This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system?

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Episode 277 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 277 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next?

On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps. 

However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment. 

So, that is what we will be looking at today and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager? 

Hi Andy, thank you for your question. 

The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance. 

At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years. 

However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not. 

However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us? 

The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day. 

With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope)

If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging. 

Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks. 

Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then. 

My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day. 

Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas. 

In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching. 

The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work. 

However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work. 

Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do. 

I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks. 

And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique. 

Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar. 

The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful. 

It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting. 

Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on. 

Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week. 

So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, we’re looking at how to define your core work and how that translates into what you do each day. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Episode 276 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 276 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

In the Time Sector Course, I introduce the concept of “core work”. The work you are employed to do or perhaps another way to look at it, the things you are responsible for at work. It’s your core work that you will be evaluated on by your employer, and if you are self-employed it is the work that generates your income. 

If you were never to define what this part of your work is, you would find yourself caught up in trivialities masquerading as important work. Those petty disagreements between colleagues, most emails and messages and water cooler gossip. 

However, defining what your core work is one part of the process. There is another, more important part to understanding your core work, which is what this week’s question is all about. This question also came up in a recent workshop I did. Defining your core work is quite different from knowing how that definition operates at a task level. Today, I hope to illuminate this important step for you.

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 Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I am a Senior Vice President for a small pharmaceutical company. I took your Time Sector Course and have got stuck with my core work. I think I know what that is, but I don’t know how that works day to day. Could you help me with this?

Hi Linda, Thank you for your question. 

Let’s start with why it’s important to identify your core work. Most of our time management and productivity issues evolve from having too much to do and not enough time to do it. This creates backlogs and that leads to you feeling overwhelmed and anxious about how much to feel you have to do. 

Yet, there are different types of tasks we need to do. There are the absolute, the discretionary, and the time wasters. If we do not identify what our absolutes are we end up spending too much time on the discretionary and time wasting tasks. 

Spending some time identifying your absolute must do tasks means you can then allocate sufficient time to get these done each week. However, in order to identify what these tasks are, we need to know what we are specifically employed to do. 

For example, if you are a salesperson, you primary roll is to sell your company’s products or services. This means your core work is any activity that will potentially lead to a sale. This could be calling prospects, meeting with existing customers and asking for referrals. 

Once you know this, you can define what these activities mean at a task level. Calling prospects, for instance, could mean you dedicate one hour each morning to call potential customers and try to arrange appointments. You could also, set aside a hour on a Friday afternoon to contact your existing customers to make appointments to meet with them the following week. 

A salesperson core work is not filling out activity reports for their sales manager or sitting in sales meetings. None of these activities risk leading to a sale. However, these might be important, to your sales manager, and you will need time to do them, but they should not take priority over your sales related tasks. 

It’s as Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn preached—majors and minors. Major time is being in front of your customer. Minor time is sitting in an office chatting with your colleagues. 

Now for you Linda, your roll is a leadership roll. Your core work is likely to be centred around supporting your team so they can do their jobs with as little interruption as possible. Your roll is not to micro-manage your team, your roll is to clear obstacles so they can get on and do their jobs. This will inevitably involve meetings with your team—although not too many so as not to interrupt their work.

I’m reminded of how Red Bull Racing’s Team Principle, Christian Horner, organises his work. Christina Horner is not only the Team Principle, he’s also the CEO of the company. In a recent video Red Bull put out we were given an insight into how he divides his time. During a race weekend, he is the Team Principle and will be track-side with the rest of his team. He’s dealing with media responsibilities, leading team briefings and managing race strategy. 

When he returns to the team’s base on a Monday or Tuesday, he’s the CEO. His role and core work has changed. Here he will have meetings with his key people to make sure everything is running as it should be and if it isn’t he will discuss strategies to get things moving in the right direction. Christian Horner’s role as the CEO is to keep a focus on the company’s goals and to be guide his team towards achieving their goals. 

Christian Horner’s core work as a CEO is to listen to his team, ask question and help to remove blocks to successfully completing projects and goals. His tasks will come from these meetings. He may need to discuss with the board to increase funding for different areas, or he may need to call a key supplier to speed up the delivery of a key component. His core work is to assist his team in solving problems so they can achieve their goals and targets. 

A leader’s core work is generally two-fold. To support their team and to report to the board of directors. To support their team, that will involve talking with the key people. So arranging regular meetings with these people is a task. Similarly, serving the board is a core work task. What does the board want? Quite often, information for the board is consistent. Reports, for instance may need to be sent to the board each month. Collecting the information and delivering these reports will be core work tasks. When and how will you do that? 

Now an issue I frequently come across is a person identifying their core work, but then not distilling that down to a task level. For instance, I create content. I consider that to be a part of my core work. Yet, just saying I create content is not enough. What does that look like at a task level? For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters, recording this podcast and filming two YouTube videos each week. The tasks here are writing, recording and filming. Now I know that, the only question remaining is when will I do that each week. 

Now I’ve been creating this content for a long time, I know how long each piece takes, so all I need do now is block time out on my calendar for creating content and make sure the tasks are in my task manager. 

So, to give you an example of how this looks, I have two hours blocked out Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. That is sufficient time to get my writing commitments completed. I have three hours blocked out on Friday morning for recording and filming. That takes care of my podcast and YouTube videos. 

Core work is non-negotiable, it must be done. This is why once you know how long you need (and you will soon learn how long your core work will take) you make sure you have sufficient time blocked out on your calendar each week for doing it.

If I include all the writing, recording and editing, I need around twelve hours each week to do my core work. When you distil your work down to its core level, you will find to complete it requires considerably less time than you think. You soon realise you have plenty of time left over for meetings and other work. By blocking out time each week for your core work, you know before the week begins you always have sufficient time for this important work. 

Architects and designers need time to do their creative work and discuss projects with clients. Architects may also need to discuss materials with suppliers. However, the core work—the work that ultimately pays their income—will be the design work. If they have not set aside enough time for doing that work, everything else will be irrelevant. 

If we look an example of a hotel general manager, their core work is to ensure the hotel is profitable, and the highest standards are maintained. Describing core work like that is not helpful at a task level. What does ensuring the hotel is profitable look like at a task level? That could be to regularly meet with the hotel’s sales and marketing team to discuss strategy. What about maintaining the hotel’s standards? That would involve walking around the hotel each day inspecting rooms, food service and cleanliness. 

I once worked with a general manager who did this every morning before his management meeting. If he spotted anything below standard he would discuss this with the relevant departmental manager in the management meeting. This was not done as a telling off session. It was about highlighting issues with the relevant manager. This method ensured the management team were all focused on the same thing. No manager wanted to be called out in the meeting. 

This particular manager went on to have a highly successful career rising to becoming Operations Director of the hotel group. 

