This week's episode is a little different as I have been away. However, all will return to normal next week, so please enjoy this episode on the three (four?) stages of project success taken from my Productivity Mastery Series over on YouTube. 

 

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

How to use Evernote for your 2020 Planning

The Annual Planning sheet Download

Podcast 104

Do you ever wish you could convince your co-workers to be better organised and more productive? Well, this week that’s what I am digging in to.

 

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

How to use Evernote for your 2020 Planning

The Annual Planning sheet Download

 

Script

Episode 104

Hello and welcome to episode 104 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you ever wished you could convince your teammates and the people you work with to be a little more organised and productive? Well, that’s the topic I am tackling this week.

Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to point out to all you wonderful listeners that we have just entered the last three months of the year. Yes, 2019 has entered its final few months and that means it’s the best time to begin thinking about what you want to achieve next year. 

Now, this is just the thinking stage. You do not have to plan anything yet. When you begin the process in October you give yourself plenty of time to think of, ponder, wonder and reject ideas for next year. It also means that you have time to really go deep and consider all things in your life. 

To help you, I have an annual planning template that you can download for free from my website—carlpullein.com— All you have to do is go to the downloads page and there, near the top, is the PDF file waiting for you to download it and start filling in. 

If you are an Evernote user, you can also add the Evernote template to your Evernote by clicking on the link in the show notes. I did a video last week on how to complete the planning sheet, so if you want to learn more head over to my YouTube channel and watch the Evernote video from last week. 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Kelly. Kelly asks: Hi Carl, I have always been an organised person but I work in a team of people who never write anything down and are always forgetting deadlines or not replying to messages and emails in a timely manner. Is there anything I can do to get my team more organised?

Ooh, great question, Kelly, and one with a simple answer—no. 

You see the difficulty here is to become better organised and more productive is a choice. It’s not as if there is a switch you can pull and everyone in your office will start following GTD or COD. 

However, while I was thinking about how I would answer your question, Kelly, I remembered a time when I worked in a car dealership and the general manager, whose name was Andrew Donovan, was one of the most organised people I have ever met. 

Andrew wrote everything down and when he asked you to do something, you knew he would not forget to follow up with you. 

Now, this was before smartphones and computers on every desk—it was the early nineties—and Andrew’s system was simple, yet brilliant. 

Whenever Andrew had a meeting he would write everything down on to a sheet in a reporters notebook. Everyone in the meeting saw him do this. So you knew if he asked you to do something, it was written down. Once the meeting was over, Andrew would then add the action and follow up items to his leather A4 diary which went everywhere he went. 

What I noticed was that Andrew’s system was soon adopted by many of the departmental managers and that trickled down to other team members. 

Now, I don't know your position in your company, Kelly, but whatever your role, that is perhaps one way you could change things within your team

Do you find you are great a creating a system and then soon find yourself not using it, or falling off the wagon as we say? It happens to us all from time t time and that’s the topic of this week’s question. 

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl’s Blog

 

Script

Episode 103

Hello and welcome to episode 103 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week I show you how to maintain your productivity system once you have it up and running and give you a few tips on how not to fall off the productivity wagon once you are on it. 

Now, before we get into this week’s question, for those of you who don’t know, I also have a YouTube channel and a blog where I post a lot of productivity and time management content each week. Over on YouTube, I focus a lot on Todoist, Drafts and Evernote as well as some useful tips and tricks. And my weekly blog dives deep into some of the issues that come up from time to time and how to overcome them.

Details on all these additional resources for you can be found in the show notes. 

And… If you haven’t already taken my FREE beginners guide to productivity, then that is a great place to start with your own system. It will give you the ideas and know-how to creating a system for you built around some very strong principles. Again, you can find all the details for that in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks: Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find any consistency in using my system. I like my system and it basically works well, but after using it for a week or two I find myself not using it and I start missing things. Is there anything I can do to stop falling off the wagon?  

Great question, Isaac. I find a lot of people struggle with this one. They spend a lot of time creating a fantastic system and then after a few days or weeks stop collecting and organising and then quickly everything stops working. 

Now, there are a few reasons why this might be happening. The most common one is creating an overly complex system. 

You see there’s a lot of fun to be had in developing your own system. For many of us solving problems is fun and building your very own productivity system, choosing the apps to use, setting up the project folders, the collection methods and deciding how we will organise our project support materials is all part of the fun. 

The problems start happening once we have built the system and start to use it in our day to day world. That's when we come up against reality and discover that what we originally thought would work well doesn't work so well and involves a lot of processing time. Now it’s no longer a lot of fun. Now it seems as though all we are doing is fixing problems and cracks which means we are still not as productive to better at using our time as we want to be. 

