Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else” 

How is your management of time? 

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Script | 403

Hello, and welcome to episode 403 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. 

Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure? 

Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility. 

Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important. 

If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done. 

But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take. 

This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so. 

The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind. 

Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days. 

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 Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar? 

Hi Alex, thank you for your question.

Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day. 

Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness. 

The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when. 

You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much.

And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment. 

I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that. 

I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that. 

One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have. 

That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment. 

When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do. 

It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality. 

If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it. 

If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour. 

It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work. 

The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters.

Now, as I eluded to at the beginning, there will be some days when things don’t go according to plan. You might be sick, had an argument with a loved one or just be distracted for whatever reason. 

Or there could be a good old-fashioned emergency that needs your attention. 

It happens. That’s life. 

However, it’s not really about what you do or not to do in one day. The purpose of time blocks is to get you to show up and do the work. It’s not about volume. 

Spending twenty minutes on your actionable email is better than spending zero minutes. It’s surprising how much you can get done when the pressure of time is on you. You don’t dilly-dally around. (Wow! That’s a phrase I haven’t used for a long time!) 

Ultimately, the measure is how well you did against your plan for the week, not necessarily an individual day. 

Let me give you an example. 

I have two blog posts, two newsletters, this podcast and a YouTube video to produce each week. They are my measurables. Six pieces of content.

I know I need about 12 hours a week to produce that content. I also have 15 hours of coaching appointments. So, in total, I need 27 hours protected before I begin my week to complete my professional work. 

It’s doable, and based on my completion rates, I complete this work around 87% of the time over 12 months. I’ll take that. (I measure it at the end of every year) 

I work with one highly successful CEO who writes a LinkedIn Newsletter every week. Her company has over 50,000 employees in six different countries. She protects two hours every week to write that newsletter. One hour for the first draft and one hour later in the week to edit it. 

Last year, she didn’t miss one newsletter. She had a 100% completion rate. And that was her goal. 

How did she do it? She protected her writing time every week. She would protect Monday mornings when in the office, and when travelling, she would take advantage of jet lag and write when she was wide awake in the early morning or late at night. 

She time-blocked the time. She knew the only way to achieve a 100% completion rate was to make sure each week she had protected the time to do the work. 

However, time blocking only works if you are planning your week. Not planning your week leaves you open to other people hijacking your calendar, and as I am sure you are aware, other people are often very persuasive… or demanding. 

When you sit down to plan the week, you first look at what meetings and appointments you have scheduled. How much time does that leave you? 

That will tell you what you could realistically get done that week. 

If you’re away at a conference for three days, you really only have two days to work with. However, one of those days will probably be needed for catching up, so realistically, you’ve got one solid work day. 

But let’s look at a typical week when you are at your usual place of work. 

How much time do you need to do the work you are employed to do each week? A journalist may be expected to write an article a week. How long does it typically take to write the article, excluding the research and interviews? That would be their starting point. 

Doctors I work with often need 2 hours or more after seeing patients to handle paperwork. If they want to get home at 7:00 pm each evening, then that will affect the time they need to stop seeing patients and do paperwork. 

Salespeople are focused on seeing clients most of the day, but they also often have paperwork and follow-ups to do. Where can they fit the time they need for paperwork and follow-ups?

Knowing what you are expected to do as part of your job and ensuring you have sufficient time to do it each week is what I call protecting time for your core work, and it goes back to the birth of humankind.

Our ancestors on the Savannahs knew their core work. To hunt for food. If they’d had a big kill one day, they may have been able to take a day off, but when they started their day, they knew their job was to go out and find food. It was a non-negotiable part of their day. 

That’s what time blocking does for you. It gives you clarity on what you need to do that day. All you need to do is show up. 

One tip I can give you about time-blocking is to keep your time blocks general. For instance, the CEO I mentioned a moment ago calls her newsletter writing time simply “writing time”. That gives her some flexibility. 

If she needs to write a report for the board and is up against a tight deadline, then that is what she will write in that time. She will then find another space for the newsletter writing.

I do something similar. I have writing time and audio/visual time protected on my calendar. I can then choose what I write or record on the day as part of my daily planning routine. 

If you’re in sales or a client-facing role, the time you spend working for your clients can be called “client” or “customer” time.

I would also highly recommend that you set aside time every day to deal with messages, emails, and admin. These tasks will creep up on you if you’re not dealing with them every day. Even if you can only find thirty minutes, take it. 

Whenever I am on a business trip, whether domestic or international, I make sure to set aside time during the day to address my actionable messages. The most challenging ones are domestic, as I generally drive to the appointment or event. The easier ones are international as there is a lot of time hanging around in airport lounges. 

Another tip I would give is not to go crazy here. Time blocking is not about blocking every minute of the day. It’s about protecting time only for the important work you need to do. 

When I look at my calendar, there are only three hours a day protected for solo work. On days when I have a lot of meetings, I usually reduce that time to one hour. 

So there you go, Alex. I hope that has helped. 

You are going to have good and bad days. That’s perfectly normal. But, you have complete control of your calendar, so you can move things around, change your blocks if necessary. But, and this is the important but, once you’ve locked them in for the day, you stick with them.

Remember, it’s not about how much you do in the time, it’s about turning up and doing the work. 

And if you want to transform your time management and adopt a sustainable time-based productivity system, my newest course, the Time-Based Productivity course, will do that for you. 

It will teach you how to time-block effectively and organise your work so you are doing the right things at the right time. PLUS… by joining the course, you get free access to my recently updated Time Sector System course and my Time Blocking Course. 

If I were to recommend one course for 2026, that’s the one I would recommend. 

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

You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year? 

That’s what I’m answering this week. 

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Script | 402

Hello, and welcome to episode 402 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. 

Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today. 

Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”. 

All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more. 

I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself. 

And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be. 

Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers. 

It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from. 

Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task. 

Superb! Or is it?

What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary. 

It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill:

“This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”

Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term:

“AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”.

So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”.

That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and 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 Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming?

Hi Robert, thank you for your question. 

AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised. 

It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially. 

I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious.

There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes. 

Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails. 

However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today. 

I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time. 

It doesn’t mean we should reject these new ways immediately. We are in the experimentation stage. It’s the fun stage. Testing new ideas, playing with tools and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t. 

However, some fundamentals remain in play. 

The first, and the one that will never go away, is that we only have twenty-four hours a day. We are human. We need to sleep, eat and bathe. All of which takes time out of those 24 hours. 

The second is that we can only focus on one thing at a time. We have the freedom to choose what we focus on, but we can only focus on one thing. 

So the question is, what will you focus on and when? 

We may not be able to stop all this AI-generated work, but we can choose when to work on it. This is where categorising your work helps you choose the right things to work on. 

For example, pretty much all of us will have to deal with communications, and it’s a great example. 

What happens if you don’t respond to your emails and messages for a day? Perhaps you’re travelling, or are caught up in meetings. That’s right, you create a backlog. 

The problem with emails and messages is that they never stop coming in, and unless you have a process and time to deal with them, you will miss deadlines and opportunities, and probably upset a lot of people. There are consequences for ignoring your messages. 

The solution is to set aside time each day to deal with them. How much time will depend on how much time you have and perhaps the volume of messages that require your attention. 

If all you have is twenty minutes between some meetings, take it. You’re not going to get much else done. So take advantage of those twenty minutes and clear some of those messages. You may not be able to clear them all, but one is always greater than zero. 

If the AI tools you use include suggestions for responses, take advantage of them for the shorter replies. 

But, be careful of the longer replies that require your knowledgeable input. AI can respond to some of these, but its responses often sound a little inhuman or, worse, give the wrong information. 

Always check the AI-generated responses. 

AI can also organise your calendar for you. Personally, I’ve not had much luck with this, as it doesn’t have enough variable information about me to be accurate. What I find AI does is look at what I like to do at certain times of the day and suggests I do that every day, and then fills in everything else around that. 

The last time I played with this AI, it recommended I get up at 6:00 am and do my workout. Pu ha ha! I am not going to get up at 6:00 to do any exercise. I hate exercising in the morning. 

To get my AI calendar to be reasonably useful, I had to spend far too much time telling it what I wanted, and I realised in the end the fastest way was for me to do it manually. 