While leadership roles are different from managerial roles in many ways, the key with leadership is to empower and trust your team will do their jobs to the best of their abilities. As a leader, your job is serve your team and help them do that. It’s not to get in their way or do their jobs for them—if you need to do that, why are you employing them in the first place. I always think of leadership core work as communicating with their team and guiding them to successfully completing their projects. Meetings helps, but can often get in the way of doing the work. Perhaps you could learn from my former general manager and make it a core work principle to do a walk round of your department each morning virtually or in person. 

So there you go, Linda. I hope that has helped. It’s likely you have identified the abstract part of your ore work. All you need do is answer the question; what does that look like at a task level? 

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. 

In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Planning Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 275 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 275 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you ever stopped to establish some rules by which you do your work and live your life? If not, you could be missing out on something very powerful that helps you to automate what you do and reduce a lot of decision making. 

A lot of the issues around productivity and better managing our time comes around because everything we do is treated as unique or new. Yet, a lot of what we do each day is not unique. In fact, we are likely repeating the same steps each day, but because we have not established a routine or process for doing these tasks, they feel cumbersome and that leaves us finding excuses for not doing them. 

That then kicks off a cycle of pain. Take email for example, we let it pile up until eventually we are forced to do something about it, and then we waste a whole day (or in some cases a week) just trying to get on top of it and deal with the backlog. That’s not a very productive way of managing your email. 

This week’s question is all about how and where to establish some rules of engagement with your work. 

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

This week’s question comes from Matty. Matty asks, Hi Carl, do you have any suggestions for simplifying tasks and work? I find as soon as the week starts, any plans I may have soon so complicated I never know where I should be starting. 

Thank you, Matty for your question. 

Interesting you use the words “simplifying tasks and work”, that’s what it’s all about. If we can find a way to simplify the work we do, we become faster at it and it requires a lot less thought—and that’s always a good good thing. 

So what can we do to make doing our work easier and more automated? 

Let’s begin with email and other messages we receive at work. This is an area that screams out for a process and some rules. Email is coming at us all the time. It never seems to stop. For many of you, you likely get emails through the night as well. If we were to let it pile up it would become a tedious task trying to find the important mails and messages. So, a process here would help you to automate it. 

I’ve talked before about setting up an Action this Day folder in your mail for any email that requires some action from you. That could be replying or reading. If you need to take any kind of action, drop it in your action this day folder. 

Now the process you follow is at some point in the morning you clear your inbox. And that is clear it, not scan it. Delete emails you don’t need and archive emails you think you may need in the future. Anything you need to act on goes into your action this day folder.

Then at some point towards the end of the day, you set aside an hour for clearing your action this day folder. 

Now here’s the thing, email is still an important part of our work communication. I know a lot of companies are using internal messaging systems such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, and because of that you want to include any responses to these messages in this time you have set aside. There may be some messages that need responding to more urgently, and you will likely need to deal with these sooner, but for the most part try to push off responding until your dedicated communication time. 

If you were to skip your communication time one day, you will find yourself having to double the time you set aside the next day. This is why, it needs to become a rule. No matter what, you will dedicate one hour of your work day for dealing with your communications. If your work involves a lot of email and message interaction, you may need to extend this time, but try it out with one hour first and see how you get on. 

Now when it comes to setting rules for communicating here’s something that will help your reputation at work. Set some rules for your response time. Now, it’s important not to be overly ambitious. If you regularly have client meetings that take two or three hours, telling everyone you will reply to your messages within an hour is unrealistic. Here’s my set of communication rules:

For email I will respond within twenty-four hours. Now if anyone it trying to engage me to use email as a form of instant messaging I will deliberately slow them down, no matter how important they are. Email should never be used for anything urgent. If your neighbour’s house was on fire you would never email them. You’d call them. There is a hierarchy of urgency. If something’s urgent, make a phone call. If it needs doing today, use instant messaging. Everything else can go by email. 

For instant messages, my rule is within four hours and phone calls, I will try to answer immediately, but if I need to get back to someone it will be within an hour. 

Whatever rules you apply, tell everyone. You can add your rules as an email signature to reinforce this. Once you’ve set your rules, the first step if for you to begin living them. You’re not likely to be perfect straight away, but just because you missed something, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Stick with it. You’ll become comfortable with it and as long as you are dealing with your actionable mail each day, you won’t have backlogs building up and that will be one area of your work you now have under control. 

Now where else can you apply rules?

How about doing focused work in a morning? This is when your brain is at its freshest—after a night’s sleep (even if it wasn’t a good night’s sleep). Take advantage of that and try to block one or two hours a couple of days each week where you will not be available for other people. You will need to be smart about this. Look through your calendar and see where the peak time for your meetings are. If most of your meetings happen in the middle part of your work day, you can make sure your blocked out focus times, are at either side of those peak times. 

You know your schedule, so find some blocks of time where you can get some quiet focus time. You do not need to do this every day, although you can try to get there over time. 

As an example, I block Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. It blocked out on my calendar and even my wife knows I am busy at those times. Thursdays and Sundays I keep free for meetings and Wednesday is blocked for family commitments—I don’t have weekends off. This is fixed and now it just feels automatic. All I need to know is what day it is. If it’s Monday, I know I’ll be writing. No thinking, no negotiating. It’s Monday. I write. 

If you were in sales, you could block 9:00 to 9:30am for calling customers and prospects to set up appointments. If you were to do this every day, that would be two-and-a-half hours a week. If you were to call five people on average each time, that would be twenty-five people. That’s likely to convert into plenty of appointments. And I know from my own experience in sales, appointments lead to sales and sales lead to better bonuses. You’re doing something simple every day that will have an impact on your income. And all you have done is set a rule. 

Now, if your calendar doesn’t have a lot of structure, you could just set the daily rule that would call five people each day to set up appointments. When you do this, you get five calls each day to improve your sales calls skills. When you first begin doing this, you may not convert many calls. But over time, you will refine your skills and you will see significant improvement. You can also measure this by calculating your conversion ratio. How many appointments you get from the calls you make.

Other areas where you can set rules is with planning sessions. Make it a rule where you cannot finish your work until you have spent ten minutes planning what your must-do tasks for tomorrow will be. Writing these out or saying saying these out loud has been scientifically proven to increase your chances of carrying out the tasks. It’s called “implementation intention”—where you plan out what you will do and when. 

You can also use implementation intention for your personal life. Let’s say you’ve neglected to do exercise for a while. You could, as part of your daily planning, say to yourself, “tomorrow I will go for a thirty minute walk immediately after eating lunch”. You can then add that to your calendar, so the time is protected and watch what happens. 

Setting standards for yourself is also a way to implement some rules into your life. I was always fascinated when a new coffee shop opened up near where I live. I would watch to see their standards. Usually for the first few weeks or months, you will see the owners wiping down the windows and tables outside every day. The Coffee shops that ultimately failed were the ones where the owners (or employees) stopped doing these little tasks after a few weeks. 

If you were lucky enough to be invited to Rolls Royce Motor Cars head office in Goodwood, UK, you could measure the grass outside reception every day and it would be the same length. That’s because Rolls Royce employs a front of house manager, whose job is to measure the length of not only the grass, but also the trees outside over hanging branches. That’s all about ensuring the highest possible standards. 

