I want to begin today’s episode by thanking you for listening to this podcast. Earlier this week, this podcast surpassed one million downloads. 

For context, that puts this podcast in the top 3 to 5 percent of the productivity and time management niche. 

So, thank you. I do this for you, and for all of you who have sent in questions for answering. You keep me on my toes and challenge me every week. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Thank you.

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Script | 386

Hello, and welcome to episode 386 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’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement. 

How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment? 

The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave? 

It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is. 

I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day. 

From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions. 

Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison.

Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted. 

Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards. 

If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart. 

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

This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position? 

Thank you, Jan for your question.

One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite. 

The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately. 

It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature. 

Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute. 

Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not. 

A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently.

Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair.

Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar.

All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them. 

One thing we did have, which I notice many companies do not, is a clear list of priorities. 

Take for example my priorities for handling email. 

Anything to do with money or forgotten passwords are things I will deal with immediately I see the email. Sorting them out doesn’t take long—five minutes for most—but I understand how frustrating it can be waiting to get a response. 

Everything else has a 24 hour response cycle. 

It’s rare I will get either of those two emergencies—perhaps one or two a month—but when they do happen, it’s automatic for me to immediately jump into action and deal with them. 

And that’s one of the first things I would recommend you do, Jan. Categorise the requests you get and put in place some rules for dealing with them. 

What are genuine emergencies? What are not? 

I know if you are new to your company, there will be a period where you will need to learn what’s urgent and what’s not. That’s where experience and knowledge comes into play. 

Given time, you will be able to analyse the types of requests you are getting and learn the patterns. There will be some people you work with that expect immediate responses. Is that a people issue or a genuine problem issue. 

Some people have become conditioned to expect an immediate response. With these people it might be prudent to slowly change their conditioning by gradually reducing your response time. 

Now, of course, you may not be able to do with people in higher positions than you but for others you may be able to do so. 

In Your Time, Your Way, I wrote about how emergency room medical staff use the medical triage method. Each patient is assessed against a scale or urgency. 

A Level 1 needs immediate attention and their condition is life-threatening, Level 2 is urgent attention required as their is potentially a threat to life, Level 3 requires timely intervention but life is not threatened, Level 4 is less urgent, and Level 5 can wait for care.

You can use this approach when you are dealing with customer care or IT issues. 

Monitor the requests you get over a week or so and grade them. You may not need five levels, three or four levels would be sufficient. For example:

A Level one request requires immediate attention.

A Level three request can be dealt with within the day

And a Level four can be ignored. 

You will need to be careful not to treat everything as a Level One. If everything was a level one, then nothing would be urgent because everything was. 

One of the great things about this kind of approach is there’s no hesitation. You know exactly what to do. If something is urgent, for example, the whole company’s system goes down or there is a security breach, everything stops until the issue is resolved. 

Hopefully, this kind of emergency won’t happen often. If it does, then there’s likely to be a problem in the company’s systems that need fixing and that would need to be escalated to the relevant person. 

The next problem in these circumstances is that you may feel obligated to be constantly watching your email and internal messaging system. If you want to be able to get on and do your work, that’s going to be a no no. 

You cannot do both. There has to be some flexibility. 

What I’ve found helpful for many of my coaching clients is to protect the first thirty minutes of their work day for going through all their communication channels to see what’s happening. 

This way, you can deal with any immediate problems before they destroy your day. 

Then the next hour (or two if you dare), you do your focused work. 

You can then check your messages and emails once you have finished your focused work. It’s only one hour. 

If you’ve never done this before, I should warn you that it will be scary. You’re likely to have become used to being reactive, and changing that to being proactive by focusing on your most important work for the day for an hour or so, can be deeply uncomfortable at first. 

Here you will need to be persistent. It gets easier, and your confidence grows with time. 

I used to be always checking my mail for “problems”. It was horrible. It took me several weeks to become comfortable turning off all communication systems for two hours while I got on and did my most important work for the day. 

But it was worth it. For one thing, I began understand that most things were not really urgent and as long as I responded within twenty-four hours people were happy. 

For you, you may need to respond faster than that. But it’s unlikely that you will need to be responding immediately to everything.

You’ve got to remember that no matter what work you do there is always a limited resource—time. You get twenty-four hours each day and that’s it. No more and no less.

And while you can expand that to a week, that still only gives you 168 hours. 

However, careful management of that time can help to reduce many emergencies. Ruthlessly protecting one or two hours a day for your most important work, for example, ensures that you are not dealing with final demands and missed deadlines. 

One way to do that is to again monitor when most of your requests come in. I’ve learned that between 9:30 and 11:30 am it’s extremely rare for me to receive an urgent request. This is why I protect that time on my calendar for doing my most important work for the day. 

Most of the urgent requests I get come in through the night, and I always keep 9:00 to 9:30 am free for dealing with them if they do arise. 

So there you go, Jan. The best thing you could do right now is to start analysing the requests you are getting and to develop a triage system for prioritising those request. 

You’re not changing anything immediately, but you are gaining information you can then use to develop a process for reducing the urgency and for bringing some structure back into your work day. 

You will feel uncomfortable when you first begin implementing these changes, and you may get some pushback from your colleagues, that’s the be expected, but it’s important to persist if you want to gain some control back. 

You may find you will need to adjust things. That’s normal. Don’t worry, just because you need to move things around in your categorisation system doesn’t mean it’s failed. Your adjusting, learning and, more importantly, improving your system. 

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

"The real magic lies at the intersection between eating, moving, and sleeping. If you can do all three well, it will improve your daily energy and your odds of living a long, healthy life," 

That’s a quote from Tom Rath, author of Eat Move Sleep. The three most important factors in you becoming more productive, focused and motivated each day.

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Script | 385

Hello, and welcome to episode 385 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. 

Don’t skip the basics. For me, this was a hard lesson to learn. I used to stay up late to finish work or watch TV. I’d skip my exercise or allow myself to get involved in meetings I didn’t really need to attend—just to feel a part of something. 

And I would eat rubbish—cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and rice or fries for lunch and pizza for dinner. 

And I felt it. I was tired, unproductive, and did not know where I was going. My weight kept going up and up, and every day felt like a drudge. I would wake up, feel horrible, go to work, come home, collapse onto the sofa, turn on the TV, and escape the real world. 

It was easy to blame everyone else. My boss, my colleagues, my customers, the weather, where I lived, the company, etc. 

Yet, it wasn’t anyone else’s fault. It was mine. 

I had allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. That was a choice. 

I cannot say there was a particular moment that changed me. It was more a gradual change. 

What I learned, though, was that creating an enjoyable, exciting, and fulfilling life started with getting the basics right. 

And that is what this week’ question is all about. What are the basics, and why do they matter? So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ali. Ali asks, hi Carl, my life’s a mess. I stay up all night watching TV or YouTube videos, and then wake up late and have to rush to get to work. Then at work I feel tired and unmotivated all day. What can I do to have some better habits? 

Hi Ali, thank you for your question. 

The first step would be to read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book, that explains how habits work, how to create your own and does all that in a simple step by step approach. 

The next step is to understand some time tested basics.

