Your Time, Your Way

"The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."  Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time.  This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 408 Hello, and welcome to episode 408 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.  Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table.  In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple.  Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought.  Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role.  When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over. In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you.  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 Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help? Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed. The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably.  This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do.  The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too often, and the line between what you are responsible for and what you volunteered to do becomes blurred.  A few years ago, I worked with a client who was a product manager in a pharmaceutical company. Her core work was to ensure that her product’s labelling, literature, and local branding were accurate and up to date. She was also responsible for three sales campaigns each year.  Unfortunately, Sam was a people pleaser. She couldn’t say no to anyone. She volunteered to be on the Annual kick-off event committee (each year the company had an off-site retreat to motivate the team for the new year), she volunteered to be the lead of a breast cancer awareness campaign her company wanted to run, and if a sales manager asked her to do a presentation to their sales people, she’d always say yes.  But her people pleasing was not confined to her professional life. She volunteered to help organise events at her church, committed to watching her husband play football every weekend and would help her friends out at the drop of a hat.  When I began working with Sam, she was a mess. Her weight had ballooned because she had no time for any physical movement or to watch what she ate; she wasn’t able to sleep properly, and she was suffering quite badly from eczema, brought on by stress and a lack of sleep.  The first thing I did was get Sam to write down her original core work. I remember her having to pull out her job description to remind her what that was.  When she looked at it, she began to cry. She confessed that what she did at work was nothing like what was written on those sheets of paper.  So that’s where we started.  I also got her to talk to her boss about stepping down from all the volunteer roles she’d accepted so she could focus on the work she was employed to do.  Her boss was brilliant. She helped Sam remove herself from the volunteer roles so she could focus on what mattered.  Within six months, Sam’s product was the top-selling product in the company. She’d lost 20 pounds in weight, she was sleeping well, and her eczema had all but disappeared.  She was focused on what mattered and did that brilliantly. So much so that she was promoted after a further year.  I tell that story because it demonstrates why defining your core work is so important. If you are not clear about what you are employed to do, in an effort to look busy and not upset anyone, you will keep accepting more and more roles outside the scope of the job you were employed to do.  This does not mean that you should never accept voluntary roles or help out your colleagues from time to time. It means you should never lose sight of what you are employed to do. And to do that, you first need to identify what it is, then take it to the next level.  That level identifies what doing your core work looks like at the task level. In other words, what do you actually do to perform your core work? So, returning to your role, Chris, as a sales manager, a part of your role will be to support your sales team. What does that look like at a doing level? Does that mean you need to schedule weekly one-to-ones with your team? Maybe you are also responsible for ensuring that the sales data is correct and up to date.  Scheduling weekly one-to-ones is relatively straightforward. You may choose to dedicate a day to doing this, so your focus is on supporting your team and, in doing so, removing a weekly decision.  For example, if you choose to hold your meetings on Mondays, you can block your calendar on those days and get them all done in one day.  Maintaining your sales admin may involve 30 minutes a day of updating your company’s internal reporting system. If so, when will you do that?  You may also be responsible for the training of your team. I know many managers are. If so, what does that involve, and what do you need to do personally to ensure it happens?  So what you are doing is looking at the type of work you do and then asking yourself what that looks like at a doing level.  Many medical doctors I speak with tell me their work is more than just seeing patients. Some of their additional roles include renewing prescriptions, completing insurance claims, and sorting out referrals to specialists.  This means being a general practitioner is not as simple as walking into their clinic, going to their office and examining patients all day. They need to find time to do the additional work, which is often an extra 2 hours or more each day.  Once you have identified your core work and pulled out what that looks like at the task level, the next step is to calculate how much time you will need to complete those tasks each week.  In theory, this is easy. After all, if you have done something before, you should be able to figure out how long it will take you to do the same task in the future.  Hahaha, not so easy. We are not machines, and some days we are not at our best. We might be tired, distracted or feeling ill.  And those distractions may not even be of our own choosing. Other people interrupt you, ask you questions, or you are prevented from doing one of your critical tasks because a colleague has not given you the information you need.  I remember talking with a gentleman who ran a car servicing business, and he told me that the biggest issue he had each day was something called “back orders”. This is where a part for a customer’s car was out of stock and on order.  Nobody knew when the part would be back in stock, so they could not tell the customer when to bring their car in for the repair, or, worse, the customer could not come in to pick up their repaired car.  In these situations, all you can do is work on the averages.  I’ve been writing a weekly blog post of around 1,000 words each week for over ten years. You would have thought I would know how long writing a blog post would take by now, after doing it over 500 times. Not a chance.  Some weeks it can take me forty minutes; other weeks, as much as two hours, to write the first draft.  It’s the same for t

“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity?  That’s the question I am answering today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 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 may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap.  It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work.  But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future?  That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future?  Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down.  Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more.  That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily.  Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out?  To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want.  No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go.  I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes.  I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written.  I rarely accept Grammarly’s sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling.  Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else. I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife’s a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she’s learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms.  She’s using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google’s Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations.  So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example.  However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I’m not sure you would want AI getting involved.  One thing I’ve always been acutely aware of is that much of what makes us feel overwhelmed is the sense that we have no control over how we spend our time.  We have calendars full of meetings, and sometimes we find ourselves double and even triple-booked. And then we have long lists of to-dos in our task managers with no sense of when or even how we will ever get that work done.  At best, AI may be able to break down those tasks into what it thinks are manageable chunks, but that won’t take into consideration how you are feeling physically, whether you slept well last night or had a rather heavy lunch with an important customer.  AI can certainly suggest ways to manage your tasks and calendar, but you will still need to show up to those meetings and do that work.  Yet that will inevitably leave you feeling less in control of your time. Particularly if you use one of those AI-enabled calendars that suggest when you should be doing something.  What happens if you disagree with the suggestion, or you cannot make it? You feel guilty, or you start to think something is wrong with you.  Yet, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re human, and you are going to feel tired sometimes or not in the mood to do that type of work.  The one area I would say you want to avoid AI getting involved in is how you manage your time. That should always be your responsibility and choice.  The idea that a computer tells you what to do and where to be is scary. Deciding what you do right now is what makes you human. You’ve chosen to listen to this podcast at this time. AI would likely tell you that, rather than listening to this podcast, you should be finishing that report you’ve been trying to finish all week. I also read about the excitement over the idea that AI could reply to your emails for you. Hmm, for me, that is a red line I will not cross.  Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that if someone has taken the time to write to me, I have an obligation to reply personally. That is just basic integrity. Now, it is true I don’t reply to all emails. I don’t respond to spam emails; for example, I simply delete them if they get through. How hard is that?  I’m fortunate that I’m old enough to remember several technological advancements. It started with the Internet, then email, the smartphone and cloud computing.  I cannot remember a technology being forced upon us, but it feels like AI is being forced on us, whether we like it or not.  And then there are the frightening ads that claim if you are not on board with using AI, you will be left on the career scrap heap by the end of the year. Nobody needed to do that with smartphones or email.  Companies, focused on making the technology user-friendly in such a way that we all wanted to adopt it eventually. The fear-mongering I see around AI makes me deeply suspicious of it. Why do they need to do that?  Perhaps that question is for people better qualified than I am.  Anyway, AI is here, and it’s not going to go away.  Where I think AI will be a huge help to us is in repetitive, mundane work. I mentioned that I use AI to create subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. That’s been a huge time saver for me.  But if you follow my email processing system, you will find that you are faster than AI. I can clear 80 emails in my inbox in less than 10 minutes. It’s also important that I do this, as I want to get a heads-up on my day. To know if there are any emergencies, what I want to read later and what I can delete.  What AI would do is categorise your emails between what it thinks is important and what is not. Trust me, you will do a far better Job of that than AI will.  The problem here is that you will not trust AI 100%, so you will still go through the emails it thinks are not important, just to check that it got it right.  And that’s a big problem with AI today, although I accept that in time this may change; people don’t trust it, which is a good thing, as AI can hallucinate and give you incorrect information. This means you spend time coming up with the right prompt, get the answer, and then have to check that it’s correct.  The question then is: did it really save you time?  I am monitoring AI carefully. I know that in time, it will bring us some productivity benefits, new technologies always do. But there are a few areas where I won’t use AI personally.  Writing emails and answering user comments. That’s a personal integrity thing to me. Your principles should tell you that.  Managing my calendar. That’s another personal thing, and giving control to any outside influence would always be problematic at a human level.  Creating content. If you’ve read an AI-generated blog post or watched an AI-created YouTube video, you can tell. Large Language Models will always default to the average, not just in the content, but in the words used. It’s horrible, and nothing unique will ever come from it.  And finally, deciding what I will do at a task level and when. That’s another one that, as a human, I will retain control. I had scheduled to write this podcast script at 11:30 today, but I had a cancella

