The Working With... Podcast Carl Pullein

What is “Time-Based Productivity”, and how can you apply it to your daily work? That’s the question I am answering this week. 
 
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course.
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
 
Script | 322
Hello, and welcome to episode 322 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the huge benefits of the Time Sector System is that it removes the tyranny of task-based productivity and replaces it with something more concrete: time. 
You see, tasks will never stop coming at you. Your kids’ toys need to be picked up, the laundry needs to be done, your bed needs to be made, and you’d better check the refrigerator to see what you need to pick up from the supermarket. And that’s before you start your work day. 
If you base your productivity system on the tasks you need to do, you will wear yourself out. It’s impossible because it’s never-ending. There are no barriers, and you will see this rather quickly if you use a task manager. Task managers fill up, and everything is screaming at you to be done. 
But then you’re faced with the question: where am I going to find the time to do all these tasks? 
It always comes back to time. 
This week’s question asks how you can transition away from this tyranny of task-based productivity and bring a sense of control and calm into your world. 
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jens. Jens asks, hi Carl, I am always overwhelmed with tasks and never able to get all my work done. I am also constantly interrupted by messages and emails and never seem to be able to get a quiet moment. How would you handle this situation? 
Hi Jens, thank you for your question.
You describe a real problem today. Over the last fifteen years or so, technology has broken down the barrier between our work and personal lives. Long gone are the days where when we finished work for the day we really did finish work. If we needed to respond to a work email, it had to be done from our office computer. Once we had gone home, that was it. No more work email.
Sure, there were other issues—people staying late in the office for one, but at least when you left your place of work for the day, that was it. You left work at work. (Or it certainly felt like it.)
So, what can you do today to establish some barriers so you do not always feel pressure to do more? 
A few years ago, I discovered that if you base your system on task management, you will lose. Tasks are never-ending, and there will always be more to do than time available to do them. 
It was that phrase—“always more to do than time available” that gave me a clue towards the solution. If tasks were unlimited, then perhaps I could work on the one area that was limited—time. 
Working with time gave me natural limits or constraints. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and during that time, I need to eat and sleep at the very least. That then gave me a new number to work with. Given that I personally need around seven hours of sleep and, let’s say, ninety minutes for eating, then all I had left was fifteen and a half hours for everything else. 
Once you work out how much time you need for sleep and eating, plus time for personal hygiene, you likely will have around fourteen hours a day to work with. 
So the temptation is often how much work can you fit into fourteen hours, yet that’s probably not the best place to work from. 
Work is just one part of

If your notes are a disorganised mess, this episode is the one for you. 
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
 
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course.
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
 
Script | 321
Hello, and welcome to episode 321 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have a special episode for you. No question; instead, I want to share a way to think about your productivity tools, particularly how your notes app fits into the whole scheme of things. 
There is a trinity of productivity tools—your calendar, task manager, and notes app—that when connected, will enhance your overall effectiveness by reducing the friction between organising and doing work. 
Today, I want to focus on the notes app because this is the tool that is most often neglected.
Within this Trinity of tools, your calendar is number 1. Everything flows from your calendar because that is the tool that will prevent you from being overly ambitious and give you the reality of the day. There are twenty-four boxes in your calendar, each representing an hour, and that’s all you get each day. 
You cannot change that, for time is the fixed part of your productivity system. 
Your task manager tells you what tasks you have committed to and when you will do those tasks. Its relationship with your calendar is critical because if you have seven hours of meetings, you’re committed to picking your kids up from school, and you have a hundred tasks to do; you will know instantly you have an impossible day. You can then either reschedule some meetings or reduce your task number.
So, where do your notes come into this trinity? 
Your notes support your tasks. It’s here where you will manage your projects, interests, goals and areas of focus. It’s also where you can keep your archive, which, if used well, will become a rich resource of inspiration, ideas and creativity. But more on that later. 
Of all the productivity tools you use, your notes app is the one where you can be a little relaxed. Your notes do not need to be perfectly curated and organised. Most notes apps today have powerful search built in, and I would argue that the ability to search within your notes is a critical part of your choice when choosing a notes app. 
I suspect Evernote’s popularity over the years (despite its recent changes) is due to two factors: its search, which is arguably still the best in the field, and its brilliant web clipper. 
The ability to search your notes means that as long as you give any note a sufficiently descriptive title, you will be able to find it quickly and effortlessly. 
As a side note, I highly recommend that you learn all the different ways your notes app can search for your notes. Just Google your notes app of choice’s search functions. For instance, you can search “OneNote search” or “Notion search”. Learning this will save you a lot of time in the future. 
Evernote has a keyboard shortcut on the Mac operating system that I’ve been using for years. However, for a brief period in 2019, this feature stopped working while Evernote was transitioning from the old “legacy” version to the new Evernote 10, which was very frustrating. 
During that six-month period, I realised how important it was to be able to search your notes quickly in terms of overall productivity. 
Your notes do not just support your projects. They can also support multiple parts of your life, from tracking your goals to keeping your eight areas of focus front and centre of your life. 
Moreover, you can ke

