Your Time, Your Way

Carl Pullein
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated weekly

Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.

  1. 11 hr ago

    Why You Never Have Time for Your Most Important Work

    When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off. Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat.  Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week?  Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script |429 Hello, and welcome to episode 429 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  There was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did.  It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days.  Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness.  And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm.  To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about.  So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails. Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.  This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars.  That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them.  The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar.  You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours.  Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day.  So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar.  However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage.  Let’s break this down. When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment? If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar.  This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point.  So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity.  Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity.  Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself.  A one-hour meeting, for example, often requires some preparation time, and then you need to be in the place where the meeting is being held, even if it’s an online meeting.  I do my coaching calls using Zoom, and for each session, there is at least fifteen minutes of prep time and 2 or 3 minutes to set up the computer for the call.  Today, I have four coaching calls; that means I need to find an additional hour beyond the four hours of calls. It’s not four hours; it’s five.  You might think the proposal you must send today will only take thirty minutes to finish, but that does not take into account interruptions, the possibility that you need to ask someone for further information, and then have to wait for them to come back to you before you can finish.  There’s a good chance that your thirty minutes turn into 90 minutes.  What all this means is that if your calendar is packed with meetings and time blocks without any buffer time, you’re going to go beyond your capacity for the day.  This relates to the difficulty we all have predicting how long a task will take. We don’t know. Not with any degree of accuracy.  And that’s because each day is different, with different distractions, emergencies and interruptions.  For me, recording and preparing a YouTube video generally takes six hours. Yet, yesterday it took me eight.  I have a process for making my videos that I’ve developed over ten years, and I create a video every week. You would have thought by now I would be able to predict with accuracy how long a video would take to prepare. Not a chance.  My wife was at home yesterday; there was an unexpected issue with one of the tools I use for making videos, and in the middle of making the video, there was an urgent message I needed to respond to.  None of those disruptions was predictable. Yet they happened despite all the safeguards I have on my calendar and in my processes.  The job still got done; the video was finished and handed over to my video editor for cleanup and polishing.  Yet because of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, the one task I had to get done yesterday was the video. Nothing else mattered.  What all this means is that it’s important to be in control of your calendar and be self-aware enough to know your capacity. If you don’t know where your limit is, you’ll be like a fuel tank with no air pocket. You’ll burst or, worse, explode.  Not in a literal sense, but you’ll exhaust yourself, make more mistakes that need rectifying later (more pressure on your capacity) and miss deadlines, which is not great for your promotional prospects or for your business’s reputation.  Unfortunately, the solution to this is not easy. It can go against all your human instincts to be helpful and courteous to other people.  The first step is to look at your regular meetings. Ask: How did that meeting come into your life?   Some meetings are unavoidable. A weekly team meeting where everyone updates the boss on their project progress, discusses progress on various proposals, sales or other work, and alerts colleagues of any unforeseen issues or delays.  Yet, there will be other meetings where, when you ask yourself how they got into your life, you realise it was because you tried to be nice to someone, but a meeting that brings you or the other attendees no real value.  These meetings should be removed.  One-to-ones with your team members or boss may also be important meetings, as they add value to theirs and your work.  Really, what you are doing is a meeting audit. Do you really have to be in all these meetings? Given that you are in a leadership position, you may be able to delegate some of these meetings to your team. This is great, as it helps them develop their skills, removes a commitment from your calendar, and you only need a short summary from your team member about what happened.  Next up, I would suggest putting a cap on your meetings each week. But before you do that, ask how much time, on average, do you need for strategic thinking and doing your important focused work?  How much time, again on average, do you need each day to deal with your communications?  I say “on average” because you can only work on averages. You will be interrupted; there will be days when your energy levels will be low, and conversely, there will be days with no distractions or interruptions, you’re feeling great, and you can get a lot of work done.  For example, I allow six hours for doing my videos each week. Yet, some weeks it takes me four; others, like yesterday, it can take eight. The important thing is that when the week began, I knew how much time I needed for the important work I needed to do that week.  Once you know how much time each week you want for your deeper, focused work and handling your communications, that will tell you how much time you have left for meetings and other appointments.  However, don’t be temp

