Your Time, Your Way

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:

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.

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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 find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time. 

Those ten hours need to be locked in each week.

Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it. 

You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible. 

I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them. 

Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time. 

It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It’s already protected. 

This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change. 

For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week. 

You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar. 

Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings. 

That’s fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project?

If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed. 

One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people’s time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you’re producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone. 

When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don’t have three hours a day to manage all those channels. 

So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour. 

And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don’t have to do everything now. 

Imagine If there’s a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it’s quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects. 

One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do. 

For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient. 

Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do. 

This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused. 

Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time. 

Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don’t harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible. 

I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time. 

You don’t have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won’t take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home. 

As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that’s not a requirement of being fit and healthy. 

I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week. 

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.

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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 limit? 

Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it. 

Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero. 

Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere. 

If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy. 

One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it’s very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory. 

When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day. 

With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs. 

Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently. 

This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company’s CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date. 

If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow.

If you’ve watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be. 

The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks. 

Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists. 

The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military. 

Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse. 

You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin. 

This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities. 

The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company’s internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications?

You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less. 

If you’ve never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done. 

One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face? 

I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it? 

We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That’s just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important. 

Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it’s difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it’s worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control. 

Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step. 

One area I never thought of was household chores. It’s easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue. 

Now, on Tuesday’s and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It’s only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes. 

And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That’s less than five minutes a day. 

One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it’s stalled you don’t have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it. 

For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone. 

I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

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:

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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 done on time each day or week? That’s your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level?

For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work. 

Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement? 

By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work. 

For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning.

If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may decide to create a time block every Monday morning called “ordering” and use that time to order any other supplies you may need that week at that time. 

What you need to order can then be held in a note you add to throughout the week so you have everything fully complete the task on Monday morning. 

That then leaves you free to focus on building the wall. 

Taking the time to establish your core work gives you a way to automate prioritising. Core work always takes priority. It’s what you will be evaluated on if you are employed, and it’s how you earn your living if you are self-employed. 

Where your calendar comes in to all this is once you have established your core work, make sure you have time protected for doing that work each week. Core work rarely changes, after all, it’s what you are employed to do. The details will change—I don’t write the same blog post or make the same YouTube video each week—but the work doesn’t change unless your job changes. 

And I use the word “protected” deliberately here. If you give up that time for another meeting, or something that’s fleetingly urgent, you will still need to catch up somewhere. 

To give you a benchmark, through my coaching programme and when I analyze my own core work, in total most people require between fifteen and twenty-hours a week for their core work. 

If you are working an average thirty-five hour week, that still leaves you with fifteen to twenty hours for meetings and voluntary work. 

There will be other “duties”. Managing your communications and daily admin, for example. If you were to protect ninety-minutes a day for these activities, that still leaves you with seven to fourteen hours a week for all the unknowns. 

This is why your calendar is the most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox.

What about task lists? These are still helpful. Apple probably called their to-do list the best way—Reminders. Ultimately, if you have established what your core work is, and protected sufficient time on your calendar to get that work done, your task list is there to remind you of the things you want to complete that day. 

You tasks will fall into three categories. The must dos. These must be done at some point in the day. If you promised to call a customer back today, then you must do it. You promised. 

Then there are the should do tasks. These are the tasks that while don’t necessarily need to be done today, getting them done will ease the pressure on the rest of the week. Most tasks fall into this category. 

If you were to give yourself twenty must do tasks today, and you are already committed to five hours of meetings, you won’t be going to bed tonight. You “must do” those tasks. So when you choose your must dos make sure you limit them to two or three tops. 

And finally there are the could do tasks. These are context based tasks. For instance if you have to visit a customer in the east of the city and that’s where the pet supermarket is, you could call in after you meeting to buy dog food for your dog. Buying the dog food would be a category three task—it’s context based. 

Now all this only works if you are consistently doing your daily and weekly planning sessions. Failure to do these will mean you miss opportunities to do your category three tasks and you will be unclear when deadlines are due. 

The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to stop and look at the bigger picture of what’s going on in your life. Perhaps you’re attending your cousin’s wedding next month and you need to buy an outfit. If you’re not doing a weekly planning session it would be easy to miss that commitment and that will leave you rushing to buy something a few days before. 

The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to reset and ensure you are doing the right things at the right time. 

The daily planning session is simply checking your calendar for your appointments and comparing that with your scheduled tasks for tomorrow. Do you have a doable day? If you have five or six hours of meetings or are scheduled to attend a training session, having twenty to thirty tasks on your task list for the day would mean you have an impossible day. 

