Your Time, Your Way

In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine. 

Hello and welcome to episode 22 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a question about morning and evening routines. To me, these two things you do every day are the foundations of building a fantastic day. And when you string together fantastic individual days you very soon start building a fantastic life.

Before we get to the answer, don’t forget you can ask me anything about productivity, time management and goal planning, all you have to do is send your question either by email or by Dming me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes. And don’t forget, if you are serious about getting yourself better organised and more productive, then take a look at my latest online course, Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. A course that will give you the know-how and framework to build your very own, bullet proof productivity system. So go on and invest in yourself and get yourself enrolled.

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

This week’s question comes from Laura. Laura asks: I really want to get myself organised and I think the best way would be to give myself a morning and evening routine. What do you suggest would be the best way to go about this? 

Thank you Laura for your great question. 

I would agree with you that setting up a couple of daily routines will help you to get yourself organised because it is the routines and the habits we do every day that takes us towards achieving the goals and plans we have set for ourselves. Most people drift through their lives and never really achieve anything. By having a plan in place and a set routine that takes you closer each day towards achieving those goals, you will start seeing some huge improvements in your life. 

The best way to get this mini-project started is to make a list of all the things you would like to do each day. Don’t worry at this stage when you will do them, just concentrate on listing out the things you would like to do each day. I would go for list of say ten to twelve things. This way you can divide the list up into what you would like to do in the morning and what you would like to do in the evening. One thing that should be on your list is “plan tomorrow” this is one thing that does need to go on your evening routine. Planning your day the night before allows you to have a better nights sleep because you know exactly what you will be focussing your energies on the next day. It also allows you to make sure you are getting the important things done each day. You do not want to be wasting your freshest hours of the day making plans and deciding what you want to do. 

Once you have made your list of ten to twelve things and have added “plan tomorrow” to your evening list, go through your list and add the different things to either the morning list of evening list. Try to keep things even. Have 5 or 6 things on your morning list and 5 or 6 things on your evening list. 

Let’s start with the morning routine. Now this depends on what kind of person you are. If you are naturally a morning person and enjoy the early mornings then you can start your routine off by making yourself a cup of your favourite tea of coffee. One of the things I have learnt over the years is if you start your day with a cup of your favourite drink, it lifts your mood immediately. I personally love Starbucks’s Breakfast blend coffee and I make that in a Braun coffee machine. It’s a simple coffee machine, but it brews a gorgeous cup of coffee. That starts my day off wonderfully. 

Now the next step depends on what you want to do. You could start off by meditating for ten minutes, or you could start by writing in your journal. Other things you can do is review your calendar for the day. Reviewing your calendar for the day is different from planning your day. Reviewing is essentially a quick check to see where you need to be and with whom and with what. It is not planning. 

Of course there is always the option to exercise in the morning if you want to build that in to your daily routine. The beauty of building your own morning routine is you can focus on the things you want to focus on before the stresses and strains of the day hit you. I like the Robin Sharma’s 5AM club routine. That is the 20/20/20 twenty minutes exercise, 20 minutes planning and 20 minutes learning. I would adapt the “planning” part to writing in my journal what my hopes and expectations for the day are, but you could also use it to review your goals and internalise your dreams. 

There’s a lot of advice about not checking your email first thing in the morning. I ignore that advice. I never get any ‘bad news’ or demanding emails in the morning, I usually only get news and questions from my students, which I love receiving. So for me, my morning emails are a source of good news and inspiration. But if you do get a lot of work emails in overnight then I would suggest not checking your email as part of your morning routine. 

For me a perfect morning routine would be something like:

• Make coffee

I am nota morning person as you can probably see.

Now on to the evening routine. This one for me is the most important one. This is where I do my Golden 10 and catch up with messages and admin. I am more of a night person, so sitting down at my desk for an hour to catch up on the day, plan the next day and get everything tidied up is one of my favourite times of the day. But this could easily be the other way round for you if you were a morning person. The key here is that whatever you do as part of your evening routine it makes you feel relaxed and contented. You do not want to be finishing the day feeling stressed. Try to make sure you evening routine leaves you feeling relaxed and ready for the next day. 