Another part of becoming better organised and more productive is moving from our old habits and installing new ones. If you are not accustomed to collecting everything —writing everything down or collecting it into a digital to-do list manager and then processing it — it can be hard to get into the habit of spending the necessary ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to do that. 

Likewise, if you are not planning your day before you finish, you are not instilling the right kind of habits you need to maintain your system. 

It’s the installation of these habits that will ensure your syst

What state do you find yourself in most days? Reactive or proactive? That’s the topic of this week’s question on the Working With Podcast.

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 102

Hello and welcome to episode 102 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week we are talking about your state and the state you find yourself working in most days. This is not something I find a lot of people think about much. Instead, most people try to get through the day as best they can hoping to survive without having too many issues erupt. Yet, it does not really have to be like that and this week I will explain why.

But before we get to that…

Don’t forget, if you want to gain access to some of my shorter courses, you can on the Skillshare platform. 

If you are not familiar with Skillshare, Skillshare is a subscription-based learning centre where you pay a monthly subscription and have access to thousands of shortish courses. I learnt Adobe Indesign and iPhoneography on Skillshare a couple of years ago. It’s a fantastic place to learn about so many amazing things from coding, productivity, creativity and photography. It’s well worth a subscription. 

And, if you use the link in the show notes you can get yourself 2 months of FREE access to Skillshare’s classes. You could learn a lot in 2 months and by signing up using the link here, you help me too. Now that sounds like an awesome deal. 

So whatever it is you want to learn, Skillshare will have courses for you. Take a look and if you see something you like use the link in the show notes to get yourself two months of premium courses for free.

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

This week’s question comes from Rachael. Rachael asks, Hi Carl, I’m one of those people who reads everything they can about being more organised and efficient. The problem I have is I always feel I am behind and never on top of all my work and commitments. Is this normal or is there something I am not doing quite right? 

Hi Rachael, thank you for your question. 

I don’t think you are doing anything wrong at all. What is likely to be happening is you are finding out that no matter what you do, the work, commitments, decisions and interruptions never stop. That’s just the world we live in today. There’s always something else. I say “the world we live in today”, but in reality, all these commitments, decisions and interruptions have always been there. The difference today is it is difficult to compartmentalise them. 

What I mean by that is before we were connected to the always-on world via our smartphones, tablets and laptops, work email could only be dealt with when we were at the office, so when we left the office for the day, that was it. Work was over and we could turn our attention to our personal lives. That does not happen today. Instead, today we are exposed to a constant stream of notifications, interruptions, news and requests and unless you set yourself some barriers, you will feel stressed out, over-worked and out of control. 

If you do feel you are always behind, that is often a symptom of not being fully aware of the big picture of what’s going on in your world. One of the biggest benefits of taking some time each week to step back and really look at what you have going on in your life is you get to see where you are on the journey. How you are doing with the projects you are committed to at work and in your own personal life and how you are doing with yo

Do you have to have a productivity system? Well, that’s this week’s question and finding the right one for you. 

 

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

Episode 101

Hello and welcome to episode 101 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I am frequently asked about my own productivity system and how to set things up the way I set them up. The problem here is that what works for me may not work for you. 

They way I work, the way I think and the way I organise my files have been created over many years and are a result of all those things above plus the work I do. You will be different. Your work is different the way you think is different and your goals and objectives in life will be different. 

In this week’s episode I answer a question about this and why it causes so many people to give up trying to organise their lives around a few simple systems.

Before we get in to this week’s question I want to say that if any of you are in the Skillshare learning programme, then many of my shorter courses are on Skillshare. 

If you are not familiar with Skillshare, Skillshare is a subscription based learning centre where you pay a monthly subscription and have access to thousands of shortish courses. I learnt Adobe Indesign on Skillshare a couple of years ago. It’s fantastic place to learn about so many amazing things from coding, productivity, creativity and photography. It’s well worth a subscription. 

And, if you use the link in the show notes you can get yourself 2 months of FREE access to Skillshare’s classes. You could learn a lot in 2 months and by signing up using the link here, you help me too. Now that sounds like an awesome deal. 

So, help yourself and help me at the same time and get yourself signed up for Skillshare .

Okay, onto the question, and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from James. James asks: Hi Carl, I love this podcast. My question is: all the various productivity experts tell us to follow this system or that system and I find it all confusing. Could you tell me which is the best productivity system to follow so I don’t have to keep experimenting? 