Going back to the categorisation of your work, if you categorise it by the types of work you do, you can then match your calendar to your categories. 

For instance, if you were a doctor, seeing patients would largely take up most of your workday. But you will also need time to complete your prescriptions, update patient notes, respond to messages, deal with any health insurance claims, and so on. 

If you don’t want to be working late into the night, you will need to be disciplined with your calendar and protect time for the admin and communication tasks. 

If you find AI is recommending a lot of tasks for you, from, say, meeting summaries, I recommend you first audit the list, then allocate a category to the work suggested. 

Why audit the list? 

Well, as I mentioned, AI is like that new recruit trying impress the boss by suggesting more work than is necessary. It will create a lot of tasks. 

Your experience will tell you that a lot of those tasks will not need to be done. It’s these that need to be removed. 

I recently did an experiment. I asked Google’s Gemini to give me a list of tasks, spread over four weeks, to start a blog. 

This prompt resulted in 29 tasks! And the task of actually writing a first draft was not suggested until the start of week four. 

While many of the tasks listed, such as choosing a domain to host the blog and your niche, do need to be done, in the real world, most people who want to start a blog will already know this. It’s part of the thought processes that lead to deciding to start a blog.

When I audited the list, I reduced it from 29 tasks down to 12. I also found I needed to move some tasks around because they weren’t in a logical sequence. 

I’m sure over time, AI will get better at this, but always remember that your experience about doing your job will still be better at predicting what needs to be done than AI will. 

If you’re using the Time Sector System, you will find that your processing naturally fits with AI’s method of breaking tasks down into when you “should” be doing them. 

My blog experiment allowed me, once I’d audited the list, to quickly move the tasks into the correct sector. Tasks that should be done in the first week were moved to my This Week folder; those for the second week were moved to my Next Week folder; and everything else was moved to my This Month folder. 

One of the benefits of using the Time Sector System with AI-generated tasks is that as you are simultaneously deciding when you will do the tasks. You retain the all-important human agency, deciding what is done and when. 

But there’s one more benefit of the Time Sector System that will help you. That is your weekly limit. 

If you have taken the course, you may remember the lesson on capping your weekly tasks to your known limit. 

This is where you find the maximum number of tasks you can realistically do in any one week. This number does not include your routines or other recurring low-value tasks. Just the important ones. But we all have a limit. 

For me, that number is thirty. If my This Week folder is higher than 30 at the start of the week, I know I am going to struggle to complete my tasks that week. I either need to go back into my This Week folder and remove some of the less urgent tasks or cancel some of my meetings. 

This teaches you the vital skills of auditing and prioritisation. Skills you will need in the AI world. It is what will separate us from the AI tools being used. 

However, one good thing about AI-generated meeting summaries is that you have a record of the meeting that can be placed inside your meeting notes for projects and teams without any editing. 

The workflow I use with these is to use Todoist’s brilliant copy/paste feature. Here you can copy a list of tasks and paste them all into your inbox in a single click. 

However, if there are a lot of them, I create a temporary project folder for them first, and then, before I move the tasks to their rightful place, I audit the list. Remove tasks that are not relevant, or that I don’t need to do, and then move them to the right time sector. 

If you don’t use Todoist, you can do this with the original meeting summary. Audit, remove and then move the tasks you need to do into the correct time sector. 

(A quick heads-up, I have a YouTube video coming out next week that demonstrates this.)

So there you go, Robert. It’s still early days, and we are very much in the experimentation period with AI. We’re testing ways to see how it can help us with our work. This is consequently creating a lot of tasks. 

As long as you are auditing these tasks, following the principles of COD, and using the Time Sector System to manage your work, you will be fine. Things will remain manageable and exciting at the same time. 

We don’t know what the future holds, but your experience and skills will see you through, I can promise you. 

Thank you, Robert, for your question.

And if you haven’t taken the Time Sector System course yet, the all-new edition is now available and can be taken in less than two hours. Look at taking that course as your antidote to the AI-generated work bloat we are all beginning to experience. 

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

Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point. 

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Script | 401

Hello, and welcome to episode 401 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. 

Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files. 

In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic. 

The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today. 

And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes. 

The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents. 

The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated. 

Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find. 

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

This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place?

Hi Julia, thank you for your question. 

A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year. 

Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know. 

What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated. 

So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM.

(They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries) 

Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year. 

Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales. 

All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened) 

I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates. 

If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year. 

You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder. 

Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015. 

The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders. 

For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder. 

How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them. 

I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are slim. The need to find a 2025 document would be much higher. 

So start with your 2025 folder and work backwards.

Don’t be tempted to pre-set up your year folders with subfolders by topic. No one year will be the same. 

In 2016, I was teaching English to executives in Korea—something I no longer do. I have a lot of teaching materials; I don’t want to throw away those, and they go up to 2020, so I have folders for those years related to my English teaching activities. After 2020, those folders are no longer in my files. 

Once you have the year folders set up, it’s relatively quick and easy to get things organised. The important thing is not overthink this or to develop an overly complex folder structure. 

My advice is two levels and no more. The year folder and the subject material. For example, 2024 > Electric bills. 

Now, there is a category of documents that you need access to across multiple years. 

For example, my car’s manual is something I will need to keep for as long as I have my current car. 

For these types of documents, you can create a folder called “current” or “active” (you decide the best name for it) and keep these in there. 

So, in my current folder, I have my company registration documents, my car’s manual and registration documents, current insurance certificates, and other miscellaneous files I need access to regularly. This folder is pinned to the top of my file folders (you can do this by adding a 00 before the word Current, then setting the list to organise by name). 

Now for your work documents. 

This one is more challenging, as you’re likely to be collaborating with others. 

There may also be legal requirements regarding document storage and archiving. When I worked in a law office, there were strict rules about how files were organised and stored, and for how long they were kept. 

However, that was not my concern. There were procedures that my colleagues and I followed for each file, and they were then sent to the archivist, who made sure that everything was stored in the correct way. 

My advice here would be to follow your company’s procedures; if there are none, use the system I described above for your personal files. 

Another challenge we face today is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are encouraging us to keep files within their app containers. 

For instance, if you create a Word document, Microsoft wants you to save that file within your OneDrive’s Word folder. 

That makes sense, and for the current documents I am creating, I use that system. 

However, once I’ve sent feedback to my coaching clients, I save the original Pages file in that client’s folder (I work in the Apple ecosystem). 

These folders are not year-specific. Many of my clients have been with me for years, and many of them come back from time to time. 

That is why, with work-related files, using years to organise your documents doesn’t always work—particularly with ongoing projects, campaigns and clients.

Given that most work related files and documents are shared with others and are kept within the company’s own file storage system, the best solution is to ensure that the title you give to these files is something you would naturally search for.

Think how you would find this document in twelve or twenty-four months time. 

For example, each year I write a workbook for my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The title of that document is “2026 Ultimate Productivity Workbook”. 

I put the year first because if I were to search for “workbook”, within the results, I would find that the Productivity workshop’s workbooks would all be grouped together by year, making it easy for me to select the right one. 

And that neatly leads me to another facet of working with digital files. 

Your computer is built for search. It’s the biggest advantage computers have over your own brain. If it’s within your computer’s search scope it will find it within a split second. 

Really the only thing you need to do is ensure that you have given the document a title you will be able to search for.

One of my favourite features of this computerised search is to use the “recents” smart list. This shows you all the documents you have worked on recently. 

The chances are something you are looking for at work will be something you have worked on recently. You might be writing a report or a proposal in Word, then in the Word app those documents will be at the top of the list. 

You may need to change the search setting in the list to last modified, not date created to see this, but it’s a phenomenal way to find a document you need quickly. 

What about your notes?

Last weekend, I watched a documentary on the beloved British comedian Sir Ken Dodd. A brilliant comedian and a man who left millions of people in laughter and happiness. 

Doddy, for that is what we called him, was in the habit of writing notes after each performance into a notebook. He would write how he felt the performance went, what jokes worked and didn’t work, and what he could do to improve his performance next time. 

After his death in 2018, his wife set about saving his immense archive of props, costumes and puppets for the nation. 

When it came to his notebooks, there were thousands of them, dating from the 1950s to his death. 