This year I began a 30 minutes study period between 10:30pm and 11:00pm Every evening between those times I study something. Usually it is a TED talk, or it could be something inspiring like a Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins talk. Either way I want to feel inspired and learn something new. This has become one of my favourite times of the day. That process of learning and writing what I have learnt into my journal just makes me feel so lucky that we live in such a resourceful world today. 

So for me my evening routine looks like:

• do today’s admin

This routine leaves me feeling relaxed and ready for the next day and, for me, is the perfect way to end the day. 

You, of course will be different and you need to build a routine around what you enjoy doing. Both your morning routine and evening routine needs to be something you look forward to. If you do don’t enjoy doing them you will not stick with it. After a few weeks these routines begin to stick and after three months they have become a habit. Once they have become a habit, you will feel very uncomfortable when you do not do them. That is a great sign. 

The thing about morning and evening routines is they have to be what you want to do. You will never get much success if you just copy other peoples. If you don’t journal, that’s okay. Don’t try and start unless you really want to start. Journalling is not for everyone. Likewise if you are not in to exercise, then don’t force yourself to exercise. This is your life, your choices and your goals. They are not anyone elses and you should be proud of what you do. Just build a set of routines that involve you doing what you want to do. 

The only thing I would add to this is that when you do get your morning and evening routines set up and working for you, you start to feel a lot happier. You start to make progress on your goals, if you make sure you do something related to your goals every day, and you start of many more good days than you had before. These routines set you up for a great life and this probably why almost all the successful people in the world have some form of daily routine they follow. Tim Cook wakes up around 3:30am and goes to the gym. Satiya Nadella goes for a run every morning and Tony Robbins has an elaborate breathing and meditation ritual he does every morning. 

So there you go, Laura. Go for it. Create you daily routines and make them a fundamental part of your life. You will never regret it and you will soon find yourself moving a lot closer to achieving the things you want to achieve. 

Thank you very much for listing to this podcast. I hope you got a lot out of it. It just remain for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine. 

Hello and welcome to episode 22 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a question about morning and evening routines. To me, these two things you do every day are the foundations of building a fantastic day. And when you string together fantastic individual days you very soon start building a fantastic life.

Before we get to the answer, don’t forget you can ask me anything about productivity, time management and goal planning, all you have to do is send your question either by email or by Dming me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes. And don’t forget, if you are serious about getting yourself better organised and more productive, then take a look at my latest online course, Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. A course that will give you the know-how and framework to build your very own, bullet proof productivity system. So go on and invest in yourself and get yourself enrolled.

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

This week’s question comes from Laura. Laura asks: I really want to get myself organised and I think the best way would be to give myself a morning and evening routine. What do you suggest would be the best way to go about this? 

Thank you Laura for your great question. 

I would agree with you that setting up a couple of daily routines will help you to get yourself organised because it is the routines and the habits we do every day that takes us towards achieving the goals and plans we have set for ourselves. Most people drift through their lives and never really achieve anything. By having a plan in place and a set routine that takes you closer each day towards achieving those goals, you will start seeing some huge improvements in your life. 

The best way to get this mini-project started is to make a list of all the things you would like to do each day. Don’t worry at this stage when you will do them, just concentrate on listing out the things you would like to do each day. I would go for list of say ten to twelve things. This way you can divide the list up into what you would like to do in the morning and what you would like to do in the evening. One thing that should be on your list is “plan tomorrow” this is one thing that does need to go on your evening routine. Planning your day the night before allows you to have a better nights sleep because you know exactly what you will be focussing your energies on the next day. It also allows you to make sure you are getting the important things done each day. You do not want to be wasting your freshest hours of the day making plan

Podcast Episode 21

In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course:

More details can be found here.

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done. 

Hello and welcome to episode 21 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week I have a great question about managing the different types of work that gets thrown at us each day and how to make sure the important work is getting done.

Before we get in to this week’s question though, if you don’t already know, I launched a new online course last week—Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. It’s a course designed to help you to build your very own productivity system and one that works for you. If you want to learn more about this course there is a link to the course details in the show notes. 

Okay, without further ado, let me hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, every day I feel I am swamped with work and I feel I get a lot done. The trouble is when I look and see what I have done for the day, none of it is really important. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get more important work done? 

Hi Alan, thank you for your wonderful question. The situation you describe is very common. I too find the same thing happening from time to time and it can be very disheartening to get to the end of the day, feel exhausted and yet realise that you haven’t done anything important all day. You’ve spent the day fighting fires and have had no time to do any of that important fire preventing work. 