Steve Jobs once said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do”, and that quote has been, and still is, a cornerstone of my whole time management and productivity philosophy.  Today, I answer a question about dealing with all the little things that pop up each day while staying focused on what is important.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 406 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 406 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) 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 happens when your productivity system collapses? Do you go looking for new apps, or do you give up and just think you’re not the organised type or lack self-discipline?  People react in many different ways when their systems become backlogged and overwhelmed, yet this is a state that will happen to all of us from time to time.  Life has a bad habit of getting in the way. It throws up all sorts of problems to test us. No one week or even a day will ever be the same. Only five minutes ago, my plan to take Louis out for our walk at 2:00 pm was changed by my wife asking if we could go at 12:30. That way, I could pick her up from her dance class and then go to the reservoir for his walk.  And that was a small change.  These little things are hitting us every day and disrupting our systems, yet that doesn’t mean our systems are broken. It just means we need to ensure that we have sufficient buffer and flexibility built in. This week’s question is all about what to do when, for whatever reason, your system begins to collapse, and you have backlogs of work, emails, messages and commitments, and you have no idea how to regain control.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a heads up to say if you are considering joining next week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop, there are only seven days left before the first session.  The workbook will be going out next week, and I would love for you to join me. This is your opportunity to get to grips with the COD and Time Sector Systems, where you can ask questions and come away with not only the knowledge, but with a rock solid system that is flexible, automatic and leaves you with enough time for the things you want to do.  PLUS, you also get, for free, four of my courses to help you go deeper in your own time.  I will put the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you next Sunday.  Now, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Nick. Nick asks, “ Hi Carl, all my professional life I have tried to be organised and focused, but every time I feel I have found the solution, something happens either at work or at home that destroys my plans. How do you suggest someone go about dealing with disruptions all the time?  Great question, Nick, and thank you for sending it in.  Much of what causes us these issues has little to do with our systems. It’s just life getting in the way.  Yet, what we are aiming to do is turn managing our time into a routine. Something we just do.  For instance, I would feel uncomfortable going to bed not knowing what my appointments and important tasks are for the next day. It doesn’t take long—five minutes tops —but most days it’s likely less than two minutes.  This is why I cannot get my head around it when people tell me they are too exhausted to plan the next day. It’s no more than five minutes! You only need to know when and where your appointments are and what your one or two most important tasks are. It takes a minuscule amount of energy to do it.  Those two minutes have a profound effect on my day.  Last night, I went to bed knowing that I had six hours of meetings today and one critical task to do. I knew if I was diligent, I would be able to complete my meetings and that one task.  The fact that my wife has already changed my plan has not caused me to drop the task. My original plan to do it after my morning calls finished has changed. I will now do it when I get back from taking Louis for his walk.  What matters is that when I finish today, I can look back knowing I have what matters done.  This all begins with respecting the basics. Those basics are contained in COD. Collect, Organise and Do.  You need a way to collect everything that comes your way throughout the day. This needs to be something you trust. That could be a task manager or a daybook (a notebook you use to manage your day).  Then, at some point in the day, you process and organise what you collected. That could be the first thing in the morning or the last thing you do before you finish your workday. If you’re doing it every day, you won’t need a lot of time for this part of the process.  If you’re inconsistent with it, you will need more time. This is why I suggested you turn these things into routines—things you just do every day. Like brushing your teeth when you wake up, or washing the dishes before you go to bed.  Finally, the daily planning, where you decide which tasks you must do that day and review your calendar for the next day’s appointments. These steps give you a clear plan for doing the work.  The great thing is that none of these steps takes a lot of time. Perhaps the processing and organising will take about 10 minutes. However, I find that this step is calming. It allows me to ensure I am not trying to do too much or limiting my flexibility.  So, step one, Nick, is to make following the principles of COD a non-negotiable part of your day.  For those of you who have not discovered COD yet, I have a free 45-minute course that walks you through the process and shows you the tools and formulas to build this into your day. I will leave the link in the show notes. The next consideration is how you are organising your work.  There are some things that need to be done every day. Responding to your actionable messages (email, Slack, Teams, etc.) and any daily admin, for example. Salespeople often need to record their daily activities. Now you could do this once a week or do it daily. I find that doing it daily keeps the time required to a minimum.  Then there are your tasks. Now, some of these may need to be done today or before the end of the week. Others may not be quite as urgent, so you can push them out of sight until next week or even next month.  This is why I recommend you organise your task manager by when you will do something. Anything that needs to be done this week goes into a folder called “this week”. This means you are not being distracted by tasks that don’t need to be done this week, and it helps to keep your task list to a minimum. This prevents your lists from becoming overwhelming.  The other good thing about this approach is that the 40% of the tasks you think you will need to do that never actually need to be done can be deleted during your weekly planning. (That’s one of my favourite parts of doing the weekly planning) This is the essence of the Time Sector System. It’s not about how much you have to do; we all have far more to do than the time available to do it. It’s about when you will do it.  There are two sides to the time management equation. Time and stuff to do. The time side of the equation is fixed. You cannot change that. There are 24 hours a day and 168 hours a week, and that’s it.  The only variable you have is stuff to do. That’s what the Time Sector System focuses on. Getting you to decide what you will do and when.  I can now give you an update on my changing day.  When I started today, I had three meetings between 8:00 and 11:30 am.  It’s now 10:30 am, as I write this, and my 8:00 am meeting went ahead as usual, but my 9:30 and 10:30 meetings have both cancelled.  When I planned my day yesterday, I accounted for all my meetings going ahead, and I would write this script before taking Louis for his walk. I would start the script between 8:00 am and 9:30 am, and then finish it after all my meetings ended.  I’ve been given 90 minutes back, so this script will be finished before I pick my wife up from her dance class. It also means I can work on an important project this afternoon, which I thought I wouldn’t have much time for.  Some days you win, others you have to fight for. Today’s a win. On the days you have to fight for it’s important to stand your ground as much as you can. For example, had all my meetings gone ahead as expected today, I would still have had time this afternoon to write this script.  The consequences of not protecting time to write this script would be squeezing my day tomorrow, and I would likely have to work on Saturday just to catch up.  I’ve played that game too often in the past, and it’s not worth it.  It would be tempting to blame my system, but ultimately, my decisions would have caused the problem.  So, as you can see, Nick, life will always get in the way. You can only work with the information in front of you.  But if you are consistent with your daily and weekly planning, you are putting yourself in a position to be clear about what matters each day.  Yet, your daily and weekly planning only works if you are collecting everything that needs to be collected. Appointments are on your calendar, and tasks are in a task manager. That way, you will have all the information you need to plan your days so that the important things get done, and the lower-value ones can be eliminated.  And finally, you can avoid many issues by building buffer time into your calendar. Trying to squeeze in as

“If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it?  In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) 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 many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few.  The question is: why are they overdue? You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them. This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user.  The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control?  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix).  Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes.  And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion?  Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.  As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it. With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag.  When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned.  Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that.  Now, this is where many people go wrong.  It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it.  Not true. Priorities change.  You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now?  Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen.  Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposal is on hold for a few months, so there is no urgency. But new priorities will come along, don’t you worry.  This is why adding your flags should be done at a daily planning level.  Now I will caveat that.  There are times when I know something will be the priority for the day. The script for this podcast, for instance, is today’s priority. I knew that when I planned the week, and I flagged it. It doesn’t matter what other things pop up through the week; when it comes to writing this script, it’s the priority for the day.  Your core work will always be a priority. This is why I have people spend time working out what their core work is. After all, your core work is the reason you are employed. If you didn’t do your core work consistently, you would not have a job for very long.  Even retired people need to consider what their core activities will be each day.  I’m reminded of this following a conversation I had with my father-in-law over the weekend. We’ve just had the lunar New Year here in Korea, and my parents-in-law stayed with us over the holiday.  During that time, my father-in-law mentioned he planned to hang up his silicone gun and tiling trowel at the end of the year. He fits bathrooms and was thinking about what he would do when he no longer needs to wake up at 5:00 am each morning.  