In the Working With Podcast this week, I answer a question about staying motivated when our daily life gets interrupted.

 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

 

Life Hack article | 15 Home Office Organization Tips to Save Time and Get More Done

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

Episode 127

Hello and welcome to episode 127 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I hope you are all staying safe and haven’t gone completely mad from having to stay at home and not be able to get outside. We are living in difficult times at the moment, but as in most things in life it won’t last and we will soon be able to start moving again. Stay strong and stay focused on the long-term.

This week, it’s all about maintaining motivation and routines when everything gets thrown out of sync. With many of you having to learn how to work from home and how to deal with a sudden drop in activity and movement it can be easy to lose your motivation to focus on what is important, your health and fitness and even keep up with the demands of your work when there are so many new distractions all around us—distractions we have not had to deal with before. 

Now a quick tip before we get into the question: if you have taken my COD course, now would be a good time to review the course. Many of you will have had your working routines change over the last few weeks and that means many of the ways you collect and organise your work and commitments will have changed. Reviewing the course will help you quickly develop a new way of collecting and organising that reflects the way you are working today. 

If you are new to this podcast and have not taken the COD course—that’s Collect, Organise and Do—the course is free and it will give you the basics of setting up your own system that will see you through these difficult times. Full details on how to get into the course are in the show notes or you can find it on my website—carlpullein.com 

Okay, on with this the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to keep up with my productivity system. I have to work from home at the moment because of the Corona virus and I had just finally got a system in place. Not it feels like everything is falling apart. Is there anything I can do to keep up with a system? 

Hi Jenna, thank you for your question. I think a lot of people are struggling with motivation at the moment. When we are suddenly taken out of our normal routines it feels disorientating and that often leads us to feeling disrupted and to losing sight of what we have identified as being important to us. The key here is to be absolutely clear about what exactly is important to us.

What I mean by this is let’s say maintaining a healthy lifestyle is something you identified as being important to you. Part of that lifestyle is you exercise five to six times per week and you follow a healthy diet. 

Now, during your normal routines, you would eat a healthy breakfast at home, and then buy a salad or something at a specific place near your workplace for lunch and then go to the gym or go for a run when you return from work. Now, because you are working from home and your gym is closed you will feel trapped and unable to maintain your healthy routines. It is very easy to just give up and tell yourself you can take a break. 

Okay, that’s probably fine for a few days. But there will come a point where you start to feel uncomfortable. Your energy levels will drop significantly and you will find yourself losing motivation to do anything. The tempt