It’s better to learn that when you can do something about it. You could reduce your task list or if you need to do something important, you may need to reschedule a meeting. The person you’re meeting will appreciate that and it demonstrates how organised you are. Win win in my view. 

And that’s it. Focus on making sure your calendar is up to date and accurate—that’s the driver of your day.

Your core work and appointments Come first, then tasks. If you need time to complete a particularly important or urgent task, make sure you protect the time on your calendar. 

And to make sure it all works, do your daily and weekly planning sessions consistently. And on the daily planning, I don’t know how anyone could start their day not know what they want to accomplish that day. Knowing gives you energy and a determination to get it done. 

I hope that has helped, Martha. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week’s podcast.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 342

Hello, and welcome to episode 342 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.

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales. 

You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries. 

There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple. 

Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those.

Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let’s be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do. 

While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity. 

Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time. 

When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day. 

This week’s question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks’ question.

This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I’m very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this?

Hi Jeff, I certainly can. 

In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues. 

Of course that’s not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that’s down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don’t hear of those courses much today. 

It’s also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I’m sure they’ve switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books. 

I remember seeing an interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen. 

Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles. 

So, that’s a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day?

Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event. 

A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There’s no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm. 

As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn’t really matter when in the day you finish the report.

And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss’s office. You’d better be there at 10:00 am. 

If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be at your boss’s office by 10:00 am. 

A wise person would block 9:15 am 10:00 am for travel time as well as the meeting time on their calendar.

That’s basics.

Now, given that your calendar is about specifics, and your task manager is about options, we can better manage all the stuff coming at us. 

Your calendar can be used as a very powerful tool if you trust it. By trusting your calendar, I mean that you don’t ignore it. That you check it each morning to see what you are committed to and if you cannot do something, you will reschedule it. 

One way to get the most out of your calendar is to use a method called time blocking. Time blocking does not mean you block every hour of your day, what it means is if you need two hours to work on that report, you would block the time out on your calendar. 

You can become very tactical here too. 

One way is to establish when you are at your most focused. Most people will either be early birds or night owls. According to author Daniel Pink, only around 3% of the population are at the most focused in the afternoons. 

If say you are more focused in the morning, you can block two-hours out between 9:30 and 11:30 am for “focused work”. 

This means, that each morning between 9:30 and 11:30, nobody can schedule appointments with you. Your calendar is blocked for doing your most important tasks. 

Knowing that you have this time protected does a lot for your stress levels. You know you have two uninterrupted hours for getting on with your work. 

And often, having two uninterrupted hours for doing critical work is all you need to stay on top of your projects. 

Unless you are nomadic, it’s likely that being able to block the same time each day for focused work will be difficult. There will always be a need for flexibility. Yet, if you were only able to protect two-hours three times a week, you would still have six hours of uninterrupted time each week. 

Imagine what you could do in those six hours. 

I protect two hours each morning for writing on a Monday and Tuesday, and the four hours is enough for me to get all my writing done for the week. Occasionally, I will need to move things around, but for the most part, those times are fixed and that gives me the confidence that I have sufficient time each week to get my committed writing projects complete. 

What all this means is your calendar is the hub for everything you do. It will tell you if you have enough time for doing your work, and where you need to be on any given day. 

If you need to collect your daughter from School on Thursday at 4:00 pm, that will be on your calendar. If it takes you thirty minutes to get to your daughter’s school, you would block time from 3:30 pm to collect her. 

This also means you would be unwise to schedule a meeting after 3:00 pm (meetings have a habit of overrunning). You would not be focused in the meeting, you’ll be clock watching and stressed. 

Instead, you could use the thirty-minutes to respond to your communications, or even plan the next day. 

You calendar should also be the first thing you look at when you plan your day. Whatever’s on your calendar is fixed. You’re committed to it. 

If you see you have six or seven hours of meetings today, how much time will you have for your tasks? Not much. 

If you begin the day, with six hours of meetings and a task list of thirty or more tasks, your day’s broken before it’s begun. You won’t be able to do everything on your task list and attend all those meetings. 

Either you cancel meetings or your remove some of the tasks, leaving only the critical ones. 

Today, for example, I have five hours of meetings and my to-do list has five tasks. It’s still going to be a busy day, but it’s doable… Just. I suspect already, that one or two of those tasks will be pushed off to another day. 