Thank you, James, for your question. I completely understand how confusing things can get with so many bits of advice out there. A lot of the advice, and I have been guilty of this myself, pushes people towards a specific way of organising and managing their work. In reality, every one of us are different and what might work for me, and the way I think, is not necessarily going to work for everyone else. 

This is one of the reasons why these days I show many different ways to manage Todoist and Evernote on my YouTube channel because there really are a multitude of different ways to manage your time and your work. 

That said, there are also some fundamentals that if you skip, no amount of ways you organise your stuff will help. Those fundamentals are:

Collecting everything. If you not collecting your tasks, commitments and appointments into a trusted place then you will rely on your head to remember everything. Which means you won't remember everything. Relying on your head to remember everything is what leads to the feelings of overwhelm and stress. You brain does not know how to manage all those inputs. Are they short-term reminders? Long-term? Your brain does not know how to distinguish between these, so it will remind you to talk to your partner about next years summer holiday while you are on a stage pitching

This week’s podcast is the 100th episode. So to celebrate this milestone, I have a rather special episode for you.

 

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Tony Robbins Blog - Daily Priming

How to do “Ass-ti-tude”

Planning the next decade with Evernote

Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 100

Hello and welcome to episode 100 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I want to tell you all about what I learned from Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within seminar, conference, event. Last week, I was incredibly fortunate to be able to attend this event and I picked up a lot of tips and knowledge around getting maximum performance in every we do. 

From a productivity perspective, I want to share some of those tips with you. 

Before I get in to that though, we now have less than four months before the end of the year and if you are serious about turning 2020 and beyond in to your most successful year (and decade) then now is the time to begin thinking about what you want to change, what you want to accomplish and who you want to become. I put together an Evernote tutorial on my YouTube channel last week that takes you through six very powerful questions that will guide towards achieving a fantastic result. Even if you are not using Evernote, you will still find the video useful and you will be able to download the question sheet. The questions sheet is also available for free on my website. Links to both these are in the show notes.

And if you are ready to take your productivity, and goals, to the next level of performance, then I have also put my three-month coaching programme on special offer. You can now get three months of coaching for just $295.00 (saving yourself $75.00) With this coaching you will get me guiding you through your goals and helping you to set up the right workflow to make sure when the new year begins you start it with purpose and intention and start achieving your goals right from day one. 

All the details for my coaching programmes are again, in the show notes.

The Mystery Podcast voice is having a week off this week as there is no question to answer.

So, what did I learn from Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within? 

The first thing I learnt—and this comes up on day one and two—is that motion = emotion. What does that really mean? Well, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been sat down for a few hours without moving? You know, just sat down, either in a car on a long journey or perhaps mindlessly watching TV? How much energy do you have? Very little. You will probably find you are not ‘in the mood’ to do very much. That’s because your body has slowed down. Your mind and body work together and so when your body does not move neither does your mind. 

To change that—to change your state—all you have to do is move. Now of course if you have been sat down for a long time that is a lot easier said than done, but if you want to instantly change your mood, give yourself instant energy, then get up and move. If you can, dance—put on some lifting music and just dance for a few minutes. You will find almost immediately your mood changes, it lifts and when you are in a positive mood, you will make better decisions and you will feel a lot more positive. 

I know that all sound very simple—it is—but it really does work. This is why your best decisions will always be made when you are moving. I remember nearly eighteen years ago, I made the decision to come to Korea while playing with my dog in the local park. I was moving. Prior to that day, I had spent weeks thinking about it and not really making any decision.

Podcast 99

Are you spending too much time planning each day and not enough time doing? That’s the question for this week’s podcast. 

 

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Time And Life Mastery 3

Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 99

Hello and welcome to episode 99 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week we have a question about time spent planning and reviewing. It’s a great question to follow up on last week’s podcast. 

But before we get into this week’s question, as we are now getting close to the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, now would be a great time to begin thinking about what you want to accomplish in the next decade. That’s right, I did say a decade. We are about to start the 2020s and that gives us a fantastic opportunity to think about what we would like to achieve over the next ten years. 

I am reminded of a saying Tony Robbins repeats and that is “most people over-estimate what they can accomplish in a year and under-estimate what they can accomplish in a decade”. 

If you want to create a life that brings you joy, happiness and prosperity then you can. But it does start with knowing exactly what it is you want. Figuring out what changes you need to make to the way you live your life today to achieve that goal and then taking the necessary action to make it happen. 

If you haven’t taken my Time And Life Mastery 3 course yet, now would be a great time to do so. The course is designed perfectly for the next decade as it guides you through the process of discovering exactly what you want, then shows you how to build motivation and momentum to do the right tasks and build the right habits so that each day you move that little bit close. 