The first thing I said was that he needs to prioritise exercise. His job ensures he’s getting plenty of exercise. Walking up and down stairs carrying sinks, shower kits and tiles is hard physical work. His job currently ensures he’s getting his exercise.  The moment he stops doing that five days a week, he will need to find a replacement activity to prevent muscle loss.  Losing his muscle mass will lead to him losing his independence very quickly.  We all have priorities that recur. Those tasks can be pre-flagged. They are critical, whether you are working or retired. Having a few tasks already prioritised helps you plan the day, since you can decide whether they will be the priority or not. Let me explain.  All of us are limited by the same thing each day. Time. It’s the one thing none of us can change. Writing this podcast script takes about 2 to 2.5 hours. That eats a big chunk of my work time each week.  At the same time, we all have to deal with communications, meetings, admin and other day-to-day tasks. I need to include an hour each day for taking Louis for his walk, and next week, he also has a grooming appointment, which will take time out of my week.  Looking at next week’s calendar today, I can see where my appointments are and already guess which tasks will be a priority. When I do my weekly planning, I pre-flag what I think will be the priority for each day, but I am aware that when I do daily planning, I may need to change it. There has to be a degree of flexibility.  It could be that I get an email on Monday asking for a proposal to work with a company and design a workshop for them. That would become a priority for that week.  I would add a task, “Begin work on company workshop”, and schedule it. Yet, I would not flag it then. When the day comes, and I do my daily planning, I then get to see the real landscape of my day.  It could be that I have five hours of meetings that day and two or three pre-planned, prioritised tasks. Now I have to make a decision. What is my REAL priority that day?  If I have promised to get the workshop outline to the client by the end of the week, that will be my red-flagged task that day. I made a promise, and I will deliver on that promise.  Given that I have five hours of meetings and need two hours to put together the outline and proposal, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else that day. I need to re-prioritise my day.  So I add the flag to the workshop’s proposal and decide on what needs to be rescheduled.  It’s likely that, in that given scenario, I would not flag anything else. I know I don’t have time to do much else.  This is why daily and weekly planning complement each other. The weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives. The daily plan is about ensuring you prioritise your day so you work towards meeting those objectives—given the new information, ie, new tasks that will inevitably come in.  Now I know many of you will add a flag to a task because you keep rescheduling it and just do not want to spend the time doing it. The thinking goes that if you flag it, you will do the task. Hmmm, how often does that work?  This is often the reason many flagged tasks become overdue. The only change is that the task now has a flag. Yet you still don’t want to spend the time doing it. When you use your daily planning time to prioritise your day, you’re using real, up-to-date information to guide you. You can remove flags from tasks you thought were important but are no longer, and add a flag to the tasks that are important that day.  I mentioned that you can pre-prioritise your week by flagging tasks at the weekly planning session. When you do the daily planning, you decide if your priorities have changed and, if so, remove flags or reschedule those tasks.  What I like about this approach is that it feels like your task manager is supporting you rather than the other way around. You retain control over what you will and will not do each day.  This works particularly well if you find yourself behind on something or have a backlog that needs dealing with. When you plan the day, you get to decide what to place on your task list and in what order. Now, how many flags should you allow each day? Several years ago, I decided to find out how many tasks I could consistently do each day for a week. I began with fifteen and soon discovered that if I wanted to be consistent, then that number was ten.  This number does not include routine tasks such as cleaning my actionable email, my daily admin tasks and the usual things we all have to do at work each day.  When it came to flagged tasks, I soon discovered that I could consistently do two important tasks a

Podcast 405 "Pen and paper will solve almost anything. Or at least start the process." - Nicholas Bate This week, I have a special episode for you about what I have discovered over the last two years from bringing pens and paper back into my productivity system. It’s certainly been an eye-opener for me.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Hybrid Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to episode 405 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 week ago, I launched a brand new course called the Hybrid Productivity Course. The purpose of this course was to help those who have found that a digital-only approach has led to a loss of focus on what’s important and a sense of extreme overwhelm and distraction.  As in most areas of life, a one-size-fits-all methodology rarely works. All humans are unique. We think differently, have different life experiences, grow up differently and experience life through many different cultures.  It stands to reason that none of us will have exactly the same needs as everyone else.  We saw this during the pandemic. Around 50% of people loved working from home. They thrived and became much more productive. The other 50% struggled, found it hard to do their work, and lost their enthusiasm and energy for it.  This highlighted the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts bounce off the energy of other people. They need the bustling office environment to operate. Take that away, and they slump.  Introverts, on the other hand, thrive in the opposite conditions. Quiet spaces and solo environments are where they thrive.  I always struggled in an office environment. I found it difficult to concentrate and focus. When I began working from home in 2015, my productivity went through the roof. I suddenly had the freedom to work when I liked, where I liked and in the quiet solitude of my front living room.  One advantage of an all-digital system is that you can easily add many features to your digital tools without much thought.  I noticed this while testing Todoist’s new feature, Ramble. Ramble lets you have a conversation with Todoist, and it pulls out all the things you indicate need to be done. Sounds great in theory, until you test it out.  Just a two-minute “conversation” with Ramble led to 15 tasks!  When I went back into my inbox to sort them out, I realised that the majority of those tasks were low-value, would-be-nice-to-do tasks, but realistically, there was no way I would have the time to do them.  I edited down that list of 15 to 6 tasks.  The problem is that most people will not edit these lists. It’s time-consuming, and you have to think it through. Two things that are out of fashion these days, it seems. This is where I found bringing a pen and notebook back into my system really helped. It forced me to edit down my list of tasks for the day. It also made me smarter when writing my lists.  If I had five people to call today, in the digital system, I would write out all five calls independently. It didn’t take long, and most of those would already be in the digital system. All I had to do was add a date.  In a paper system, it would mean writing out all those calls individually. You soon find that rather than doing that, you would write “do my calls”. Writing those three words strangely reinforced the action. All you then needed to do was to ensure that any communication tasks were correctly labelled in your digital system.  This is where the seeds of a hybrid system began to take shape.  If it were easier to collect using digital tools, then why stop doing it that way? If you were more focused when writing out a daily to-do list than using a digital to-do list, why stop doing that?  My idea was to marry the two.  This led to the development of what I call my Day Book. However, before I got there, I went back to my roots and used the Franklin Planner for eighteen months.  The strength of the Franklin Planner is in the way the daily pages are laid out. You have your daily prioritised task list on the left, your calendar for the day next to it, and, on the right page, a place to keep notes and ideas.  This means that once you have written your appointments, you can see how much time you have available to do tasks. It forces you to be realistic.  If you had seven hours of meetings and began writing out a long list of tasks, you would instantly see that you were creating an impossible day.  If you were to consider meeting overruns, the “urgent” messages and “quick questions” that will inevitably come your way that day, it’s likely you won’t be doing any tasks.  Yet the digital system won’t show you that. All it shows you are the tasks you have dated for today.  And let’s be honest, most people are adding dates to tasks, not because they need to be done that day, but because they are afraid they will forget about them or they will get lost in the system.  That’s not how a to-do list is meant to work. It’s meant to give you a clear indication of what needs to be done. On a day-to-day basis, that means what needs to be done today.  The act of writing down on a piece of paper the tasks that need to be done today forces you to be realistic.  When it comes to storage, though, paper is not so great. It’s here where digital tools shine. You can easily store files and documents. You can keep meeting notes together in one place and create a master project note for all your projects, so everything is kept together in one convenient place.  And of course, digital’s piece de resistance, search.  If you were to keep all your notes in notebooks, you would soon have notebooks all over the place, and notes would be difficult to find unless you carefully indexed every notebook you used. Perhaps not the best use of your time.  Instead, you can keep all your notes in a notes app, and allow it to use keywords, date ranges or titles to find what you need when you need it.  However, I have discovered that paper is a great planning medium. This is where I always used to struggle.  When I first began teaching, there were no such things as Evernote or Apple Notes. They didn’t come along until five years after I began teaching. I therefore used my old counsel notebooks. These were what would be described as foolscap in size, slightly taller than A4, and had a royal blue cover.  Given that throughout my school and university days, I would always plan out my essays on paper, it was perfectly natural for me to make notes on paper when planning my lessons. Then we had the digital explosion. Smartphones became a thing, followed shortly afterwards by apps. I began using Evernote in 2009, and I started planning digitally.  It was certainly convenient, but I did notice I rarely went into any depth. I tried using mind-mapping software, but it didn’t help.  I thought there must be something wrong with me.  Then, a couple of years ago, I began seeing studies about how our brains work differently between digital and physical tools.  The most striking studies found that when you write on paper (or a whiteboard), you activate the same areas that artists activate when creating art. This is the creative centre of your brain.  When you tap on a keyboard, you don’t. Tapping is formulaic and monotonous. If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. When you handwrite, you are forming shapes. Letters are shapes. When you write via keyboard, all you are doing is tapping. There’s nothing artistic about that.  This was when the penny finally dropped for me. There was nothing wrong with me! It was science.  Now, I would never consider opening up my phone or laptop to sketch out an idea. I would open a notebook.  One of my favourite ways of doing this is to grab a notebook, a few pens and a pencil and head off to a local cafe for an hour or two. I can sit in a corner and brainstorm ideas for new courses, YouTube videos and blog posts.  Since I began doing this, my productivity has improved significantly. It helped because I have fewer re-edits to do. When I sit down at the computer to write, I now have a fully planned-out structure and well-thought-through points, and I am writing the first draft much faster. It seems that planning works best on paper, yet storage and output are best digital. Again, leading to the conclusion that there is a place for both digital and analogue tools in a solid productivity system.  I saw this all in action recently. I was watching a UK Supreme Court session, where a barrister (a lawyer who speaks before a judge, not someone who makes coffee) had an iPad in front of him containing all the case files and documents. Yet his speaking notes were on paper. As he made his arguments before the judge, he marked off the points with a pencil and added notes.  The opposing barrister was also using the same tools. Her case files were on an iPad, yet as she listened to her opposite number, she was taking notes in a notebook and appeared to be adding revisions to her own speaking notes.  What’s more, if we’re being honest, stationery is much more fun than digital tools. Digital fonts, screens and keyboards are not really all that exciting.  But the many different types of pens, pencils, notebooks, and pencil cases at all different price ranges give you the ultimate way to make your tools truly personal.  I’m sure you already know I love fountain pens. I’ve been writing with them since middle school and just love the way the nib feels on a quality sheet of paper.  I remember being excited when Apple brought out the Apple Penci

Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else”  How is your management of time?  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 403 Hello, and welcome to episode 403 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.  Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure?  Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility.  Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important.  If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done.  But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take.  This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so.  The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind.  Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days.  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 Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar?  Hi Alex, thank you for your question. Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day.  Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness.  The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when.  You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much. And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment.  I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that.  I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that.  One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have.  That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment.  When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do.  It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality.  If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it.  If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour.  It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work.  The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters. The best salespeople block time every day to prospect and follow up with their customers. That’s why they are the top salespeople. The best CEOs block time every day for working on their top priority task. That’s why they are the best at what they do. Best-selling authors block time for writing every day. That’s why they sell a lot of books.  Now, as I eluded to at the beginning, there will be some days when things don’t go according to plan. You might be sick, had an argument with a loved one or just be distracted for whatever reason.  Or there could be a good old-fashioned emergency that needs your attention.  It happens. That’s life.  However, it’s not really about what you do or not to do in one day. The purpose of time blocks is to get you to show up and do the work. It’s not about volume.  Spending twenty minutes on your actionable email is better than spending zero minutes. It’s surprising how much you can get done when the pressure of time is on you. You don’t dilly-dally around. (Wow! That’s a phrase I haven’t used for a long time!)  Ultimately, the measure is how well you did against your plan for the week, not necessarily an individual day.  Let me give you an example.  I have two blog posts, two newsletters, this podcast and a YouTube video to produce each week. They are my measurables. Six pieces of content. I know I need about 12 hours a week to produce that content. I also have 15 hours of coaching appointments. So, in total, I need 27 hours protected before I begin my week to complete my professional work.  It’s doable, and based on my completion rates, I complete this work around 87% of the time over 12 months. I’ll take that. (I measure it at the end of every year)  I work with one highly successful CEO who writes a LinkedIn Newsletter every week. Her company has over 50,000 employees in six different countries. She protects two hours every week to write that newsletter. One hour for the first draft and one hour later in the week to edit it.  Last year, she didn’t miss one newsletter. She had a 100% completion rate. And that was her goal.  How did she do it? She protected her writing time every week. She would protect Monday mornings when in the office, and when travelling, she would take advantage of jet lag and write when she was wide awake in the early morning or late at night.  She time-blocked the time. She knew the only way to achieve a 100% completion rate was to make sure each week she had protected the time to do the work.  However, time blocking only works if you are planning your week. Not planning your week leaves you open to other people hijacking your calendar, and as I am sure you are aware, other people are often very persuasive… or demanding.  When you sit down to plan the week, you first look at what meetings and appointments you have scheduled. How much time does that leave you?  That will tell you what you could realistically get done that week.  If you’re away at a conference for three days, you really only have two days to work with. However, one of those days will probably be needed for catching up, so realistically, you’ve got one solid work day.  But let’s look at a typical week when you are at your usual place of work.  How much time do you need to do the work you are employed to do each week? A journalist may be expected to write an article a week. How long does it typically take to write the article, excluding the research and interviews? That would be their starting point.  Doctors I work with often need 2 hours or more after seeing patients to handle paperwork. If they want to get home at 7:00 pm each evening, then that will affect the time they need to stop seeing patients and do paperwork.  Salespeople are focused on seeing clients most of the day, but they also often have paperwork and follow-ups to do. Where can they fit the time they need for paperwork and follow-ups? Knowing what you are expected to do as part of your job and ensuring you have sufficient time to do it each week is what I call protecting time for your core work, and it goes back to the birth of humankind. Our ancestors on the Savannahs knew their core work. To hunt for food. If they’d had a big kill one day, they may have been able to take a day off, but when they started their day, they knew their job was to go out and find food. It was a non-negotiable part of their day.  That’s what time blocking does for you. It gives you clarity on what you need to do that day. All you need to do is show up.  One tip I can give you about time-blocking is to keep your time blocks general. For instance, the CEO I mentioned a moment ago calls her newsletter writing time simply “writing time”. That gives her some flexibility.  If she needs to write a report for the board and is up against a tight deadline, then that is what she will write in that time. She will then find another space for the newsletter writing. I do something similar. I have writing time and audio/visual time protected on my calendar. I can then choose what I write or record on the day as part of my daily planning routine.  If you’re in sales or a client-facing role, the time you spend working for your clients can be called “client” or “customer” time. I would also highly recommend that you set aside time every day to deal with messages, emails, and admin. These tasks will creep up on you if you’re not

You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year?  That’s what I’m answering this week.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Take the Time Sector System Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 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.  Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today.  Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”.  All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more.  I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself.  And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be.  Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers.  It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from.  Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task.  Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary.  It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and 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 Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question.  AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised.  It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially.  I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious. There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes.  Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails.  However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today.  I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time.  It doesn’t mean we should reject these new ways immediately. We are in the experimentation stage. It’s the fun stage. Testing new ideas, playing with tools and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t.  However, some fundamentals remain in play.  The first, and the one that will never go away, is that we only have twenty-four hours a day. We are human. We need to sleep, eat and bathe. All of which takes time out of those 24 hours.  The second is that we can only focus on one thing at a time. We have the freedom to choose what we focus on, but we can only focus on one thing.  So the question is, what will you focus on and when?  We may not be able to stop all this AI-generated work, but we can choose when to work on it. This is where categorising your work helps you choose the right things to work on.  For example, pretty much all of us will have to deal with communications, and it’s a great example.  What happens if you don’t respond to your emails and messages for a day? Perhaps you’re travelling, or are caught up in meetings. That’s right, you create a backlog.  The problem with emails and messages is that they never stop coming in, and unless you have a process and time to deal with them, you will miss deadlines and opportunities, and probably upset a lot of people. There are consequences for ignoring your messages.  The solution is to set aside time each day to deal with them. How much time will depend on how much time you have and perhaps the volume of messages that require your attention.  If all you have is twenty minutes between some meetings, take it. You’re not going to get much else done. So take advantage of those twenty minutes and clear some of those messages. You may not be able to clear them all, but one is always greater than zero.  If the AI tools you use include suggestions for responses, take advantage of them for the shorter replies.  But, be careful of the longer replies that require your knowledgeable input. AI can respond to some of these, but its responses often sound a little inhuman or, worse, give the wrong information.  Always check the AI-generated responses.  AI can also organise your calendar for you. Personally, I’ve not had much luck with this, as it doesn’t have enough variable information about me to be accurate. What I find AI does is look at what I like to do at certain times of the day and suggests I do that every day, and then fills in everything else around that.  The last time I played with this AI, it recommended I get up at 6:00 am and do my workout. Pu ha ha! I am not going to get up at 6:00 to do any exercise. I hate exercising in the morning.  To get my AI calendar to be reasonably useful, I had to spend far too much time telling it what I wanted, and I realised in the end the fastest way was for me to do it manually.  Going back to the categorisation of your work, if you categorise it by the types of work you do, you can then match your calendar to your categories.  