I don’t care. The most important parts of my day are the confirmed appointments. 

If I find myself with some critical tasks that must be done, then I will have to find time on my calendar to do them. I’m comfortable rescheduling meetings if necessary to complete an important piece of work. You should be too. 

Your calendar is never going to lie to you. It only shows the 24 hours you get each day. How you use those hours is largely up to you. If you open up your calendar to everyone, there’s no point in complaining you don’t have time. You do have time. By allowing other people to schedule meetings with you without first consulting you, you are allowing g them to steal your time. 

If you need time for exercise, to be at your son’s school concert or to finish any important piece of work, it’s on you to protect that time on your calendar. 

Your task manager and notes app will not help you here. You can throw a hundred tasks into your task manager and date them for tomorrow And tomorrow you will have a hundred tasks to complete. 

You task manager will never tell you that you don’t have time to do all those tasks. Only you calendar will do that.

So there you go, Jeff. That’s how to use a calendar. It’s your connection with the real world. It never lies to you and it’s a tool you need to be in control of. 

Thank you for your question, Jeff, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week. 

Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today.

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Script | 341

Hello, and welcome to episode 341 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.

Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them. 

If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect. 

If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect. 

And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect. 

It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all. 

As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”.

Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found. 

That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself. 

It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week?

Hi Suzie,

Thank you for your question. 

This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do. 

Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening. 

Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening. 

As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything. 

One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day. 

If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do? 

So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day. 

Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first. 

The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do. 

For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning.

Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work. 

However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made. 

There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for. 

This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like? 

Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible. 

Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent? 

These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career? 

Again, there’s no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment. 

The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me. 

Often, when you look deeply at it, it’s not really about the work itself; it’s the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you’re working on risks being unpopular. 

We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work. 

And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won’t they? Won’t they? 

Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we’re in our thirties and forties, most people don’t worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health. 

Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don’t change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health. 

If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It’s a choice you can make today. 

All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next. 

This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose?

These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow. 

What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms? 

Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular? 

When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made.

The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time. 

The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for. 

Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business?

To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do?

To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make?

Being more productive is never about doing more. It’s about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people. 

After all, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.”

So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you.

Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life. 

I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

One of the biggest drains on your time (and productivity) is a disorganized workspace. This week, I’m sharing some ideas for getting organised so you can find what you need when you need it. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Script | 340

Hello, and welcome to episode 340 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.

I remember watching videos by David Allen—author of Getting Things Done—where he explains the importance of having an organised workspace. 

These videos were recorded before the digital takeover, yet the principles remain the same whether we deal with paper or digital documents. 

If your stuff is all over the place, you will waste a lot of time trying to find what you need, and it’s surprising how much time you lose. 

This week’s question caught my attention, as getting and keeping your workspace organised is an overlooked part of the modern productivity movement. It won’t matter how clever your digital tools are if you don’t know where everything is or how to organise your notes so you can find what you need when you need it in seconds. You’ll still waste much time doing stuff you shouldn’t need to do. 

As I researched this, I could only find advice on keeping desks and physical files, notes, and documents organised. There is little advice on keeping a digital workspace clean and organised. Well, that is apart from some older articles about how an untidy computer desktop slows down your computer and makes finding anything slow and cumbersome. 

Now before I go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Alice. Alice asks, Hi Carl, How do you keep all your files, notes and other digital things organised? I’m really struggling here and would love some advice.

Hi Alice, thank you for your question.

One of the first things you will need to do is allocate a single place for your digital documents. Today, most people are comfortable storing all their personal files in a cloud storage system, such as Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple’s iCloud. 

If you are concerned about security, an external hard drive also works.

Now, just as before the 2000s, you will likely have two places: one for work and one for your personal stuff. Your company will probably dictate your work storage system. 

The important thing about storing documents and files you may need is accessibility—i.e., how fast you can access the files. 

In the past, if we wanted a file for a client named Rogers, we would go to the filing cabinet, locate the letter R, and find the file for Rogers there. If it wasn’t there, one of our colleagues probably had it. (And how frustrating was that) 

Today, all you need to do is open iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive and type in the name of the client you are looking for. You will then be presented with a list of all the documents related to that client.

And perhaps you may already be seeing a problem. 

In the past, everything was kept together in a single file folder; today, client notes can be found everywhere. We have CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management software) that track communications with customers and clients. However, these are only as good as those who enter the data. 

We receive phone calls, emails, perhaps text messages, and all the documentation generated by orders, invoices, and quotes. If the people entering the data are not timely and perfect, time can be wasted just looking for all that stuff.