One of the many reasons why anyone would feel demotivated about the day is they are not clear on what is important to them. 

Not everyone wants to be supremely fit and sporty and that’s fine. You don’t have to be. But it’s equally true no one wants to die prematurely. 

As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement address in 2006

"No one wants to die... even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there"

To find your purpose, or simply the motivation to jump out of bed each morning go through the Areas of Focus workbook. It’s free and you can download it from my website. 

This will give you the eight areas of life that should be in balance. 

Those eight are:

Family and relationships

Career or business

Health and fitness

Finance

Lifestyle and life experiences

Self development

Spirituality

Life’s purpose

Now, when I say in balance, it means defining what each one means to you. For example, for your finances area of focus could be something as simple as “I live within my means and not over spend on trivial things” or your lifestyle and life experiences could be “I live in a clean and tidy home”.

Getting these eight basics of life in balance will give you some purpose each day. Living in a clean and tidy home may mean that before you leave to go to work, you make your bed and wash the dishes. 

To keep your finances in check, you may decide to do a weekly or monthly budget to track how you are spending your money. 

That becomes a habit. It’s a must-do. 

None of these takes a lot of time, but they help to keep your areas of focus in balance. 

Now onto another important factor. One of the things I’ve noticed about highly motivated and successful people is they have some structure in their lives. 

They wake up at the same time each day, they follow a morning routine and have some structure for the rest of the day. That could be exercising at the same time each day or just going for a walk at the end of the day to decompress.

Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, starts his day with an extremely early wake-up, around 3:45 AM, to read emails from customers and employees before heading to the gym for an hour of exercise. He eats a healthy breakfast, gets coffee, and then begins his workday.

I recently wrote about Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie detective in many of her novels in my weekly newsletter. 

Poirot was obsessive, it’s true. He was immaculately turned out at all times. Yet he had structure to his days. Breakfast was at the same time each day and he had his famous tisane (a kind of herbal drink) served in the same glass. 

What draws me to Poirot is that fastidiousness. Nothing was rushed. The only things that ever bothered him was if his routines were interrupted. Perhaps not a good thing, but it did enable him to have a purpose each day.

If he was taking a holiday, he refused to entertain any work. He was resting his “little grey cells” and that was the purpose of the holiday. 

When he was working he was engaged completely. He actions were methodical and deliberate. I know Poirot is a fictional character, but in fictional characters there’s always a grain of truth somewhere. 

Perhaps Poirot’s obsessiveness for order and structure, was motivated by someone somewhere. 

The one thing I’ve learned is if you’re not getting the basics right, then everything else falls apart.

The basics are your daily routines. Your sleep schedule, what and when you eat and stepping away from screens and moving. 

They are not difficult to do, but without one essential ingredient, you won’t do them. That ingredient is self-discipline. 

You need discipline to get out of bed on a cold, wet morning. You need discipline to say no to that plate of unhealthy food, and you need discipline to turn off the TV and go to bed at the right time. 

I often shy away from advising people to develop their self-discipline because it’s hard to do. And these days I find many people have simply given up and just tell themselves they have no self-discipline and that they never have had. 

They will look back in their lives to find examples and use that to prove it to themselves. Ignoring the fact that there will also have been examples of them being disciplined. 

It’s complete rubbish for anyone to say they lack self-discipline. It’s innate and inside all of us. But, like a muscle, if you don’t use it, it will weaken. But never disappear entirely. 

Strengthening your self-discipline isn’t particularly difficult. As Admiral McRaven said in his Texas University Commencement address—begin the day by making your bed. Is that so difficult? It’s one thing, but it’s the start of strengthening your self discipline. 

Now you mentioned that you want better habits. What would you consider to be “better habits”? 

That would be the place to start. 

I’ve never been a good sleeper—as a consequence I fell into the trap of believing it was “just the way I was wired”. Of course, that’s not true. 

In January I made a commitment to myself I would be in bed no later than midnight. It was a struggle, but I persisted. Now, nine months later, I’m in bed consistently at midnight and my sleep is better than ever. 

It took a bit of self-discipline for the first week or two, but soon it was a habit. 

Changing your sleep habit is straight forward. Calculate how much sleep you need, then decide what time you want to wake up, and work backwards. 

So, if you discover that you need seven hours sleep and you want to wake up at 7:00 am, then you need to be in bed by 11:30 pm. (It’s not like we instantly fall asleep when we get into bed) 

Another thing you mentioned, Ali, is you lack motivation at work. That may be a bigger issue. If work is demotivating you, it’s also draining you of purpose. That’s where I would spend some time analysing.

When your purpose is drained, that has a big effect on your mental energy. 

What is it about your work that is demotivating? 

If it’s just a stage—we all go through that at times—what can you do to find some purpose. Perhaps you could set yourself a target. Sell X amount of products, solve a particularly difficult problem for your team or do something to improve your own workflows and processes.

If it’s bigger than that and it’s about the job itself, then it may be time to begin looking at alternative jobs. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your current job, what it means is you begin looking at alternatives. 

What kind of work would motivate you? 

It’s perfectly okay to accept that you made a mistake in your choice of career. That does not mean you are stuck with that mistake. You can change careers at any time. I’ve been a hotel manager, car salesperson, a lawyer and teacher. 

The hardest part for me was accepting that the legal profession was not for me. I’d spent six years in school and training, but after graduating and working in a law office, I soon found myself hating it. 

I felt I was in a day release prison. I had to sign in at 9:00 each morning and was not allowed to leave until 5:30 pm. During that time it felt I was chained to a desk only being allowed to move to go to the bathroom. 

It was hard to accept I had made a monumental mistake. But the thought spending the next twenty-five years stuck behind a desk was terrifying. I had to change my career.

That was when I came to Korea—I told myself it would be for one year and during that time I would think about my future. 

I was lucky, I fell in love with teaching, loved the way of life in Korea and met some amazing people. At the end of the first year, there was no way I was going to go back to the UK. So, when my employer in Korea asked if I wanted to sign an extension to my contract, I ask, where’s the pen? 

Twenty three years later, I’m still here. Doing what I love day in day out. 

Sometimes, we have to do the unthinkable. I remember my friends telling me I was mad to give up a career in law to become a teacher in a foreign land. But I knew deep down I was not cut out to be a lawyer. 

So, Ali, take a step back. Ask yourself what needs to change. Do you have the basics right? Are you getting enough sleep, moving enough and eating right? 

If not, focus your attention there. Build some habits around those three areas. 

Then look at your career. Are you happy? If not, what alternatives could you look at. Remember, you do not have to quit your job to do this. Perhaps you decide to go back to school and learn a new skill, or simply to change the way you work—you processes and workflows. 

I should add, you do not have to rush this. Just getting the basics right will bring you better focus and energy. From there you can decide what to do next that will bring some purpose back into your life. 

I hope that has helped, Ali. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. 

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

Let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble upon the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there’s not enough time to get everything done that you’re convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done.

That’s a quote by Andy Stanley, an author and church leader and perfectly captures the topic of this week’s episode. Enjoy. 

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Script | 384

Hello, and welcome to episode 384 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. 

