could do, perhaps would like to do someday. None of that matters today. What matters today is you get the important things done. And choosing those are is entirely within your power.  Yes, you can go to the

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings." There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us. What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why 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 Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 381 Hello, and welcome to episode 381 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages?  And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did?  It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do.  It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one.  And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep.  The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right?  And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses.  And that’s where this week’s question comes in. 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 Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with.  Hi Maggie, thank you for your question.  You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it.  As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do.  Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email.  If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence.  Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten.  The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers.  What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river.  Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with.  And family meals were important.  The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner.  I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals.  Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History.  Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s.  The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared.  For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories.  One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act’s sessions.  It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts.  I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow.  I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV.  Somehow, we’ve sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there.  And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you.  And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who’s got time for hobbies today?  And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool.  One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I’ve always enjoyed reading. It’s been a big part of my life.  I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday.  After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it.  The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience.  I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure.  Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey.  There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette.  You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today’s standards, but that wasn’t the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done.  And that’s where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise. For example, this year, I’ve made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls.  I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it’s just me and little Louis lying next to me.  It’s quiet and incredibly relaxing.  Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I’ve been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year.  I’ve been sketching out on paper ideas of where I’ll put thes

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."  Eddie Cantor This week, I’m answering a question about why it’s important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 380 Hello, and welcome to episode 380 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 very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you.  And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it’s all good news? Well, maybe not. You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago.  And it’s causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests.  Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day.  I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I’d begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I’d read the opinion pieces.  It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I’d pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money’s worth.  I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story.  Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what’s really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you?  This is why over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally slowing down.  It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It’s moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes.  And that brings me on to this week’s question. So, that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you’ve talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future. Hi Michael, thank you for your question.  I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic’s Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life.  However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life.  I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well. I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance.  That didn’t turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly.  So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument.  It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed.  From a time management and productivity perspective I’ve always felt it’s important that you decide what is important and what is not.  For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way.  Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can’t learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot.  Henry Kissinger was a divisive figure. Some loved him, others hated him. Yet successive presidents both Republican and Democrat sort his advice long after he had left government. Why? Because of his vast personal experience dealing with dictators and uncompromising world leaders.  Now I understand why technology does this. Companies such as Google and the media organisations want my attention. Their algorithms are trained to do just that. And as a human being it’s very difficult to resist.  But the biggest problem with this is everything is becoming faster and faster. So fast, that your brain cannot keep up.  Now there are things we should move fast on. An upset customer, a natural disaster in your town or city, A suddenly sick loved one or a burst pipe in your bathroom.  Equally, though, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be moving fast on. Deciding what must be done today, for example, sitting down and talking with your kids, or partner. Talking with your parents, siblings, friends or taking your dog out for a walk.  One work related example would be managing your email. There are two parts to this. Clearing your inbox requires speed. You’re filtering out the unimportant from the important. And with experience, you soon become very fast at this.  Then there’s the replying to the important emails. That requires you to slow down and think.  