Those CRM systems may track documents related to that client, which makes things a little easier. But do you trust them? 

So, how can you keep your workspace organised and in order? 

First, choose your tools. Your calendar and email will likely already be selected for you in your professional environment. Fortunately, you should have freedom over your task manager and notes app. 

Rule number one. Use only one. 

By this, I mean one task manager, one notes app and one calendar.

Now, it is okay to use a separate calendar for your work events; after all, you may only be able to access your work calendar through selected devices. I would always advise you to try to connect your work calendar to your personal one where possible. 

By this, I mean that if you use a Google or Apple calendar for your personal life, you can subscribe to your work calendar. Not all companies allow this, but I’ve found that most do. 

This way, you have all your events viewable in one place. (Wasn’t life easier when we all carried our own diaries? No interference from outsiders) 

Your to-do list and notes, however, are entirely within your realm. Avoid the temptation of using your work’s Microsoft To-Do or Trello. You want to have your complete life together, not scattered everywhere. 

You may need to call a client early in the morning, and if all the details are separated on your work’s system, that call could easily be missed. Similarly, you may need to contact your bank. If that task is on a personal system, unless you look at that system in your lunch break, you’re going to miss it. 

Now here’s a quick tip. Use a daily note. 

A daily note is a note you create each day to capture meeting notes, ideas, things to look up, and other useful bits of information. Each note’s title is today’s date. 

As you create a new note each day, you have a reference—the date. If you number each item you add to the daily note, you now have a transferable reference to link to tasks and calendar events. 

For example, imagine I captured an idea for a YouTube video, added it to my daily note, and assigned it the number 1. 

That means the reference number for that idea is today’s date plus 1. I can use that reference for any task or project from that idea. You can go one step further by adding a link to the note for your task, so all you need to do is click the link and boom, you are right where you need to be. 

I would also advise you to keep your digital notes separate from work. I once had a client who was a university professor. She used her university’s OneNote to organise all her research notes. 

She then left that university, and within two or three hours of leaving, the system’s organiser deleted all her notes. Seven years of research gone in seconds. 

Of course, you should keep confidential information off your personal devices, but a large part of what we keep in notes is not confidential and is usually meeting notes, ideas, and possible solutions to difficult problems. 

Once you have your tools and storage places sorted, it comes down to making sure what you need when you need it is quickly accessible. 

To do that, learn how to search your computer. On Apple devices, this means learning to use Spotlight. It’s a powerful tool that means I can find coaching client feedback simply by typing their name into the search box. I can also find digital copies of my passport, car insurance, residency permits and my address in Korean (I find it’s faster to copy/paste than to type in Korean) 

Everything I need frequently is instantly to hand. 

And that’s another reference to the pre-2000s. An optimised workspace meant that you had the files you were working on and anything else you needed quick access to within arms reach of your desk. 

Anything you didn’t need was stored in filing cabinets a few steps away from you. 

There’s the famous picture of Rose-Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, demonstrating how she accidentally erased 18 minutes of the tape recordings during the Watergate investigation. If you Google the picture, you can see that everything a secretary would need was on her desk or next to it (or rather coincidently, within arms reach)

For Windows computers, look up Universal Search. That will explain how you can search for everything on your computer from a single place. 

The final part of the puzzle is file naming. 

For years, I’ve used a file name system that includes the date, the file type, and the name. For example, if I had a client named Bill Tanner and wrote a proposal for him, the proposal title would be 2024-09-25-proposal-Bill Tanner. 

If I need to amend the proposal, I would change the date. This way, when I search Bill Tanner, I will see all the proposals I have written grouped together. 

I’ve found that adding version numbers to the title doesn’t work either, and it’s not as easy to get to the latest document. Searching by date puts the very latest version on top every time. 

And I do still recommend keeping your desktop clean. A cluttered desktop causes distraction. A clean desktop helps maintain focus. 

Now, before I finish, I should mention your phone. This can be a complete mess. I was in the bank the other day, and some twenty-somethings were opening an account. All they had with them was their phones, yet when the bank clerk asked them for different documents, they took ages to find the information on their phones. 

Rather amusingly, an elderly gentleman, armed with a plastic wallet of essential documents, completed his business at the bank far faster than those twenty-somethings. 

When the clerk asked him for a document, he pulled it out and handed it over instantly. It was a real eye-opener for me. Perhaps paper is faster than digital… Sometimes. 