Setting up a structured day makes sense. It reduces decision-making and helps you prioritise your work. But how strict should you be with this structure? That’s the question I answer this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 320
Hello, and welcome to episode 320 of the Working With 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.
The change that has given me the biggest productivity benefit over the years was giving my calendar priority over every other productivity tool. This means that if my calendar tells me it’s time to buckle down and do some focused work, I will do that. If a customer or boss asks for a meeting when I have scheduled time to work on a project, I will always suggest an alternative time. 
This single change has meant I get all my work done (with time to spare), I can plan my days and weeks with a reasonable amount of confidence, and I rarely, if ever, get backlogs. 
However, when you adopt this method, the temptation is to adhere to it rigidly. And that is where things begin to go wrong. 
This week’s question is on this very question. How strict should you be with the plan you have for the week? So, with that said, literally, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 
This week’s question comes from Lucas. Lucas asks, hi Carl, I love your idea of blocking time out for your core work each week. The problem I have is I feel guilty now whenever I ignore a message or refuse to meet someone when I have a time block. What do you do to overcome this feeling of guilt? 
Hi Lucas, thank you for your question. 
Having structure in your day (and week) lets you know with a strong degree of confidence that you have sufficient time each day to do your work. 
Let me give you an example. Pretty much all of us get email each day. It’s just one of those inevitable parts of life. Now, if you are a typical knowledge worker, you will be getting upwards of 80 emails each day. Let’s say, of those 80 emails, half of them are non-actionable, 10 of them are for reference, and the remaining emails (thirty) require a response of some sort from you. 
How long will it take for you to respond to thirty emails? An hour? An hour-and-a-half? However, how long it will take you is rather less important. What matters is that at some point in the day, you will need to deal with those emails. If you don’t allocate some time, you will require double the amount of time tomorrow because you will have to deal with all the emails you didn’t deal with today. 
That’s how backlogs build: by being unrealistic about the amount of time you need to protect to stay on top of things like email and your admin. 
It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to find an hour a day and dedicate it to responding to your emails. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, life will get in the way. It always does. 
And even if life doesn’t get in the way, you may be exhausted, or something could be worrying you. All of which will conspire to slow you down and make you less efficient. 
Instead of strictly sticking to a plan, you will find it better to work on the principle that one is greater than zero. In other words, while you may like to have an hour to manage your emails, on those days that you don’t, give yourself twenty or thirty minutes instead.
The goal is not necessarily to clear your actionable email each day. The goal is to stay on top of it. This means that if you are unable to clear all your actionable emails today when you come to

So, your calendar and task manager are organised, and you have enough time to complete your important work. But how do you define what your individual tasks are? That’s what I’m answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
 