It’s easy to create a productivity system on paper, working with theories and concepts. The challenging part comes when that system is confronted with real-life events. 

The upset customer who demands immediate action, a colleague off work sick and a boss who thinks you can drop everything and work on their latest wheeze. 

It’s not that these productivity systems don’t work, they do, it’s that a system is only as good as the person adopting it is willing to slow down and consider how important the demand in front of them really is. 

It’s also understanding what you have control of and what you don’t. 

You don’t have control over whether your daughter’s after-school class is cancelled at short notice or not. You do have control over putting in place a contingency in case it happens. 

In the real world, things change fast. An urgent email you received at 9:15 a.m. Is resolved on its own by 9:28 a.m. A meeting you spent all weekend preparing for get’s cancelled two hours before it’s due to begin. The list is endless. 

Yet, having some kind of system still helps you. 

And that’s what this week’s question is about. How to use a productivity system in a fast moving, chaotic world. 

And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, hi Carl, how would you advise someone that is struggling to set up a system because their work is always changing. My customers expect me to be available all the time and my boss keeps calling meetings without any notice. I never have any time to do my work. 

Hi Alan. Thank you for your question. 

I think it was Jim Rohn that taught me to understand that there are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. Obvious ones would be the weather, or a train breaking down that prevents you from getting into work on time. 

Yet, there are also things like phone calls and urgent messages that can significantly change your plans for the day. 

This is what I suppose we call life. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our plans. 

However, it’s always been like that. Life has always been unpredictable and yet many people have managed to deal with it. 

There are a number of things you can do that will help you to stay on track, yet have the space and time to deal with the unexpected when they occur. 

The first one is when planning the week, don’t focus on tasks, focus on objectives. 

What I mean by this is when you focus on scheduling tasks for the week, it’s likely 60% or more will not get done. Either you don’t have the time or things change and they no longer need to be done. 

Too much can change over seven days. 

I’ve seen people carefully schedule out an exercise plan for the week, only to pick up a calf strain on Tuesday that prevents them from doing any more running for the rest of the week. 

Yet, had they set the objective to exercise four times that week, the calf strain would be a minor inconvenience and perhaps to fulfil their exercise objective they could go swimming or to the gym and do non-leg exercises instead. 

Similarly in the work environment, if you were to plan out a project’s tasks for the week, and you keep getting pulled into a last minute “urgent” meetings, the chances are by the end of the week you will have done practically none of the tasks you scheduled for yourself. 

If you had instead set the objective of doing some work on the project, you would give yourself more flexibility to choose what to do given the changing circumstances of your week. 

This way, although you may have only done three things on the project you still completed your objective. That’s a win. 

Had you set yourself up to complete ten tasks on the project and only done three, you would consider that a failure and feel planning the week is a waste of time. 

It’s as if all you are doing in a weekly planning session is scheduling tasks you won’t do. Which then makes it feel like a waste of time. But It’s not a waste of time if you are setting yourself realistic objectives based on what your calendar says you have time for. 

Tasks are assigned at a daily level. 

When you assign your tasks at a daily level you can take into account the changing nature of the week. 

I’ve had clients have their complete week destroyed because of a crisis with a client in another country. They go into work with one expectation and by 11:00 am they are driving to the airport to catch a flight to the other side of the world to resolve a crisis. 

This is why weekly and daily planning go hand in hand. 

Another tip I would recommend is to avoid scheduling anything for the first thirty minutes of your work day. 

Use that time to get a heads up on the day. 

Go through your messages and emails to see what is happening. 

I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should not check your email or messages in the morning. That to me is a ridiculous idea. When you stop yourself from processing your messages, you start to worry that there might be something in there that is important. 

That worry causes distraction and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. 

The chances that there is a crisis that needs your urgent attention is slim and if there is a crisis that needs your attention better to know about it early so you have time to slow down and consider the best steps to resolve it. 

But more importantly, those first thirty minutes gives you a chance to get a feel for the day, confirm your plan and decide when best to do whatever work you had decided to do that day. 

To give you an example. I woke early this morning for a meeting at 8:00 am. I did my morning routines, and as I was preparing for the meeting, I got a text message informing me that the meeting had been cancelled. 

That gave me back an hour I had not planned for. 

So, I looked at my plan for the day and decided that the best use of that hour would be to begin writing this podcast script. Doing that would take the pressure off the rest of the day and give me a chance to bring forward other work. 

All this does not mean having a system is pointless. Having a system means you can switch focus quickly and you know where to look to make better decisions on what to work on next. 

For example, having a quick and simple way to collect stuff is a no-brainer. A paper notebook open on your desk with a pencil ready to go allows you to quickly jot something down when on a call or in the middle of doing something else. 

Making sure that your phone and computers are set up for quick capture is also important. Ideas and requests can happen at any time. Being able to collect those ideas with the minimum of fuss is important.

Then, allowing yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day for processing what you collected so you can delete the unnecessary and ensure that what is left is either scheduled or dealt with. 

This is why I urge everyone to take the free COD course. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it’s the foundations of every solid productivity system. 

I’ll put a link in the show notes for you if you haven’t taken the course yet. 

Another thing you can do, which is linked to the first thirty minutes of your day is to mentally map out when you will do something. This is where you use the power of “implementation Intentions”. 

This is where you used an “if this, then that formula” 

If it’s 2:00 pm then I will spend an hour clearing my actionable email.

If it’s 5:30 pm, I will stop and plan tomorrow for ten minutes. 

I like to use the first thirty minutes of the day to review my calendar and then visualise the different times in the day what I will be doing at that time. 

It really helps to get you focused and prevents you from getting involved in things you do not need to be involved in. 

Don’t be too strict with yourself. If you planned to respond to your actionable emails at 2:00 pm and it’s now 2:20 pm, it doesn’t matter. Just start going through your actionable emails. Whether you spend an hour or forty minutes on this activity isn’t the issue. What matters in you spent some time doing it. 

Being consistent and allowing yourself to get back on track is what really matters. When it comes to things like emails and messages and daily admin, it’s never going to be about clearing everything in one day. It’s always about spending some time doing it daily. 

If you’re just starting out on an exercise programme, it’s not really about the quality of your workout initially, It’s about spending time doing exercise. Getting fit and healthy doesn’t happen with one workout. It’s an accumulation of many workouts done consistently over a period of time that results in your increased physical fitness. 

A final point is if you work in a dynamic environment. This is work that involves multiple interruptions each day and rapid changes in focus. 

Here we have to be careful. Many people believe their jobs are dynamic, but often the chaos is not the job, but the way they are structuring their day. 

I remember once being contacted by someone who worked in customer support. They worked in an office and they were customer facing. There was no place to go and do other work without the risk of someone coming in and interrupting them. 

In this instance asking what is their core work gave then the answer they were looking for. They were employed to deal with customer issues, face to face. 

The priority here was to be available for customers coming in to their office. If there was a lull, then they could make calls or follow up people they were waiting to hear back from. If there wasn’t a lull, then as long as they were in front of the customer, they were doing the job they were employed to do.

