How should a great productivity system be working? That’s the question I’m answering this week in the Working With Podcast. 

 

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Script

Episode 116

Hello and welcome to episode 116 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.

My guess is if you are listening to this podcast you have some interest in productivity and time management. And for people like us (I certainly have an interest), there is a huge resource of material around that showcases how to set things up so you can become more productive and be more efficient with your time. 

But the question is, with all this advice around, what does an effective, efficient, well-managed productivity system look like? How does it really operate when it comes face to face with everyday life? 

Well, today, I will try to answer those questions.

But first, I just want to give you a heads up that if you enrol in either my Your Digital Life, Time and Life Mastery or Create Your Own Apple Productivity courses you can get my Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life course completely FREE. That’s almost two hours of learning that will help you build momentum towards a life you love living and towards making progress every single day towards whatever you define as success. 

The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life normally costs over $100s, but for this month only you can get that course for free. So if you are serious about building a great system—a system that works for you—then now would be a fantastic time to pick up one of these courses and begin your journey today.

All the details are in the show notes.

Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Natalie. Natalie asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following your YouTube channel and a lot of other productivity YouTubers as well and you all have different ways of organising and doing things. What I really want to know is what does a ‘perfect’ productivity or time management system look like?

Hi Natalie, thank you for sending in your fantastic question. It’s a question that got me thinking because in a sense you hit upon a very important point. There are a lot of different ways of creating a system, many will work well, a lot will not. The question to ask is how can I build a system that will work for me? 

So, to begin with, let’s ask why do we need a productivity and time management system in the first place? 

If we go back to the era before industrialisation, when we lived an agrarian life, we did not need anything more than a seasonal calendar. We certainly did not need a to-do list manager or a daily diary. Our work was determined by the seasons and the weather. We planted in the spring and we gathered in the autumn. In the summer we looked after our crops and in the winter we cleaned up and repaired our stuff. Very simple really.

Then came industrialisation, but even then the majority of us did not really need elaborate calendars or to-do lists. Factory work was simple. We turned up, went to our work station, did our work and then came home. 

We then became information workers. Now we no longer had a fixed job. Now we were managing information. This changed everything because suddenly nothing was fixed. We became much more reliant on other people for information. Computers needed information inputting and we needed to make sure we had the right information in the right place at the right time. 

Meetings were invented (well, I can’t imagine a farmer 200 years ago having a meeting to decide what to do next can you? It was obvious), water co