So what can you do to make sure you are doing the important work each day? Well the first thing to understand is you will always have to take care of the fires. The unimportant, but urgent work that gets thrown at us everyday. That’s just part of life and is never going to change. A couple of years ago I analysed the work I was doing in details and discovered that no matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could avoid the busy work. It’s there, it comes at us through email, meetings and other people’s requests. It just has to be done. What I discovered is that around 70% of my work was busy work. It still is. So for me I realised I needed to be very clear on how I would spend the other 30% of my work time. It’s the 30% for me that really matters each day.

These numbers are very close to the 80/20 principle. For work that means 20% of your work will bring 80% of your positive results. The other 80% of you work will have no real impact on your work. I would guess this is pretty much the same for everyone. So the big question is, what are you going to do with the 20%? 

The thing is, we do not have to spend all our working time doing the unimportant, but urgent work. If we take some time at the end of everyday and look at what we should be working on, the work that really matters and the work that will take us forward and grow us as individuals and select one or two tasks that will move us forward on those projects or goals each day, then each day you will have a focus. These tasks or goals do not have to be big, they can be little twenty minute tasks. Exercise is a good example. If you decided that no matter what, you were going to do at least twenty minutes exercise tomorrow, when you wake up in the morning, you will actively seek out those twenty minutes to make sure it happens. Likewise, if you know you need to work on the important report or essay, you can make sure you spend one or two hours on writing the report or essay. 

I’ve just launched a new online course and each morning, when I wake up, there are a lot of admin tasks that came in overnight associated with that course. Student questions, enrolment issues etc. Although I don’t consider these to be busy work tasks, answering student questions is a very important part of my work, they are tasks that were not on my to-to list for the day. Yet, no matter what, the two objectives I set for myself the evening before do not get changed. I might change other, less important tasks so I have time to deal with the course work, there is no way I will allow anything to get in the way of doing the two important tasks I set myself for the day. 

Setting those two important tasks is part of my Golden 10 evening schedule. This is where I take ten minutes at the end of the day to process my inboxes, review my calendar for the next day and set my objectives and focus for the next day. It only takes ten minutes, but it is one of the most important parts of the day for me. Without those ten minutes, I know my life would drift and I would be spending all my time doing the busy work tasks that come in on a day to day basis. 

Why just ten minutes? Well, I have found if I limit the time I have to make a decision about what I want to focus on tomorrow I choose the focus that means the most to me at that moment. Likewise with my two objectives. If I spend too long thinking about what I want to accomplish tomorrow I end up choosing things that sound nice, but do not have a very big impact on my life. When I restrict the time for thinking, the things that are most important to me right now come immediately to mind and I put them down on my list. And of course, everyone can find ten minutes at the end of the day to plan the next day. 

In order to get control of what you are working on, you do need to know what the important things are and what the unimportant is. For me, the important things are related to creating content. It is content that keeps me moving forward and it is content that I enjoy doing the most. I have never liked admin, but I know it does need doing. Like almost everyone else, I also get a lot of email each day, some of it I enjoy dealing with—student questions for example—other stuff I don’t enjoy dealing with—paying bills, sending attendance records and having to reschedule my English students’ classes. But this work still has to be done. For the stuff I do not enjoy doing, I have tried to automate as much as possible. Keeping track of student attendance records for example is done in the most automated way I can do it using my phone, calendar and Apple’s Numbers. 

I also restrict the time I spend on admin tasks. I allocate thirty minutes after my dinner to sit down at my computer and update all the day’s admin. If I left it all until it was required—usually the end of the month—it would take me hours of work. I can manage thirty minutes each day. I even clock watch it. I note the time I start and I calculate when I need to stop. That way my brain knows it’s on a deadline and the work always seems to get done in the time frame. 

The thing about all this unimportant, but necessary work is we will never be able to escape it. Whether you are a student, an office worker, doctor or construction worker, you will still get it. And, it is likely to take up the majority of the time you spend working. The key is to develop methods to deal with it, without you letting it interfere with the work that is important. 