What I’ve learned is to keep all your frequently used apps on your Home Screen. Learn how to use widgets—they can be a real-time saver when you need them. 

Oh, and one more: when flying, use your airline’s app. Place it on your Home Screen. It’s incredible how often you need that at the airport or in a taxi when they ask you which terminal you need to go to. 

And there you go, Alice. I hope that has helped. 

It comes down to doing a little cleaning up and getting your important files and apps where you need them. Remember, it’s all about accessibility. 

Thank you, Alice, for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

Podcast 339

How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Script | 339

Hello, and welcome to episode 339 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.

This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything’s urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take? 

Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible. 

Before I answer the question, I’d like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe.

I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it’s any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book. 

So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode.

Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take? 

The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not. 

You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning. 

This is why I don’t recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you’ll struggle to do two or three of them. 

I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words. 

I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I’m going to get something done. And that’s good enough. 

This means I know I have two hours to write, and something will get done as long as I write in those two hours. I want to finish everything, but if I can’t, as long as I’ve got something written when I return to finish later, it will be much easier than if I had not started. 

However, that said, sometimes time constraints can help. If you know you have a deadline on Friday, and you also know you still have a lot to do, putting yourself under a bit of pressure to get moving on the project can help tap into your energy reserves. The trouble is that this is not sustainable or productive in the long run. 

Doing that means you will neglect other parts of your work. Emails will pile up, your admin will become backlogged, and you will neglect other things you should be doing, meaning you will need to tap into those reserves repeatedly. 

And that becomes a vicious circle. 

What works is to allocate time for your important work each day. Instead of focusing on how much you have to do, you focus on your available time. 

Imagine you are in sales, and you have follow-ups to do each day. If, on average, you need an hour to do your follow-up, that would be the time you protect each day for doing your follow-ups. Some days, you will complete them in less than an hour; others, you won’t. But it doesn’t matter. As long as you do your follow-ups daily, you will always be on top or thereabouts each week. 

And let’s be honest: When dealing with phone calls, nobody knows how long they will take. It’s just not something you can predict. 

Now, on to the question of prioritising your day. 

This comes back to knowing what is important to you and your core work—the work you are paid to do (not the work you volunteer to do). 

All the classic books on time management start with you thinking about what you want before you dive headfirst into sorting out the mountain of work you think you must do. 

You see if you do not know what is important to you, everything that seems remotely urgent will be important to you. And that is not true at all.

It could be argued that not knowing what is important is just plain laziness. You’re delegating an essential aspect of your life to everyone else because you cannot be bothered to decide. If you don’t determine what’s critical, then everything becomes critical. That’s the easy way out—although the consequences are never pleasant. 

I remember when I was a trainee hotel manager. I did two years in night management. When I joined the night team, I inherited three night porters. One of them was aggressive and would speak his mind if he didn’t like something or felt it was a waste of time. One was a stickler for doing only what his job description said, and the third one was gentle and willing to do anything asked of him. 

As their manager, guess who I got to do the little things that popped up randomly during the shift? The third one. 

As a manager, I didn’t have time to argue with the two other night porters about whether something needed doing or was part of their job description. So, I dumped everything onto Martin. (Sorry, Martin) 

If you don’t know what is important to you and what your core work is, you will be dumped on. And that is often the main cause of why you have far too much to do. 

To overcome this at work, know what your core work is. Then, prioritise that work. For instance, if you are a photographer, you are paid to take photos. So, taking and processing those photos will be your most important work. Nothing should ever pull you away from doing that work. 

Similarly, finding new clients will also be an essential part of your work if you are a freelance photographer. That may involve curating an Instagram account and perhaps some other social media. 

Any activity or task involving those parts of your work should always take priority over everything else. Researching new lighting, redesigning your website or helping a family member find a good photographer (assuming you cannot do it yourself) are not your priorities. 

What I find helps is to list your core work tasks—the tasks you need to do each day or week and then ensure you protect time in your calendar for doing that work. 

Once it’s protected, nothing but an emergency will move it. 

This work is your core work and, therefore, your priority. It’s where your income comes from and what you will be judged on for promotion. Screw this area up by doing low-value stuff for other people may make you liked and popular, but you will be swamped, stressed out and exhausted at the end of the day. 

You need to set boundaries. 

Setting boundaries does not mean you become unpleasant towards your colleagues. It means there’s a time and a place for work and a time and place for socialising. Don’t mix the two up. 