The solution in this instance was to arrange with their team leader to allow the customer support team to have thirty minutes each day away from talking with customers face to face to deal with any follow up issues. 

As it happened in that case the team leaders realised that this was a good idea and allowed all customer support people to have two thirty minutes periods each day. Those times were fixed where possible so the team could better plan their days. 

The key here is to protect periods of time in the day for doing the non-dynamic work. You can do this weekly or daily. If you do it daily, the daily planning will become more important as you will be fixing in these protected times when you do your daily planning.

And remember, thirty minutes is always going to be better than zero minutes. 

I hope that has helped, Alan. 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. 

“I'm not gifted. I'm not smarter than everybody else. I'm not stronger. I just have the ability to stick to a plan and not quit.”

That’s a quote from Jonny Kim. A Navy SEAL, Harvard educated medical doctor and NASA Astronaut. All of which was achieved before he was thirty five. 

Now the key part to that quote is “the ability to stick to a plan and not quit” And that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.

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Script | 383

Hello, and welcome to episode 383 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. 

It took me many years to learn that the best things in life never happen by accident. They are the products of slow steady work.

Becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not about making a decision in middle school and then miraculously ten years later you’re performing in the Supreme Court or surgery in a top hospital. 

It takes years of slow steady study, experiencing ups and downs and frequently wanting to quit because it’s hard. 

Yet that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s hard because as human beings we thrive when we have a goal that requires us to work hard consistently. 

Jonny Kim is remarkable because he did three incredibly hard things. Yet, to achieve all of them required him to follow a simple process of study and preparation. It wasn’t impossible. All it took was a steely determination to achieve these things, being consistent and, to take control of his calendar. 

And that’s what this week’ question is all about. How to do the the hard things consistently so you start to see progress. 

So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Joe. Joe asks, hi Carl, the one thing I find incredibly hard to be is consistent. I’m great at setting up task managers and notes apps, but after a few days, I stop following the system. How do you stay consistent?

Hi Joe, thank you for your question. 

There could be two parts to this. The first is what I call the “Shiny Object Syndrome”. This is where you see every new tool on YouTube or in a newsletter as something that promises to solve all your productivity and time management problems. 

We all go through this phase. In many ways, I think it’s important to do so. This way you learn the limitations of tools and find out, the hard way, that no tool will ever do the work for you. 

You also discover that the more addictive the tool (I believe they call it “sticky”), the less work you will do. 

For me, Notion was a classic example of that. When Notion first came onto my radar around 2018, I was fascinated. I downloaded the app and began setting it up. It was exciting. Far more editable than Evernote or Apple Notes. 

There were all these cool things you could do with it. Change the font, the colours, the background, create increasingly more complex dashboards and so on. 

On that first day, I spent eight hours “setting it up”. It was later that evening I realised that if I were to use Notion I would never get any work done. I’d always want to play with it and try and get it to show me what I wanted to see, when I wanted to see it. A goal I was never likely to achieve. 

So, I deleted the app. 

It came down to one very simple thing. Do I want tools that will help me do my work or not? 

Well, the answer was I wanted tools that got me to work fast. And that was not going to be Notion. 

The tools that best promote solid work are boring. They have no flamboyant features. They just do what they are meant to do. In other words they are so featureless the only thing you can do is get on and do the work. 

I rather envy those people who have the time to be constantly changing their apps. I know from experience that transferring everything to a new app takes time. And then there’s the learning curve, although I suspect that’s where the dopamine hits come from. 

I certainly don’t have the time to do that. I’d prefer to spend my free time with my family, walking or playing with Louis or reading books. 

The other area where a lack of consistency comes in is when you have no processes for doing your regular work. 

Humans work best when they follow a pattern. 

If you’ve ever learned to ride a bicycle, you will remember it was difficult at first. You were wobbly, probably fell off. Yet, if you persisted, today riding a bicycle doesn’t require a thought. You jump on and off you go. 

There’s an illustration that Tony Robbins talks about. When a child learns to walk it’s a painfully slow experience. There’s the crawling, the pulling itself up on a chair, the inevitable first step and the constant falling over. 

Yet, no parent would ever say stop! Give up. You’ll never be able to walk. 

We persist and after a few days or weeks the child is walking everywhere. 

If you want to be consistent with something, there will inevitably be a period of a few weeks or months where things don’t go smoothly. Mistakes are made, plenty of falls and a lot of frustration. 

That’s the initial learning curve. We all have to go through it. 

Recently, I updated my iPad to the new operating system. I do this annually to get to know what’s new in preparation for updating my Apple Productivity Course. 

This year, Apple has significantly changed the design of the operating system. It’s slick, fast and very different to what I am used to.

Now, each morning, I clear my email inbox on my iPad. I’ve done this for years and it’s automatic. Write my journal, then grab my iPad and clear the inbox. 

Over the last few days I’ve felt a little frustration. The layout of Apple Mail has changed and buttons have moved. For two days I was trying to get rid of the sidebar (a new feature). I done that now and after a week, I’m beginning to get used to the new layout. 

The issue here is that those changes slowed down my processing speed. This in turn threw out my routine a little. 

It reminded me why changing apps all the time destroys ones productivity. But more importantly it reminded me that consistently following processes ensures speed—which ultimately is what reduces the time required to do the work. 

The problem with following routines and processes is that doing so can be boring. Yet, anything worthwhile is going to be boring at times. 

But boring is good for your brain. It doesn’t have to think too much and it gives it a chance to relax. 

Constant stimulation, problem solving, learning to use new apps, messing around with routines and processes that work may be exciting (dopamine hits), but they don’t get the work done. 

This one of the reasons why having a regular morning routine is a great way to start the day. By following a set routine every morning from the moment you wake up, allows you to do healthy things that do not require a lot of thought. 

A morning routine could be making yourself a cup of coffee, doing some stretches, brushing your teeth and taking a shower. 

Or it could be a little more with meditation, journal writing or exercise. These are your morning routines, so you get to choose what you do. All that matters is that whatever you choose to be your morning routine, you consistently do it. Every morning (including weekends) 

Another way to bring consistency into your life is to put some stakes in the ground. In other words, build some structure around your day based on meal times, for example. 

I do the family’s laundry when I go down to cook dinner. The washing machine is in the area of the kitchen, so it seems natural to take down the laundry and do the washing while I cook dinner. Once dinner is done, the washing is finished and ready to be hung up. (I refuse to use a dryer as it destroys clothes). 

With work, I try to protect 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. each day for doing the most important work of the day. It’s not always possible, sometimes I need to be in a meeting, but I will fight tooth and nail to protect that time where possible. 

It took a year or so to consistently protect that time, but now, even my wife respects it. She knows not to disturb me when I am doing my focused work. 

It’s just two hours a day. That still leaves me with six hours for emergencies, customer queries and team requests. 

You can also do this with your communications and daily admin. If you were to protect the same time each day to respond to your actionable emails and do whatever admin is required it makes things so much easier for you.

If, you were to choose 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. For your communication and admin time, and got serious about protecting that time each day, after a few weeks it would feel very strange if you were not doing it. 