For instance, if you were a doctor, seeing patients would largely take up most of your workday. But you will also need time to complete your prescriptions, update patient notes, respond to messages, deal with any health insurance claims, and so on.  If you don’t want to be working late into the night, you will need to be disciplined with your calendar and protect time for the admin and communication tasks.  If you find AI is recommending a lot of tasks for you, from, say, meeting summaries, I recommend you first audit the list, then allocate a category to the work suggested.  Why audit the list?  Well, as I mentioned, AI is like that new recruit trying impress the boss by suggesting more work than is necessary. It will create a lot of tasks.  Your experience will tell you that a lot of those tasks will not need to be done. It’s these that need to be removed.  I recently did an experiment. I asked Google’s Gemini to give me a list of tasks, spread over four weeks, to start a blog.  This prompt resulted in 29 tasks! And the task of actually writing a first draft was not suggested until the start of week four.  While many of the tasks listed, such as choosing a domain to host the blog and your niche, do need to be done, in the real world, most people who want to start a blog will already know this. It’s part of the thought processes that lead to deciding to start a blog. When I audited the list, I reduced it from 29 tasks down to 12. I also found I needed to move some tasks around because they weren’t in a logical sequence.  I’m sure over time, AI will get better at this, but always remember that your experience about doing your job will still be better at predicting what needs to be done than AI will.  If you’re using the Time Sector System, you will find that your processing naturally fits with AI’s method of breaking tasks down into when you “should” be doing them.  My blog experiment allowed me, once I’d audited the list, to quickly move the tasks into the correct sector. Tasks that should be done in the first we

Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 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.  Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files.  In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic.  The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today.  And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes.  The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents.  The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated.  Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find.  So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question.  A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year.  Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know.  What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated.  So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries)  Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year.  Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales.  All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened)  I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates.  If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year.  You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder.  Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015.  The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders.  For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder.  How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them.  I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are slim. The need to find a 2025 document would be much higher.  So start with your 2025 folder and work backwards. Don’t be tempted to pre-set up your year folders with subfolders by topic. No one year will be the same.  In 2016, I was teaching English to executives in Korea—something I no longer do. I have a lot of teaching materials; I don’t want to throw away those, and they go up to 2020, so I have folders for those years related to my English teaching activities. After 2020, those folders are no longer in my files.  Once you have the year folders set up, it’s relatively quick and easy to get things organised. The important thing is not overthink this or to develop an overly complex folder structure.  My advice is two levels and no more. The year folder and the subject material. For example, 2024 > Electric bills.  Now, there is a category of documents that you need access to across multiple years.  For example, my car’s manual is something I will need to keep for as long as I have my current car.  For these types of documents, you can create a folder called “current” or “active” (you decide the best name for it) and keep these in there.  So, in my current folder, I have my company registration documents, my car’s manual and registration documents, current insurance certificates, and other miscellaneous files I need access to regularly. This folder is pinned to the top of my file folders (you can do this by adding a 00 before the word Current, then setting the list to organise by name).  Now for your work documents.  This one is more challenging, as you’re likely to be collaborating with others.  There may also be legal requirements regarding document storage and archiving. When I worked in a law office, there were strict rules about how files were organised and stored, and for how long they were kept.  However, that was not my concern. There were procedures that my colleagues and I followed for each file, and they were then sent to the archivist, who made sure that everything was stored in the correct way.  My advice here would be to follow your company’s procedures; if there are none, use the system I described above for your personal files.  Another challenge we face today is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are encouraging us to keep files within their app containers.  For instance, if you create a Word document, Microsoft wants you to save that file within your OneDrive’s Word folder.  That makes sense, and for the current documents I am creating, I use that system.  However, once I’ve sent feedback to my coaching clients, I save the original Pages file in that client’s folder (I work in the Apple ecosystem).  These folders are not year-specific. Many of my clients have been with me for years, and many of them come back from time to time.  That is why, with work-related files, using years to organise your documents doesn’t always work—particularly with ongoing projects, campaigns and clients. Given that most work related files and documents are shared with others and are kept within the company’s own file storage system, the best solution is to ensure that the title you give to these files is something you would naturally search for. Think how you would find this document in twelve or twenty-four months time.  For example, each year I write a workbook for my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The title of that document is “2026 Ultimate Productivity Workbook”.  I put the year first because if I were to search for “workbook”, within the results, I would find that the Productivity workshop’s workbooks would all be grouped together by year, making it easy for me to select the right one.  And that neatly leads me to another facet of working with digital files.  Your computer is built for search. It’s the biggest advantage computers have over your own brain. If it’s within your computer’s search scope it will find it within a split second.  Really the only thing you need to do is ensure that you have given the document a title you will be able to search for. One of my favourite features of this computerised search is to use the “recents” smart list. This shows you all the documents you have worked on recently.  The chances are something you are looking for at work will be something you have worked on recently. You might be writing a report or a proposal in Word, then in the Word app those documents will be at the top of the list.  You may need to change the search setting in the list to last modified, not date created to see this, but it’s a phenomenal way to find a document you need quickly.  What about your notes? Last weekend, I watched a documentary on the beloved British comedian Sir Ken Dodd. A brilliant comedian and a man who left millions of people in laughter and happiness.  Doddy, for that is what we called him, was in the habit of writing notes after each performance into a notebook. He would write how he felt the performance went, what jokes worked and didn’t work, and

WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey. And now, let us begin.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 400 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.  15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years. This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points.  Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure. It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, 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 Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important? Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question.  When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation.  Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them.  Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes.  Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists.  And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world.  It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough.  Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection.  That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today.  Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents.  These were all original thoughts and observations.  Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books.  What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini.  This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude.  But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes.  Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored.  When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45.  And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later.  And that’s where our digital tools today are so much better than the paper notebooks we kept. We can find anything, any time, from any digital device we have on hand.  I remember reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography, and he often travelled to other parts of Italy. If he needed to reference a note he had made—and he made copious notes—and he did not have the right notebook with him on his travels, it would have taken him days to retrieve the information.  We don’t have that problem today.  So, when it comes to collecting, be ruthless in what you keep.  I have a notebook in my notes app called “Suppliers”. This is where I store the names of the companies I regularly buy things from.  For example, I get my clothing from several preferred retailers. I buy my woollen jumpers (sweaters) from Cordings of Piccadilly. In the note I have for Cordings, are my sizes and the website address.  This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for and order. I use Apple’s Password app to store my login details, so once I have found what I want, I can order it very quickly.  Amazon makes this even easier with a “Buy It Again” section, so if I am running low on Yorkshire Tea, I go to Amazon, click Buy It Again, and within a few seconds, I see Yorkshire Tea and can order straight away.  Ten years ago, I kept all that information in my notes. Today, I don’t bother as it’s faster to go directly to Amazon.  Another use I have for my digital notes is to keep all my client meeting notes. Each week, I will have around fifteen to twenty calls with clients, and I keep notes for each call as I write feedback, which I send to the client after the call.  These are unique notes, and each one will be different, so using the Darwin/Newton principle—keeping thoughts, ideas and observations in your notes—they will be kept in my notes in a notebook called “clients”. What’s great about this is I have over eight years’ worth of client notes in Evernote, which feed ideas for future content as they’re directly relatable to real experiences and difficulties.  Another useful note to have in your notes is something called an “Anchor Note”. This is a note where you keep critical information you may need at any particular time.  For example, I keep all the subscriber links to my various websites there, which can be quickly copied and pasted whenever needed.  I also have the Korean Immigration office website there, since it’s not easy to find, and I only need it every 3 or 4 years.  Depending on how security-conscious you are, you can also keep your Social Security and driving license numbers there, too.  How you organise your notes depends on you and how your brain works. However, the more complex your organisational system, the slower you will be at finding what you need.  