Now I know there are AI email apps that promise to do the filtering for you. Yet do you really trust that it got it right? That lack of trust results in you going through the AI filtered emails, “just in case”.  Which in turn slows down the processing. You would have been faster had you done it yourself.  But this goes beyond where AI and technology can help us. It goes to something deeper and more human.  One of the most mentally draining things you can do is sit at a screen all day.  You can respond to messages, write reports, design presentations, edit videos, and read the news all from a single screen. This means that, in theory, except for needing to go to the bathroom, you could spend all day and night without getting up from the chair.  That’s not how you work. Your brain cannot stay focused for much more than 90 minutes without the need for a break. Yet, if a break means you stare at another window, perhaps stop writing the report and instead read a news article, your brain is not getting a rest.  Instead, one of the best things you could do, particularly now, with the new flexible ways of working, is to get up and do something manually.  Perhaps take the laundry and do a load of washing. Then return to your computer, work for another hour and then hang the washing up.  Two things happen here. First, your brain gets a rest from deep thinking and does something simple. And secondly, you move. Another thing your brain requires to work at its best.  Repetitive tasks are therapy for your brain. This is why some say that jogging or hiking is therapeutic. The act of putting one foot in front of another is repetitive and your brain can operate on automatic pilot.  Yet, there’s something else here.  The other day I had a pile of ironing to do. It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was around forty-minutes of work there to do.  At the same time, I was working on an article I was writing. That writing began strongly, but after an hour or so, my writing had slowed considerably. I was struggling. It was at that moment I looked up and saw the pile of ironing.  So, I got up, pulled out the ironing board and iron and spend forty minutes or so clearing the pile.  WOW! What a difference. After hanging up the clothes, I sat back down at my desk and the energy to write returned and I was able to get the article finished in no time at all.  Now what would have happened had I stayed tied to my desk? Probably not very much at all. I would have continued to struggle, perhaps written a bit, but likely would have had to rewrite what I had written.  Instead, I gave my brain a break. I did something manual that was repetitive, ironing. I know it’s not exciting, but that’s the point. It recharged my brain and I was able to return to my writing refreshed and didn’t need to rewrite anything later.  Other activities you can do is to make your own lunch. Going into the kitchen to make a sandwich does not require a lot of brain power. It gets you up from your desk, gives your brain a break from the screen and you’re making something.  It was a sense that everything I was doing was done at a screen that was the catalyst for me to return to doing some things manually.  I remember when I decided to start using a pen and notebook for planning out my week. I was shocked how much better I thought.  When I was planning my week digitally, I couldn’t wait to get it over. Just to make it feel more worthwhile, I would clean up a folder or clear my desktop of screenshots and PDFs I no longer needed. I noticed I was doing anything but actually plan the week. When I closed my computer, pulled out a notebook a

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential” That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 379 Hello, and welcome to episode 379 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. Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate.  Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible.  One of the dangers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It’s a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists.  Don’t get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it’s a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising. In today’s episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing.  So, that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer’s desktop I don’t know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising?  Hi Sally, thank you for your question. Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising.  I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool.  I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen’s website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer.  It took me seven years to realise that I wasn’t getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists.  Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation.  Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work.  And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned.  You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans.  While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on.  It didn’t matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note.  The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty.  I’ve seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department’s plans for the year. It’s written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It’s as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government’s treasury department: “This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.” You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done.  What matters is knowing what the department’s objectives are and what needs to be done to accomplish them.  That does not need thirty pages. That can be summarised on one page, at most.  If you’re working in an organisation that loves using management speak to communicate their ill-thought through ideas, one of the best ways to navigate these documents is to establish what the ultimate goal is.  What are the targets, or in management speak “KPI’s” (Key Performance Indicators)? Once you know how you or your department will be measured, you can use your own experience and knowledge to put in place a plan to achieve those targets.  Ultimately, your boss, and their boss, are concerned about your targets. How you achieve those targets are less important, although they should always be achieved legally, of course.  In many ways translating these verbose annual planning documents is the role of the departmental managers. This means translating them into actionable items so that everyone in the team clearly understands what they are aiming for. This then reduces the necessity of further planning meetings and everyone can get on and achieve the objectives.  And this is the same for individuals.  When we plan things out we are exploring options, considering best ways to do things and perhaps thinking of potential outcomes.  While these exercises do have their place, they cannot replace doing the work.  The objective, therefore, is to figure out as quickly as possible what you need to do to get the work completed.  My wife bought me a new iron and ironing board for my birthday. I love ironing, I find it relaxing. I’ve learnt that no matter how big the pile of ironing is, the pile is not going to diminish by more planning and strategising. The only way the pile of ironing will shrink is for me to plug my iron in, set up my ironing board and get started.  