His wife asked an archivist to come in to help organise these notebooks into something that could be searched by future comedians. The archivist decided to most logical way would be to organise them by year, and then add a tag for each theatre and city he performed in. 

This meant that if someone wanted to search for a specific note, they could type in the year and the name of the city or theatre, and a list of notes for that search would pop up. 

Simple, logical and minimised the amount of work required to get them in order. 

When it comes to your notes, keeping the structure simple makes sense. With your digital notes, you are organising them for quick search and retrieval. 

You don’t need to worry about the date; all decent note-taking apps will date-stamp the creation of a note for you automatically. All you need to do is focus on creating a title for the note that makes sense to you so you can retrieve it years later. 

The key to getting your digital files organised is to keep things simple and let your computer do the hard work. 

The year folders you create can be reviewed over time. It’s the kind of thing you can do while sitting on the sofa in the evening. Pick a year and categorise the documents you have collected for that year. If you do this over a couple of weeks, you will have all your digital files organised and searchable. 

I can assure you it’s a wonderful feeling. 

Receipts can be organised into a Receipts folder, and within that folder, you can organise them by month. If you need to separate your personal and professional receipts, create a work and personal folder within that month’s receipt folder. 

I know that adds a lot of levels, but you are only setting this up once a month, and it won’t take you much more than a minute. Yet, that minute will save you hours later when you need to submit your expenses. 

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

I have a course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation that shows you a simple yet effective way to get your notes organised so they are searchable and easy to find. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. 

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

WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey.

And now, let us begin. 

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Script | 399

Hello, and welcome to episode 400 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. 

15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years.

This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points. 

Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure.

It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary

And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, 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 Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important?

Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question. 

When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation. 

Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them. 

Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes. 

Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists. 

And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world. 

It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough. 

Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection. 

That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 

During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today. 

Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected

Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents. 

These were all original thoughts and observations. 

Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books. 

What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini. 

This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude. 

But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes. 

Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored. 

When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45. 

And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later. 

And that’s where our digital tools today are so much better than the paper notebooks we kept. We can find anything, any time, from any digital device we have on hand. 

I remember reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography, and he often travelled to other parts of Italy. If he needed to reference a note he had made—and he made copious notes—and he did not have the right notebook with him on his travels, it would have taken him days to retrieve the information. 

We don’t have that problem today. 

So, when it comes to collecting, be ruthless in what you keep. 

I have a notebook in my notes app called “Suppliers”. This is where I store the names of the companies I regularly buy things from. 

For example, I get my clothing from several preferred retailers. I buy my woollen jumpers (sweaters) from Cordings of Piccadilly. In the note I have for Cordings, are my sizes and the website address. 

This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for and order. I use Apple’s Password app to store my login details, so once I have found what I want, I can order it very quickly. 

Amazon makes this even easier with a “Buy It Again” section, so if I am running low on Yorkshire Tea, I go to Amazon, click Buy It Again, and within a few seconds, I see Yorkshire Tea and can order straight away. 

Ten years ago, I kept all that information in my notes. Today, I don’t bother as it’s faster to go directly to Amazon. 

Another use I have for my digital notes is to keep all my client meeting notes. Each week, I will have around fifteen to twenty calls with clients, and I keep notes for each call as I write feedback, which I send to the client after the call. 

These are unique notes, and each one will be different, so using the Darwin/Newton principle—keeping thoughts, ideas and observations in your notes—they will be kept in my notes in a notebook called “clients”.

What’s great about this is I have over eight years’ worth of client notes in Evernote, which feed ideas for future content as they’re directly relatable to real experiences and difficulties. 

Another useful note to have in your notes is something called an “Anchor Note”. This is a note where you keep critical information you may need at any particular time. 

For example, I keep all the subscriber links to my various websites there, which can be quickly copied and pasted whenever needed. 

I also have the Korean Immigration office website there, since it’s not easy to find, and I only need it every 3 or 4 years. 

Depending on how security-conscious you are, you can also keep your Social Security and driving license numbers there, too. 

How you organise your notes depends on you and how your brain works. However, the more complex your organisational system, the slower you will be at finding what you need. 

Now this is where computers come into their own. Whether you use Apple, Google or Microsoft, all these companies have built incredible search functionality into the core of their systems. 

This means as long as you give your note a title that means something to you, you will be able to find it in five or ten years’ time. 

I remember once my wife asked me for a password to a Korean website I had not used in ten years or more. I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t have the password stored in my old password manager, 1Password. 

As a long shot, I typed the name of the website into Evernote—the note-taking app I’ve been using for almost fifteen years—and within a second, the website with my login details was on my screen. 

If I’d tried to find that information by going through my notebooks and tags, I would never have found it. I let Evernote handle the hard work, and it did so superbly. 

However, that said, there is something about having some basic structure to your notes. I use a structure I call GAPRA. GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. It’s loosely based on Tiago Forte’s PARA method. 

I find having separate places for my goals, areas of focus and projects makes it easier for me to navigate things when I am creating a note. 

My goals section is for tracking data. For instance, if I were losing weight, I would record my weight each week there. 

My areas of focus notebook is where I keep my definitions of my areas and what they mean to me, and it gives me a single place to review these every six months. 

My project notebook is where I keep all my notes for my current projects. 

The biggest notebook I have, though, is my resources notebook. This is a catch-all for everything else. My supplier’s notebook is there, as is information about different cities I travel to or may travel to in the future. As I look at that notebook now, Paris is the note that has the most information. (Although Osaka in Japan is getting close to it) 

I also have places to visit in Korea that I keep for when my mother visits—which she does every year—so I can build a different itinerary for her each year. 

The archive is for old notes. I’m not by nature a hoarder, but I do find it reassuring that anything I have created is still there and still searchable. 

And that’s it, Ricardo. 

You don’t need to keep anything that is findable on the internet or in AI; that’s duplication. But what I would highly recommend you keep are your original ideas, thoughts, and meeting notes (even if they are being summarised by AI. How AI interprets what’s been said is not always what was meant) 

And if, like me, you prefer to take handwritten notes, you can scan them into your digital notes app so you have a quick reference even if you don’t have your paper notebook with you. 

I hope that helps, and thank you for your question, Ricardo. And thank you to you, too, for listening. 

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

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in twelve months and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” 

I first heard that quote from Tony Robbins, and it completely changed my approach to yearly goals. I stopped setting ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and began looking further ahead to see what I could do over the next twelve months that would move me closer to my longer-term dreams and goals. 

In this week’s special episode, I will share with you why smaller steps over the next twelve months will do so much more for you than trying to do something big and scary that you ultimately fail at. 

Let’s go.

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Script | 399

Hello, and welcome to episode 399 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

What are the mistakes most people make when it comes to goals and resolutions for the New Year? 

Well, the simple answer is that they overcomplicate things and try to do too much in one year. 

Let me explain. Like most people, I used to set New Year’s resolutions when I was growing up. At various times in my life, they included losing weight and getting fit, quitting smoking, saving money and many more. 

And, again, like most people, I failed miserably every time. 

What Tony Robbins’ quote made me realise is that I was failing because none of these resolutions were connected to my long-term goals or vision. 

I was in my twenties, and I believed I was immortal. It wasn’t until I reached my early thirties that three-day hangovers convinced me that I wasn’t immortal after all. 

It wasn’t until I’d settled down, married and begun to see a life ahead of me that I started to wonder if I could control that life and the direction it would go in. 

And yes, I could. And so can you. But you do need to know what kind of life you want to be living in ten or twenty years. 

Hope is not a good strategy. It’s no good carrying on as you are and “hoping” you will one day reach the goals and the life you’ve always wanted to live. 

To achieve that, you will need to take action. 

To give you an example of what I mean. 

I want to be active well into my eighties and nineties. I long admired Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh. He died in 2021, just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday. And yet he remained active throughout his eighties and nineties, being one of the hardest-working members of the Royal family. 

The Queen allowed him to retire at 97. 

How did Prince Philip maintain his strength and endurance? 

He did something called the 5BX every morning for eleven minutes. 

5BX is a series of body-weight exercises you can do anywhere that was developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1940s to keep their servicemen fit, healthy and strong. 

I highly recommend you search for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube and watch it. It seems so quaint by today’s standards. 

He also walked miles and miles every day, ate small portions of food based on a traditional balanced diet, limited his alcohol intake, and went to bed and woke up at the same time each day.