What are your standards? 

So there you go, Matty. Simplifying your system is really all about setting yourself some rules and ensuring that each day you live by your own standards. It’s repeating these tasks day in day out that will mean you will have les thinking to do and your work will just run that little smoother. 

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

This week’s episode is all about getting on top of your calendar so you remain in control of your most valuable asset.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Planning Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 274 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 274 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth. 

While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar. 

And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else. 

Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan. 

Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode. 

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

This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar? 

Hi Rob, thank you for your question. 

Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have. 

You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day. 

Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system. 

The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours. 

And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time. 

So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week? 

When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first. 

Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view.

Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you.

Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you? 

If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be six, seven or eight hours. Whatever number of hours you need block your sleep time out on your “perfect week” calendar. 

The reason for beginning with your sleep is once you have your sleep schedule in your calendar, you now know how much time you have available for everything else. 

Next, what would you like time for in your personal life? Why start with your personal life? Well, this is the area of our lives we often neglect at the expense of our work. Yet, if you want to live an active, balanced life, we need to proactively create that life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us. 

So, if you want time to go to the gym three time a week, then schedule that on your calendar. This is reminiscent of when I was a teenager and doing track and field. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening was training nights, and I would never let anything get in the way of that. The only way to ensure that happened was to block out those days. 

What about your hobbies? How much time would you like to spend on your pastimes and, more importantly, when would you like to do it? Again, schedule out time each week for these activities. 

Then there are your family responsibilities. Things like taking your kids to and from school and walking your dog. Our dog, for example, likes an hour’s walk each day. This should be blocked out too. 

Only when you have everything you would like time for each week on your calendar on a personal level, do you switch your attention to your work. 

For your work calendar, the place to start is with your fixed appointments. I know a lot of companies have weekly team meetings. If these are fixed, get them in your calendar. I would also suggest, if you get a break for lunch, you get that on your calendar too. 

What we are looking for is to see where the gaps are once all the fixed work commitments are in your calendar. It is these gaps that will inform you where you have time to do your important, core work—the work you are employed to do. 

Let’s imagine one of your core work responsibilities is to produce a sales report for your CEO each week. This report’s deadline is every Friday at 12pm. If your CEO requires the sales figures for Thursday, this leaves you will two options. You will either do it after business hours on a Thursday evening—probably not the best option as you will be preparing the report after you finish work. Or Friday morning. 

If you know you need forty-five minutes to collate the data and get it into the correct format, then you would block an hour for this work on a Friday morning. Ideally, you would fix this in your calendar, so there was no risk someone else can come along and “steal” that time away from you. 

This exercise is about designing your “perfect” week. A week where you have time for everything you would like to do. It will be unlikely you will be able to immediately start living this perfect week, although some of you may be lucky enough to be able to do that, for most of us, it will become an aspiration. 

If when you have finished and you look at the calendar and feel, yes, this is the kind of week that would leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled, the next step is to begin the process of merging your real calendar with this “perfect week” calendar. 

Because you have already set this up as a separate calendar, you can periodically turn it on and off and compare it with your real calendar. 

A tip I can share with you here, Rob, is pick one part of your perfect week calendar and focus on bringing your real life into alignment with that. For example, if, on your perfect week, you have your going to bed time at 11pm and wake up time at 6:30am, yet at the moment, you are going to bed after midnight and struggling to get out of bed at 7:00am, this would be a good place to start. 

In my experience, readjusting your sleep schedule takes around two weeks. So, you can begin by committing to going to bed at 11pm every night for the next fourteen days. 

I have also found you can build a work item into your real week as well. If you have a block of time on your perfect week calendar for focused work each Tuesday and Wednesday morning, try aligning that with your real week. Again, make sure you block it out on your calendar and see how you go. 

Much of this will be a trial and error. However, if you work at it, over time you will find you are beginning to adjust things in your life so you have the time do the things you want to do.

A lot of the stress associated with work comes from a feeling we don’t have enough time to do all the things other people are demanding of us. It’s not just our work commitments, but commitments to our family, friends and partners. It can also be voluntary commitments we have made in the past that perhaps are not bringing us the sense of accomplishment we thought they would. 

It maybe you will need to make some difficult decisions and have awkward conversations about the demands others are making on your time. While these will be uncomfortable in the moment, the sense of release you will get when you do it will be huge and the benefits to you, your mental wellbeing and ultimately your accomplishments in life will make those brief moments of discomfort worth it. 

To finish, here are some quick fire tips to help you with your calendar management.

Try at all possible to have one master calendar where both your personal and work commitments can be seen together. If you work in a company that restricts access to your work calendar, you can copy your appointments over, although you won’t need to copy over your focus time blocks. 

When planning your week, begin with your calendar. That will show you how committed you are before you start deciding what tasks you will do. This way, you will be able to better see where you can add more or less tasks. If you have a day of meetings, you can reduce the number of tasks you do, when you have days with fewer meetings you decide to add more tasks. 

Don’t allow yourself feel wedded to your calendar commitments. If you feel tired, sick or just want to have an easy day, move your commitments around if you can. Your calendar is there to serve you, not the other way round. The only thing I would advise against is ignoring your calendar completely. Your calendar is there to guide you, but if you start to ignore it, its usefulness will disappear. 

So there you go, Rob. I hope that has helped and given you some motivation to begin using your calendar. 

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

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day. 

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Episode 273 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 273 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Last week, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work. 

If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work. 

However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day. 

Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately.

Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately. 

I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”. 

That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner. 

Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these?

Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question. 

It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these. 

Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it. 

There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes) 

Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared. 

The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around. 

The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder. 

To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day. 

If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery” which will show you how to set everything up and turn you into a master of email. 

The key this is consistency. If you do this sporadically, it will not work. 

The way I look at it is if I skip a day, that means I now need two hours the next day to get on top of email. I don’t have two hours spare in the middle of the week to deal with email—there’s a lot more important things to do. 

So, that one hour a day is non-negotiable. It gets done. 

Last week in my Productivity workshop, one of the participants asked me how to handle email when it takes more than two hours just to reply to a single email? Here’s a unique problem—most email does not take more than two hours to respond. However, if you do get an email that requires two hours or more work, that becomes a task in your task manager. 

The question is: where will you find the two hours to work on that email response? If you leave an email like that in your Action This Day folder, it will list there for a long time and no work will get done on it. It needs pulling out and putting into your task manager and you can then decide when you will work on it. 

Now, what about all those messages? 

Here’s the thing about messages. You don’t have to respond immediately. Let me repeat that: You do not need to respond immediately. 

Now let that sink in for a minute. 

Let’s look at this logically, if you were working on something important that required all your concentration, why would you allow a message to interrupt your chain of thought? 

A doctor performing open heart surgery is not going to stop in the middle of the operation to read and respond to a text message. A pilot in the process of taking off or landing their plane is not going to look at her messages. And a lawyer defending you in court is not going to allow themselves to be distracted by messages coming in. How would you feel if they were always pausing their arguments to read and reply to their messages? I’m sure you’d be wanting to fire your lawyer. 