One final part to making sure you are focused on the important work is to do a weekly review. This is where you sit down, usually on a weekend when there is little being thrown at you, and review all your open projects and make sure you are moving forward on your goals. When you do a weekly review it helps you to focus on what you want to work on, what you want to get completed the following week and make sure you are on track with your goals. A weekly review takes anywhere between 45 and 90 minutes to complete. I sit down at my desk, put on some relaxing music, have a nice cup of tea and go though my calendar, to-do list and make sure I have collected everything from my various inboxes and notebooks. It allows me quiet time to make sure I am doing the work that matters and that the busy work hasn’t overtaken my life. 

So there you go. That’s how you can make sure you are doing the important work and not getting tied up in unimportant busy work. Set yourself two objectives for the day the night before, make sure you have a focus for the day and accept that busy, unimportant work still needs to be done and just get it done. There will be days where you spend all day on busy work, that just the nature of things, but the important thing to do is to make sure that those days do not become the majority of days. 

Thank you very much for listen to this podcast. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on productivity, time management, GTD or goal planning, then please get in touch. All the various way to contact me are in the show notes.

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

Podcast Episode 21

In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course:

More details can be found here.

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done. 

Hello and welcome to episode 21 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week I have a great question about managing the different types of work that gets thrown at us each day and how to make sure the important work is getting done.

Before we get in to this week’s question though, if you don’t already know, I launched a new online course last week—Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. It’s a course designed to help you to build your very own productivity system and one that works for you. If you want to learn more about this course there is a link to the course details in the show notes. 

Okay, without further ado, let me hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, every day I feel I am swamped with work and I feel I get a lot done. The trouble is when I look and see what I have done for the day, none of it is really important. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get more important work done? 

Hi Alan, thank you for your wonderful question. The situation you describe is very common. I too find the same thing happening from time to time and it can be very disheartening to get to the end of the day, feel exhausted and yet realise that you haven’t done anything important all day. You’ve spent the day fighting fires and have had no time to do any of that important fire preventing work. 

So what can you do to make sure you are doing the important work each day? Well the first thing to understand is you will always have to take care of the fires. The unimportant, but urgent work that gets thrown at us everyday. That’s just part of life and is never going to change. A couple of years ago I analysed the work I was doing in details and discovered that no matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could avoid the busy work. It’s there, it comes at us through email, meetings and other people’s requests. It just has to be done. What I discovered is that around 70% of my work was busy work. It still is. So for me I realised I needed to be very clear on how I would spend the other 30% of my work time. It’s the 30% for me that really matters each day.

These numbers are very close to the 80/20 principle. For work that means 20% of your work will bring 80% of your positive results. The other 80% of you work will have no real impact on your work. I would guess this is pretty much the same for everyone. So the big question is, what are you going to do with the 20%? 

This week, I answer a question about how to develop the habit of better productivity and time management

LINKS

Email me at [email protected]

Website | Twitter | Facebook 

More details on the Your Digitial Life 2.0 Online course can be found here:

SCRIPT:

Podcast Episode 20

In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system.

Hello and welcome to episode 20 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week I have a great question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system. I think this is a problem many people face when they make that initial decision to get themselves better organised and more productive. 

Before I get into the question, I want to let you all know that my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course has just launched. This course has taken four months to design and create and compliments the book I published late last year. If you have already bought the book you can enrol in this course for just $19.99. For everyone else, the course is at a super low price of $39.99. I’ve set the course at a low price because I want to help as many people as I can discover the benefits of building a time management and productivity system that works and can get set you up for a fantastic life. I’ll put a link to the course in the show notes. This is something that can really help you get super productive. 

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

This week’s question comes from Rebecca. Rebecca asks, Carl, I’ve watched most of your Todoist videos on YouTube and I’ve set up my Todoist like yours. The problem I have sticking to using it. I can go few days, but then work and other commitments get in the way and I end up not looking at Todoist for a few days. Is there anything I can do to get better at using Todoist?

Thank you, Rebecca, for this wonderful question. This really a question about developing habits. And when it comes to developing habits what you must do is to focus your attention on what it is you want to achieve. This is one of the reasons new years resolutions don’t work. People set too many resolutions and then have great difficulty focusing on the various habits or behaviours they want to change. Now sometimes it can work. Losing weight and exercising compliment each other for example. When you start a programme of exercise, the new healthy routine you set for yourself also focuses your attention on the food you are eating each day. But losing weight and spending more time with your friends do not compliment each other. What you would be best doing it focusing on one of those resolutions in the first quarter of the year and then in the second quarter (when spring comes for many of us) focusing on the other resolution. 