Now this is where computers come into their own. Whether you use Apple, Google or Microsoft, all these companies have built incredible search functionality into the core of their systems.  This means as long as you give your note a title that means something to you, you will be able to find it in five or ten years’ time.  I remember once my wife asked me for a password to a Korean website I had not used in ten years or more. I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t have the password stored in my old password manager, 1Password.  As a long shot, I typed the name of the website into Evernote—the note-taking app I’ve been using for almost fifteen years—and within a second, the website with my login details was on my screen.  If I’d tried to find that information by going through my notebooks and tags, I would never have found it. I let Evernote handle the hard work, and it did so superbly.  However, that said, there is something about having some basic structure to your notes. I use a structure I call GAPRA. GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. It’s loosely based on Tiago Forte’s PARA method.  I find having separate places for my goals, areas of focus and projects makes it easier for me to navigate things when I am creating a note.  My goals section is for tracking data. For instance, if I were losing weight, I would record my weight each week there.  My areas of focus notebook is where I keep my definitions of my areas and what they mean to me, and it gives me a single place to review these every six months.  My project notebook is where I keep all my notes for my current projects.  The biggest notebook I have, though, is my resources notebook. This is a catch-all for everything else. My supplier’s notebook is there, as is information about different cities I travel to or may travel to in the future. As I look at that notebook now, Paris is the note that has the most information. (Although Osaka in Japan is getting close to it)  I also have places to visit in Korea that I keep for when my mother visits—which she does every year—so I can build a different itinerary for her each year.  The archive is for old notes. I’m not by nature a hoarder, but I do find

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in twelve months and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”  I first heard that quote from Tony Robbins, and it completely changed my approach to yearly goals. I stopped setting ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and began looking further ahead to see what I could do over the next twelve months that would move me closer to my longer-term dreams and goals.  In this week’s special episode, I will share with you why smaller steps over the next twelve months will do so much more for you than trying to do something big and scary that you ultimately fail at.  Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 399 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 are the mistakes most people make when it comes to goals and resolutions for the New Year?  Well, the simple answer is that they overcomplicate things and try to do too much in one year.  Let me explain. Like most people, I used to set New Year’s resolutions when I was growing up. At various times in my life, they included losing weight and getting fit, quitting smoking, saving money and many more.  And, again, like most people, I failed miserably every time.  What Tony Robbins’ quote made me realise is that I was failing because none of these resolutions were connected to my long-term goals or vision.  I was in my twenties, and I believed I was immortal. It wasn’t until I reached my early thirties that three-day hangovers convinced me that I wasn’t immortal after all.  It wasn’t until I’d settled down, married and begun to see a life ahead of me that I started to wonder if I could control that life and the direction it would go in.  And yes, I could. And so can you. But you do need to know what kind of life you want to be living in ten or twenty years.  Hope is not a good strategy. It’s no good carrying on as you are and “hoping” you will one day reach the goals and the life you’ve always wanted to live.  To achieve that, you will need to take action.  To give you an example of what I mean.  I want to be active well into my eighties and nineties. I long admired Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh. He died in 2021, just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday. And yet he remained active throughout his eighties and nineties, being one of the hardest-working members of the Royal family.  The Queen allowed him to retire at 97.  How did Prince Philip maintain his strength and endurance?  He did something called the 5BX every morning for eleven minutes.  5BX is a series of body-weight exercises you can do anywhere that was developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1940s to keep their servicemen fit, healthy and strong.  I highly recommend you search for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube and watch it. It seems so quaint by today’s standards.  He also walked miles and miles every day, ate small portions of food based on a traditional balanced diet, limited his alcohol intake, and went to bed and woke up at the same time each day. If we were to break that down into daily activities, it was simple and doable. Because he was able to do it every day—even when he was travelling—it meant there were few excuses he could use not to do it.  You wake up, and after a few minutes, do your 5BX session, shower, have a small, healthy breakfast, and get on with your day, taking every opportunity to walk. And you do it every day.  Tie that to going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, and you would be setting yourself up for a long, healthy, active life.  And in that, there is nothing complicated or time-consuming.  There are also no goals involved. It’s just a shift in your daily routine, so these activities become part of your daily routine.  Although I would suggest you use January as a “test”. Often, we read or listen to something, think it’s a good idea and then find that because of our circumstances, we struggle to make it work.  That doesn’t mean it cannot work. It means we need to rethink the routine and make a few changes so it works for us.  I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and thought it was a good idea. And it was a good idea in 2016. I could get to bed at a reasonable time.  Then I started my productivity work and coaching programme, and it became challenging to get to bed before midnight. Something had to change.  I realised that the power of the 5 AM Club was not in getting up at 5 AM. It was what you did when you woke up. So, the only thing I needed to change was my wake-up time. And ten years later, I still follow the morning routine I developed after reading that book.  Another example would be with your personal finances. Davie Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, gives a simple step-by-step approach to getting your personal finances in order.  The first is to build a starter emergency fund—usually around $1,000 to $5,000. Then pay off all non-mortgage debts as quickly as you can.  The third step is to build a longer-term emergency fund. That would be three to six months of living expenses.  And then to invest in your retirement and live on less than you earn.  Within that framework, there would be a few key things you could do. For example, try to save the starter emergency fund in 2026 and pay down some of your shorter-term debts.  Around those areas, you could set some goals in 2026.  The bigger principle in The Total Money Makeover is to pay off all debts, including mortgages. That’s unlikely to be possible for most people in one year, but over ten years? It could be possible.  The good thing about something like this is that you can plan five or ten years ahead and set a goal to be completely debt-free by 2036.  Whether it’s health or finances, what you are doing is setting standards for how you live your life. You eat healthy, do some exercise each day, and live within your means.  And really, that’s what a new year should be all about. Not resolutions or goals, but reaffirming your standards. The standards you live your life by.  Standards don’t need motivation; they are just the way you live your life.  However, when setting your standards, you will likely need some help from motivation and self-discipline initially. There will be days when you forget to do something or cannot do it. That’s perfectly normal.  It’s not about hitting everything 100% of the time. That would be impossible anyway. I would suggest a monthly target of 80%+  A good example of this is when I travel to visit my parents. The trip from our home in Korea to where my parents live on the West Coast of Ireland takes about 26 hours door-to-door.  During that time, I am not able to go out for a run or to the gym. If my goal were to exercise every day, I would be setting myself up for failure before I begin. I travel to visit my parents at least once a year.  And if I were determined to do it, why put myself through that extra stress? Travelling is stressful enough.  Then there would be those occasions when I am ill or delayed when travelling domestically.  However, if my target was an 80% success rate, I’m in with a chance, and on those days when I’m exhausted or an emergency comes up, I wouldn’t be destroying my standards.  If you want to discover what is important to you in your life, I suggest you download my free Areas of Focus workbook. That workbook will take you through each of the eight areas of life we all share, help you define each one and then set some actionable steps you can take to keep your areas in balance.  It’s a great way to kick off a new year, as it will help you focus on what matters to you and identify areas where you can establish habits and standards that will be meaningful to you. A new year is a wonderful opportunity to review how things are going in our lives and reflect on what we could change to get our lives back on the right track, living the life we want.  If you’re entirely new to this approach to a new year, don’t really know what your longer-term vision is, or aren’t clear on what is important to you in life, and you’re ready to make changes, I would recommend my Time and Life Mastery online course.  This is a complete package that will help you explore what is important to you. Once you have established those, I then show you how to build your standards into your daily life.  Plus, you get my complete mini-course library for free when you join. And if you act now, you can save 50% with my End of Year Sale offer using the coupon code “codisgreat” (all lowercase, and one word).  I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you.  Thank you for listening, and let me wish you an amazing 2026.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