So why do you allow it to happen to you? 

To me, this is about professional standards. But then I get annoyed when I stand in line at the bank for ten minutes only to get to the counter and the bank clerk answers his phone while I am talking to him. Ooh that really annoys me. The most annoying thing is that phone call likely came from his boss. Why is his boss more important than a customer? 

For the less urgent messages, you can deal with these as part of your communication hour, however, if they are urgent don’t feel obligated to respond immediately. Finish what you are doing before replying. 

There’s a reason for this. You want to be slowing down the response time. You see, if you set an expectation with your boss, clients or customers and colleagues that you respond immediately, then you’ve just caused yourself a lot of problems later down the line. 

The goal is to slow things down. A good tip here is to add your response times to your email signature. For example:

Email: 24 hours

Messages: within 6 hours

Telephone call: within 2 hours. 

This way you are telling people that you know the importance of your work. And constantly being distracted by messages is going to destroy your effectiveness at doing the work you are employed to do. 

Look at it this way, nobody gets promoted because they answer their messages immediately. They get promoted for the quality of their work. People remember you for the work you produce. Always remember that. 

Now, I understand this can be a bit scary when you first begin to do it—particularly if you have a boss that expects instant responses—but you can do this gradually. Perhaps for one week, leave each message for fifteen minutes before responding. Then the following week, extend that to thirty minutes. 

Keep doing that until you get someone complaining. This way you will find the balance. 

You phone and computer have a do not disturb function. You can turn this on when you need to focus. There’s a reason why so many productivity and time management specialists harp on about this. It works. And you do not need to turn this on all day. You turn it on when you need some distraction free time to do your work—the work you are employed to do. 

I find, I can respond to instant messages in between sessions of work. As I am writing this script, I will likely have received four or five emails and a few messages. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t looked. 

However, it takes me around ninety minutes to write this script, so nobody will be waiting long for my response. When I finish the script, I will stand up and use my phone to check messages and email. I can do that while walking around and then make a decision about which ones I will respond to. 

Finally, reduce your communication channels. If you have every social media messaging service, Teams and Slack as well as several email accounts, is it any wonder you are inundated with messages? Reduce these channels.

The great thing about reducing your communications channels is you reduce the number of time wasters. You force people to communicate with you on your terms. For instance, my wife and mother know the best way to get in touch with me is through iMessage. I only give that out to family and very close friends. 

Everyone else I advise to contact me though email because I have a process for handling email and it means I can work on my timeline. 

There have been occasions where I was asked to use WhatsApp or Telegram for a particular event I was speaking at. I will install the app for the duration of the event, and as soon as it’s over, I delete the app. 

If someone really wants to get in touch with you, they will. They will find a way. 

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

This week we’re exploring the need for projects and why the way a project has been defined is causing most of your task management problems. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Episode 272 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 272 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

How many projects do you have? 50? 75? More than a hundred? Well, if you are defining a project as “anything you want to do that requires more than one action step”, as many people do, you are going to have a lot of projects. And all those projects need looking at to decide what needs to happen next. 

When I was researching the reasons why so many people resist doing a weekly planning session, one thing I kept coming up against was the large number of “projects” people told me they had to review, which made doing a weekly review or planning session too long. 

I began to realise that if our resistance was down to the sheer number of projects we had to review each week, that was something fixable because we have control over the number of projects we have. More interestingly, we also have control over how we define what a project is. 

If we change the way we define a project to something that fits better with the work we do, we can reduce the number of projects we have and that in turn will reduce the time it takes to complete a planning session. 

So, before we dive a little deeper into this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Christian. Christian asks: Hi Carl, I’ve always struggled with managing my projects. When I look at my task Manager, I have over 80 projects. These take a very long time to go through each week and I hate doing it. (Which is why I don’t do a weekly planning session) My question is; is it normal to have so many projects?

Hi Christian, thank you for your question.

I’ve found those who have read and tried to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done, do tend to have a lot of projects. This is a consequence of how David Allen defines a project. That being anything that requires two or more steps. 

This means, in theory, making an appointment to see your dentist, take your car in for a service or arranging your annual medical check up will all be projects. Yet, if you stop and think about this, if you dedicated thirty minutes on a given day, you could easily make all these arrangements. They certainly don’t need to be projects. 

Over my working life, I’ve worked in a number of different industries. From hotel management, to car sales, law and teaching. When I look back over these jobs, I cannot remember treating everything as a project. I came into work, and got on with the work. 

For instance, when I was working in a law office, we had around 150 cases ongoing at any one time. We never treated these cases as projects. They were our work. And our work had a process. When a new case came in, we needed to collect information and there was a checklist on the inside of the case file that we checked off as the information came in. The first step, once the new case was entered into the firms computer system was to request the information we needed. 

Each day, we were receiving information for many of these cases and we simply printed off the file or, if it came in my regular mail, check the information, put the documents in the case file and checked off the information that had come on the checklist. 

It was a part of my core work to ensure that the cases due to be completed that month, were monitored and any reasons why a case might not complete on time, were communicated to the client. To manage this, we had a spreadsheet, which either myself or my colleague updated every Friday afternoon and sent it to our client. 

I remember when I worked for a famous marketing company here in Korea, the copy writers and designers never considered individual campaigns as a project. It was just a part of their daily work. They would come into work, make coffee and then get on with the work they were currently working on. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Once the current piece of work was completed, it was handed on to the next person in the chain and they did their bit. 

It seems to me, that perhaps what we are doing is confusing our core work with project work. 

So, what is a project? For me a project is something unique that has a clearly defined deadline that is going to take a reasonably long time to complete. For example, moving house, would be a project. There are a lot of interconnected things here. Putting your current house on the market, finding a new home and arranging for furniture to be moved. 

Moving house is not going to to happen over a weekend and will only happen if you have a plan to make it happen. 

Theoretically, producing this podcast would be a project. There are multiple steps from deciding which question to answer, to writing the script, organising the Mystery Podcast voice to record the question and recording and editing the audio track. But it’s not a project. It just a part of my core work.

I produce a podcast every week so I have a process for doing it. I also consider producing this podcast as part of my core work, which means I have a process for doing it. 

Each week, I write the script on Tuesday, I send the question to the Mystery Podcast Voice on Thursday and record the podcast on Friday during my audio visual time block on a Friday morning. 

I don’t need project folders, I don’t have anything to review. It’s just a part of my work that I do every week. The only thing I have is a list in my notes app of all the questions I have collected and on a Tuesday morning I will pick a question to answer. 

So, Christian, what I would suggest is first look at the work you do and identify your core work—the work you are employed to do. What are you responsible for? What results does the company you work for expect of you? That will give you a clear set of activities to perform each week and month. Once you know what these are, you can distribute those activities throughout the week to ensure they get done. 

For example, if I take working for the law firm as an example. Each morning we would receive around five to ten new cases. The first job with any new case was to get the case into the firm’s system. So, I would have a daily recurring task on my task list that says “Input new cases into the case management system”. 