Now when it comes to developing a productivity system, there are quite a lot of parts to it. There is the habit of collecting everything, then organising what you collected into its rightful place and then, of course, there’s the doing. Doing the work that matters. My advice would be to focus your attention on the collecting first. If you’re not collecting then you are not getting the right stuff into your system and that results in you not having the right stuff to organise. So focus your attention on collecting. As you develop the habit of collecting all your stuff, you will be pushing yourself to organise all that collected stuff anyway. 

Focusing on collecting also enables you to learn the fastest ways to collect. You can experiment, you can try different apps. I use an app called Drafts to collect a lot of my stuff because it is so fast. I also have the IFTTT Note extension on my phone so I can also collect stuff quickly into Todoist from wherever I am on my phone or iPad. On Android phones, you have widgets, which can really speed up the process of collecting and on iOS you have the share sheet. All of these little pieces, when playing around with will teach you the fastest way to collect stuff into your system. To me, this is the fun part of creating your own system. 

Once you are in the habit of collecting, then you want to be developing the habit of the Golden 10. This is where you spend ten minutes at the end of the day organising everything you collected. At first, this is likely to take more than ten minutes because you will be slow. Again, what you are looking to do is to get faster at organising. Making sure that when you see something in your inbox you immediately ask the question: “What is it?” then moving it into its rightful place or dealing with it there and then if you have time. Now if you can focus your attention on collecting and organising at the same time, the doing part will obviously take care of itself. 

One great tip is to use your calendar. Many of us are programmed to only put appointments and events on our calendar and to leave to-dos and tasks on a to-do list. If you adopt a policy of ‘what’s on my calendar gets done’, then the first thing you look at in the morning is your calendar. What you can do is put the Golden 10 on your calendar as a set, recurring time every day. It is only ten-minutes and everybody should be able to find ten-minutes every day to do some reflecting and planning. 

I schedule all sorts of things on my calendar. Preparing this podcast is scheduled for every Tuesday morning. My blog post writing is scheduled for Monday mornings and recording and editing my YouTube videos are scheduled every Saturday afternoon. What’s on my calendar gets done and is non-negotiable no matter what I feel like doing at that time. Your calendar is a great way to develop positive habits. You can put things like your morning routine on there. If you are a part of Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club, you can schedule the 20/20/20 for 5 AM every morning. This is a great way to motivate yourself and is also a wonderful way to keep a record of what you have done. Exercise is another great addition to your calendar too. If it’s on your calendar, it gets done. There are no mind-negotiations about it. It’s on your calendar, you do it. 

That leads me to another key part of this. That is self-discipline. It is very easy to go to bed at night saying to yourself you will start tomorrow. The trouble is of course when tomorrow arrives, you might wake up late, rush into the shower, grab your coffee and rush to catch your bus. The twenty minutes you planned to review your calendar for the day is already forgotten about and the moment you walk into the office you are inundated with emails, meetings and other people’s urgent tasks. This is why you need self-discipline. You need to make sure that when those little urges, we all get them, to not write something down, or skip the Golden ten in the evening you can stop yourself and make sure you do collect the ideas, tasks and commitments and that you do get yourself up off the sofa to sit down with your Todoist and calendar open and organise everything you collected that day. 

And okay, if you do wake up late and miss your twenty-minutes planning and reflection time (if that is something you choose to do) cut your lunch-hour by twenty-minutes and use that time to do your planning and reflection. In my experience, if you miss a time like that, all is not lost you can always find the time later in the day. 

But the best way to get into the habit of using your productivity tools consistently is to start small and focus on developing the habits one step at a time. Start by getting into the habit of collecting first, then add the Golden Ten. Once you have those two parts tied down, you will soon find everything else falls into place. The doing should be happening naturally anyway. The key part is to make sure you are doing the work that matters and not wasting time on those little routines that don’t improve your life or take you closer to achieving your goals. That’s why the Golden Ten is there. To keep you focused on the important things in your life. 