 "The first ritual you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it has the effect of setting the mind and setting the context for the rest of your day." — Naval Ravikant or was it Eben Pagan? I don’t know, but it’s a great quote to begin today’s episode.  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 | 398 Hello, and welcome to episode 398 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.  Your morning routine is one of the best ways to create a productive day.  If you were to wake up at the very last moment, rush around your home getting ready while trying to sip your hot coffee, and rush out the door to catch the train to work, you’ve started the day in a stressed state, and you’re likely to stay stressed all day.  It’s not a great way to begin the day.  If you were to start the day with a set of routines that you follow every day, two things would happen. The first is that you have no decisions to make, which preserves your decision-making powers—powers that diminish throughout the day. And the second is that the routine itself allows you to slow down.  However, as with all things good for us, we can take it to extremes, which can create stress in itself.  I remember in 2017, I began doing Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club. This is where you wake up at 5:00 AM, do twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, twenty minutes of planning, and twenty minutes of learning.  It’s a great routine, but unfortunately for me, in 2018, I began coaching, which meant I was doing calls late at night, significantly reducing the sleep I was getting.  I found myself walking around all day like a zombie.  I decided to stop doing the 5 AM Club routine and develop my own, which I’ve stuck with for seven years now, and I still love my mornings.  And with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Teagan. Teagan asks, In my morning routine, I take care of my pets, check my home budgeting app, then have breakfast and coffee while doing my email sort. My daily planning is done the night before. The problem is that I don't want to transition to getting dressed and starting work after doing this routine. It takes me 3 hours or more to get going. I'd like to do some physical activity, but this would make the morning even longer. Do you have any tips on moving more efficiently through the morning? Hi Teagan, thank you for your question.  I think the simple answer would be to include getting dressed as part of your morning routine. However, before you get there, I think there may be an issue in your routine. Three hours is too long for a morning routine.  Let me explain. Imagine you had a flight to catch at 7:00 AM. It takes you 90 minutes to get to the airport, and you need to allow 2 hours for check-in and getting to your gate.  That would mean you need to leave your house at 3:30 AM.  If your morning routine takes three hours, you would need to start your day at 12:30 AM. Therefore, dangerously reducing your sleep time.  Most people think of doing their morning routines when everything is normal. Unfortunately, “normal” is not a consistent state of affairs for most of us. It may happen 90% of the time, but when we develop our morning routines, we need to consider the 10% of days when it doesn’t and how we will start the day on those days.  The “perfect” morning routine is a routine you do 100% of the time.  This would be your starting point.  I’ve found that a morning routine of around 45 minutes is realistic. This means that even on days when you need to start your day earlier than usual, there are few excuses you can use not to do your routine.  Although hopefully you won’t need “excuses” for not doing it.  Your morning routine should be something you look forward to doing. It gives you a reason to jump out of bed, not crawl out.  It should be built around things you enjoy doing. To give you an example, my morning routine is: Wake up and put the kettle on. Drink a glass of lemon juice water while the kettle is boiling. Make a pot of Yorkshire Tea. Wash my face and brush my teeth. Then, sit down at my desk, with my mug of tea, open my journal and begin writing.  Finally, open my email and clear my inbox.  In total, that takes me about 40 to 50 minutes. It depends on how much I write in my journal.  As I know my routine won’t take any longer than 50 minutes, I can confidently decide when to set my wake-up time.  For example, on a Monday, I have a call at 7:00 am; therefore, I wake up at 6:00 am. Other days, I can wake up at my preferred time of 8:00 am.  Last summer, we needed to leave for the airport at 5:00 am. This meant on that day, I woke up at 4:00 am and was ready to go at 5:00 am.  I don’t include getting dressed in my morning routine. I get dressed as my tea is brewing after I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth.  The purpose of your morning routine is to mentally prepare you for the day ahead. It’s not to create more stress.  I love writing my journal and that first cup of tea of the day. When my alarm goes off in the morning, it’s often the first thing I think about, and I do jump out of bed—much to Louis’s annoyance—he’s not a morning dog.  Robin Sharma recently posted his “new” four-hour morning routine on YouTube. It’s a superb, inspiring and motivational routine, yet completely impractical for most people.  You don’t need a four-hour morning routine to get the benefits of the morning routine.  Some people love exercise in the morning, others don’t. That doesn’t mean that those who don’t like exercise in the morning miss out.  For a morning routine that works for you, start with what you love doing.  You mentioned your pets. If your pets like to go out in the morning, and it’s something you enjoy doing, then you can build that into your morning routine. However, if it’s just refilling water bowls and giving them breakfast, you could use that as the trigger to start your routine.  The trigger is the first thing you do in the morning.  For me, that’s putting the kettle on; for others, it could be a visit to the bathroom or letting their dog out.  The trigger should be something you automatically do without thinking. This is similar to what James Clear calls “habit stacking”. It’s the first in a series of activities that start the stack.  So how do you transition from your morning routines to the start of your day?  This will depend on whether you work from home or go to an office.  If you work from home, the last activity of your morning routine should automatically transition you.  For example, clearing my email inbox is the last activity of my routine, and it smoothly transitions me into my first task of the day.  Today, that was to write this script.  Now, why do I clear my email first? I protect the first 30 minutes of my day for emergencies or urgent requests. So, today I began at 8:00 am and started writing this script at 9:30 am. 9:30 am is usually when my focus time starts.  If there’s an email that requires an urgent response, I have time to deal with it without it distracting me while I am focusing on my most important work of the day. It clears my head and reassures me there’s nothing more important than doing that first task.  If you work in an office, the last activity in your routine should be leaving for work. You know when you need to leave for work, so you have a reference point you can use to decide when you should be waking up.  The definition of a routine is something that you do consistently, often without thinking. I’ve been doing my morning routines for seven years, and I frequently find myself sitting at my desk writing in my journal, wondering how I got there.  I know I’ve followed my routines. I have a cup of hot tea next to me, and I am dressed. These routines are ingrained into how I begin each day. One thing I do, though, that may help you, Teagan, is I lay out my clothes before I go to bed. When I wake up, my clothes are there right in front of me—no decision to make. Just put them on and start my day.  Having your clothes laid out ready for you in the morning may mean that you need a small end-of-day routine.  While you may not have a formalised closing-down routine, one thing you can do as you get ready for bed is to lay out your clothes for tomorrow morning after you’ve brushed your teeth.  Then, in the morning, you’ve reduced the resistance to getting dressed and starting the day.  So there you go, Teagan. I would first suggest you look at your morning routines and see where you could reduce them so they don’t last more than an hour. Think about those days when you may need to wake up early—could you still complete your morning routines?  Make sure what you have in your routines are things you love doing. If you don’t love doing them, your morning routines will become a chore. Not the best way to start your day.  And for getting dressed, set out your clothes the evening before so you reduce the resistance when you wake up.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Teagan, and thank you to you too for listening.  This podcast will be on a break next week, so let me wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive end to 2025.   

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." That was President John Kennedy in 1961, speaking at the Joint Session of Congress. It is possibly the best example of a project statement ever made.  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 | 397 Hello, and welcome to episode 397 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.  Starting projects. It can be tough. Where do you start? Where will you find the time? And what do you need to do?  These are just some of the questions you will find yourself asking.  Yet the biggest obstacle to completing a project on time is overthinking and over-planning. Thinking about and planning a project are not the same as working on one. Working on a project is doing something that moves it forward.  Decorating your bedroom will require paint and brushes. The only pre-project decision you need to make is what colour.  The first two steps, therefore, are:  Decide what colour to paint the bedroom Buy paint and brushes I would add a third decision: when. When will you do it?  Once you’ve done those three things, you’re ready to go—no more planning, no more thinking. Just get on and start.  Yet, that’s not how most projects go, is it? There’s thinking, planning, then creating tasks in your task manager, and if it’s a work project, a meeting, then perhaps another meeting.  Often, by the time a project is conceived, 80% of the time required to complete it gets spent on thinking, planning, and meetings.  And that brings us nicely to this week’s question—a question about finding ways to reduce the thinking and planning time.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, “Hi Carl, how do you work on complex projects?” I find I spend a lot of time planning a project, end up with a long list of things to do, and when it comes to starting, I freeze. It’s as if I don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips on handling this type of problem? Hi Phil, thank you for your question.  “Project freeze” is a common problem for many people. I suspect this stems from the belief that every aspect of a project needs to be planned before starting. Yet, for many projects, this would be impossible.  Imagine you were part of NASA in May 1961, and you’d just heard President Kennedy’s speech at the joint session of Congress about why the US should put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth before the end of the decade.  At that time, NASA was struggling to get even the smallest of rockets into space—the idea of sending astronauts to the moon and back was a pipe dream.  Yet a group of incredible people at NASA in 1961 took on the challenge. Instead of planning every single step they thought would be needed to complete the project, they looked at what they already knew, the obstacles they would need to overcome, and the first steps. That gave birth to the Mercury space mission. The Mercury programme was not to put a man on the moon; its objectives were to orbit a crewed spacecraft around Earth, study the human ability to function in space, and ensure the safe recovery of both the astronaut and the spacecraft. Before they could reach the moon, they needed to understand how humans cope in space. So the project’s objective was to send a man into Earth’s orbit.  The key was to get started, and they did this by listing out the obstacles they needed to overcome first. They then worked out how to remove those obstacles.  Now, I know our projects are unlikely to be as big as sending someone to the moon and back, but we can adopt the same approach that NASA used to work on our projects.  Even small projects can adopt this approach. Let’s say you were asked to do a presentation on the likely effects of AI on your company’s business over the next five years. Where would you start?  For something like this, there would be several phases.  The first would be to research and gather information. For this, the task would likely be to find out who to ask or what to read.  Okay, when will you do this?  Here’s the key point. It’s no good just deciding what needs to be done first. You need to make it intentional, and to do that, you will need to set aside time to do it.  Perhaps you decide to give yourself an afternoon to research this.  Research is a challenge in itself. We can go down rabbit holes that bring no meaningful insights into what we are trying to do. Yet, we can also underestimate how much time is required for research. So the first step is to do an initial session of research to help you develop some boundaries.  You might be lucky and find that the first research session gives you everything you need to start the presentation. However, if not, and you discover you need to do more research, then when will you do that?  One thing you can do with creating a presentation is to set up your PowerPoint or Keynote file. Create the document, do the first slide and perhaps set the theme colours.  Having a document started makes it much easier to get into creating the presentation.  The danger of listing out all the things you think you need to do to complete the project is that 80% of what you think needs to be done doesn’t, and you will find that 80% of what ends up being done were things you never thought of in the first place.  All you really need is a starting point.  I recently did a video on how to write a book. The number one reason people who want to write but never do write a book is that they overthink and plan it.  Thinking and planning do not produce a book.  