Now years of ironing has taught me to begin with the clothes that require a cooler setting and finish with clothes that require a hotter setting such as linen shirts. That’s experience, although, I remember being taught that one by my grandmother many many years ago.  The final part of this is choosing when to do the ironing. For me, I find ironing after I’ve been sat down for a long time works best. I’m stood up and have to move around to hang my shirts up after they’re ironed. So, doing the ironing in the afternoon or early evening works best for me.  Given that I generally do the ironing once a week, all I need to decide is when. When will I do it? That’s the only planning I need to do with something I routinely do.  When it comes to organising, I’m always surprised how so many people have missed one of the best features of computers and technology. It’s not so you can sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. It’s the speed at which a computer can organise your files.  You can choose to organise your files by date created, date modified, title, type of document or by size. The only thing you need to do is to put the file into a folder.  If you were to keep things as simple as possible, two folders one for your personal life and one for your professional life would work. (And I know a lot of people who do just that and can find anything they need with the use of a keyboard shortcut or a few typed letters.  While travelling last month, I had all my flight confirmation emails and car hire documents stored in Evernote in its own notebook. Before we set off, I made sure this notebook was downloaded to my phone so that no matter where I was in the world, I was not going to be relying on flakey internet.  This meant, when we finally reached the car hire desk at 11 p.m. At Dublin Airport, all I needed to do was open Evernote, type Europcar in the search and all my details we instantly on my screen ready to show the assistant.  Most notes apps people are using today have incredibly powerful search features built in. Evernote was build on its search features. I’m frequently amazed at how quickly Evernote can find something I vaguely think might be in there.  I remember my wife trying to sort something out for me on a Korean website while we were sitting in cafe. She asked me if I remembered my password for a particular website I had not used for over ten years.  I opened up Evernote and typed in the name of the website and in less than second the login and password details were there. My brain cannot work that fast when trying to recall something from ten years ago.  What this means is you do not need to spend days or months trying to come up with a “perfect” notes organisation system. You could quite easily operate on a simple professional and personal folder system.  You’d still be able to find anything you were looking for, and all you would need to do is to learn how to use the search features.  So, Sally, if you want to get things organised, let your computer do the work for you. Start by creating a simple folder structure of personal and work, and organise your documents there first.  As you’re doing this I w

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.” That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet. You can subscribe to this podcast on:    Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 378 Hello, and welcome to episode 378 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts.  And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special.  This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. 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 Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience?  Hi Phil, thank you for your question.  Before I begin, I should give you some background.  My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation”  A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns.  Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker.  I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha. A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew.  That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week.  I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change.  It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better.  Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools.  It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution.  That’s the background.  So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner.  Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today.  It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important.  It was unpleasant. So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen.  It was a revelation and I was shocked.  The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done.  With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn’t. I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task.  It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager.  I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them.  That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not.  The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important.  Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again.  Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video.  Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally.  And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000!  The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note.  On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube.  I quickly began to see that there was something going on here.  Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it’s fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful.  99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information.  And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office.  In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information.  Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It’s slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive.  It’s done that by getting me to think again.  And that’s perhaps where digital tools are failing us.  Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient.  Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them.  Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love.  Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that’s helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up.  This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important.  Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists.  Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed.  Will I go back to an all-digital system? No. 