  2. 9 Aug

    Why You’re Too Tired to Plan Tomorrow

    “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |428 Hello, and welcome to episode 428 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements.  If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically.  And this is important.  Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”. And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions.  When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions.  In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling.  And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks.  It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should.  When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed.  When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex.  And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice.  This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day?  Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question.  When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided.  Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day.  If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions.  And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow.  So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there.  However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything.  This is where routines, processes and rules come into play.  Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions: What deserves my attention? What can wait? What should I ignore? What should I delegate? When is “good enough” truly good enough? If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves.  And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up. This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done.  Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it.  And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it.  For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work.  It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask.  Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that.  In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!)  It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work.  They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow.  I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him.  It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed.  When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day.  Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it.  So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day. Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make.  For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done.  It tells me that my workday is now finished. There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed.  That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that.  And then there are your rules, or standards.  Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to.  For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time.  Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait.  For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can” This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait.  The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”.  If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example.  Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.” What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloadi

  3. 2 Aug

    Why You’re Still Overwhelmed After Trying Every Productivity System

    Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |427 Hello, and welcome to episode 427 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity.  In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier.  This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated. AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not.  When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist.  For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut.  I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year.  I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it.  Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do.  No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin.  No need for AI to get involved.  AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change.  There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time.  Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep.  The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time.  And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot.  Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives. Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive.  As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning. They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course.  Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system.  This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised. Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed. A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor.  YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity.  Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it.  It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming. I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday.  On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree.  I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people.  And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit! It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work.  It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years.  Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger.  Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous. And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different. Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects.  You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice.  The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally.  The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day. This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain. Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change. They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges.  My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me! I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.”  the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned.  All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years. I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them.  Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it. So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you.  I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions

  4. 26 Jul

    Your To-Do List Is Hiding the Truth About Your Time.

    What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Time Sector System here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script |426 Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes.  And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time.  Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days). Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work. I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office.  Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home.  I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s.  In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen.  It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you.  If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot.  Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool.  So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus? Hi Judy, thank you for your question. There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication.  Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done.  Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do.  Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics. Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists.  All great features.  And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do.  Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you.  With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two. With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer.  Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise.  But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.  When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day.  For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete.  If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do.  However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work.  Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have.  One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task.  Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday.  On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day.  I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates.  Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day.  This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work.  With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted.  Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier.  I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45.  I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did.  So where should a task list fit into your overall system?  Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it.  If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month.  On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin.  Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work.  That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checki

  5. 19 Jul

    How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan

    The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."  Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life.  No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences.  A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill.  These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day.  Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for.  In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through.  Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.   The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script |425 Hello, and welcome to episode 425 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative.  They usually go something like: “Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster”  Well, was is a disaster?  Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned.  It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster.  The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan.  And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events. But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again.  This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?” Hi Will,  Thank you for your question.  Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week.  You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that.  The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has.  There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too.  We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week.  There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting.  None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate.  If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story.  One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with. For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script.  Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording.  Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer.  This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life:  Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work) Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally. Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc.  And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered.  Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week.  I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you. The next idea is related to your daily planning.  Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan.  Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon.  Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning.  That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have.  And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning.  Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing.  It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down.  You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep.  And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets.  Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day?  This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down.  The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop.  Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do. Often you

  6. 12 Jul

    You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.

    Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said: "The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want. This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Perfect Week Calendar Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method 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 |424 Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do?  And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything.  In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once.  This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day.  And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep.  In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness.  I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints. This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be.  Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes.  What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked.  I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had.  Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!) So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week? Hi Scott, thank you for your question.  I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it.  This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them.  Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this.  This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between.  What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic.  I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days. Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day.  Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them.  Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden.  During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family.  Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours.  Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus.  One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one.  This walk invariably took place just before lunch.  Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend.  Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business.  If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend.  What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend.  There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it.  I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4.  Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it.  There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds.  What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night.  Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do. Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day.  What has changed is we have far more options than they had.  And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have.  The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed.  If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible?  If not, what would you do instead after dinner?  Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead?  One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life.  Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin. I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally. Reading a book does the opposite.  I’ve noticed that with my team too.  We don’t have any regulated work times in the company. People can work whenever they feel like it. My Marketing Manager likes to do her work early in the morning; my video editor prefers the evenings.  We work on timelines. For example, I supply my video editor with that week’s videos on a Wednesday afternoon, and she has until Sunday evening to complete the edits.  As the boss, the only thing I care about is receiving the edited videos no later than Sunday evening.  The final issue most people face is wanting to do too much.  Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, we learn that Lord Peter had two hobbies. Playing the piano and collecting books. When he’s had an exhausting day or was stressed about something, he would either pick up a book or play the piano. They were his go-to relaxation methods.  What do we do today? We get ourselves stressed out because we want to learn to play the violin, take up pickleball, go to the movies with our friend

  7. 28 Jun

    How to Keep Going When the Motivation has Gone

    You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor.  Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going.  This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2026 Summer Sale page The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method 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 |423 Hello, and welcome to episode 423 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  One of the consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new.  That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening. All seemingly easy to do.  And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it. It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas.  It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation.  Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend.  Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult.  The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do?  Hi Fran, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day.  Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!” Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day.  Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there.  In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox. It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again.  I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry.  Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.”  The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning.  Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed.  Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.  And yet, people still struggle. Why? Because they are relying on motivation.  I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated.  I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day.  It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day.  And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete.  And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done.  I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday.  Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW! The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small.  Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once.  That’s the hardest way to do it. Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta. And there’s a common thread between all of them.  When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league.  Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players.  They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great.  Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies.  These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things.  As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement: “We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value”  In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change?  When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it.  One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system.  There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant.  Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong? Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change.  Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and while there were areas for improvement, there was no need for a root-and-branch change in how everything was run.  Today, the company is struggling against its competition, the employees are demotivated, and sales are average at best.  And yet the Agile methods could have worked had the reasons for the change been better communicated. My client still has no idea why the company changed its management methods.  Without a strong reason to change, you will find your motivation runs out very quickly.  Talking with some of the members of my Retirement programme, I’m surprised by how quickly they start taking health and fitness seriously after retirement.  We go through our working lives sitting for 8 hours a day, slowly and quietly destroying our posture and mobility. We don’t sleep enough and eat convenient food because who’s got time to eat healthily when you have hundreds of messages to respond to, and you’ve got to get the latest marketing campaign finished by the end of the week? And then we go for a medical check-up and discover that we are pre-diabetic, we have early signs of heart disease, we are

  8. 21 Jun

    How to Stop Interruptions.

    Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day” When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue.  Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method 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 |422 Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus.  There are eight areas that we all share. These are: Family and relationships. Career or business Health and fitness Finances Lifestyle and life experiences Self-development Spirituality Life’s purpose The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you.  The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ.  This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up.  Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose.  This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me?  Hi Annie, thank you for your question.  This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do. This is where having some structure built into your week can help.  Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week.  From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example.  The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable.  For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days.  Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training.  Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm.  I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture.  I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university. University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night.  There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse” And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true.  You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on.  I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him.  As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season.  I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”.  After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him.  Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities.  And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you.  It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away.  This is why time blocking, when done right, works.  Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example.  No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone.  It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours.  But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week.  When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have.  Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it.  Yet there’s a fix for that.  Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm.  Now you have the two most important numbers.  When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need.  That means the question becomes, when will you do it?  If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed.  And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it.  This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team.  The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does.  A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic.  I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.  In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart.  At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game.  And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals.  In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not.  When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you.  The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible.  The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute.  Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly.  Then carry out the work.  It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control.  Ideall

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About

Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.

Information

  • Creator
    Carl Pullein
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    200
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 Carl Pullein International. All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Your Time, Your Way

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