Your Time, Your Way

Carl Pullein
  • 4.8 (74)
  • SELF-IMPROVEMENT
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Your Time, Your Way

Answering all your questions about productivity and self-development.

  1. 6 DAYS AGO

    How To Work With Your Strengths.

    This week, why it’s important to know what kind of person you are.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 350 Hello, and welcome to episode 350 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. WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast.  So, back to this episode.  One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person.  Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You’ll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks.  Then you beat yourself up.  But, perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just trying to do something you are not wired to do.  That’s why it’s important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn’t. Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them? Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question.  I’ve witnessed something like this very close to home.  My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines.  In the twenty + years I’ve known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever.  My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she’s likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready. It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa.  My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn’t see the point in over preparing.  Yet, we shouldn’t be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results.  Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning?  I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning.  I have clients who see Ali Abdaal’s productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do

    13 min

  2. DEC 8

    How To Plan The Week in 45 Minutes or Less

    This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 349 Hello, and welcome to episode 349 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 issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long. It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction.  The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week.  The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects.  Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long.  This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past.  Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days. So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour? Hi Greg, thank you for your question. The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone? If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox.  Processing your inbox is about asking three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether.  When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder.  If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date.  Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days.  In my experience, that only takes ten minutes.  Now what about all those projects?  Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects.  However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you

    14 min

  3. DEC 1

    Yes, You Can Design A Perfect Week.

    This week, I’m going to show you how to design your “perfect” day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 348 Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.  I’m talking about how a typical day would go.  What time would you like to wake up? What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day? What would you like to do in the evenings? And what time would you like to go to bed? These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.  Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.  When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.  Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.  So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.  This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?  Hi Megan, thank you for your question.  That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for.  But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar? First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”. I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this. Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep). Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.) Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?  Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.  You c

    11 min

  4. NOV 24

    Don't Copy. Find Your Own Style.

    This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 347 Hello, and welcome to episode 347 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 is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you.  Well, not so fast.  One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests.  One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area.  This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.) This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work.  So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them? Hi Frank, thank you for your question.  Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea.  I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough.  I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system.  It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours.  For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do.  I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day.  He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening.  Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me.  Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try.  For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day.  Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes.  And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it.  But then I hit a problem. My coaching bus

    13 min

  5. NOV 17

    Deep Dive With Dr Kourosh Dini

    This week, I have a special episode for you.  A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini.  In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it. We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.   Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter:https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/Waves of Focushttps://wavesoffocus.com/on SMART goalshttps://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

    1h 3m

  6. NOV 10

    How To Find Time.

    Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 345 Hello, and welcome to episode 345 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. Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need. The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have.  Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death.  Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives.  We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO.  However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them. But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep? Hi Giles, thank you for your question.  The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available.  And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations.  One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine.  Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961.  In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30.  After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin.  Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it.  Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book.  For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year.  If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole.  He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began.  That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two.  This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will f

    12 min

  7. NOV 3

    How To Clear Your Backlogs.

    Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 344 Hello, and welcome to episode 344 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. Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.  With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.  Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.  The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.  You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.  The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.  The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.  Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind? Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.  This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak. The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?  If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop.  The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.  Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.  The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.  With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?  For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your

    12 min

  8. OCT 27

    How To Keep Things Simple.

    What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what’s important each day? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  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 | 343 Hello, and welcome to episode 343 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. Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager.  That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple.  The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you? The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time.  When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works. Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example. The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling. While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That’s when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do.  Which ultimately means you don’t have time for the things you want time for.  So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler? Hi Martha, thank you for your question.  The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It’s your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing.  This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends.  You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time.  The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned. I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings.  That’s always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting.  The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we’ve become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job.  I know it’s become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”.  What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is don

    13 min
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About

Answering all your questions about productivity and self-development.

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

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