The best way to write a book is to get the first draft written as fast as you can. All that is required is a few ideas about what you want to write about. From there, you start writing the first draft.  The first draft will be the worst state your book will ever be in. It’s meant to be messy, unstructured and occasionally unreadable.  But, once you have a first draft, you have around 80,000 words you can manipulate, craft and organise into a best seller. Without that first draft, you have nothing but a few ideas. How do you write a first draft? Set aside time each day to write. An hour or two every day for eight weeks will give you your first draft.  As you write, new ideas will form, and you can make a note of those along the way. That will make your editing easier.  The common denominator with any project is to get started. Everything has a starting point. Wherever that is, start there.  It’s as you are working on the project that your next steps reveal themselves.  When I first began creating online courses, I had no idea what I was doing. But what I did have was fifteen years of teaching experience, and I knew how to create a lesson plan.  I also knew what I wanted to create an online course on. So I could create a lesson plan and a topic. That was where I started.  Once I had a lesson plan, I realised I needed a storyboard of sorts to help me break the course down into lessons. That evolved into the outline I have written for every course I have created since.  Now, after eight years of creating courses, I have a process I follow. All I need is a topic and time to plan, outline, record, edit and post. (Five steps)  On big projects, many tasks are completed before the project ends. Yet, if you were to try to predict what needs to be done at the start, you will find you are wasting a lot of time.  NASA had no idea whether a human being could survive in space. What they did know was that they needed to develop a reliable rocket to get them into space. So, they began with that. Without the rocket, it didn’t matter whether a human could survive in space or not. There would have been no way of getting them there.  In 1962, NASA didn’t know that they would need software to keep the spacecraft on the right trajectory. There was no way they could have planned for that at that point. It was only when they began working on the Gemini programme that they realised software would be needed.  Without paint and brushes, it wouldn’t matter what colour you wanted to paint your bedroom.  In many ways, when you’re working on a large, complex project, you’re solving problems as you go along. Yet, there’s always going to be a starting point.  Another thing about bigger projects is setting a deadline.  Because we are not sure how long a large project will take to complete, it can be tempting to set an unrealistic deadline. Three months to complete a project that realistically would take twelve. This is why setting up the project’s stages will help you.  What’s the first stage? Give yourself a realistic time frame to complete that first stage. The information you gather during that first stage will guide you with the deadlines for the next stage.  I would also take another leaf from NASA’s book. President Kennedy said, “before the decade is out”. Given that he made this speech in 1961, NASA had around 9 years to complete the project. Yet it was not absolute.  Theoretically, the deadline was 31 December 1969, but the actual deadline was a grey area until NASA got closer to achieving the goal.  Deadlines are good as they bring energy to the project. Yet, unrealistic deadlines bring nothing but stress to a project.  I know an online course will take me about 6 weeks to complet

"In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention." — Pico Iyer How do you feel when you have nothing to do but enjoy your surroundings? Where nothing is urgent, and you can enjoy the moment you are in?  Never felt it? Maybe that’s a problem you need to fix. Today’s world makes us feel that everything must be done now, yet it doesn’t. If you were to slow down, step back from time to time to think, you’d get a lot more important things done and eliminate much of what is unnecessary.  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 | 396 Hello, and welcome to episode 396 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.  Slow down. There, I’ve said it.  If there were one distinguishing characteristic of those who control how they spend their time and when, it would be that they are slow.  Not in a negative way, more in an intentional way. They meet their deadlines, are never late for appointments and have clearly had time to read through the meeting preparation notes.  Even in one of the most stressful occupations, that of being a special forces soldier, they are trained to slow down. The US Navy SEALs have the expression “slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”, and I know from talking with former members of the UK Special Forces that a large part of their training is focused on slowing down and being deliberate with their actions. Of course, the problem here is that when you’re faced with twelve urgent Teams messages, you have five missed calls from an important customer, and your next appointment is about to start, the last thing your instincts will tell you to do is to slow down.  Yet it is precisely in those situations that slowing down and being intentional about what you do next is what you do.  Slowing down calms your over-anxious mind, and when your mind is calm, you make better, more rational decisions.  And slowing down is what this week’s question is all about. So, to kick us off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Hanna. Hanna asks, Hi Carl, I work in a very busy Pharmaceutical company, and from the moment I step through the door at work, it feels like chaos. My phone never seems to stop ringing, and my Teams feed looks like it’s alive. It’s always moving! The day’s a blur. What can I do to slow things down and regain some control? Hi Hanna. Thank you for your question.  One of the things I’ve learned is that we do have control over the speed of the day. I know often it feels like we don’t, but we do.  The reason is that we always have choices, even when it often feels like we don’t. You can choose to answer your phone or let it run to voicemail. You can choose to answer those urgent Teams messages immediately or not, and you can choose to go to the staff rest area and make yourself a nice cup of tea.  Unfortunately, it’s natural for us to head straight into the storm of those phone calls and messages. And when we do that, we start conditioning ourselves to do it consistently.  Yet maybe the best thing you can do is pause, make that cup of tea, and strategically plan your approach.  This is often what I call the tactical retreat. Step back, pause, and look at what’s currently on your plate and your most important tasks for the day.  However, you will only be able to do that if you can move from being a firefighter to becoming a fire prevention officer.  Firefighters charge straight into every issue with only one intention: putting the fire out. Fire prevention officers: pause, look at the bigger picture, and seek ways to prevent the fires from starting in the first place.  In all companies, you need both types of people. You’re not going to prevent every crisis or urgent issue. Yet many can be prevented.  I gave one example in last week’s episode.  If you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first.  If you don’t have a process or a strategy for handling that situation, you will panic. Panicking slows you down because the act of panicking creates a lot of activity, yet nothing happens to deal with the messages.  The strategy I suggested was to use the first-in-first-out approach. Deal with the oldest first. This way, even if the last message you received is from your angry boss, at least you won’t have to deal with eight angry customers as well.  And let’s be honest, if you were to give yourself fifteen minutes to deal with these messages, nobody would be waiting more than fifteen minutes for your response.  There is one trick you can use every day that will help you slow things down. That is to protect the first thirty minutes of the day to get a handle on the day.  Hopefully, you won’t have a crisis every day, but those first thirty minutes give you a chance to review your Teams messages, emails, and your plan for the day. You can also speak with your colleagues to see what’s happening and deal with anything urgent that popped up at the start of the day.  More often than not, you won’t need the full thirty minutes, but you have it protected, and on the days you don’t need it, you can make yourself that lovely cup of tea.  Another trick is to give yourself a proper screen break between work sessions.  Now, this will depend on the kind of work you do. If you were a graphic designer, an accountant or a journalist, a lot of your work would be spent sitting in front of a computer screen.  If you were to stop after ninety minutes, get up, and walk somewhere for ten minutes without a screen, that screen break would give you time to stop and think. That thinking might be what element you can add or remove from the design you are creating, or where to place a particular paragraph in the article you are currently writing.  Getting away from your screen allows your brain to relax. It’s when your brain is relaxed that you make better, more rational decisions.  Yet, when we are under deadline pressure, stepping away for ten minutes is often the last thing we feel we should do.  When you return, allow yourself 20 minutes to address any messages that may have come in while you were locked away doing focused work.  Sometimes I find it helpful to look at the messages before I take the ten-minute break. That way, I can think about the responses while I’m relaxed.  If you’ve found yourself reacting without thinking all the time, and from the moment you wake up, it feels like you’re go-go-go, that may be a sign you need to retrain your brain to slow down.  The best way to do this is to set aside 30 to 45 minutes each morning. This time must be focused on you. Not your partner or kids. It’s time dedicated to yourself.  You could write a journal or develop a slow, deliberate morning coffee ritual. Perhaps you could add some light stretching or go out for a morning walk.  As long as it’s focused on you and the things you enjoy doing, you’ll find that this morning routine helps to rewire your brain to slow down.  Now for an unusual one.  Avoid unnecessary conveniences.  Part of the Reason we all feel rushed today is the speed at which things can be done. We can order home-delivered food, have our laundry picked up and delivered clean and ironed, order our weekly supermarket shop online, and have it delivered straight to our door later that day or the next.  Convenient, yes. Good for us, no. I recently saw a video about why people in the UK began gaining weight alarmingly from around the late 1970s onwards.  Yes, there was a shift in our diet. In 1979, Marks and Spencer introduced their first ready meal. It was their famous chicken Kiev, and it sparked a revolution in how families cooked.  The M&S chicken Kiev was introduced at around the same time microwave ovens began taking off, and suddenly people were eating ready-made meals.  No more “real” cooking. Boiling vegetables, cooking meat, it was pre-packaged and additive-riddled food that could be cooked in less than ten minutes.  Then there were more and more convenient ways to travel. People stopped walking to the shops. People working in offices would walk the two metres to their car in the morning, drive to their office, park in the underground carpark, and walk the five metres to the lift (elevator) to arrive at their office, having walked no more than ten metres.  Then to spend the rest of the day sitting behind a desk.  All in the name of convenience.  Yet, this convenience is causing us to speed up.  Walking is one of the best ways for us to slow down. It’s one reason why studies show owning a dog can reduce stress and improve health. Dogs need walking. For me, walking Louis is one of my favourite times of the day. I get to think without a screen, get some fresh air and relax.  And given that Louis will stop and investigate every tree and lamp post, it’s a slow walk.  And the final tip is to plan your day before you finish the day.  In other words, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you close out the day to review your appointments for tomorrow, curate your task list for the day based on how much time you have between meetings, and allow for the unknowns—there are some.  Then pick your two must-do tasks, make sure they are highlighted and stop.  You cannot do everything in one day, but doing a little often moves things forward, and soon t

"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