Here’s an exercise you could do. List out your core work—the work you are paid to do. Then, calculate how long you need, on average, to do that work. As this is your core work you should have some data—it’s likely to be on your calendar. 

If you don’t have the data, monitor it for a week or two. That will give you sufficient information to make the calculation. 

Remember, you won’t necessarily be perfectly accurate. You’re human, after all. But all you need is an average. 

Let me give you an example. I know if I protect twelve hours each week for doing my core work, I will be able to get it all done. This means if I were working a regular forty-hour week, I would still have twenty-eight hours available for meetings, dealing with emergencies and anything else unexpected. Surely, that’s enough time? 

You, too, will likely find you don’t need much time for your core work. However, until you know what that work is and have calculated how much time, on average, you need to complete the work, you are flying blind. And your brain will tell you you don’t have enough time. 

Externalise it, write it down, get it into your task manager and calendar and protect the time. 

Over the last 100 years or so, many books have been written on time management and productivity. Professors, senior executives, and business titans have studied the subject relentlessly, and in almost all cases, they have come to the same conclusions. 

To be on top of your work and live a balanced life, you must know what you want time for. If you don’t know that, you will quickly find yourself wasting that precious resource. (And, of course, building huge backlogs of stuff you’ve neglected)

So, there you go. First, you will never be able to accurately calculate how long a task will take. You are not a machine; you’re a living, breathing human being susceptible to emotions, low energy, and sickness. Stop trying. Instead, allocate time for your work, get as much done as possible within that time, then take a break and move on. 

Getting started is the most critical thing. It’s better to do 25% of the task and only have 75% left. At least you’ve started and will know how to finish. 

And secondly, be very clear about the work you are paid to do. That’s your prioritised work. The work you volunteer to do should never be prioritised over your core work. 

I hope that helps. 

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

What is the Eisenhower Matrix and how can you use it to help you focus on the important things in life. 

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Script | 338

Hello, and welcome to episode 338 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.

You may have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, or as Stephen Covey called it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Productivity Matrix. It’s a matrix of four squares divided up between Important and urgent (called quadrant 1), Important and not urgent (quadrant 2), urgent and not important (quadrant 3) and not urgent and not important (quadrant 4).

It’s one of those methods that gets a lot of attention after a book has been launched. Yet, this matrix was first introduced to us by President Eisenhower in the 1950s after President Eisenhower mentioned in an interview that "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

This “quote” was first spoken by Dr J Roscoe Miller, president of the North Western University at that time. 

So, it’s questionable if Eisenhower ever applied this method to his work, but whether he did or he didn’t, it is an excellent framework to help you prioritise your work and help you to get focused on your important work and aspects of your life. 

This week’s question is all about this matrix and how you can apply it to your life so you are not neglecting the important, but not urgent things that so many of us neglect because they are not screaming at us and because they need an element of discipline which so many people find difficult today. 

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Michele. Michele asks, hi Carl, I recently read your book and saw that you wrote about the Eisenhower Matrix. I’ve always been fascinated by this matrix but have never been able to use it in my daily life. How do you use it to get things done? 

Hi Michele, thank you for your question. 

This matrix is one of those things that once you’ve learned and begin to apply it to your daily life, you soon forget you are using it. 

Let me explain. Much of what comes our way is “urgent”, or it is to the person asking us to do something. That could be your boss, a client, your spouse or partner or your kids. Whatever they want, they want it now, and only you can give it to them. 

Then, there are quite a few things that are important but not urgent. These include taking care of your health, planning your week and day, sitting down for a family meal at least once a day, and self-development—whether that is through reading books, going to night school, or taking courses. 

These are often neglected because the urgent and important drown them out. 

Ironically, if you consistently take care of the important and not urgent things, you will spend less time dealing with the urgent and important. Yet, most people cannot get to these quadrant 2 tasks because the quadrant 1 tasks are swamping them. 

It becomes a vicious circle. 

The bottom part of the matrix—the not important things—is what you want to avoid. these are the urgent and not important and the not important and not urgent things. (What’s called quadrants 3 and 4).

The urgent and not important things (quadrant 3) are the deceptive things. These are unimportant emails dressed up to look important. Most emails and messages will come under this quadrant. 

One of the things I’ve noticed when I begin working with a new client is the kind of tasks they have in their digital task manager. 80% of the tasks there are not important tasks. It’s these tasks that are drowning out the quadrant 1 and 2 tasks (the important ones). 