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 319
Hello, and welcome to episode 319 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the most powerful ways to improve your effectiveness is to ensure you have sufficient time each day protected for your important work. Some of these tasks will be obvious. If you’re a salesperson and one of your customers asks you to send them a quote for a new product you are selling, that will come under the general category of “customers”. As this is an important part of your work as a salesperson, your “customer” category will have time protected each day. Well, I hope it does. 
Then there will be your general communications and admin to deal with. We all have these categories of tasks to do each day. There’s no point in sticking your head in the sand, as it were, and hoping they will go away. Emails demanding a reply do not disappear. Ignore these for one day, and you’ll have double the amount to do tomorrow. This means you will need double the amount of time, too—time you likely do not have. 
What this all means is that if your task manager supports tags or labels (and most do), you can use these for your categories. 
This week’s question is about how you choose which category for your tasks. 
So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from José. José asks, Hi Carl, I am struggling to define which tasks are admin, consulting, or sales-related. How do you go about choosing categories for your tasks?
Hi José, thank you for your question. 
Let me first explain the different categories of work you may have. 
The concept here is that every task you have will come under a particular category. Those categories could be communications or admin, but they could also be sales activity, writing, designing, or marketing. Your categories will depend on the kind of work you do.
Once you have established your categories, you protect time each day (or week) to work on those categories.
For example, I have a category for “projects.” I block Wednesday mornings for project work. This means that when I plan for the week, the majority of my project tasks will be scheduled for Wednesday. 
The important thing is you do not add too many categories. The less, the better. To give you a benchmark, I have eight categories. Mine are:
Writing
Audio/visual
Clients
Projects
Communications
Admin
Planning
Chores
It can be difficult to establish your categories at first, and the temptation will be to add more categories than you need. This is a mistake because very soon, you will have too many categories, which slows down your processing. 
If you’re familiar with COD (and if you are not, you can take the free course—the link is in the show notes), the purpose of Organising is to get everything in the right place as quickly as possible. If you have too many categories, it will slow you down and involve far too many choices. You may experience the paradox of choice, where too much choice paralyses your thinking. 
So, what are your categories? Well, you will likely have communications and admin. We all have to communicate, and email and Teams/Slack are pernicious and never-ending. Having some time protected each day to deal with your communication

This week, it’s COD week. In a special episode, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have. 
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
 
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
 
Script | 318
Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of the Working With 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.
Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, it’s not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly.
COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators. 
There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smith’s Franklin Planner system to Stephen Covey’s First Things First and Jim Rohn’s notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didn’t neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that. 
There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work. 
When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work. 
Let me begin with collecting. 
Nothing will work if you don’t collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day. 
Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you don’t trust that you will see them later in the day.
What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go. 
What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it. 
The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox. 
The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you. 
What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up. 
With your task manager, what mat

Do you feel your digital notes are not giving you what you want? And, is there a right and wrong way to manage all these notes? That’s what we are looking at today. 
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 317
Hello, and welcome to episode 317 of the Working With 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.
Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion around how we manage our digital notes. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of new notes apps promising to do wonderful things for us and there have been numerous ways to organise all these notes from Tiago Forte’s PARA and the Second Brain to the Zettelkasten system. 
The question is do any of these apps and systems work? 
I feel qualified to answer this question as I have been down every rabbit hole possible when it comes to digital notes. I’ve tried Michael Hyatt’s Evernote tagging system, Tiago’s PARA and I even developed my own system, GAPRA. But, ultimately do any of these work ? 
And asking that question; do any of these systems give you what you need? Perhaps is the right place to start. What do you want from a notes app? What do you want to see and how? 
Before we get to the answers here, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 
This week’s question comes from Susan. Susan asks, Hi Carl, I’m having difficulties trying to understand how best to use Evernote. I just do not know how to organise my notes. I have thousands of notes in there going back at least five years and it’s a mess. Do you have any suggestions on how best to clean all these notes up? 
Hi Susan, thank you for your question. 
I don’t think you are alone. The popularity of books like Building A Second Brain and the number of YouTube videos on this subject suggests many people are struggling to know how best to organise their digital notes.
But, I wonder if what we are doing is over-complicating something that should be very simple. 
I’ve recently been reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and on the chapter about his notebooks Isaacson points out that Leonardo Da Vinci instilled the habit of carrying around a notebook into all is students and apprentices. It was something Leonardo did himself and everything he collected, wrote and sketched was random in order.
We are very fortunate that many of these notebooks survive today and what we get to see is the complete randomness of what he collected. In these notebooks there are designs, sketches, thoughts and to-do lists all on the same page. It was this randomness that led to Leonardo discovering new ways to connect ideas to solve difficult problems and to paint in a way no one else had ever done. 
And, I think, this is where we have gone wrong with our digital notes. It’s the randomness of your notes that will lead you to discover new ways of doing things. It will help you to be more creative and help you develop your ideas. If you try and strictly organise your notes—something a digital notes app will do—you lose those random connections. Everything will be organised by topic, thought or idea. 
That does not mean that you want complete randomness. There will be projects, goals and areas of interest that you will want to keep together. A large project works best when all related notes, emails and thoughts are kept together. After all, they are connected by a common desired outcome. This is where your digital notes will excel—everything together in one