Your Time, Your Way

Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day”

When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue. 

Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want. 

 

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The COD Productivity Method 

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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Script |422

Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus. 

There are eight areas that we all share. These are:

Family and relationships.

Career or business

Health and fitness

Finances

Lifestyle and life experiences

Self-development

Spirituality

Life’s purpose

The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you. 

The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ. 

This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up. 

Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose. 

This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities.

So, let me now 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 use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me? 

Hi Annie, thank you for your question. 

This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do.

This is where having some structure built into your week can help. 

Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week. 

From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example. 

The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable. 

For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days. 

Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training. 

Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm. 

I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture. 

I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university.

University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night. 

There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”

And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true. 

You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on. 

I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him. 

As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season. 

I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”. 

After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him. 

Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities. 

And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you. 

It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away. 

This is why time blocking, when done right, works. 

Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example. 

No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone. 

It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours. 

But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week. 

When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have. 

Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it. 

Yet there’s a fix for that. 

Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm. 

Now you have the two most important numbers. 

When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need. 

That means the question becomes, when will you do it? 

If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed. 

And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it. 

This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team. 

The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does. 

A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic. 

I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur. 

In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart. 

At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game. 

And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals. 

In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not. 

When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you. 

The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible. 

The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute. 

Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly. 

Then carry out the work. 

It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control. 

Ideally, I like an hour to respond to messages and emails, but if I’ve had to adjust my plan, I’ll do 30 minutes. It just helps keep things under control and doesn’t mean I have to find more time tomorrow than I planned for. 

The most important thing, though, Annie, is that you first decide what is important to you and what is not. This will help you to make the right decisions each day. That’s why going through the Areas of Focus exercise will put you in a much better position. 

You will know what is important to you, and you can build your calendar around those priorities. 

After that, when things are demanded of you that you cannot decline, stay calm and composed and adjust your plan accordingly. 

It’s never the end of the world, and as long as you get back onto your plan as quickly as possible, you’ll soon find that at the end of the week, you’re not far from where you wanted to be. 

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

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

"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills."

That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his.

Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line.

The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level.

And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time.

 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

 

The COD Productivity Method 

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

 

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

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

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Script |421

Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set. 

Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear. 

Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy. 

Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new. 

This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice. 

Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk. 

If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined. 

The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in. 

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

This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic?

Hi Kathy, thank you for your question. 

This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems. 

One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard. 

After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems. 

Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits. 

The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do with it?

When will I do it?

When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place. 

Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns. 

In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun.

The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond. 

The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster. 

How was Scaramanga faster? Practice. 

How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast? 

I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something. 

This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow. 

What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features.

And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app. 

It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them. 

Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong. 

This is where practice and experience come in. 

I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time. 

He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel. 

When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office. 

How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work?

Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated. 

The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks 

He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI. 

The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly. 

And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility. 

In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office. 

When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected. 

One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example. 

Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough. 

Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work. 

When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching. 

The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit. 

The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward. 

If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw. 

In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter. 

Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills. 

For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster. 

For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something. 

The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce.

This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees.

This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said:

“The rest of the time I maintain my skills.”

Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment.

If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week. 

One way you can do this is to plan your objectives. 

What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be:

To finish an important proposal

Get on top of your emails

To clean up the garden 

To exercise a minimum of four times

To update your LinkedIn profile

With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them. 

One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week. 

This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won. 

However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose. 

When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead. 

He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan. 

Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead. 

You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes.

It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it. 

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

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

“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”

That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive. 

And it’s a single word: Consistency. 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

 

The COD Productivity Method 

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

 

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

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

Subscribe to my Substack 

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script | 420

Hello, and welcome to episode 420 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics. 

Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency. 

Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay. 

But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency.

So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today. 

So, 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 Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days?

Hi Stephan, thank you for your question. 

Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently. 

Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was:

“If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”

I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control. 

The numbers take care of themselves. 

This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications. 

Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete. 

But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox. 

Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low. 

Your consistency will take care of the numbers. 

When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising. 

You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox. 

However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions:

What is it? A note, an appointment or a task

What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask…

When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term. 

If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising. 

When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow. 

But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic. 

And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage. 

Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes. 

But there are other factors here. 

The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools.

I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory. 

When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature. 

Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future. 

So, I don’t use that feature. 

So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help. 

The first is to start small. 

Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself. 

Instead, pick one area. 

For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager. 

This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week. 

When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone. 

While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot. 

However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone. 

I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station. 

Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning. 

Daily planning involves three steps. 

The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?)

The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes) 

And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes) 

When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone. 

One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do. 

Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself. 

I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond). 

Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer. 

How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency. 

Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet.

Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were. 

When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top. 

Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion. 

But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there. 

It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one. 

Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it. 

It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are. 

That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time.

Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section. 

If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom. 

If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you. 

Thank you, Stephan, 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.

If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago. 

It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan. 

He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set.

In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.

 

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Script | 419

Hello, and welcome to episode 419 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards. 

Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example. 

It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things. 

My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day. 

This week’s question is related to these approaches. So 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 Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent? 

Hi Sonya, thank you for your question.

As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done. 

Let me explain. 

It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things. 

And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things. 

If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long. 

Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them. 

That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true. 

The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what? 

I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away. 

That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it. 

One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day. 

That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be. 

That’s it. Five minutes tops. 

This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary. 

Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway. 

Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic. 

One way to do this is to set minimums. 

Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week. 

So far so good. 

But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read. 

That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong. 

Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target.

But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day. 

So set a realistic minimum. 

If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading. 

What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading.

You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop. 

That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable. 

Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities. 

And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back. 

On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity.

Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it. 

I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum. 