I am starting an experiment to see if using a paper Franklin Planner for three months can still be done in 2024. One thing I’ve already noticed is because I have to write out the tasks I need to or want to do today, I am much more aware of the kind of tasks I am writing. My daily task list is much shorter than when I do this digitally. 

As a consequence, tasks that are not important (urgent or otherwise) rarely get onto my list. 

This paper-based task list has reversed the type of tasks on my list—now, 80% are important. 

So, what kind of tasks fall into these different categories?

Let’s begin with the easiest one: Quadrant 4. These are the tasks that are not important and not urgent. 

These tasks include watching TV, scrolling social media, reading political news, and anything else that triggers you in some way. 

While checking social media or watching TV may be beneficial sometimes, these activities should be undertaken only after you have completed your important work for the day. 

What about quadrant 3–the urgent and not important. What kind of tasks are these? Well, quite a few emails are. These could be something you want to buy, but you are not ready to do so yet. However, a last-minute offer might expire at midnight (urgency), so you feel you have to act. 

No, you don’t. 

I don’t need to buy my winter sweaters in September—the temperature is 28 degrees outside (around 85 degrees Fahrenheit), and it’s still quite humid; I can wait until the end of October. Yet the email is urging me to act now. It’s not important. 

You’ll also find many requests from colleagues that fall into this category. “I need it now!” “I have to have it immediately!” only for you to find a few minutes later that it’s unimportant and they don’t need it now. 

Busy work also falls into this quadrant. When I was teaching at a university, the admin department was always sending reminders to teachers to send the attendance record for that day’s class. It was framed as urgent, yet in the grand scheme of things, attendance records were not important to me as a teacher. 

As a teacher, ensuring my students learned was important. Not some box ticking exercise to keep the administration team happy. 

I was never late in sending my attendance sheets, but I did find it annoying that almost immediately after the class finished, there was a message asking me to send the attendance sheet. 

I soon got to ignoring those messages—they were sent out to all professors. 

This is the bottom part of the matrix—the place you want to stay away from as much as possible. Likely, you will never be able to remain entirely out of it. After all, there’s a new season of Taskmaster starting this week, and your favourite sports team could be heading towards the finals, and every game is on TV. 

(Although watching a favourite TV show or sports team could arguably be placed in the quadrant 2 area—after all, it’s a form of relaxation—well, perhaps not if you support the Leeds Rhinos rugby team) 

Now, the top part of the matrix, the important area, is where you want to spend as much time as possible. You can think of this area as the proactive area. 

The urgent and important quadrant—quadrant 1—includes your core work tasks, customer requests, and some requests from your boss and colleagues (the important project/process-driven requests). 

These tasks are often deadline-driven—hence their importance. 

Then there is quadrant 2—the important but not urgent quadrant. This is possibly the most important quadrant because, as I mentioned, the more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent areas. 

Your areas of focus drive quadrant 2. It also includes planning, thinking and self-development. 

For example, exercise, reading, weekly and daily planning are all quadrant 2 tasks. As is spending time with your family, learning and reading. 

All healthy pursuits will come here. 

The problem is that there’s no sense of urgency. These important tasks are often sacrificed for the important and urgent tasks of Quadrant 1. Spend too much time in Quadrant 1, and it will grow and grow. 

If you pull yourself away and try to move towards your quadrant 2 area, your quadrant 1 area will shrink—a good thing. 

So, how can you implement this matrix into your own life? 

Identify what each quadrant looks like in your life. Where do the urgent and not important (Quadrant 3) tasks come from, and why? Ask the same question about Quadrant 1—urgent and important, why are they urgent? 

What is the underlying reason these tasks become urgent? 

You will likely find that you are not doing something from Quadrant 2. For example, not doing a weekly planning session will always cause things to become urgent because you never get a chance to see the overview of what you have going on. 

That’s how deadlines creep up on you. 

Not giving yourself ten minutes at the end of the day (or first thing in the morning if you are an early bird) to plan the day will leave you at the mercy of events (quadrants 1 and 3). 

Creating an Eisenhower Matrix on paper and writing out the different activities you do in each category can help you prioritise. And that’s not just related to work. It’s a life-changing prioritisation exercise for your whole life. 

You can see what you should be doing and what needs to change so you have more time for what you want to do in your life. 

It will also show you what needs to be eliminated to find that time. Anything in the bottom half of the matrix should eliminated (although that may not be possible 100% of the time) 

I hope that has helped Michele. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That’s what I’m exploring in this week’s episode. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 

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Script | 337

Hello, and welcome to episode 337 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 have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change. 

Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you. 

These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will. 

What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible. 

Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things. 

Technology hasn’t changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster. 

Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later. 

Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It’s a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April. 

Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient. 

So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed you’ve been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed?

Hi Lisa, thank you for your question.

The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles. 

The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work. 

You see, if you don’t know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That’s likely to come from other people and not from you. 

Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important. 

The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action. 

The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas. 

Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution. 

When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away. 

Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you. 

Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus. 

These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are important to you. 

It’s these that give you the power to say no to things that conflict with your values. 

Without knowing what they are, you will say yes to many things you don’t enjoy or want to do. 

The next principle is to plan your week and day. Again, this is another area so many people avoid. I remember hearing a statistic that less than 5% of Getting Things Done practitioners do any weekly review. 

If you’ve read Getting Things Done by David Allen, you’ll know that he stresses the importance of the weekly review in almost every chapter. 

People who don’t plan are often driven by the fear of what they might learn, such as a forgotten project deadline, an important meeting that needs a lot of preparation, or a lost opportunity. 

Yet, these are the results of not planning. If you were to give yourself thirty minutes at the end of the week to plan the next week and five to ten minutes each evening to plan the next day, many of the things you fear will never happen. You will be alerted to the issues well before you need to act. 

For me, consistently planning my week and day has been life-changing. This simple activity has ensured I am working on the right things, dealing with the most important things, and ending the week knowing that the right things were completed. 

Prior to becoming consistent with my planning, I was all over the place. I spent far too much time on the unimportant and saying yes to many things I didn’t want to do. I was also procrastinating A LOT. 

A huge benefit of planning is that you get to see data. In other words, you learn very quickly what is possible and what is not. When you begin planning the week, you will be overambitious and try to do too much. The more you plan, the more you learn what can be done. 

No, you won’t be able to attend six hours of meetings, write a report, reply to 150 emails, go to the gym and spend quality time with your family. 

When you know what is important, you will ensure you have time for it because you plan for it (can you see the connection?). You will start to say no to some meetings (and yes, you can say no by offering an alternative day and time for the meeting) and renegotiate report deadlines. 

A third principle is to manage your time ruthlessly. By that, I mean being very strict about what goes on your calendar. Never, ever let anyone else schedule meetings or appointments for you. 

Your calendar is the one tool you have that gives you control over your day. Allowing other people to control it essentially turns you into a puppet. No, never ever let that happen. 

Now, before Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, we carried our own diaries around with us. No one else could have control of it. If you were fortunate enough to have a secretary (now called an “executive assistant”), you would meet with her (secretaries were largely female in the 60s, 70s and 80s) each week and explain when you were and were not available. 

Your secretary would then gate keep your calendar. The best secretaries were pretty much impossible to get past. They protected their boss’s time. 

People knew that time was important and for anyone to do their work, they needed undisturbed time. Your calendar was respected. 

A person’s diary was so important that the courts would accept it as evidence they were in a particular location. I doubt very much they would do that today. 

A mistake is to say yes to a time commitment too quickly. This is how we get conflicts in our calendars. You cannot be in two places at the same time—that’s another law of physics—so you either say no and offer an alternative date, or you have to waste time renegotiating with someone later. 

I am shocked at how often I see conflicts on people’s calendars. Clearing these up should be the first thing you do during your weekly planning. 

Information you need to know about the day should go in the all-day section of your calendar, not in the timed area. Only committed timed events go in the time area of your calendar. 

When your calendar truly reflects your commitments, you can then set about planning a realistic day. If you have six hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete, you will know instantly that you have an impossible day, and you can either move some of your appointments or reduce your task list. 

Ignoring it only diminishes the power of your calendar, leaving you again at the mercy of other people’s crises and issues. 

This is about being strict about your time. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day so you have solid bookends to your day. Ensure you protect time for your important work and your family and friends. And never let other people steal your time. 

The final principle is the tool you use won’t make you more productive or better at time management. Tools come and go. In the 1980s, it was the Filofax. In the 90s, it was the Franklin Planner. Today is the latest fashionable app. It doesn’t matter. None of them will ever make you more productive. 

What will make you more productive is knowing what is important to you. Having a plan for the day and week so you know what must be accomplished that day, and week. And being in complete control of your calendar. 

Get those three things right, and you will feel less stressed, more in control of your life and have a sense of purpose each day. Isn’t that what we all want? 

I hope that has helped, Lisa. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.