Every Friday, I would have a task that says: “Update case spreadsheet and send to client”. That task may mean I need two hours to collect the information, which likely means I need to block two hours out on my calendar every Friday to do the work. 

If I were to treat each new case as a project, it would be overwhelming trying to keep everything up to date. But my core work was not to micromanage individual cases, it was to ensure that all cases were up to date and in the system and to report updates to the client each week. That’s not a project, that’s a process. 

For many of you listening, your company will have some form of work management system. That could be a CRM system if you work in a sales related job, or it could be a central file folder where the work you do on a daily basis can be shared with your colleagues—as there was for the designers and copywriters in the marketing company. 

One of my clients is a screenwriter and while he will have two to four scripts to work on at any one time, and theoretically each script could be considered a project, each day, his focus is on writing. When he does his weekly planning, he will identify the most important scripts and decide which ones to work on the following week. This will be determined by script deadlines.

Then, on Monday morning, he will open his script writing software, sit down and write. His core work is to write scripts, deal with any re-writes the producer requests and meet his deadlines. The only way that will happen is if, when he begins his day he focuses his attention on writing scripts. 

I’ve never heard my client talk about projects. He knows his core work. He knows what his responsibilities as a script writer are and he’s developed a process for getting his work done. All he needs to do is follow that process. 

Another way to look at this would be if Toyota decided to create a new car. If, to build this new car, they have to build a factory then building a factory is a project. It’s a one off unique task with a deadline. Making the cars, that’s a process. If Toyota treated each new car as a project, it would be the most inefficient way to make a car. Instead, they follow a process. That way they can monitor productivity, costs and resources. 

Last week, I answered a question about analogue v digital systems. I was lucky, I began my working life when the world of work was transitioning from a paper based one to a digital one. One of the advantages of the paper-based world was we could put the work we need to do into a physical in-tray. We would then begin at the top and work our way through the in-tray. As we completed work, we move it to an out-tray. At the end of the day we would then transfer what was in our out-tray to the filing cabinet and close out our day. 

Being able to see our work in a physical form meant we could instantly see how much work we had to do. The digital world hides our work, we have emails with documents attached to them hidden inside Outlook. Presentations, spreadsheets and reports are hidden inside folders deep within our computers. We cannot see the work we need to do. 

However, if you build processes for doing you work rather than creating projects, you are going to find life a lot easier. Following processes ensure you get your important work done. The work you are responsible for. Hiding everything inside self-contained projects not only risks things being missed, it also wastes time when have to go looking for things you think you may have missed. 

So, Christian, rather than turning every multi-step task into a project, look for the processes. And if there are no processes for doing your work, create some. It’s how surgeons and pilots do their work every day. They follow processes. It’s how Formula 1 racing teams can move a whole team and two cars from one country to another week after week. It’s not projects, it’s about following a tried and tested process. 

I hope that helps, Christian. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Are the old ways still the best ways? That’s what I explore in this week’s podcast. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Planning Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 271 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 271 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it?

Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter. 

This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. 

Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today. 

I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital. 

What I’ve learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system. 

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

This week’s question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder? 

Hi David, thank you for your question.

You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to. 

Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks? 

The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in.

When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time. 

But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things. 

Let’s say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things. 

With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that’s ten hours) and there’s sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean. 

If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don’t pay it, you’ll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you’ll make yourself sick and won’t be able to do your work and you’ll likely lose your job. 

Just like with bank account, there is a finite amount you can use and you get to choose how you spend your money or time on your commitments

Technology has not changed that. Just because we can manage our to-do list digitally, doesn’t mean we automatically become more productive. And just because we can schedule repeating events on our calendar, doesn’t mean we have more time. 

Most companies and individuals go bankrupt because they have over-committed themselves with debt. Likewise, you will burn yourself out if you over-commit yourself with time. 

Now, one of the downsides of the digital systems is, the ease with which we can commit ourselves. We can throw an unlimited amount of tasks into our task managers without necessarily seeing what we have committed ourselves to. The more you throw in there, the less time you have for other things. 

Conversely, with an analogue system—one written out on paper, you can see exactly what you are committing yourself to. Either you are writing your tasks out on a piece of paper or you are adding them into the notes section of a diary. 

The act of writing them out, triggers your brain to resist adding too much. You become very aware of what you are committing to and how little time you have. 

Recently, I was talking with a tech loving friend of mine who is always trying out the latest productivity apps—he understands it’s a bad habit of his. However, he did confess to me recently that whenever he feels overwhelmed he pulls out an old fashioned notebook and writes out all the things that he thinks he needs to do. 

Once he’s done this “brain dump”, he will cross out all the tasks he either doesn’t want to do or knows deep down he’s never going to get round to doing. 

This act of pruning his list leaves him feeling better and a lot less overwhelmed. 

And that is where good old fashioned pen and paper still holds an advantage over the digital tools we now have access to. The awareness of what you are committing yourself to is far greater than when you use digital tools. 

I love my Apple Calendar, it allows me to add recurring events, subscribe to my rugby team’s calendar so I can see when they are playing and I can share a calendar with my wife so I know when our family commitments are. The downsides to modern digital calendars is you can allow other people to schedule events for you. For me, that’s not good. That’s like giving people access to your bank account and letting them withdraw money without asking you. You’re never likely to do that are you? So why are we allowing people to do that with our time. 

With a digital calendar, I would recommend you make sure you have, at the very least, the option to “accept”, “decline” or “maybe” a meeting request. I would also suggest if you need time to work on a piece of work, to block that time out. You do not need to worry, the other person cannot see what you have blocked out. All they see is that you are unavailable at that time. This will safeguard you against time thieves filling up your calendar with their priorities. 

One area where I feel digital tools are better than analogue tools is the notes app. Traditionally the issue people had keeping all their notes in a notebook is finding their notes later. There was also the issue of scribbling down an idea on a scrap of paper only to lose that scrap paper. 

With digital notes, you don’t lose them and finding notes you wrote years ago is as simple as doing a keyword or date search within your notes app. 

There is a danger if you in the habit of switching your digital notes app every few months that you will lose something. But if you stick with one notes app, over the years you are going to build, as Tiago Forte called it a “second Brain”. 

I’ve been using Evernote for nearly 13 years and when I do a keyword search for something I am often pleasantly surprised when I get a note I wrote sever years ago. It’s a great way to reminisce and also can trigger me to build on the ideas I had back then. That isn’t as easy with paper-based notes unless you spend a lot of time carefully indexing and organising your notebooks—which can look incredibly impressive in a bookcase, but does take up an enormous amount of time just keeping organised. 

Digital notes apps do a lot of that hard work for you. 

So, David, to answer your question, I have found that when it comes to my calendar and notes, digital tools have made life much easier. There are dangers with your calendar, but if you are vigilant, your digital calendar can serve you better than having to carry around a diary everywhere you go. 

And with your notes, you now have access to a library of ideas and thoughts on your phone—a digital device you carry with you everywhere you go. That again, is far better than carrying around a notebook—or series of notebooks so you have access to everything. 