This is how Jonny Kim managed to do what most people would consider impossible. It wasn’t because he was smarter than anyone else. He never graduated top of his class. Instead it was down to ruthlessly protecting time to study and train. 

It’s how averagely talented athletes win Olympic gold medals. They prioritise the small things. The long boring runs, the hours in the gym, or practicing their serve over and over again. 

It’s boring, yes. But it gets results, every time. 

And yet, if you were to look at how much time you spent on these routines, it’s tiny. Out of twenty-four hours, you’re using two to four hours a day on doing the basics. 

It’s when you don’t do that, that you need to find eight to twelve hours just to catch up. And because you don’t have a regular process for doing the work, it’s slow, feels laborious and horrible and you have to repeat multiple times each month. 

When you’re consistent, you don’t think about it. You just do it. It’s neither boring nor difficult. It’s just what you do. 

Think about brushing your teeth and washing your face. It’s boring right? You do it two to three times a day, yet it’s something you just do. You don’t think about it. 

That’s how being consistent with doing the important things—keeping backlogs at bay, dealing with messages and emails and doing your core work works. 

It’s exciting the first time you do it, less so the second time until it’s just boring. Then suddenly, it’s something you just do. It’s neither boring nor exciting. 

Getting there is the challenge. That why kids argue with their parents about brushing their teeth or washing their hands before meals. It’s boring and unexciting, until it isn’t. It’s just something they automatically do. 

So there you go, Joe. You will have to go through the valley of despair, go through the boredom stage until suddenly, it’s just something you do. It’s then when you know you are now consistent. 

Good luck. 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. 

"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."

That’s a quote by former GE CEO, Jack Welch.

This week’s episode is about finding balance in our lives. 

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Script | 382

Hello, and welcome to episode 382 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. 

It’s always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar. 

I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974. 

In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse. 

Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends.

Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home. 

Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries. 

Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes. 

Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way. 

This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss. 

So, to get into the how, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance? 

Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question.

One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week.

Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends? 

Add these to your calendar.

Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work. 

Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible. 

You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours. 

Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night. 

This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went. 

After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home. 

During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game. 

If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game. 

That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable. 

And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable. 

Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar. 

Task managers and notes apps can collect a lot of stuff. Ideas, things to do, future projects, meeting notes. The list is infinite.

Yet, the time you have is not infinite. It’s limited. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours. 

Part of the reason many feel there is no balance in their lives is they’ve allowed task managers to become their primary time management tool. 

If you look at your task manager, it’s just a list of things you either have to do or would like to do. There’s no time frame. Some of the things on there will be important and time sensitive. However, a lot won’t be. And when you scroll through the list, all you see are things to do. 

It numbs the mind and makes you feel you have no time to rest.

The difference between today and the 1970s is what we are prioritising. 

Because in the 1970s the only productivity or time management tools we had were desk or pocket diaries and notebooks, the only tool we looked at when asked to do something was our diaries. 

This meant we would instantly see a conflict and would be able to say “No, sorry I cannot do that on that day”. 

Today, when we are asked to do something we add to our task manager-after all, it’s easier to add it there than to open up our calendar app, and look at what we are committed to. 

If you have on your calendar a regular aerobics class on a Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. And you’re asked to attend a meeting at 4:30 p.m. You’d more likely say you cannot attend that meeting if all you had is your calendar to look at. 

Today, we don’t do that. We say “yes, okay” then later realise we’’ll struggle to get to our class. 

I remember when I was at university, my finish time at work was 5:30 p.m. and my lectures began at 6:00 p.m. There was no way I would accept a meeting request on a Tuesday or Thursday after 3:30 p.m. 

It took me twenty minutes to get to my university from the office. 

Attending university was a non-negotiable for me. Meetings with colleagues could be arranged either earlier in the day or the next. 

This is why you cannot afford to leave things to chance if you want to bring balance into your life. If something is important to you, you need to be intentional about it. 

But there’s another important consideration and that is flexibility. Balance is about being flexible. 

Most nights, I finish my coaching calls around 11:00 p.m. Now it would be very tempting for me to quit and flop down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch something. Yet, reading real books is something I get a great deal of pleasure from. So, before I consider turning on the TV, I grab my book, go through to the living room and read for twenty minutes or so. 

It’s wonderfully relaxing—much more so than trying to find something to watch TV. 

Yet, if there is something I do want to watch on TV, I’ll skip the book and watch the TV show. 

There are sometimes when for one reason or another, I have not cleared my actionable email. If all I have is the hour after my calls finish to do it, then I’ll spend thirty minutes or so clearing as many emails as I can. 

Doing my email late is far better than having to try and find additional time the next day. 

On Wednesday this week, my wife asked me if I would go with her and her parents on a little trip to the mountains that afternoon. 

I had not planned for it, but said if I could have the morning to record my YouTube videos and get my Learning Note out, I would love to go. 

I knew I would have to edit the videos when I got back that evening, but spending time with my family was important. So, that’s what I did. 

We had a lovely afternoon in the mountains and I got my videos edited. 

As I sat down to read my book on Wednesday night, I had a little smile on my face because the day had been fantastic, and all my important work had been done. 

Creating balance in life is not about adding more and more stuff to do in a task manager. It’s about how you are allocating your time each day. 

What is important to you? That’s what goes on your calendar. There’s a time when you can sit down at your desk and do work. But there’s also time when you need to stop, relax and spend time with the people you care about, or do your exercise, play with your kids or walk your dog. 

Everything you want to do requires time. Yet, time is the one thing in your life that is limited. 

You can accept thousands of tasks, and have hundreds of ideas to do things but none of those will happen if you do not have the time to do them. 

That’s why I advocate managing your work by when you will do it, rather than managing endless lists of tasks. When you focus more on your available time to do stuff, you begin eliminating more of the low-value stuff and begin to appreciate your time more. 

There are thousands of things you could do, perhaps would like to do someday. None of that matters today. What matters today is you get the important things done. And choosing those are is entirely within your power. 

Yes, you can go to the gym, you can also have a movie night with your friends or family. They are important (think family and relationships and health and fitness areas of focus). 

Yet, if you have an important interview tomorrow and feel a couple of hours this evening spent preparing would be a better use of your time, then ask if you can postpone the movie night to tomorrow. 

Tonight is not zero hour. You can move things around to better fit with your priorities for today. 

And that neatly brings us back to the daily and weekly planning. 

Weekly planning is about the big picture. The big things you want to get accomplished. If you decide that you will go to the gym three times this week, schedule it. 

If you see that a good use of your time would be to work on that big project where the deadline is approaching, schedule time for working on it. 

The daily planning is about making the necessary adjustments to deal with the things that you were unaware of when you did the weekly planning. The client with a crisis, your disorganised boss that forgot to tell you about her impending deadline, or your son coming down with a heavy cold. 

It all starts and ends with your calendar. That worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, it still works today. 

Task managers and notes apps support you. Your calendar is where you get to see what you’re committed to and tells you if you have time to take on more, or whether taking a few days break would be more beneficial for you. 

I hope that helps, Isabelle. Thank you again 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. 

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings."

There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us.

What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why we’re looking at this week. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 381

Hello, and welcome to episode 381 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. 