If we were to break that down into daily activities, it was simple and doable. Because he was able to do it every day—even when he was travelling—it meant there were few excuses he could use not to do it. 

You wake up, and after a few minutes, do your 5BX session, shower, have a small, healthy breakfast, and get on with your day, taking every opportunity to walk. And you do it every day. 

Tie that to going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, and you would be setting yourself up for a long, healthy, active life. 

And in that, there is nothing complicated or time-consuming. 

There are also no goals involved. It’s just a shift in your daily routine, so these activities become part of your daily routine. 

Although I would suggest you use January as a “test”. Often, we read or listen to something, think it’s a good idea and then find that because of our circumstances, we struggle to make it work. 

That doesn’t mean it cannot work. It means we need to rethink the routine and make a few changes so it works for us. 

I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and thought it was a good idea. And it was a good idea in 2016. I could get to bed at a reasonable time. 

Then I started my productivity work and coaching programme, and it became challenging to get to bed before midnight. Something had to change. 

I realised that the power of the 5 AM Club was not in getting up at 5 AM. It was what you did when you woke up. So, the only thing I needed to change was my wake-up time. And ten years later, I still follow the morning routine I developed after reading that book. 

Another example would be with your personal finances. Davie Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, gives a simple step-by-step approach to getting your personal finances in order. 

The first is to build a starter emergency fund—usually around $1,000 to $5,000. Then pay off all non-mortgage debts as quickly as you can. 

The third step is to build a longer-term emergency fund. That would be three to six months of living expenses. 

And then to invest in your retirement and live on less than you earn. 

Within that framework, there would be a few key things you could do. For example, try to save the starter emergency fund in 2026 and pay down some of your shorter-term debts. 

Around those areas, you could set some goals in 2026. 

The bigger principle in The Total Money Makeover is to pay off all debts, including mortgages. That’s unlikely to be possible for most people in one year, but over ten years? It could be possible. 

The good thing about something like this is that you can plan five or ten years ahead and set a goal to be completely debt-free by 2036. 

Whether it’s health or finances, what you are doing is setting standards for how you live your life. You eat healthy, do some exercise each day, and live within your means. 

And really, that’s what a new year should be all about. Not resolutions or goals, but reaffirming your standards. The standards you live your life by. 

Standards don’t need motivation; they are just the way you live your life. 

However, when setting your standards, you will likely need some help from motivation and self-discipline initially. There will be days when you forget to do something or cannot do it. That’s perfectly normal. 

It’s not about hitting everything 100% of the time. That would be impossible anyway. I would suggest a monthly target of 80%+ 

A good example of this is when I travel to visit my parents. The trip from our home in Korea to where my parents live on the West Coast of Ireland takes about 26 hours door-to-door. 

During that time, I am not able to go out for a run or to the gym. If my goal were to exercise every day, I would be setting myself up for failure before I begin. I travel to visit my parents at least once a year. 

And if I were determined to do it, why put myself through that extra stress? Travelling is stressful enough. 

Then there would be those occasions when I am ill or delayed when travelling domestically. 

However, if my target was an 80% success rate, I’m in with a chance, and on those days when I’m exhausted or an emergency comes up, I wouldn’t be destroying my standards. 

If you want to discover what is important to you in your life, I suggest you download my free Areas of Focus workbook. That workbook will take you through each of the eight areas of life we all share, help you define each one and then set some actionable steps you can take to keep your areas in balance. 

It’s a great way to kick off a new year, as it will help you focus on what matters to you and identify areas where you can establish habits and standards that will be meaningful to you.

A new year is a wonderful opportunity to review how things are going in our lives and reflect on what we could change to get our lives back on the right track, living the life we want. 

If you’re entirely new to this approach to a new year, don’t really know what your longer-term vision is, or aren’t clear on what is important to you in life, and you’re ready to make changes, I would recommend my Time and Life Mastery online course. 

This is a complete package that will help you explore what is important to you. Once you have established those, I then show you how to build your standards into your daily life. 

Plus, you get my complete mini-course library for free when you join. And if you act now, you can save 50% with my End of Year Sale offer using the coupon code “codisgreat” (all lowercase, and one word). 

I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you. 

Thank you for listening, and let me wish you an amazing 2026. 

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

 "The first ritual you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it has the effect of setting the mind and setting the context for the rest of your day."

— Naval Ravikant or was it Eben Pagan? I don’t know, but it’s a great quote to begin today’s episode. 

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Script | 398

Hello, and welcome to episode 398 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. 

Your morning routine is one of the best ways to create a productive day. 

If you were to wake up at the very last moment, rush around your home getting ready while trying to sip your hot coffee, and rush out the door to catch the train to work, you’ve started the day in a stressed state, and you’re likely to stay stressed all day. 

It’s not a great way to begin the day. 

If you were to start the day with a set of routines that you follow every day, two things would happen.

The first is that you have no decisions to make, which preserves your decision-making powers—powers that diminish throughout the day. And the second is that the routine itself allows you to slow down. 

However, as with all things good for us, we can take it to extremes, which can create stress in itself. 

I remember in 2017, I began doing Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club. This is where you wake up at 5:00 AM, do twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, twenty minutes of planning, and twenty minutes of learning. 

It’s a great routine, but unfortunately for me, in 2018, I began coaching, which meant I was doing calls late at night, significantly reducing the sleep I was getting. 

I found myself walking around all day like a zombie. 

I decided to stop doing the 5 AM Club routine and develop my own, which I’ve stuck with for seven years now, and I still love my mornings. 

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

This week’s question comes from Teagan. Teagan asks, In my morning routine, I take care of my pets, check my home budgeting app, then have breakfast and coffee while doing my email sort. My daily planning is done the night before. The problem is that I don't want to transition to getting dressed and starting work after doing this routine. It takes me 3 hours or more to get going. I'd like to do some physical activity, but this would make the morning even longer. Do you have any tips on moving more efficiently through the morning?

Hi Teagan, thank you for your question. 

I think the simple answer would be to include getting dressed as part of your morning routine. However, before you get there, I think there may be an issue in your routine.

Three hours is too long for a morning routine. 

Let me explain. Imagine you had a flight to catch at 7:00 AM. It takes you 90 minutes to get to the airport, and you need to allow 2 hours for check-in and getting to your gate. 

That would mean you need to leave your house at 3:30 AM. 

If your morning routine takes three hours, you would need to start your day at 12:30 AM. Therefore, dangerously reducing your sleep time. 

Most people think of doing their morning routines when everything is normal. Unfortunately, “normal” is not a consistent state of affairs for most of us. It may happen 90% of the time, but when we develop our morning routines, we need to consider the 10% of days when it doesn’t and how we will start the day on those days. 

The “perfect” morning routine is a routine you do 100% of the time. 

This would be your starting point. 

I’ve found that a morning routine of around 45 minutes is realistic. This means that even on days when you need to start your day earlier than usual, there are few excuses you can use not to do your routine. 

Although hopefully you won’t need “excuses” for not doing it. 

Your morning routine should be something you look forward to doing. It gives you a reason to jump out of bed, not crawl out. 

It should be built around things you enjoy doing. To give you an example, my morning routine is:

In total, that takes me about 40 to 50 minutes. It depends on how much I write in my journal. 

As I know my routine won’t take any longer than 50 minutes, I can confidently decide when to set my wake-up time. 

For example, on a Monday, I have a call at 7:00 am; therefore, I wake up at 6:00 am. Other days, I can wake up at my preferred time of 8:00 am. 

Last summer, we needed to leave for the airport at 5:00 am. This meant on that day, I woke up at 4:00 am and was ready to go at 5:00 am. 

I don’t include getting dressed in my morning routine. I get dressed as my tea is brewing after I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth. 

The purpose of your morning routine is to mentally prepare you for the day ahead. It’s not to create more stress. 

I love writing my journal and that first cup of tea of the day. When my alarm goes off in the morning, it’s often the first thing I think about, and I do jump out of bed—much to Louis’s annoyance—he’s not a morning dog. 

Robin Sharma recently posted his “new” four-hour morning routine on YouTube. It’s a superb, inspiring and motivational routine, yet completely impractical for most people. 

You don’t need a four-hour morning routine to get the benefits of the morning routine. 