So, if you are really struggling to get into the habit of being more productive, take advantage of the power of your calendar. Make it a strict policy that any that goes on your calendar gets done and make sure that your calendar is easily accessible on all your devices. As I prepare this podcast episode, the only thing open on my computer is my writing app. I don’t need anything else to prepare this podcast. My calendar told me that right now I should be preparing next week’s podcast and that is exactly what I am doing. My calendar also told that in twenty-minutes time I should be going outside for a run—yes I put my exercise schedule on my calendar too—and at 9:30pm I am scheduled to do my Golden Ten. What goes on my calendar, gets done. 

Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Working With… Podcast. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, please get in touch either by email, or by DMing me on Twitter or Facebook. 

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

This week, I answer a question about how to develop the habit of better productivity and time management

LINKS

Email me at [email protected]

Website | Twitter | Facebook 

More details on the Your Digitial Life 2.0 Online course can be found here:

SCRIPT:

Podcast Episode 20

In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system.

Hello and welcome to episode 20 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week I have a great question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system. I think this is a problem many people face when they make that initial decision to get themselves better organised and more productive. 

Before I get into the question, I want to let you all know that my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course has just launched. This course has taken four months to design and create and compliments the book I published late last year. If you have already bought the book you can enrol in this course for just $19.99. For everyone else, the course is at a super low price of $39.99. I’ve set the course at a low price because I want to help as many people as I can discover the benefits of building a time management and productivity system that works and can get set you up for a fantastic life. I’ll put a link to the course in the show notes. This is something that can really help you get super productive. 

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

This week’s question comes from Rebecca. Rebecca asks, Carl, I’ve watched most of your Todoist videos on YouTube and I’ve set up my Todoist like yours. The problem I have sticking to using it. I can go few days, but then work and other commitments get in the way and I end up not looking at Todoist for a few days. Is there anything I can do to get better at using Todoist?

Thank you, Rebecca, for this wonderful question. This really a question about developing habits. And when it comes to developing habits what you must do is to focus your attention on what it is you want to achieve. This is one of the reasons new years resolutions don’t work. People set too many resolutions and then have great difficulty focusing on the various habits or behaviours they want to change. Now sometimes it can work. Losing weight and exercising compliment each other for example. When you start a programme of exercise, the new healthy routine you set for yourself also focuses your attention on the food you are eating each day. But losing weight and spending more time with your friends do not compliment each other. What you would be best doing it focusing on one of those resolutions in the first quarter of the year and then in the second quarter (when spring comes for many of us) focusing on the other resolution. 

Now when it comes to developing a productivity system, there are quite a lot of parts to it. There is the habit of collecting everything, then organising what you collected into its rightful place and then, of course, there’s the doin

This week, I answer a question about procrastination and offer some tips on beating it.

LINKS

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AnjunaDeep Podcast

Cafe Del Mar Apple Music Playlist

The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Online Course

SCRIPT

Podcast Episode 19

In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about overcoming the bad habit of procrastination.

Hello and welcome to episode 19 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a question about procrastination and how to stop yourself from procrastinating when there are important things that need doing. I think this is a problem many people face and I too, from time to time, fall into the procrastination trap. 

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

This week’s question comes from Anatoly who asks:

I have a bad habit of putting important things off and instead watching videos on YouTube or just watching TV for hours even though I know I have to finish some important work. Do you have any suggestions on how I can stop myself from doing this? 

Thank you do much for your question, Anatoly. This is a question I am sure many people would ask. How to stop procrastination from interfering with getting the important stuff done in your life. 

I believe not all procrastination is bad. We need procrastination to allow our creativity to flow and develop ideas, so we should not be trying to cut out procrastination completely. Often it is when we are lost in some form of procrastination that we come up with some amazing ideas or brilliant solutions to problems we are facing. What we need to be able to do is to prevent procrastination from stopping us from getting important work done when that work needs doing. How do we do that?

Well, as with all bad habits we first need to identify when we are doing it. What are we doing and where are we when we slip in to the bad form of procrastination. For example, do you find yourself procrastinating when you are trying to do work in your local coffee shop? What is happening here is your environment is telling your brain that this place is a good place to procrastinate. If that is the case, what you should do is find another coffee shop and only do important work in that coffee shop. Your local coffee shop can be used for browsing YouTube, chatting with friends online and reading magazines. The second coffee shop is for work only and you only ever go there to do focussed work. This is a trick I use all the time. I move around Seoul pretty much every day and I have a number of select coffee shops I use for only doing focussed work. I also have a few coffee shops around the city for what I call “creative play” I use these when I am brainstorming ideas or just want to do some non-essential research or reply to messages. 