How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages? 

And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did? 

It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do. 

It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one. 

And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep. 

The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right? 

And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses. 

And that’s where this week’s question comes in. And that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with. 

Hi Maggie, thank you for your question. 

You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it. 

As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do. 

Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email. 

If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence. 

Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten. 

The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers. 

What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river. 

Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with. 

And family meals were important. 

The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner. 

I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals. 

Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History. 

Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s. 

The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared. 

For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories. 

One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act’s sessions. 

It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts. 

I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow. 

I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV. 

Somehow, we’ve sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there. 

And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you. 

And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who’s got time for hobbies today? 

And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool. 

One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I’ve always enjoyed reading. It’s been a big part of my life. 

I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday. 

After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it. 

The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience. 

I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure. 

Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey. 

There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette. 

You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today’s standards, but that wasn’t the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done. 

And that’s where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise.

For example, this year, I’ve made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls. 

I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it’s just me and little Louis lying next to me. 

It’s quiet and incredibly relaxing. 

Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I’ve been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year. 

I’ve been sketching out on paper ideas of where I’ll put these boxes and what flowers I could grow in them. I’ve even considered growing my own vegetables too. 

All non-tech hobbies that have brought some real enjoyment with them. 

Other activities you may wish to consider are knitting and needlework. I’ve remember teaching myself to sow buttons onto shirts and jackets—great fun but can be equally frustrating. 

Water colour painting. There’s an initial cost in paints and paint books, but again great fun when you get going. This is a particularly good hobby if you like to get out into the countryside. 

Winston Churchill used painting as a way to destress at weekends and on holidays. 

While I’m not a big fan doing digital detoxes or restricting use of digital tools, that’s just a waste of time because you end up finding excuses to check your digital devices. 

What I have found, though, is if you have a hobby or activity that is non-digital, you lose the temptation to “check” for messages and notifications. You become engrossed in the activity you engaged in. 

Perhaps you could have a Saturday or Sunday morning family walk. Give it some added interest by including some bird spotting or trying to find new routes around the park or woods. 

When to comes to switching off, look for activities that don’t involve phones or computers. Puzzles are good, learning to detail a car (my current hobby) or some gardening—which can large or small. 

I hope that has helped, Maggie. Try to use things to switch off that do not involve a screen and you’ll find yourself relaxing and rediscover some lost pleasures in life. 

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. 

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why." 

Eddie Cantor

This week, I’m answering a question about why it’s important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers. 

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Script | 380

Hello, and welcome to episode 380 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.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you. 

And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it’s all good news? Well, maybe not.

You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago. 

And it’s causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests. 

Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day. 

I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I’d begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I’d read the opinion pieces. 

It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I’d pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money’s worth. 

I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story. 

Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what’s really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you? 

This is why over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally slowing down. 

It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It’s moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes. 

And that brings me on to this week’s question. So, that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you’ve talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future.

Hi Michael, thank you for your question. 

I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic’s Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life. 

However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life. 

I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well.

I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance. 

That didn’t turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly. 

So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument. 

It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed. 

From a time management and productivity perspective I’ve always felt it’s important that you decide what is important and what is not. 

For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way. 

Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can’t learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot. 

Henry Kissinger was a divisive figure. Some loved him, others hated him. Yet successive presidents both Republican and Democrat sort his advice long after he had left government. Why? Because of his vast personal experience dealing with dictators and uncompromising world leaders. 

Now I understand why technology does this. Companies such as Google and the media organisations want my attention. Their algorithms are trained to do just that. And as a human being it’s very difficult to resist. 

But the biggest problem with this is everything is becoming faster and faster. So fast, that your brain cannot keep up. 

Now there are things we should move fast on. An upset customer, a natural disaster in your town or city, A suddenly sick loved one or a burst pipe in your bathroom. 

Equally, though, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be moving fast on. Deciding what must be done today, for example, sitting down and talking with your kids, or partner. Talking with your parents, siblings, friends or taking your dog out for a walk. 

One work related example would be managing your email. There are two parts to this. Clearing your inbox requires speed. You’re filtering out the unimportant from the important. And with experience, you soon become very fast at this. 

Then there’s the replying to the important emails. That requires you to slow down and think. 

Now I know there are AI email apps that promise to do the filtering for you. Yet do you really trust that it got it right? That lack of trust results in you going through the AI filtered emails, “just in case”. 

Which in turn slows down the processing. You would have been faster had you done it yourself. 

But this goes beyond where AI and technology can help us. It goes to something deeper and more human. 

One of the most mentally draining things you can do is sit at a screen all day. 

You can respond to messages, write reports, design presentations, edit videos, and read the news all from a single screen. This means that, in theory, except for needing to go to the bathroom, you could spend all day and night without getting up from the chair. 

That’s not how you work. Your brain cannot stay focused for much more than 90 minutes without the need for a break. Yet, if a break means you stare at another window, perhaps stop writing the report and instead read a news article, your brain is not getting a rest. 

Instead, one of the best things you could do, particularly now, with the new flexible ways of working, is to get up and do something manually. 

Perhaps take the laundry and do a load of washing. Then return to your computer, work for another hour and then hang the washing up. 

Two things happen here. First, your brain gets a rest from deep thinking and does something simple. And secondly, you move. Another thing your brain requires to work at its best. 

Repetitive tasks are therapy for your brain. This is why some say that jogging or hiking is therapeutic. The act of putting one foot in front of another is repetitive and your brain can operate on automatic pilot. 

Yet, there’s something else here. 

The other day I had a pile of ironing to do. It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was around forty-minutes of work there to do. 

At the same time, I was working on an article I was writing. That writing began strongly, but after an hour or so, my writing had slowed considerably. I was struggling. It was at that moment I looked up and saw the pile of ironing. 

So, I got up, pulled out the ironing board and iron and spend forty minutes or so clearing the pile. 

WOW! What a difference. After hanging up the clothes, I sat back down at my desk and the energy to write returned and I was able to get the article finished in no time at all. 

Now what would have happened had I stayed tied to my desk? Probably not very much at all. I would have continued to struggle, perhaps written a bit, but likely would have had to rewrite what I had written. 

Instead, I gave my brain a break. I did something manual that was repetitive, ironing. I know it’s not exciting, but that’s the point. It recharged my brain and I was able to return to my writing refreshed and didn’t need to rewrite anything later. 

Other activities you can do is to make your own lunch. Going into the kitchen to make a sandwich does not require a lot of brain power. It gets you up from your desk, gives your brain a break from the screen and you’re making something. 

It was a sense that everything I was doing was done at a screen that was the catalyst for me to return to doing some things manually. 

I remember when I decided to start using a pen and notebook for planning out my week. I was shocked how much better I thought. 

When I was planning my week digitally, I couldn’t wait to get it over. Just to make it feel more worthwhile, I would clean up a folder or clear my desktop of screenshots and PDFs I no longer needed. I noticed I was doing anything but actually plan the week.

When I closed my computer, pulled out a notebook and one of my favourite fountain pens, I actually planned and thought about what I wanted to accomplish that week. 