I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can. 

It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages. 

I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards. 

Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that. 

And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club. 

It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation. 

Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff. 

Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails. 

Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks. 

With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day. 

From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning.

Reviewing is entirely different. 

The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next. 

It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them. 

Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start. 

Let me show you this in action: 

Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever. 

But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done? 

Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere. 

Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan.

And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy. 

If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you. 

It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day. 

I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme. 

Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped. 

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

Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding? 

I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way. 

Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

 

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

 

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

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Subscribe to my Substack 

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script | 418

Hello, and welcome to episode 418 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again. 

It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round. 

One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am. 

I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours.

I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster. 

Fair point. 

But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing. 

This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace. 

Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha. 

In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure. 

If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him.

Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant. 

Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there. 

It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is. 

So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible. 

You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life. 

And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation. 

That’s not what life is about at all. 

One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day?

There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry. 

But what other things would be non-negotiable for you? 

For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level. 

At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is that I create something. 

And that’s it. Together, that’s around four to five hours a day. 

Once you have established what your non-negotiables are, it becomes easy to say no to things that could interfere with them. 

Another way to bring some calm and quiet back into your life is to focus on time not what you have to do. 

Let me explain. 

Most of what comes at us each day is not within our control. You do not know how many Slack or Teams messages you will get today. Neither do you know how many emails you will get nor what you will be asked to do. 

What you do know is how much time you can dedicate to these inputs. 

Over the years, I’ve learnt that if I allow 40 minutes or so each day to respond to my actionable messages and emails, I’ll mostly stay on top of my communications. Sure, occasionally I am behind, but as I can see I am getting behind, I can allow a little extra time to catch up if necessary. 

I also know that if I have two hours a day to create, I’ll always hit my publication schedule. 

If you work on projects, what would happen if you dedicated 2 hours a day to quiet, focused work on them? No distractions, no interruptions, just quiet, focused work.

From the people I’ve worked with who have done this, they’re amazed at just how much work they get done each week. And how deadlines no longer become stressful or missed. 

Two hours may not seem much, but over a working week, that’s ten uninterrupted hours. Ten hours you know you will not be interrupted by anyone. 

The great thing about this approach is that you gain control over your time. And with a little consistency, you soon find yourself on top of your work. 

You also learn where your limits are. 

I know my brain gets tired around the 90-minute to 2-hour mark of focused work. 

Sure, there are days I would love to spend three hours in focused work, but experience has taught me that the extra hour is a wasted hour. I make more mistakes; I start snatching a quick look at my messages and emails, looking for anything to distract me. That pile of washing suddenly needs to be put away, or those cups and dishes need washing and putting away. 

Once you know your limits, you can work within them. 

This approach is a more human way to go about your day. It’s not optimised to create impossible days, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and disappointed with yourself. 

It’s set up to work with your strengths and, more importantly, with your biorhythms. Your body’s natural rhythms. 

The advantage of this kinder, calmer way of going about your day is that you naturally slow down. You have the space to deal with the urgencies and the demands of your bosses, clients and colleagues. And that results in fewer mistakes, leaving you with less corrective work to do. 

The problem with being human is that we are really quite fragile. My client, who woke up at 5:00 am to fix Claude’s mistakes, will find the afternoon a dead zone. He’ll be exhausted and trying to operate at 100% with less than five hours of sleep. 

That lack of sleep will likely affect his food choices at lunchtime. He’ll probably grab a quick sandwich or something else high in carbohydrates, which will spike his insulin levels, leaving him feeling drowsy afterwards. 

And then we’re also susceptible to all sorts of bugs and illnesses, which can have a debilitating effect on our energy levels. 

Again, not within our control unless we seal ourselves off from the outside world. Not a great idea. 

I can assure you that the best approach to managing time and improving your productivity is to be human about it. Work with you and your natural state, rather than trying to be like a machine. 

Take care of your three foundations: get enough sleep, eat healthy and move frequently. 

Then, have a plan for the day. Not a minute-by-minute plan, but one that takes care of your non-negotiables, allows for some focused work time and has enough flexibility to take care of unknowns that will inevitably pop up throughout the day. 

Since the 1980s, technological advances have consistently promised us less work and more leisure time. And yet that’s never materialised. Instead, the opposite happens. 

Smartphones took business communications out of the office and made them omnipresent, leaving us with no place to hide. The desktop computer eliminated the typing pool and left managers and executives responsible for crafting their own letters and emails. 

Cloud computing eliminated the filing cabinet and placed company documents within our reach 24/7, even when we were supposed to be on vacation. 

What’s more, all this technological advancement has sped everything up. And it’s this speeding up that has left us with so much more to do. What used to take us three or four days to do is now expected to be done in an hour. 

That’s where the problem is. 

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this: be human. Make your own decisions about what you work on and when. Wrestle back control of your calendar and protect time to do the things that matter. 

These are simple steps, not easy to implement initially, but worth putting the effort into implementing them. 

As Matt D’Avella has discovered, and Samurai Matcha’s girlfriend already knew, keeping things human, simple and logical to yourself is the best way to live in a calm, quiet, focused way.

Now, before I go, if what you’ve heard today in this podcast resonated with you and you want to learn more, my Quiet Productivity Method programme will do just that. 

Recently updated to cover your non-negotiables, the superb daybook system and how to plan your days and weeks so you are living within your time means, this programme will teach you, step by step, how to create a system that works for you. How to find time for what you want, and much more.

In addition, you will also become a part of the Quiet Productivity Method community, where you can share ideas, ask questions and join the monthly live sessions that will answer your questions and hold you accountable as you move away from the unsustainable task-based systems of old and towards a sustainable, humane, time-based system. 

I do hope you can join me. 

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