Some people love exercise in the morning, others don’t. That doesn’t mean that those who don’t like exercise in the morning miss out. 

For a morning routine that works for you, start with what you love doing. 

You mentioned your pets. If your pets like to go out in the morning, and it’s something you enjoy doing, then you can build that into your morning routine. However, if it’s just refilling water bowls and giving them breakfast, you could use that as the trigger to start your routine. 

The trigger is the first thing you do in the morning. 

For me, that’s putting the kettle on; for others, it could be a visit to the bathroom or letting their dog out. 

The trigger should be something you automatically do without thinking. This is similar to what James Clear calls “habit stacking”. It’s the first in a series of activities that start the stack. 

So how do you transition from your morning routines to the start of your day? 

This will depend on whether you work from home or go to an office. 

If you work from home, the last activity of your morning routine should automatically transition you. 

For example, clearing my email inbox is the last activity of my routine, and it smoothly transitions me into my first task of the day. 

Today, that was to write this script. 

Now, why do I clear my email first? I protect the first 30 minutes of my day for emergencies or urgent requests. So, today I began at 8:00 am and started writing this script at 9:30 am. 9:30 am is usually when my focus time starts. 

If there’s an email that requires an urgent response, I have time to deal with it without it distracting me while I am focusing on my most important work of the day. It clears my head and reassures me there’s nothing more important than doing that first task. 

If you work in an office, the last activity in your routine should be leaving for work. You know when you need to leave for work, so you have a reference point you can use to decide when you should be waking up. 

The definition of a routine is something that you do consistently, often without thinking. I’ve been doing my morning routines for seven years, and I frequently find myself sitting at my desk writing in my journal, wondering how I got there. 

I know I’ve followed my routines. I have a cup of hot tea next to me, and I am dressed. These routines are ingrained into how I begin each day.

One thing I do, though, that may help you, Teagan, is I lay out my clothes before I go to bed. When I wake up, my clothes are there right in front of me—no decision to make. Just put them on and start my day. 

Having your clothes laid out ready for you in the morning may mean that you need a small end-of-day routine. 

While you may not have a formalised closing-down routine, one thing you can do as you get ready for bed is to lay out your clothes for tomorrow morning after you’ve brushed your teeth. 

Then, in the morning, you’ve reduced the resistance to getting dressed and starting the day. 

So there you go, Teagan. I would first suggest you look at your morning routines and see where you could reduce them so they don’t last more than an hour. Think about those days when you may need to wake up early—could you still complete your morning routines? 

Make sure what you have in your routines are things you love doing. If you don’t love doing them, your morning routines will become a chore. Not the best way to start your day. 

And for getting dressed, set out your clothes the evening before so you reduce the resistance when you wake up. 

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

This podcast will be on a break next week, so let me wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive end to 2025. 

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

That was President John Kennedy in 1961, speaking at the Joint Session of Congress. It is possibly the best example of a project statement ever made. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.

Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.

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

The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

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Script | 397

Hello, and welcome to episode 397 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. 

Starting projects. It can be tough. Where do you start? Where will you find the time? And what do you need to do? 

These are just some of the questions you will find yourself asking. 

Yet the biggest obstacle to completing a project on time is overthinking and over-planning. Thinking about and planning a project are not the same as working on one. Working on a project is doing something that moves it forward. 

Decorating your bedroom will require paint and brushes. The only pre-project decision you need to make is what colour. 

The first two steps, therefore, are: 

I would add a third decision: when. When will you do it? 

Once you’ve done those three things, you’re ready to go—no more planning, no more thinking. Just get on and start. 

Yet, that’s not how most projects go, is it? There’s thinking, planning, then creating tasks in your task manager, and if it’s a work project, a meeting, then perhaps another meeting. 

Often, by the time a project is conceived, 80% of the time required to complete it gets spent on thinking, planning, and meetings. 

And that brings us nicely to this week’s question—a question about finding ways to reduce the thinking and planning time. 

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

This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, “Hi Carl, how do you work on complex projects?” I find I spend a lot of time planning a project, end up with a long list of things to do, and when it comes to starting, I freeze. It’s as if I don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips on handling this type of problem?

Hi Phil, thank you for your question. 

“Project freeze” is a common problem for many people. I suspect this stems from the belief that every aspect of a project needs to be planned before starting. Yet, for many projects, this would be impossible. 

Imagine you were part of NASA in May 1961, and you’d just heard President Kennedy’s speech at the joint session of Congress about why the US should put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth before the end of the decade. 

At that time, NASA was struggling to get even the smallest of rockets into space—the idea of sending astronauts to the moon and back was a pipe dream. 

Yet a group of incredible people at NASA in 1961 took on the challenge. Instead of planning every single step they thought would be needed to complete the project, they looked at what they already knew, the obstacles they would need to overcome, and the first steps.

That gave birth to the Mercury space mission. The Mercury programme was not to put a man on the moon; its objectives were to orbit a crewed spacecraft around Earth, study the human ability to function in space, and ensure the safe recovery of both the astronaut and the spacecraft.

Before they could reach the moon, they needed to understand how humans cope in space. So the project’s objective was to send a man into Earth’s orbit. 

The key was to get started, and they did this by listing out the obstacles they needed to overcome first. They then worked out how to remove those obstacles. 

Now, I know our projects are unlikely to be as big as sending someone to the moon and back, but we can adopt the same approach that NASA used to work on our projects. 

Even small projects can adopt this approach. Let’s say you were asked to do a presentation on the likely effects of AI on your company’s business over the next five years. Where would you start? 

For something like this, there would be several phases. 

The first would be to research and gather information. For this, the task would likely be to find out who to ask or what to read. 

Okay, when will you do this? 

Here’s the key point. It’s no good just deciding what needs to be done first. You need to make it intentional, and to do that, you will need to set aside time to do it. 

Perhaps you decide to give yourself an afternoon to research this. 

Research is a challenge in itself. We can go down rabbit holes that bring no meaningful insights into what we are trying to do. Yet, we can also underestimate how much time is required for research. So the first step is to do an initial session of research to help you develop some boundaries. 

You might be lucky and find that the first research session gives you everything you need to start the presentation. However, if not, and you discover you need to do more research, then when will you do that? 

One thing you can do with creating a presentation is to set up your PowerPoint or Keynote file. Create the document, do the first slide and perhaps set the theme colours. 

Having a document started makes it much easier to get into creating the presentation. 

The danger of listing out all the things you think you need to do to complete the project is that 80% of what you think needs to be done doesn’t, and you will find that 80% of what ends up being done were things you never thought of in the first place. 

All you really need is a starting point. 

I recently did a video on how to write a book. The number one reason people who want to write but never do write a book is that they overthink and plan it. 

Thinking and planning do not produce a book. 

The best way to write a book is to get the first draft written as fast as you can. All that is required is a few ideas about what you want to write about. From there, you start writing the first draft. 

The first draft will be the worst state your book will ever be in. It’s meant to be messy, unstructured and occasionally unreadable. 

But, once you have a first draft, you have around 80,000 words you can manipulate, craft and organise into a best seller. Without that first draft, you have nothing but a few ideas.

How do you write a first draft? Set aside time each day to write. An hour or two every day for eight weeks will give you your first draft. 

As you write, new ideas will form, and you can make a note of those along the way. That will make your editing easier. 

The common denominator with any project is to get started. Everything has a starting point. Wherever that is, start there. 

It’s as you are working on the project that your next steps reveal themselves. 

When I first began creating online courses, I had no idea what I was doing. But what I did have was fifteen years of teaching experience, and I knew how to create a lesson plan. 

I also knew what I wanted to create an online course on. So I could create a lesson plan and a topic. That was where I started. 

Once I had a lesson plan, I realised I needed a storyboard of sorts to help me break the course down into lessons. That evolved into the outline I have written for every course I have created since. 

Now, after eight years of creating courses, I have a process I follow. All I need is a topic and time to plan, outline, record, edit and post. (Five steps) 

On big projects, many tasks are completed before the project ends. Yet, if you were to try to predict what needs to be done at the start, you will find you are wasting a lot of time. 

NASA had no idea whether a human being could survive in space. What they did know was that they needed to develop a reliable rocket to get them into space. So, they began with that. Without the rocket, it didn’t matter whether a human could survive in space or not. There would have been no way of getting them there. 