My Saturday morning planning sessions have become one of my favourite times of the week. I can stop, slow down and just think slowly and deeply about what I want to accomplish. 

And all these little things that have slowed me down have resulted in me getting far more done each week. 

Without consciously choosing to do so, my social media time has dropped significantly. I don’t watch as many YouTube videos as I used to do, and I feel more fulfilled and accomplished at the end of the day. 

A couple of months ago, while my wife was studying for her end of term exams, I would finish in my office, go through into the living room where she was studying, pick up a real book and read. 

It was a lovely feeling. My wife, Louis and myself all on the sofa engaged in something meaningful. We were still able to ask each other questions, but for the most part it felt calm, quiet and natural. 

Last weekend, during my TV time, I began watching the autobiographical series on the Life and Times of Lord Louis Mountbatten. 

Mountbatten was born in 1900 and died in 1979. He lived through two World Wars, was a part of both, was a member of the Royal Family, being the cousin of King George 6th, and was involved in many post war events. 

As he was describing his work, I noticed there was no “9 til 5” hours or any of the structures we impose on ourselves today. 

For most of Mountbatten’s life there was no television. Instead, people wrote letters or read books in their quiet times. Most weekends were spent socialising with family and friends and there was a lot of walking in the countryside. 

Yes, Mountbatten lived a privileged life, he was royalty after all, but even if you study the working classes of the time, they went to work—often hard manual labour, and come home where they would either spend the evening talking and playing games with their families or call into the local pub and enjoy time with their friends and neighbours. 

They were different times, of course, but the noticeable thing was the everything that needed to be done got done. 

Was was most striking about these times was the sense of fulfilment people spoke and wrote about. They were doing hard manual work, yet had a sense of accomplishment each day. 

Today, that sense of fulfilment and accomplish can be lost and instead because of the endless lists of to-dos, messages to respond to we feel overwhelmed and swamped. 

The most noticeable benefit I’ve found by returning to a few analogue tools is I no longer feel overwhelmed. I find I am more intentional about what I do and at the end of the day, I feel a sense of accomplishment. 

So there you go, Michael. That’s why I’ve brought back some analogue tools into my life. They slowed me down, enabled me to think better and ironically, I am getting a lot more done that I did when I was completely paperless and digital. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. 

Now I must go and hang up the laundry. 

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

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”

That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning. 

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Script | 379

Hello, and welcome to episode 379 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.

Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate. 

Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible. 

One of the dangers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It’s a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists. 

Don’t get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it’s a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising.

In today’s episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing. 

So, that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer’s desktop I don’t know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising? 

Hi Sally, thank you for your question.

Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising. 

I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool. 

I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen’s website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer. 

It took me seven years to realise that I wasn’t getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists. 

Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation. 

Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work. 

And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned. 

You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans. 

While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on. 

It didn’t matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note. 

The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty. 

I’ve seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department’s plans for the year. It’s written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It’s as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government’s treasury department:

“This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.”

You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done. 

What matters is knowing what the department’s objectives are and what needs to be done to accomplish them. 

That does not need thirty pages. That can be summarised on one page, at most. 

If you’re working in an organisation that loves using management speak to communicate their ill-thought through ideas, one of the best ways to navigate these documents is to establish what the ultimate goal is. 

What are the targets, or in management speak “KPI’s” (Key Performance Indicators)? Once you know how you or your department will be measured, you can use your own experience and knowledge to put in place a plan to achieve those targets. 

Ultimately, your boss, and their boss, are concerned about your targets. How you achieve those targets are less important, although they should always be achieved legally, of course. 

In many ways translating these verbose annual planning documents is the role of the departmental managers. This means translating them into actionable items so that everyone in the team clearly understands what they are aiming for.

This then reduces the necessity of further planning meetings and everyone can get on and achieve the objectives. 

And this is the same for individuals. 

When we plan things out we are exploring options, considering best ways to do things and perhaps thinking of potential outcomes. 

While these exercises do have their place, they cannot replace doing the work. 

The objective, therefore, is to figure out as quickly as possible what you need to do to get the work completed. 

My wife bought me a new iron and ironing board for my birthday. I love ironing, I find it relaxing. I’ve learnt that no matter how big the pile of ironing is, the pile is not going to diminish by more planning and strategising. The only way the pile of ironing will shrink is for me to plug my iron in, set up my ironing board and get started. 

Now years of ironing has taught me to begin with the clothes that require a cooler setting and finish with clothes that require a hotter setting such as linen shirts. That’s experience, although, I remember being taught that one by my grandmother many many years ago. 

The final part of this is choosing when to do the ironing. For me, I find ironing after I’ve been sat down for a long time works best. I’m stood up and have to move around to hang my shirts up after they’re ironed. So, doing the ironing in the afternoon or early evening works best for me. 

Given that I generally do the ironing once a week, all I need to decide is when. When will I do it? That’s the only planning I need to do with something I routinely do. 

When it comes to organising, I’m always surprised how so many people have missed one of the best features of computers and technology. It’s not so you can sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. It’s the speed at which a computer can organise your files. 

You can choose to organise your files by date created, date modified, title, type of document or by size. The only thing you need to do is to put the file into a folder. 

If you were to keep things as simple as possible, two folders one for your personal life and one for your professional life would work. (And I know a lot of people who do just that and can find anything they need with the use of a keyboard shortcut or a few typed letters. 

While travelling last month, I had all my flight confirmation emails and car hire documents stored in Evernote in its own notebook. Before we set off, I made sure this notebook was downloaded to my phone so that no matter where I was in the world, I was not going to be relying on flakey internet. 

This meant, when we finally reached the car hire desk at 11 p.m. At Dublin Airport, all I needed to do was open Evernote, type Europcar in the search and all my details we instantly on my screen ready to show the assistant. 

Most notes apps people are using today have incredibly powerful search features built in. Evernote was build on its search features. I’m frequently amazed at how quickly Evernote can find something I vaguely think might be in there. 

I remember my wife trying to sort something out for me on a Korean website while we were sitting in cafe. She asked me if I remembered my password for a particular website I had not used for over ten years. 

I opened up Evernote and typed in the name of the website and in less than second the login and password details were there. My brain cannot work that fast when trying to recall something from ten years ago. 

What this means is you do not need to spend days or months trying to come up with a “perfect” notes organisation system. You could quite easily operate on a simple professional and personal folder system. 

You’d still be able to find anything you were looking for, and all you would need to do is to learn how to use the search features. 

So, Sally, if you want to get things organised, let your computer do the work for you. Start by creating a simple folder structure of personal and work, and organise your documents there first. 

As you’re doing this I would add that you ensure the title of the documents and files are clear. Sometimes we download something from the internet and we end up with a jumble of letters and numbers. While your computer will be able to tell you when you downloaded it and what the file type is, it won’t be able to tell you what it is. That part of the organising process is on you. 

If you wish to have a little more structure than simply personal and professional you can modify things later. The goal here is to begin the cleaning up process. 

And don’t forget the delete key. It’s your best friend when cleaning up. 

Once you’ve tidied everything up and you know where everything is, when it comes to what to do next will naturally follow. 