Now is the time to plant the seeds for the life you want and Time And Life Mastery 3 will guide you all the way. Details of the course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Adriana. Adriana asks, Hi Carl, I sometimes feel I am spending so much time planning that I do not have enough time to do my work each day. How much time do you spend planning each day and what do you plan? 

Thank you for your question, Adriana. I’ve always been curious about how long it takes people to do their daily and weekly planning. I did ask David Allen how long it took him to do his weekly review, but he rather diplomatically didn't answer the question. 

The truth is it depends. If you’ve been away on a business trip for a week and have not had a moment to yourself throughout the trip, your planning and reviewing when you get back is likely to take a while. If you are at home, doing your normal daily routines, then it should not be taking you too long. Ten to twenty minutes for a daily review and plan and around forty to fifty minutes for a weekly review. 

What I discovered was if you skimp on the weekly review, that will have a knock-on effect with your daily planning. If you are not entirely confident you have all the right tasks scheduled to show up when they need to show up, you are going to be wasting time in the week double-checking your projects to make sure you haven't missed anything. That’s almost like having to do a full weekly review every day. If that's happening then you are spending too much time planning. 

Let’s look at what’s involved in a daily review. First, clear your to-do list’s inbox. Get tasks into their right projects, add labels and dates if they need to be done this week—or before your next weekly review—and then review what you have planned for tomorr

“I don’t have time”, “There aren’t enough hours in the day”, “I’m busy”. Do you use these phrases regularly? If so, then this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast is for you.

Links:

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Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

Episode 98

Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week we are returning to the question of time, and how to manage your time on a daily basis. I know so many people really struggle with this, yet there are a few things you can do to reduce your feelings of stress, overwhelm and that feeling of busyness. 

But before we get to this week’s question, for those of you in the UK—or anywhere really—the Life and Time Mastery workshop is returning to Scunthorpe on the 28th December. 

This workshop is going to be very special. We are calling it “Life and Time Mastery - the 2020 Edition - Start Fast. Start Strong” and its single purpose is to help you to set yourself up for the best decade you have ever had. 

So if you are in the UK and want the opportunity to visit the wonderful Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe, spend a day with some incredibly energised, positive and amazing people plus Kevin Blackburn—a regular guest on this podcast—and myself, get yourself registered soon. Places are limited and they are selling out very fast. 

It would be fantastic to meet you in Scunthorpe in December. AND… There might even be a possibility to meet this show’s mystery podcast voice. Now there’s a fantastic reason to join us. 

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

This week’s question comes from Jake. Jake asks: Carl, I know you talk a lot about the 2+8 Prioritisation system and I do understand it, but I have so much to do each day, I really can’t cope. There’s no time for me to block time off for focused work and even thinking about working on my goals is a joke. Is here anything you can suggest that will help? 

Thank you for your question, Jake. 

Okay, let’s start with time. Everybody gets the same amount of time each day. Twenty-four hours. Some people can get an amazing amount done in that time, while others struggle and seem to be always telling everyone who will listen how busy they are. 

So if we start with the premise that we all have the same amount of time, the only variable is what we are doing in those twenty-four hours. 

Let me tell you a little secret. The way to get the most out of the time you have available is to get realistic about what you can achieve. 

If you have a complex 100 plus slide presentation to create, you are never going to do that in one day. Not if you accept that throughout the day you will get interrupted and distracted. It just isn't going to happen. Take a typical Apple keynote presentation, for example, we know, from the books that came out following the death of Steve Jobs, that one of those presentations took around six months to prepare. And in the two weeks leading up to the keynote, a team of people were spending all the time they had available putting the finishing touches to it. 

So, if you have a project as big as an important two-hour presentation, you are going to need more than a week to prepare it. If you are the kind of person who leaves those kinds of tasks until the last minute then sure you are going to feel busy and overwhelmed, yet those feelings are entirely of your own making. 

What you have to understand is that a lot of the work you have to do, if you want to do the work properly, will need more than a day to do so you

The weekly review. Are you consistently doing one? If not you might just be missing out on the one thing that will elevate your productivity to the next level 

Links:

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Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

Live (ish) 2+8 Prioritisation Processing in Todoist

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 97

Hello and welcome to episode 97 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, we have a question about the weekly review. Should you be doing one every week and would a daily review be more effective?

But before we get to that as we are heading towards the end of the year—there are only four months left—now would be the right time to get yourself set up for the new year which this year will be the start of a new decade. 