In 1962, NASA didn’t know that they would need software to keep the spacecraft on the right trajectory. There was no way they could have planned for that at that point. It was only when they began working on the Gemini programme that they realised software would be needed. 

Without paint and brushes, it wouldn’t matter what colour you wanted to paint your bedroom. 

In many ways, when you’re working on a large, complex project, you’re solving problems as you go along. Yet, there’s always going to be a starting point. 

Another thing about bigger projects is setting a deadline. 

Because we are not sure how long a large project will take to complete, it can be tempting to set an unrealistic deadline. Three months to complete a project that realistically would take twelve.

This is why setting up the project’s stages will help you. 

What’s the first stage? Give yourself a realistic time frame to complete that first stage. The information you gather during that first stage will guide you with the deadlines for the next stage. 

I would also take another leaf from NASA’s book. President Kennedy said, “before the decade is out”. Given that he made this speech in 1961, NASA had around 9 years to complete the project. Yet it was not absolute. 

Theoretically, the deadline was 31 December 1969, but the actual deadline was a grey area until NASA got closer to achieving the goal. 

Deadlines are good as they bring energy to the project. Yet, unrealistic deadlines bring nothing but stress to a project. 

I know an online course will take me about 6 weeks to complete. I know the process, and I’ve learned from experience that the whole process takes six weeks. 

If I were to stop doing all my other work, close my calendar to appointments and work solidly for fourteen hours a day for two weeks, I might be able to complete the course in two weeks, but all I would have is a lot of stress. Not pleasant. 

Six weeks gives me time to bring the course to life, check things, and make sure everything fits together. 

And the final part of developing any project is to be clear about your outcomes. 

I refer you back to the opening quotation from President Kennedy:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

A perfect project outcome statement. It’s clear about the objective, and there is a timeline. There was nothing else for NASA to know.

Something they did with magnificent effort on the 20th July 1969. 

Thank you, Phil, 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. 

"In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention." — Pico Iyer

How do you feel when you have nothing to do but enjoy your surroundings? Where nothing is urgent, and you can enjoy the moment you are in? 

Never felt it? Maybe that’s a problem you need to fix. Today’s world makes us feel that everything must be done now, yet it doesn’t. If you were to slow down, step back from time to time to think, you’d get a lot more important things done and eliminate much of what is unnecessary. 

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Script | 396

Hello, and welcome to episode 396 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. 

Slow down. There, I’ve said it. 

If there were one distinguishing characteristic of those who control how they spend their time and when, it would be that they are slow. 

Not in a negative way, more in an intentional way. They meet their deadlines, are never late for appointments and have clearly had time to read through the meeting preparation notes. 

Even in one of the most stressful occupations, that of being a special forces soldier, they are trained to slow down. The US Navy SEALs have the expression “slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”, and I know from talking with former members of the UK Special Forces that a large part of their training is focused on slowing down and being deliberate with their actions.

Of course, the problem here is that when you’re faced with twelve urgent Teams messages, you have five missed calls from an important customer, and your next appointment is about to start, the last thing your instincts will tell you to do is to slow down. 

Yet it is precisely in those situations that slowing down and being intentional about what you do next is what you do. 

Slowing down calms your over-anxious mind, and when your mind is calm, you make better, more rational decisions. 

And slowing down is what this week’s question is all about. So, to kick us off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Hanna. Hanna asks, Hi Carl, I work in a very busy Pharmaceutical company, and from the moment I step through the door at work, it feels like chaos. My phone never seems to stop ringing, and my Teams feed looks like it’s alive. It’s always moving! The day’s a blur. What can I do to slow things down and regain some control?

Hi Hanna. Thank you for your question. 

One of the things I’ve learned is that we do have control over the speed of the day. I know often it feels like we don’t, but we do. 

The reason is that we always have choices, even when it often feels like we don’t.

You can choose to answer your phone or let it run to voicemail. You can choose to answer those urgent Teams messages immediately or not, and you can choose to go to the staff rest area and make yourself a nice cup of tea. 

Unfortunately, it’s natural for us to head straight into the storm of those phone calls and messages. And when we do that, we start conditioning ourselves to do it consistently. 

Yet maybe the best thing you can do is pause, make that cup of tea, and strategically plan your approach. 

This is often what I call the tactical retreat. Step back, pause, and look at what’s currently on your plate and your most important tasks for the day. 

However, you will only be able to do that if you can move from being a firefighter to becoming a fire prevention officer. 

Firefighters charge straight into every issue with only one intention: putting the fire out. Fire prevention officers: pause, look at the bigger picture, and seek ways to prevent the fires from starting in the first place. 

In all companies, you need both types of people. You’re not going to prevent every crisis or urgent issue. Yet many can be prevented. 

I gave one example in last week’s episode. 

If you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first. 

If you don’t have a process or a strategy for handling that situation, you will panic. Panicking slows you down because the act of panicking creates a lot of activity, yet nothing happens to deal with the messages. 

The strategy I suggested was to use the first-in-first-out approach. Deal with the oldest first. This way, even if the last message you received is from your angry boss, at least you won’t have to deal with eight angry customers as well. 

And let’s be honest, if you were to give yourself fifteen minutes to deal with these messages, nobody would be waiting more than fifteen minutes for your response. 

There is one trick you can use every day that will help you slow things down. That is to protect the first thirty minutes of the day to get a handle on the day. 

Hopefully, you won’t have a crisis every day, but those first thirty minutes give you a chance to review your Teams messages, emails, and your plan for the day. You can also speak with your colleagues to see what’s happening and deal with anything urgent that popped up at the start of the day. 

More often than not, you won’t need the full thirty minutes, but you have it protected, and on the days you don’t need it, you can make yourself that lovely cup of tea. 

Another trick is to give yourself a proper screen break between work sessions. 

Now, this will depend on the kind of work you do. If you were a graphic designer, an accountant or a journalist, a lot of your work would be spent sitting in front of a computer screen. 

If you were to stop after ninety minutes, get up, and walk somewhere for ten minutes without a screen, that screen break would give you time to stop and think.

That thinking might be what element you can add or remove from the design you are creating, or where to place a particular paragraph in the article you are currently writing. 

Getting away from your screen allows your brain to relax. It’s when your brain is relaxed that you make better, more rational decisions. 

Yet, when we are under deadline pressure, stepping away for ten minutes is often the last thing we feel we should do. 

When you return, allow yourself 20 minutes to address any messages that may have come in while you were locked away doing focused work. 

Sometimes I find it helpful to look at the messages before I take the ten-minute break. That way, I can think about the responses while I’m relaxed. 

If you’ve found yourself reacting without thinking all the time, and from the moment you wake up, it feels like you’re go-go-go, that may be a sign you need to retrain your brain to slow down. 

The best way to do this is to set aside 30 to 45 minutes each morning. This time must be focused on you. Not your partner or kids. It’s time dedicated to yourself. 

You could write a journal or develop a slow, deliberate morning coffee ritual. Perhaps you could add some light stretching or go out for a morning walk. 

As long as it’s focused on you and the things you enjoy doing, you’ll find that this morning routine helps to rewire your brain to slow down. 

Now for an unusual one. 

Avoid unnecessary conveniences. 

Part of the Reason we all feel rushed today is the speed at which things can be done. We can order home-delivered food, have our laundry picked up and delivered clean and ironed, order our weekly supermarket shop online, and have it delivered straight to our door later that day or the next. 

Convenient, yes. Good for us, no.

I recently saw a video about why people in the UK began gaining weight alarmingly from around the late 1970s onwards. 

Yes, there was a shift in our diet. In 1979, Marks and Spencer introduced their first ready meal. It was their famous chicken Kiev, and it sparked a revolution in how families cooked. 

The M&S chicken Kiev was introduced at around the same time microwave ovens began taking off, and suddenly people were eating ready-made meals. 

No more “real” cooking. Boiling vegetables, cooking meat, it was pre-packaged and additive-riddled food that could be cooked in less than ten minutes. 

Then there were more and more convenient ways to travel. People stopped walking to the shops. People working in offices would walk the two metres to their car in the morning, drive to their office, park in the underground carpark, and walk the five metres to the lift (elevator) to arrive at their office, having walked no more than ten metres. 