This organising may take you a weekend to do. Yet, that investment in time will be well worth it. You’ll feel less anxious, lighter and will have begun developing confidence in your system. That’s a very nice place to be. 

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

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”

That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet.

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Script | 378

Hello, and welcome to episode 378 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 recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts. 

And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special. 

This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. 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 Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience? 

Hi Phil, thank you for your question. 

Before I begin, I should give you some background. 

My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation” 

A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns. 

Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker. 

I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha.

A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew. 

That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week. 

I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change. 

It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better. 

Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. 

I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools. 

It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution. 

That’s the background. 

So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner. 

Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today. 

It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important. 

It was unpleasant.

So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen. 

It was a revelation and I was shocked. 

The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done. 

With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn’t.

I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task. 

It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager. 

I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them. 

That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not. 

The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important. 

Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again. 

Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video. 

Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally. 

And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000! 

The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note. 

On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube. 

I quickly began to see that there was something going on here. 

Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it’s fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful. 

99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information. 

And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office. 

In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information. 

Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It’s slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive. 

It’s done that by getting me to think again. 

And that’s perhaps where digital tools are failing us. 

Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient. 

Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them. 

Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love. 

Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that’s helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up. 

This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important. 

Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists. 

Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed. 

Will I go back to an all-digital system? No. 

I’ve found a happy balance. My Franklin Planner allows me to make better choices about what I should work on today. My Planning Book gives me a space to think about what I am trying to do and to brainstorm better ways of doing the work. 

However, I do see a space for digital tools. 

I always scan in my plans to a digital project note. The output of my work is digital. Blog-posts, YouTube videos, online courses and even my coaching programmes are all done digitally. (I use Zoom to talk with my clients who are based all over the world) 

I also use Todoist to keep track of the recurring stuff I would likely forget to do. Reminders to water the office plant (every four days), to do my expenses, respond to my actionable emails and to send out regularly recurring invoices are all managed in Todoist. 

The conclusion I have come to from this experiment is that the perfect system is a hybrid of digital and analogue tools. Your calendar works best digitally, yet on a daily basis, slowing down and writing out what you will do that day works better in an analogue form. It stops you from overwhelming yourself. 

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

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.” 

That’s a quote from Alex Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.

How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year? 

I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there’s just so much to do and so little time to do it. 

Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work. 

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Script | 377

Hello, and welcome to episode 377 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.

For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It’s an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages. 

Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There’s a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they’re away. 

However, there’s is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week’s episode I will share with you the things I do while away. 

Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work. 

Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up.

Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course. 

It’s an evolution of everything I’ve taught over the last several years. 

You have no control over what’s coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what’s important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks. 

It’s unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed.

Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do. 

It’s a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all. 

There’s currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you. 

Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course. 

Okay, now on with the podcast.

First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don’t. 

If you’re employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back. 

Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back. 

This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead. 

The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something’s important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work. 

Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there’s going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don’t want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back. 

For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help. 

I travelled to Ireland. That’s eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am. 

When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm. 

I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a business owner, are my responsibility to deal with. 

It’s just two hours a day done before the day gets started. 

The great thing with this approach is that once I’ve done it, that’s it for the day. I won’t return to my email or messages for the rest of the day and I get on and enjoy the holiday. 

This is a better approach than to come back to 800+ emails and messages on your first day. If you’re going straight into meetings and catching up with what has happened while you were away, you’ve just created a huge backlog for yourself that will take weeks to get back on top of. 

Next. One of the biggest issues I get from my coaching clients is they don’t have any time to step back and define what is important to them, reorganise their daily structure or to establish what their core work is. 

Holiday time is great for this. There’s often a lot of travelling involved, and it’s likely to be with your family. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk with your partner about what you want as a family. 

My wife and I use flying time to talk about what we want to accomplish as a family over the next year. It’s not planned. It’s spontaneous. And, it’s usually when we are flying back home rather than when we fly out. Yet, we always do it. 

I remember when I was employed and suffering from what we called “the holiday blues”. This is where you feel slightly depressed on your return to work for a week or two. You miss the sense of relaxation and have nothing to look forward to except for the daily drudge of work and meetings.

Having a talk with your partner and or family on your return journey can give you a multitude of things you can do as a couple or family. Giving you something to look forward to. 

If you’re taking a summer holiday, this is also a good time to review how you are doing on your goals this year. 

When this year started, I was 88 kilograms (about 195 pounds or nearly 14 stone). That’s way above my target weight of between 80 and 83 kilograms (175 to 180 pounds or 12 ½ to 13 stone) 

So, my number one health and fitness goal for 2025 was to get my weight back to within my normal range. That was achieved, but, while away I ate too much—don’t we all when on holiday?—and need to refocus my attention on getting it back. 

Fortunately, it’s only two or three pounds, so the target it to get it back within acceptable limits by the end of July. 

This means, I need to quickly get back into my exercise routine and eat healthily.

It’s a great way to get yourself refocused on your return. 

Another thing you can do while away is to do some digital cleaning up. I love this time. 

While you’re on holiday there is likely to be pockets of time you can use to clean up your notes, calendar and task manager. 

Let’s be honest, when we’re in the day to day hustle, we throw a lot of useless information into our notes and add tasks into our task manager that we know we will never do. 

This is a wonderful time to clear these out. 

Last Wednesday, my first day back at work, my notes were organised, my task manger was clean and tight and my calendar was cleared of conflicts. What a wonderful way to restart. 

What I noticed was I felt organised, focused and ready for anything. Isn’t that what a holiday is meant to do for you. 

Yet, if you don’t do any cleaning up, you come back to a mess. Nothing has changed and the very things you hate about your work life continue. No control, a messed up list of things to do and a calendar that fills you with dread. 

And, something powerful happens when you do this learning up. You learn a lot. 

You discover better workflows and processes and you gain a sense of optimism about how the changes you make now will bring you incredible rewards once you return to work. 

I often find I cannot wait to get restarted because I’m excited to test out new ways of managing my work day. 

And let’s be honest, cleaning things up doesn’t require a lot of mental energy. It’s the kind of thing you can do in the evenings with a laptop on your knees while enjoying a cocktail or two. (Although not too many. You don’t want to delete important things) 

Now, you may be thinking ‘no way! I’m on holiday I don’t want to deal with any work issues’. And I get that. 

But, and it’s big but, your holiday may only last a week or two, and then you’re back at work. Doing all or some of these tips, will last far longer and leave you with less stress and overwhelm. 

It gives you optimism, and helps you to refocus on the important things in life. Surely, a few hours out of your holiday time to do some cleaning up is worth it to feel that way? 

In the past I’ve not done any of these things and just found myself in the same mess I was in before my holiday. It’s not pleasant and that’s when I struggled with the holiday blues. 

Now, I do these things and I’ve never experienced holiday blues and instead am excited to get back to work feeling refreshed and energised. 

It’s your choice. But I can assure you, if you do all of these or just some of them on your next holiday, you will continue to do it for every holiday in the future. 

Thank you for listening and don’t forget to check out the brand new Time Based Productivity Course. 

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