So more than ever before, starting the year right is going to be crucial if you want the next decade to be the best decade you’ve ever had in terms of your finances, your life pursuits and goals. 

To help you, I have a bundle of courses designed exactly for you to help you build the right goals, have the right systems in place and to have a plan in place ready to hit the year not just running be at a sprint. 

So I urge you to take a look at my Pathway To A Productive Life bundle, take the courses over the next four months and be ready to start 2020 with the right plan and the right system for you. This bundle includes, From Disorganised to a Productive Life, Your Digital Life 2.0 and Time and Life Mastery 3. And all for an amazing price of just $145.00. That’s a tiny investment to set yourself up for an amazing decade.

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

This week’s question comes from Angela. Angela asks, Hi Carl, I keep hearing that it is important to do a weekly review every week, but I am so busy, the last thing I want to do is look at my to-do list on a weekend. Do I really need to do a weekly review or would a daily review, say Monday to Friday, be okay?

Hmmm okay, where do we start with this one? 

One of the biggest parts to becoming better organised and more productive with your time is knowing what needs doing and by when. This is where the weekly review comes in. It is the part of your week where you can sit down with no distractions or interruptions and for around forty-five minutes go through all your projects and tasks to see what needs doing. It gives you a big picture view of everything you have going on in your life. 

You see, without that big-picture view, you are going to miss something. A project deadline will get missed, a task does not get done when it should be done, an important call not made when you said you would make it and your partner’s birthday gets forgotten. None of these things is nice, but that’s what happens when you miss your weekly review. It might not happen every week, but over time these things will happen. 

Another reason for doing a weekly review is it puts you back in control of your time. It’s when we don't know what’s coming up and when - that makes us feel overwhelmed and stressed out. We feel out of control and that is not good for your productivity or your health. 

So when should you do your weekly review? Well, that depends on you. What you are looking for is around one hour where you will be uninterrupted. You will need your computer for this too. I’ve tried doing it on my mobile phone in the past but found the limited screen size does not allow me to see the big picture—my calendar and to-do list next to each other for example. 

For me, Sunday afternoon, after I finish exercising, is the b

Are you finding your projects list overwhelming? Then this week’s podcast is just for you. 

 

Links:

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Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist

The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 96

Hello and welcome to episode 96 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week’s question is all about managing an overwhelming projects list. A projects list that keeps moving, changing and growing. The problem here is not actually with your projects list but rather the way you are thinking about your whole system. 

But before we get to this week’s question, I’d just like to remind you about my current coaching offer’s imminent end. It’s true, my coaching programme’s summer offer will be ending this week. Right now you can sign up for the programme for just $99 and if you wish to continue you can save yourself up to $300 on any of my longer programmes. 

I know from my own personal experience how a coach can change your outcomes. As a teenager, I was a pretty useful middle-distance runner. But before I discovered that, a teacher at my school saw me running in a cross country race and recommended I get a coach. He saw something in me I did not see, I guess, but I decided to do just that. I got a coach. 

Very quickly my running got better, my speed endurance improved and my race tactics became sharper and more focused. That was because there was now someone guiding me, encouraging me and making small incremental changes to the way I trained and the way I ran races.

I learned that if you want to perform at your best, you cannot do it alone. To get the best out of yourself you need a coach. Someone on the outside who can help you improve your technique. To hold you accountable when you try to take shortcuts and to keep you focused on the goal. 

So as we head towards the end of this decade and the start of a new decade, now would be the right time to get yourself a coach. Someone to look at your current system and give you guidance, strategies and methods to improve your overall set up so you can start the new decade Sharpe, focused and motivated to make it the best decade of your life. 

All the details of what you get in the programme are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Dinh Hai. Dinh Hai asks: Hi Carl. I have lots of projects running at the same time. I am having trouble keeping track of all of them. I use Todoist and Evernote quite regularly. Do you have any ideas on managing multiple projects at the same time? 

Thank you, Dinh Hai, for the question. 

Okay, I think we need to go back to basics here. Whether you are using a pure GTD set up that is operating through contexts (people, place or tool) or you have your own setup, a project folder is just a list of tasks related to a single outcome. Unless you decided to work on a single project all day to the exclusion of everything else, then you are never likely to be working from your project folders. So the number of projects you have going on at any one time is not relevant. 

Ultimately, what you do each day is controlled not by the number of projects you have but by the time you have available to do the tasks associated with those projects. You only have 24 hours—the same as everyone else. 

We normally work from a daily list of tasks we have decided we want to do today or we are working from a list of tasks that we can only do given where we are, who we are with or what tools we have available. 

If we did not have these project placeholders, our inboxes would become a ver