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”  That’s a quote from Alex Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year?  I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there’s just so much to do and so little time to do it.  Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 377 Hello, and welcome to episode 377 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. For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It’s an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages.  Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There’s a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they’re away.  However, there’s is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week’s episode I will share with you the things I do while away.  Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work.  Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up. Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course.  It’s an evolution of everything I’ve taught over the last several years.  You have no control over what’s coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what’s important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks.  It’s unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed. Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do.  It’s a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all.  There’s currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you.  Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course.  Okay, now on with the podcast. First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don’t.  If you’re employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back.  Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back.  This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead.  The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something’s important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work.  Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there’s going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don’t want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back.  For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help.  I travelled to Ireland. That’s eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am.  When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm.  I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a business owner, are my responsibility to deal with.  It’s just two hours a day done before the day gets started.  The great thing with this approach is that once I’ve done it, that’s it for the day. I won’t return to my email or messages for the rest of the day and I get on and enjoy the holiday.  This is a better approach than to come back to 800+ emails and messages on your first day. If you’re going straight into meetings and catching up with what has happened while you were away, you’ve just created a huge backlog for yourself that will take weeks to get back on top of.  Next. One of the biggest issues I get from my coaching clients is they don’t have any time to step back and define what is important to them, reorganise their daily structure or to establish what their core work is.  Holiday time is great for this. There’s often a lot of travelling involved, and it’s likely to be with your family. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk with your partner about what you want as a family.  My wife and I use flying time to talk about what we want to accomplish as a family over the next year. It’s not planned. It’s spontaneous. And, it’s usually when we are flying back home rather than when we fly out. Yet, we always do it.  I remember when I was employed and suffering from what we called “the holiday blues”. This is where you feel slightly depressed on your return to work for a week or two. You miss the sense of relaxation and have nothing to look forward to except for the daily drudge of work and meetings. Having a talk with your partner and or family on your return journey can give you a multitude of things you can do as a couple or family. Giving you something to look forward to.  If you’re taking a summer holiday, this is also a good time to review how you are doing on your goals this year.  When this year started, I was 88 kilograms (about 195 pounds or nearly 14 stone). That’s way above my target weight of between 80 and 83 kilograms (175 to 180 pounds or 12 ½ to 13 stone)  So, my number one health and fitness goal for 2025 was to get my weight back to within my normal range. That was achieved, but, while away I ate too much—don’t we all when on holiday?—and need to refocus my attention on getting it back.  Fortunately, it’s only two or three pounds, so the target it to get it back within acceptable limits by the end of July.  This means, I need to quickly get back into my exercise routine and eat healthily. It’s a great way to get yourself refocused on your return.  Another thing you can do while away is to do some digital cleaning up. I love this time.  While you’re on holiday there is likely to be pockets of time you can use to clean up your notes, calendar and task manager.  Let’s be honest, when we’re in the day to day hustle, we throw a lot of useless information into our notes and add tasks into our task manager that we know we will never do.  This is a wonderful time to clear these out.  Last Wednesday, my first day back at work, my notes were organised, my task manger was clean and tight and my calendar was cleared of conflicts. What a wonderful way to restart.  What I noticed was I felt organised, focused and ready for anything. Isn’t that what a holiday is meant to do for you.  Yet, if you don’t do any cleaning up, you come back to a mess. Nothing has changed and the very things you hate about your work life continue. No control, a messed up list of things to do and a calendar that fills you with dread.  And, something powerful happens when you do this learning up. You learn a lot.  You discover better workflows and processes and you gain a sense of optimism about how the changes you make now will bring you incredible rewards once you return to work.  I often find I cannot wait to get restarted because I’m excited to test out new ways of managing my work day.  And let’s be honest, cleaning things up doesn’t require a lot of mental energy. It’s the kind of thing you can do in the evenings with a laptop on your knees while enjoying a cocktail or two. (Although not too many. You don’t want to delete important things)  Now, you may be thinking ‘no way! I’m on holiday I don’t want to deal with any work issues’. And I get that.  But, and it’s big but, your holiday may only last a week or two, and then you’re back at work. Doing all or some of these tips, will last far longer and leave you with less stress and overwhelm.  It gives you optimism, and helps you to refocus on the important things in life. Surely, a few hours out of your holiday time to do some cleaning up is worth it to feel that way?  In the past I’ve not done any of these things and just found myself in the same mess I was in before my holiday. It’s not pleasant and that’s when I struggled with the holiday blues.  Now, I do these things and I’ve never experienced holiday blues and instead am excited to get back to work feeling refreshed and energised.  It’s your choice. But I can assure you, if you do all of

“Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they'd do is inspect my bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors. Tough, battle hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.” That is an excerpt from Admiral McRaven’s Commencement Address at Texas University in 2014. And it’s the heart of this week’s episode. Simple, mundane tasks that carry far more weight than you may think.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take the Areas of Focus Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 376 Hello, and welcome to episode 376 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 read the comments on any productivity or time management YouTube video, you’ll find many well-meaning commentators talking about this app, or that new method or hack to play with.  The truth is few of them will work and most involve adding more and more layers of complexity which only stops you from doing the work that matters. Real improvements in your time management and productivity comes from the boring and mundane. It’s the sitting down to respond to your emails and messages every day. It’s taking the laundry to the washing machine and hanging it up after it’s been washed. And yes, it’s making your bed each morning before you leave to take your kids to school.  Doing the simple, basic tasks each day whether you’re in the mood or not, is the secret to massively improved outcomes. It means when you get home after a particularly stressful day, everything is calm, peaceful and ready for you to relax get some rest.  It’s how you avoid getting home, stressed out and exhausted only to find your breakfast things are still on your dining table, your bed’s unmade and your laundry basket is overflowing with clothes that are beginning to give off a rather unpleasant odour.  And, yes, it means giving yourself five to ten minutes each day to map out your day. To see where your appointments are and what tasks you must get done.  None of this is complicated. It’s basic, it’s almost laughably unimportant, yet it isn’t. These are the critical things each day that ensure you remain on top of everything and know what needs to be done, where you should be and when and leaves you feeling calm, serene even, and ready for the next day.  And with all that said, 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 Charlie. Charlie asks, hi Carl, over the last twelve months, I feel everything has spiralled out of control. I get home exhausted and just never seem able to catch up. My Task list is out of control and my calendar seems to fill up with random meetings each day. What can I do to get some control back into my life?  Hi Charlie, thank you for your question.  This is something that can happen from time to time. Things spiralling out of control. It’s often because we say “yes” a little too freely, or we stop following some basic principles.  The basic principles of better time management and productivity are planning your days and week. Not in a micro-management way, but more in a what’s happening tomorrow or this week way.  It’s also understanding that in most cases you can cancel or reschedule a meeting. I’ve often looked at my diary for tomorrow and seen I was over scheduled and realised I needed to postpone some meetings or rearrange some of the things I had planned to do.  It’s never the end of the world if you have to reschedule. It’s just a part of life.  For example, if you’re scheduled to pick your kids up from school but realise that if you do you’ll not be able to finish the proposal that must go out today, you could ask your partner or parents to help you out today.  It’s only today. Or, you may decide to ask to be excused from a team meeting so you can finish the proposal.  We always have options. Yet, if you want more options, plan the day the evening before and you will see any potential conflicts with plenty of time to explore all options.  If you don’t plan your day, it’s likely you will see the problem you have a couple of hours before you have to pick your kids up. You’re not leaving yourself with much time to sort out the conflict.  It’s the same reason why weekly planning is critical. The weekly planning session gives you the “big picture” view of your week. It your chance to see any potential issues well before they become crises.  This is the number one reason you will find you feel behind, rushed and overwhelmed. You’re not giving yourself a moment to pause to look ahead for potential storms so you can plot an alternative route through.  To start getting back in control, do a weekly plan for next week. Open you calendar and first look for any conflicts—these are where you have inadvertently double booked yourself. You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one.  Next, open your task manager. This is probably where the bigger problems lay. When we lose control we start throwing all sorts into our tasks managers. It’s easy to put stuff there.  If your sense of control has completely gone, it’s possible you may have stopped looking at your task manager altogether. If that’s the case, open it.  Now you have a choice. You could declare task management bankruptcy and delete everything. Don’t worry, if something’s genuinely important, you’ll be reminded of it somewhere. You can then add it back later.  The second choice is to go through everything in your task manager one by one. Delete what’s no longer relevant, update what is by making sure the task is written in an actionable way. In other words you have an actionable verb in the task so it’s clear what you need to do.  Then for anything in your inbox, ask the three processing questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it.  Then, organise your tasks by stuff you will do this week, next week, next month.  Once done, go back to your this week list and, with your calendar open, put the day you will do the tasks next week.  Now be smart here. If you have six hours of meetings on Wednesday, avoid putting tasks on that day. You won’t have time. Not when you remember you will need to spend some time on your email and messages and any other matters that will inevitably pop up once the week gets going.  Anything not in your this week list can be left undated. Hopefully, many of those will sort themselves out. If they don’t, you can look at them again when you do you next weekly planning session and decide if they need to be brought forward into the following week.  Just doing these basic weekly planning steps, you’ll instantly give yourself a sense of control.  Yet, this is only as good as your ability to say no.  You cannot be in two places at once, and you’re not going to be able to complete sixty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in one day. If that’s what your day looks like stop.  You’re going to have to say no to something and the sooner you do this the easier it is to do it.  The consequences of not doing these planning sessions are missed deadlines, over booked calendars and a lot of late nights and weekends spent catching up, feeling stressed and blaming your company.  The blame game solves nothing unless you’re willing to say “no. This has go to stop”. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t complain. A bit harsh, I know, but you always have a choice remember.  More basics are giving yourself time each day for your messages and emails. I’m always surprised how unwilling people are to protect time for dealing with these. 99% of the time it’s out of control email, Slack and Teams inboxes that people are most stressed about. And I know, if you don’t spend sometime on your communications daily, they will backlog quickly.  And when I say quickly I mean it. One day missed will mean you will need double the time tomorrow. And that keeps increasing until you decide to spend a whole day clearing up your email.  If you want to avoid spending days clearing your email inbox, protect time every day for dealing with it. That has to be a non-negotiable.  I believe it was Einstein who said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.  Well unless you protect time for managing your communications each day, you’ll be s