The coffee shops I use for doing focussed work are places that the moment I walk in I go into a focussed state and I can lose myself completely in the work I have to do. My phone is on do not disturb and all I have on the table is the work I am working on. It’s a simple, yet very effective way of preventing negative procrastination from creeping in. 

Another trick, and somewhat related to the previous one, is your normal work environment. I do a lot of my work from home and my desk is where I write and plan out my videos and courses. My desk is incredibly minimal. I do not have anything on my desk except for things that are essential. Computer, lamp, water bottle and my journal. There is nothing else. This means there is nothing around to distract me and cause me to procrastinate. Once again, I do not have notifications turned on, so there are no popup windows distracting me. It means I can just sit down and focus on my work. The same can apply at your office, if you find you procrastinate when sat at your desk, then look around you environment. If there are a lot of distractions, files, books, phones, tablets and so on, remove them from your desk. Only have the essential items on there. Don’t allow anything to come between you and your work. 

Still on your working environment, I find music is a good way to stop me from procrastinating. If I am at play, or doing something that is not important I listen to 80s/90s pop music or uplifting dance tunes from the music festivals I have been to. This music brings back wonderful memories for me and it’s just great fun to listen to. 

However, when I want to do some focused work, I change the music. I listen to music from Cafe Del Mar or the Anjunadeep podcast which is all slow, deep, electronic music. This music is incredibly relaxing and does wonders for my focus. (a link to a Cafe Del Mar Apple Music playlist and the Anjunadeep podcast is in the show notes)

The scientific side to this music idea is when your brain recognises a type of music it knows you want to focus. Of course, this is not going to happen overnight. You need to train your brain to understand that slow, deep electronic music means focused deep work. You can also do this with the lighting. Change the lighting in your workspace when you want to do focused work. For example, if you want to get some focused work done, turn on your lamp. This way you are subconsciously telling your brain it’s time to focus. All other times, when you are watching videos on YouTube or in Facebook, turn it off. 

Other ways to beat procrastination are to use your calendar to assign times to do focused work. Lets say between 10 and 11:30am you rarely have any meetings or lectures. Then schedule focussed work for these times. What you need to do is be specific about the work you want to do. For example, if you have an important presentation to prepare, you write in your calendar “Work on next week’s presentation” for 10 to 11:30am on the specific day. Then on that day, when you see you calendar you see “work on next week’s presentation” and you subconsciously tell your brain it’s time to do focused work. This might seem a bit simple, but it really does work.

Part of the reason we procrastinate is because we are not being specific about what we want to do. If you are not specific, you are giving your brain an excuse to procrastinate. You need to be very specific about what it is you want to accomplish. If you write something on your to-do list or calendar like “do some work” I can guarantee you will procrastinate. “Do some work” is not specific. What work? That’s the question your brain asks and then it goes off into all sorts of different places and before you know it, you’ve lost an hour. Be specific. 

Last week, I did a video on the Golden Ten minutes, a practice you should follow every evening before you finish. I’ll put a link to this video in the show notes. What the Golden Ten minutes does is prepares you for the next day so you can get the important work done. It keeps you in control of your projects and deadlines and allows you to plan what you will do for the day. This means you are being very specific about what you want to accomplish and does not give your brain any chance to procrastinate. It’s very powerful and it only takes ten minutes. If you really struggle with procrastination, then I strongly suggest you start making the Golden ten minutes a part of your everyday routine. 

Bad procrastination is caused because you are being unclear about what you intend to do. To overcome procrastination all you need to do is to become more specific about what your intention is. So if you have a piece of work that needs completing by Friday, then schedule the time to sit down in a place that focuses your brain on work and make sure you are specific about the outcome you want for that period of time. Repeat this process and you will soon be training your brain to focus on the work that needs doing and not cute puppies on YouTube or your Facebook newsfeed. There are times for YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, but when you have important work that needs doing, then that’s not the time. 

And don’t forget to create a specific work environment. This simple trick does work and is very easy to implement. 

Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. If you have a question you would like answering about productivity, time management or goal planning, then please email me at [email protected] or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes. 

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