Then to spend the rest of the day sitting behind a desk. 

All in the name of convenience. 

Yet, this convenience is causing us to speed up. 

Walking is one of the best ways for us to slow down. It’s one reason why studies show owning a dog can reduce stress and improve health. Dogs need walking. For me, walking Louis is one of my favourite times of the day. I get to think without a screen, get some fresh air and relax. 

And given that Louis will stop and investigate every tree and lamp post, it’s a slow walk. 

And the final tip is to plan your day before you finish the day. 

In other words, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you close out the day to review your appointments for tomorrow, curate your task list for the day based on how much time you have between meetings, and allow for the unknowns—there are some. 

Then pick your two must-do tasks, make sure they are highlighted and stop. 

You cannot do everything in one day, but doing a little often moves things forward, and soon things you thought would take hours are almost complete. 

Yet, in my experience, the most significant cause of our feeling that we have no control over our day or time is the way many people are chained to a screen. 

The current statistics indicate that over 7 hours a day are spent in front of a screen (and that does not include TVs). 

The problem here is that messages, emails, news alerts and much more are a constant stream. The more time you spend looking at your screen, the more anxiety you feel that you are falling behind with everything. When this happens, you are no longer in control; instead, your devices are controlling you. 

Yet if you were to go out for a twenty-minute walk after lunch, or do your own grocery shopping each week, you would find yourself slowing down naturally. 

Add that to perhaps reading a real book in the evening and spending 30 to 40 minutes in the morning doing yoga, meditation, or journaling. You’ll find that much of the speed anxiety many of you feel will start to disappear. 

As for walking into your workplace and getting caught up in the rush of things, take a deep breath, make sure you know what your two most important items of work for that day are, and between sessions of work, get up, move around, make yourself some tea or coffee and think about what one thing you need to do next. 

I hope that helps, Hanna. 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. 

"The mind is like water. When it's turbulent, it's hard to see. When it's calm, everything becomes clear." — Kobe Bryant 

Kobe Bryant was definitely onto something when he spoke those words. If you’re not in control of your commitments and have no idea what needs to be done next, you’re going to be stressed. And stress, like turbulent water, makes it hard to see where you should be spending your time. 

Links:

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Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.

Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.

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

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 395

Hello, and welcome to episode 395 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

What’s the point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around—work that will need to be done at some point anyway?

Well, yes and no. 

Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub. 

It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix. 

Today, it’s very different. Most of you listening to this podcast will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain. 

And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem. 

I remember when I worked in a law firm, I caught the bus home and often spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem. In the past, people would have looked forward to getting home to their families.

When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy that time with your family and friends. 

Today, it also means there’s no barrier—except our own willpower—to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night. 

In the past, the factory gates were locked, or someone else was doing your job on the night shift. It wasn’t possible to work beyond your regular working hours.

Time management was much easier. Not so today.

And that nicely leads us to this week’s question. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, I’ve spent years struggling with time management, and it’s got to the point where I think there’s no point. As hard as I try, there’s always something that needs to be done, and I never get a chance to finish anything and end up with everything being urgent. Is there any point to all this time management and productivity stuff?  

Hi Michael, thank you for your question. 

In many respects, you might be right that managing time, or at least trying to, is a waste of time. (I think there might be a pun there) 

As I alluded to, with knowledge work and the explosion of communication tools over the last few years, things that could have waited a day or two now seem to have to be dealt with immediately. 

It’s not that the task is suddenly urgent; it’s a combination of people’s expectations and the delivery system. 

The problem here is that no matter how fast the delivery system becomes—or other people’s expectations— we are human. We can still only do one thing at a time. That is not going to change in our lifetime. 

And that’s where to start—understanding that you, as an individual, can only work on one thing at a time. 

In other words, if you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first. 

Now, you could come up with a complex, convoluted system for deciding which message to respond to first, or you could adopt a more straightforward first-in-first-out approach. Start with the oldest and work your way through your list of messages. 

What are we talking about here—perhaps a ten-minute delay for you to get to a particular message? Does ten minutes really matter? You’re not trying to save someone’s life in an emergency room, are you? 

Messages are often more time-sensitive than emails, and I find that responding to them between work sessions works best. 

For instance, if you were to protect 9:30 to 11:30 am for focused work. That’s two hours where you are technically not available. Once you finish that session, check your messages and respond to any that require a response. 

When I set these barriers of doing undisturbed, focused work for two hours a day, I used to panic every time my phone dinged. I felt I had to respond immediately. Of course, that was not true. It never was, and it’s still not true for any of us today. 

It took a few weeks to wean myself off panicking every time a message came in, but the results were fantastic. My productivity went through the roof, leading to fewer urgent tasks. 

Our brains are not good at handling interruptions to the flow of work. I’ve seen studies showing that even a minor interruption can take you up to 18 minutes to refocus and get back to where you were before. 

Think about that for a moment. Even if you were taking ten minutes to refocus and getting an average of six interruptions per day, you’ve lost an hour. Or to put it into a better perspective, that’s 12 ½ per cent of your work day gone. Wasted.

By responding to messages between work sessions, you avoid losing focus and get more work done in less time. 

And it’s there that you will find fewer urgent tasks to do. Because you are getting more done in less time, you will be able to stay on top of projects and other work without getting too close to the deadline. 

Another area that can make us feel that managing our time is a waste of time is focusing on the number of tasks rather than the time we have available.

Again, this is linked to the fragility of being human. We are affected by how much sleep we get, our mood, and our diet. 

Have a bad night’s sleep, then a fight with your kids over the breakfast table and a sugary doughnut as a midmorning snack, and you’re not going to get a lot of work done. 

You have a sleep debt, you’re worked up by the argument, and that doughnut is going to give you a massive energy crash. 

This is why estimating how long a task will take is challenging. 

I’ve been writing a 1,000-word blog post every week for around ten years now. You’d think I would be able to estimate reasonably accurately how long writing 1,000 words would take after writing over 500 blog posts.

Ha! No chance. Some days I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes, other days it can take me two hours. 

The biggest effect on how long it will take me is sleep. If I get my seven hours, I know it’ll take me less than an hour. Less than six hours, and I’m struggling to do it in two hours. 

A better approach is to allocate time for doing groups of linked tasks. For example, group all your actionable emails and set aside 40 to 60 minutes at the end of the day to deal with them. 

This way, it doesn’t matter how many emails you have to act on; you do as many as you can in the time you have. 

If you’re doing this every day, you’ll soon find you have no email backlogs.

What amazes me is the people who try this for a few days and give up because their huge backlog of actionable emails is not getting significantly smaller. Well, of course not. If you’re starting with six hundred actionable emails, it’s going to take you a long time to get that under control. 

What you could do is set aside a one-off period to get that backlog under control first. Then set a time each day to keep it under control. 

Or make sure you have a “net-gain” with your responses. For instance, if you get 20 actionable emails in a day, respond to at least 21. That’s a net gain. If you do that consistently over a few weeks, your backlog of actionable emails will reduce significantly. 

You’re not going to lose the holiday weight you gained in a few days. It might have only taken you a few days to gain that weight, but it’s going to take you a few weeks, if not months, to lose it. (Life’s tough, isn’t it?) 

Most of the reasons why so many people quit making necessary changes, whether in their work or personal life, are linked to the initial difficulty of change. 

All change is difficult at first. You’re changing. But soon that change becomes your norm, and then it becomes easy. It becomes “just what you do”. 

There’s a time and place for the things you want to or must do. This is where your calendar comes into play. 

Scheduling time for play, rest and exercise is just as important as scheduling meetings with your clients or boss. Trouble is, we don’t do that. We prioritise work over other essential things in our lives. 

As Jim Rohn said, “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two”

Ask yourself, where’s your boundary? If you don’t have one, you’re not managing time; you’re allowing time to manage you. 

There are many ways you can take control of your calendar. 

You could, for example, limit the number of hours you spend in meetings each week. If you work a typical 40-hour week, you could set the maximum time you spend in meetings at 15 hours. That will leave you with 25 hours dedicated to doing your work tasks. 

Most people I talk with have no idea how much time they are spending in meetings each week. They say “yes” to every meeting request. WOW! If you don’t have control of that, you’re “up the creek without a paddle”. 