The only digital tool I feel is better in an analogue system is the to-do list. A paper based to-do list worked for centuries. The digital to-do list, or as we call it now task manager, can cause a lot of overwhelm and stress. It doesn’t help you to prioritise what’s important unless you keep it well organised and curated—which I find most people don’t do—and a lot of things we add to our task managers disappear, never to be seen again until it’s too late. 

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

Podcast 270

Do you feel you have balance in your day? If not, this episode is for you.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Episode 270 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 270 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

So, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work? 

The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching. 

At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward. 

The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you. 

That, nicely leads me to this week's question, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. 

This week’s question comes from Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day? 

Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question.

That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any. 

Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours. 

Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life. 

When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance. 

Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day. 

Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them. 

With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities. 

These need to be your priority each day you are at work. You do not want to confuse results with activity. To get the results you want, you need to identify the activities that will give you those results.

You can also bring this to your family. What are the results you want, and then determine what the activities are that will bring those results. Those activities are your priorities each day. 

So, to give the care you want to give to your father, what do you need to do? That needs to be your priority. 

Now, once you know what activities you need to perform each day to bring the results you want, you can make sure they are embedded in your day. 

To give you a simple example. Louis, my dog, needs to go for a walk every day and I like to spend an hour exercising. In total two hours, that means two hours of my day have already been taken up before each day begins. The only question I need answer is when? When will I do these activities? For me, I like to break up my day. So, I take Louis out for his walk around 2pm, then when we get back home, I will exercise. My calendar is blocked from 2pm until 4pm each. 

I don’t work a typical nine til five job. I work mornings and evenings and do my personal activities in the afternoon. That works for me. 

You will likely have work commitments through the day leaving you with the early morning and evening for your family activities. 

Now, what about you, Mary-Anne? What do you want to do for yourself? 

Balance is all about balancing our commitments to others with the commitments to ourselves. If we spend all our time on the commitments to others, we will feel out of balance and lost. Our lives will be directed by other people and that is never going to be good for you. 

You may want some time to yourself for reading, pursuing a hobby or exercise. We all need some “alone time”. It’s what recharges us and help keep us mentally balanced. 

Too often we feel guilty about spending time on ourselves, but you should not. It’s healthy and vital if you want the energy to take care of others—which is something we naturally want to do. The problem is you cannot do that if you are exhausted from giving too much of yourself to others. 

Time for yourself does not need to be a lot. We’re talking an evening or two a week or an afternoon on a weekend where you can step away and do your own thing. 

Whatever time you do set aside for yourself you want to put that on your calendar. It gives you something to look forward to and every time you look at your calendar you’re going to see it. And, once it’s on your calendar, it becomes non-negotiable. You do not sacrifice that time for anyone or anything. Tell everyone that this time is for you. You need to protect it. 

I do this with my Saturday nights. Saturday night is the only night each week I have to myself. It begins with a family dinner and once finished, the rest of the evening is my time. To do with whatever I want. I usually settle down to some TV and just wallow in doing absolutely nothing at all. 

The key, Mary-Anne, is to step back a little. Prioritise what is important to you and make sure that whatever time you want for the important things in your life are scheduled on your calendar. 

While I was away on my quarterly “Strategy week” last week, I undertook to watch all episodes of the early 70s action comedy, The Persuaders! Starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The show was set in the early 70s (perhaps late 60s) and well before the mobile phone or home computer. What I noticed was how less stressed people were. The beauty of paper is it slows everything down. If you needed to send a document you only had one way to do it—the mail (and not email). So there was always around 48 hours to wait before things got completed. 

But because everything was slower, we had time for ourselves. Mornings were never rushed, we ate a proper breakfast—bacon and eggs (all natural ingredients) and as there was fewer cars on the road, there were no traffic jams. 

I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a better time—but it was a lot slower. Many of the words we use today were not used—burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed—nobody used those words. There were fewer distractions and finding out the news meant you either watched the 9 O’clock news or sat and read the newspaper. 

What we can do is learn from that. Slow down and have fixed times when you do things. What do you do after dinner? Could you not find an hour for yourself and either go read a book or out for walk? Where are the pockets of time that you can use to do the things you want to do to add balance to your own life—rather than serving others? 

Ultimately, Mary-Anne, it’s about taking control of your calendar and making sure you have the things you need to do and want to do on there. Task managers and notes apps don’t help here. All these do is tell you what you still have to do. Not helpful if you want to take control of your day and have a more balanced life. 

Where possible try to make your activities routine. Routines require a lot less energy because you can do them without thinking. You’re not wasting time thinking about what to do next. You know and you automatically do it. For instance, I go downstairs to cook dinner at 6pm every evening. It’s automatic. 

This also means I have some markers in my day. As I mentioned before, I break between 2 and 4pm, then come back to some work until 6pm when I go down to make dinner. These markers mean I can balance my work between these natural breaks in my day. 

I should also mention that if you are struggling with doing a weekly plan, then I just launched a new mini course that covers just that. If you hurry, you can get that course for the early-bird discount of $25.00. This course will help you to create plan for the week which will not take you two or three hours to do—forty minutes tops. I’ve put the details of this course in the show notes for you.

I hope that has helped, Mary-Anne. 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. 

Why bother with a weekly plan when a single crisis can destroy the whole week? That’s what I’ll be answering this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

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The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 269 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 269 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” There are numerous variations to this quote, one of my favourites is allegedly by Mike Tyson; “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth”. 

Now, it would be easy to take these quotes at face value and decide that there’s no point in planning the week when the chances are some crisis or another will come up on Monday morning rendering any plan you may have useless. Well, that’s not strictly true. 

A plan’s purpose is to guide you through the week. It’s designed to keep you focused on what’s important and prevent you from being pulled off track by these crises that will inevitably crop up. There’s always something unexpected. That could be your colleague calling in sick, an important meeting being cancelled or postponed or a catastrophic problem with one of your customers. 

However, having a plan means no matter what is thrown at you, you still have a road map that will guide you through the week. There’s still an objective and it’s that that ensures that while you may not be able to get everything done that you set out to accomplish, you at least get some of it done. 

So, today I will outline why, despite the chances of you being pulled away from your plan, it’s still important to have a plan. And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Matthew, Matthew asks; Hi Carl, I know you always stress how important it is to do the weekly planning, but I find every time I do one, by Tuesday afternoon that plan is useless because so many issues and problems come up and I have to deal with them and forget my plan. Do you have any insights why and how planning can stop this from happening? 

Hi Matthew, thank you for your question. 

Sometimes when we talk about doing a weekly plan or weekly review many people miss its main purpose. A plan for the week is not to give you a step by step micromanaged plan for the week. It’s to give you a set of objectives to achieve that will take you from what you are today to where you want to be at the end of the week. 

Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say I need to get a 5,000 word report written next week. Now, logically, I would divide that work up into writing 1,000 words each day next week. That’s a plan. It’s a project broken down into smaller a steps. 

But what happens if something comes up on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm that requires all my time and attention. I may even have to go off site and visit an important customer on Wednesday to fix the problem. Now, my carefully laid plan of writing 1,000 words each day has been destroyed. I’m not going to be able to write anything on Wednesday and Tuesday, because of the crisis, I was only able to write 500 words. 

Now, the week is only half way done and I’m 1,500 words behind. Now, here’s the thing, the objective was not to write 1,000 words per day. The objective was to complete the 5,000 word report by the end of the week. The plan was to write 1,000 words, that’s now gone, but the objective still remains the same. 

All I need do now, when I get back on Wednesday after resolving the issue, is to readjust my plan. Okay, I cannot finish it by writing 1,000 words on Thursday and Friday, but I can if I write 1,750 words per day. 

I will still accomplish my objective and all I needed to do was to adjust my plan. 

Now, it’s likely you will need to also adjust your timings. Perhaps you allocated an hour each day to writing the report, you now need to increase that time to ninety minutes per day, but finding an extra thirty minutes each day for two days is not a huge dilemma. 

Making adjustments to your plan is far better than giving up altogether and getting stressed out. That’s not going to solve anything. Work the problem in front of you, don’t make things worse by worrying about things you cannot do anything about right now. 

This why we need to build two things into our days. The first is some buffer time. For me, I like to give myself at least thirty minutes between sessions of work where possible. Sometimes, that’s not always going to be possible, say when I have back to back meetings, but for the most part I will have at least two thirty minute buffer slots in my day—even on the busiest of days. 

Secondly, doing a daily planning session. Now, your daily planning session is not about creating a new plan. Its purpose is to make sure you are still on track with your weekly plan. It’s here where you have an opportunity to make adjustments to your weekly plan that will help you to reach your objectives for the week, or if necessary, adjusting your weekly objective. 

I like to think of my weekly plan as like a flight plan for a commercial flight. Let’s say I am flying between Seoul and Paris. This is a flight that leaves Seoul at around 11:30am (Seoul time) and arrives in Paris around 4:00pm (Paris Time). It’s a fifteen hour flight. 

The flight is scheduled every day, yet each day the pilots will have a briefing meeting to review the weather, the flying time, the anticipated weight and calculate how much fuel they will need. They will also confirm their flight plan based on conditions in countries they are flying over both in terms of weather and geopolitical developments. 

For example, This flight previously took around eleven hours. Yet, in February 2022, it was no longer possible to fly over Russia and Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not known to Air France before the day they entered Ukraine. Yet, the pilots will have adjusted their flight plan to fly around Russia and Ukraine thus avoiding any potential danger to the flight. 

The objective of the pilots was not to fight between Seoul and Paris in eleven hours. The objective was to get the passengers, crew and plane to Paris safely. On that day in February last year, the pilots achieved their objective. Nobody complained that the flight arrived four hours late. 

So, Matthew, the purpose of planning the week is to give you a set of objectives and a framework in which to achieve those objectives. 

The purpose of planning the day is to confirm you are on track and to make any adjustments if necessary. 

When I begin a typical week, I will have twenty coaching calls booked in. That’s twenty hours of calls and a further seven hours of writing feedback on those calls. However, each week, I will likely have two or three calls cancel and reschedule for another day. That means I will have a few extra hours in which to catch up or work on something else. 

I know most of you may begin the week with a set number of meetings planned, but some of those will cancel or reschedule for another week, so while it’s likely additional work will come in as the week progresses—work you did not anticipate having to do, you are also going to pick up some extra time too with work that either no longer needs doing or cancelled meetings. 

Over the course of a week, things generally balance out. Throwing your plan out because Monday or Tuesday didn’t go to plan is not a good strategy. Work the problem in front of you and get back to your plan. Then at the end of the day, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to make any adjustments to your weekly plan based on your objectives for the week.

Now how to stop problems and issues arising in the first place. That comes down to anticipating future problems. This will generally only come from experience. But, doing the weekly planning also gives you an opportunity to plan ahead and to anticipate what could go wrong. 

One the biggest benefits of getting yourself organised and being consistent with your weekly and daily planning is you are moving from being reactive—reacting to events, to being proactive—being prepared for events. It’s not something you even need to learn. It’s a natural coincidence of having some time at the end of the week and looking forward and seeing the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish. 

Now, something else that works well is to what I call “front load” the week. What this means is you try to get as much of your fixed work done early in the week. If you have a number of tasks that require a lot of focus or time, try to schedule these for early in the week. This will help you later in the week because either they are done, or if they need finishing, the biggest part of the task has been completed—you only then need to find a small amount of time to fin ish them. 

I do this with my writing. I try to get as much of my writing done on Monday and Tuesday. If you have an important meeting to prepare for later in the week, do the hard work on Monday and Tuesday. It takes the pressure off you and leaves you free to fine tune things. 

However, the most powerful thing you can do is to make sure you are doing the daily planning session. Think of this as a debriefing meeting with yourself to review your plan and consider new tasks that have come in and to revise your plan if necessary. 

Becoming better with your time management and being more productive is not going to stop additional work from coming in. However, what it does do is train you to quickly decide what is important. You become better at making decisions, and it’s that speed with your decision making that improves your overall productivity. 

If something needs to be done, then it meeds to be done. All you need do is decide when you will do it. 

Thank you, Matthew for your question. I hope this has helped. 

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

How confident are you setting up a project and delivering it on time every time? If you struggle in this areas, then this podcast is for you. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 268 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 268 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Completing our personal projects is something we all frequently find difficult. This is largely because there’s usually nobody holding us accountable and we don’r have access to the same resources our companies will have. However, it does not have to be difficult if we follow a simple formula. 

I’ve spent many years studying how NASA went from a seemingly impossible challenge to successfully landing Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969. 

When that project was first floated by President Kennedy in May 1961, NASA lacked the knowledge of whether humans could survive in space, they were struggling to get a rocket off the ground, and the nobody had left the confines of Earth’s orbit. Yet, eight years later, Neil Armstrong spoke those infamous words: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind”.

Now it’s true that NASA did not have to worry about resources, Congress gave them the money to make this happen. But it was not all about the money. Sure, that helped, but the technology still needed to be invented, scientists had to work out how to get a spaceship out of Earths orbit and into the Moon’s orbit and they needed to know if humans could survive in space and if so, how. 

I’ve always been a believer in finding the success stories and then breaking them down to their component parts to understand how the success happened. It’s why I know there is no such things as an overnight success, there’s much more to completing a project than being in the right place at the right time. 

And with the Moon landings, everything is there to show you the roadmap towards completing a project—or a goal for that matter—all we need to do is break it down. And that is what we will do in this episode.

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

This week’s question comes from Jonathan. Jonathan asks, Hi Carl, one thing I really struggle with is working on my personal projects. I have some home improvement projects that I’ve had on my list for years and I just never seem to get around to doing them. Do you have any tips on getting these projects done? 

Hi Jonathan, thank you for your question.