Managing time is about managing your calendar and doing the hard things, like saying no to additional meetings that won’t help you do your work. 

This is one reason why the old-fashioned paper planners were so good. Because you had to handwrite your appointments into your diary, there was no way you could double-book yourself. Sadly, that one simple feature does not exist in digital calendars. 

I’ve seen people with four appointments all scheduled at the same time. Come on, you cannot be in two meetings at once, let alone four!

You can also protect blocks of time for doing your most important work each day. It’s not difficult, and with shared calendars, doing so indicates to other people that you are not available at that time. 

And most important of all, you can do a short daily planning session where you look at your calendar to see where your commitments are, then curate your to-do list so that the number of tasks you have for today is realistic, given how much non-meeting time you have. 

Yet none of these are tool issues. These are human decisions we need to make, and we need to be strong enough to follow through with them. Blaming our boss, colleagues, customers, or tools won’t improve the situation. 

Only by being strong enough to say “no, not then, how about this time”, can you ever regain control of your time and see a corresponding increase in your productivity. 

So there you go, Michael. Time management and productivity systems can and do work, but they only work if you are willing to make the difficult choices that come with them. 

Be consistent in trusting your calendar. Allow it to structure your day between your work and home life. 

Don’t allow someone else’s “urgent” to become your urgent. Respond to messages appropriately, but within your time frames. 

I hope that has helped, and 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. 

Back in October, I gave you the five questions to ask yourself before 2026. In this special follow-up episode, I share with you what you can do with the list you have been building over the last two months. 

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Script | 394

Hello, and welcome to episode 394 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. 

Hopefully, you’ve started creating a list of things you want to change and or do in 2026. If not, it’s not too late. 

If you missed that episode, the five questions are:

What would you like to change about yourself? This question is focused on you, your habits—good and bad.

What would you like to change about your lifestyle? This is about how you live, the material things, if you like, such as your home, car and other possessions that improve your lifestyle.

What would you like to change about the way you work? The professional question. Perhaps you want to learn more about AI, or change jobs and work from home, or maybe go back to working in an office.

What can you do to challenge yourself? What could you do that frightens you slightly? This question is designed to help you move out of your comfort zone. 

What goals could you set for next year? Realistically, what could you accomplish next year that has alluded you? 

The idea behind this exercise is to give you time to think a little deeper and discover where you are happy and where you feel things need to change. 

Now, one thing you will find helpful is to go back to your Areas of Focus. There, you have your definitions of what family and relationships, health and fitness, career, lifestyle, self-development and others mean to you. Often, you will find that by reviewing these eight areas, you will find something you have neglected over the previous twelve months. 

As I’ve been helping my coaching clients with this exercise, it’s surprising how many of them have discovered neglected areas. This is quite natural, given that once the year begins, we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day crises. Then we drift away from our good intentions. 

In a perfect world, you would give yourself two months to reflect on these questions. To explore options and talk with your family. But don’t worry if you have not started yet. There’s still time to develop your thoughts and ideas.

Now, some people have asked me where best to capture these ideas.

Over the last two years, I’ve written these questions out in the back of my planning book. This book is always on or near my desk, and I have captured a lot more ideas this way than I ever did digitally. 

So, my advice to you is: if you have not started this exercise, grab yourself a notebook, write the five questions as headings, and over the next few weeks, allow yourself to think about them and write down your ideas.

Right now, it’s less about what you write out and more about just getting everything written. And there’s a very good reason for this. 

If you do this exercise over a few weeks, what you will discover is that a theme will develop.

Let me explain. Last year, I failed at getting back to fitness. During 2023, I reduced my exercise time to focus on writing Your Time Your Way. I also wasn’t very careful about what I ate, and as a consequence, my weight ballooned. 

Last year was supposed to be the year I got back into shape, and I failed miserably. 

So, last year, as I went through these questions and captured ideas, I soon found that health and fitness were common themes. This meant when I began 2025, my focus was to get back into shape and not repeat the mistakes I made in 2024. 

And it worked. I went from touching 88 kilograms (around 195 pounds) in January to where I wanted it to be—80 kilograms (around 176 pounds) by the middle of July. 

To do that, I needed to change a few habits. Moving more and locking in a consistent exercise time were the obvious ones, but I also looked at my diet and removed all processed foods, replacing them with natural foods—real vegetables, fruit, and fresh meat. 

Given that around Christmas and the end of the year are quiet times for me, I reviewed my calendar and moved a few things around to accommodate my new routine. 

Another example, I remember two years ago, a client of mine was struggling to grow her side business. It was causing her a lot of frustration. 

One idea she wrote down was to work harder on her business in the evenings, but every time she looked at that, she felt that was unrealistic, given that she had two sons, one aged three and the other five. 

As we were talking about this, I asked her if she’d spoken with her husband about him possibly taking responsibility for the kids a few nights a week so she could “disappear” and work in her business. 

She hadn’t. So her “homework” that week was to discuss with her husband. The result was fantastic. He agreed to take full responsibility for the boys Monday through Friday, leaving her undisturbed time in the evening to work on her business. 

Within six months, she was able to give up her full-time job and work solely on her own business. That reduced the need for her to work on her business in the evenings, and she returned to what many would describe as a normal work/life balance. 

Yet none of this would have happened had she not spent some time thinking about the five questions. She would have carried on as before and become increasingly frustrated. 

The theme she discovered was that she desperately wanted her side business to succeed, but to do so, she needed to spend more time on it. Time she thought she did not have. 

As I’ve been going through my questions this year, I’ve seen a theme emerge: Less but better.

Now I have a history with this quote from Dieter Rams, the celebrated industrial designer behind the German company Braun. He’s been one of my design heroes for many years, and his Ten Principles of Good Design philosophy is ingrained in my thinking about everything I produce.

Less but better bleeds into every area of my life, not just my professional life. For example, I have added to do a big clothes throw-out at the end of the year, leaving myself only with quality clothing made entirely of natural fibres—cotton, leather and wool. 

These clothes and shoes are often more expensive than their man-made fibre equivalents, but they are also generally of a higher quality and last considerably longer. 

So own fewer clothes, boots, and shoes, but better-quality items. 

On a professional front, we’ve all heard a lot about how AI may, or may not, change the way we work. There’s a lot of hype around at the moment, and it’s not easy to see what’s realistic and what is fantasy. 

However, what’s real is that AI is here and not going away. So, what could you do to keep up to date on what AI can do? 

Maybe you could take a course, read a book, or do some self-learning beyond using ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions you used to ask Google. 

Now, this may overlap with your self-development focus. It’s certainly a fascinating topic to learn, and in doing so, you may find that you can save yourself a lot of time by creating a process that AI does automatically for you. 

The reason many people struggle to find what they really want is that life gets in the way. Family and professional demands pull our attention all over the place, and when we do stop, we’re exhausted and just want to flop into the easy chair, open our phones, and scroll through social media or the news. 

One or two days like that is no problem, but it can rapidly become a habit, and we drift far from where we want to be. 

Having a plan or a goal for the year gives you a roadmap for when you do become distracted and perhaps a little lost. You can use your weekly planning sessions to review your year-long plan, or, if you’re doing well, review it every 3 to 6 months. 

If you’ve been working on this since October, now’s the time to begin filtering down your list. If you’ve found a theme or a few connected ideas, these will likely be the ones you highlight as potential goals to set. 

This brainstorming exercise will generate many ideas, which will be too many to accomplish in 12 months. What you want to be doing now is looking for the ones that excite you and, more importantly, are realistic goals for the next 12 months. 

Remember, you don’t have to do all of what you wrote. You can keep this list in your digital notes by scanning your notebook pages into a note titled “Annual Planning 2025.” Then next October, you can come back to the list to see if you can move anything onto your 2027 list. 

Over time, you create an extraordinary archive of ideas you’ve had over the years, and you will see how much you are accomplishing—you really are. 

While I haven’t filtered down my list yet, I’m already excited about 2026. It’s going to be focused on less but with a lot more quality. 

You will make decisions, experience setbacks and failures, and face frustrations, but by the end of 2026, I know you will be further ahead than you are today. And that’s what it’s all about. 

Now go on and break open that notebook and ask yourself the five questions:

Good luck, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very productive week.