Firstly I must start by saying this is something very common and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this, Jonathan. The good news this is an opportunity to develop skills. 

Now, let’s begin with what I talked about a moment ago with the clarifying sentence. I used to talk about this as the clarifying statement, but somehow the word “statement” invited people to write line after line of words defining what the project was. No. That’s not what you are trying to achieve here. What you are looking for is a simple sentence that gives clarity on what you want to accomplish with the project. 

Going back to the John F Kennedy sentence setting the parameters of the Moon landing project when he stood before Congress and announced that the US;

"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." 

Twenty-six words that set NASA on a course that captivated the world. Those words were clear, contained a deadline and left no-one in doubt about what was to be achieved.

Now, Kennedy was no scientist. He was a student of government and international affairs. Certainly nothing that gave him a deep knowledge of the science and engineering feats required to land and walk on the moon. 

But that didn’t matter, Kennedy was the leader, not the implementer. There was a reservoir of talented, motivated scientists and engineers ready to take up the “challenge” and turn Kennedy’s project outcome into a reality. 

Now, depending on the size of the project you are attempting to do, Jonathan, you may need to reach out for the skills you do not process. For instance, one of your home improvement projects could be to build a conservatory onto the side of your house. Now, unless you are a builder, you are not going to have the know-how or skills to build the conservatory—you are going to need to hire outside help. A builder and an electrician are likely to be your first requirements. 

Plus, you may need to hire an architect to draw up the plans for you. 

So, this means you will need to “secure the funding” for the project. Now, Kennedy assigned this part of the project to his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed Congress for the necessary funding. 

Now, if I were to undertake building an extension to the side of our house, I would need to “Secure” the funding somehow. That could come from my savings or I may need to talk to the bank for a loan. Either way, because I would need to hire experts to do the work, I would need funds, so before anything started on the project I would need to get some estimates on how much the project would likely cost. 

One area where I find people waste time with project planning is to sit down and plan out the whole project step by step. In my experience, I find there’s always time to plan the next steps, but planning can and often does become the source of procrastination. There’s too many unknowns and if you really want to get the project off the ground take the first logical step. 

To write a book, start writing the first draft. Don’t worry about publishers, writing applications, chapter headings or book cover designs. Until you have a first draft you are not going to have anything to work with anyway. 

Similarly with your home improvement projects, you will need a budget, so get the quotes and estimates together. That will give you the right information to proceed to the next step. 

With the Moon landings, NASA broke the project down into three parts. There was Mercury, where they wanted to learn what was required in order to get humans into space. Then came Gemini, where they learned all about rendezvousing with other spacecraft and doing space walks, and finally Apollo, which was the part of the project that took humans to the Moon. 

Each part of the lunar landing project had its own set of objectives. Whatever project you are working on, will be the same. The first part could be to secure the funding. The second part may involve hiring the right people to do the work, and finally the construction part. Each part will have its own outcome, but ultimately, the overall project sentence will guide you. 

For example, if you want to have the conservatory built by the summer, and you have three months until the summer begins, each part of your project will need to be broken down to meet that deadline. If, when you get the estimates, you are told the builders will require eight weeks to complete the work, then that leaves you with four weeks for the other parts of the project. 

When we moved to the East Coast of Korea, my wife and I first sat down to decide how we were would do it. Our initial plan was to spend three months living in a guest house in the area we wanted to move to. These three months confirmed we definitely wanted to proceed with the project and we extended our stay in the guest house until the end of the year. 

During that time, we began looking at properties and working on our budget. We decided on our new home in October and as it was still being built, we were given a moving in date on the 20th December.

That gave us almost three months to put into action the second phase of our project—which was the interior design and furniture. And then the final part of the project was to move in. 

Looking back at my original notes for that project, very little went according to that initial plan. But one thing did not change. The deadline (by the end of the year) and the move itself. The initial action was to move to the area we wanted to live in for three months and we did that within two weeks of making the decision to proceed. After that plans changed, but the outcome did not. 

There’s always going to be delays, issues to resolve and changing plans. That’s to be expected. However, if you have been clear with your project sentence, and you stick to your overall deadline for the project, you will push yourself to get things moving. 

And problems and issues will always arise. That’s part of life. With the moon landing project, tragedy struck on the 27th January 1967 when during a test on the new Apollo programme (the third phase) a fire broke out in the astronauts cockpit instantly killing the three astronauts. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffy were killed in the tragic accident and all manned flights were stopped, just three years before the project deadline while a full investigation took place. 

NASA, continued developing the programme, as information from the tragedy came through, changes were implemented and by the time the final investigation report came through, almost all its recommendations had been implemented. 

Hopefully, nothing as tragic will happen with your projects, but problems and issues will inevitably arise. While you are dealing with those issues, what could you be doing to make sure they the issue does not delay you from your final deadline? 

For instance, there could be a materials shortage and there may be a two week delay to receiving some of the materials needed to build your conservatory. What could you do so that when the material is available and delivered you minimise any further delays? 

And finally, you need a competitor or villain. For NASA and the United States, the villain and competitor was the Soviet Union. When NASA began the project to land on the Moon, The Soviet Union had already been the first to put a man in space and had launched the first satellite, Sputnik. NASA was still struggling to get a rocket to lift off without exploding. 

The introduction of a villain or competitor brings energy to the project. Now, of course, with our personal projects it’s unlikely you will have a competitor. However, the reality is you do. The competitor is you. 

The reason most of us fail with our personal projects is because of us. We are our own worst enemies. If you want to go deeper, it’s comfort that stops you from completing your projects. We naturally don’t like change and we always default to our comfort zone. But if you really want to complete these personal projects, whether they are home improvements or buying a new house, you will have to get uncomfortable. 

The way I deal with this is, it to turn whatever comfort I am defaulting to into the enemy. At its simplest level that comfort could be the sofa. I never let the sofa beat me. No matter how inviting and seductive the sofa tries to be, I will still go out for a run when it’s raining. The sofa will never beat me. That’s my mindset.

And it’s an easy mindset to develop. First identify the comfort, then look at it and tell it that it will never beat you. You will always win.

If you find yourself procrastinating, externalise it by writing Procrastination in big words on a piece of paper and stare at it as if it was your worst enemy and tell it it will never ever beat you. 

Steve Jobs invoked this strategy. First it was Microsoft and IBM, then it was Intel. With Steve, there was always an enemy to galvanise his employees. Today, Tim Cook does it with Samsung and Android. 

Interestingly, because there was a clear competitor and enemy for NASA in the 1960s, their staff were highly motivated and focused on winning. They were making history and that was enough for them to succeed. NASA never needed table football tables (Fuzzball), nap pods, massage rooms or any of the other crazy benefits for their employees. Having a clear outcome, a strategy and a defined enemy was all that was needed to keep their employees focused, happy and engaged. 

So there you go, Jonathan. I hope that has helped. I strongly recommend the documentary film Unsung Heroes, The Story Of Mission Control and Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. Both of these films will inspire you and give you everything you need to finally complete all those projects that you are stalling on.

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