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“I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.” I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself. In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith 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 | 413 Hello, and welcome to episode 413 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.  1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving.  The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends.  And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life.  It could be asked, what went wrong? I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey.  Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”.  What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination.  You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well. The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times. Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break.  Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together.  Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people.  But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”.  It was down your tools and go out.  This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available” If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour. What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect.  If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write.  This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate.  What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump. Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know.  Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic).  This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner.  After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the smoking room for brandy, coffee and cigars. There, the day’s business was often discussed.  This was the aristocracy, not the middle or working classes. Although even the lower classes treated dinner more formally than we do today. It was the family meal of the day, and everyone was expected to be there.  After that, people often wrote letters, read books, or, in the case of people like Winston Churchill, went back to their studies and did some more work.  And that was something I have noticed. Because there were no fixed working hours for the upper classes, work occurred at all hours of the day. A lot of work happened after dinner, rarely in the early hours of the day.  This gave a lot more flexibility for things like admin and communications. Most letter writing was done late in the day. The founder of the British Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir Mansfield Cumming, would retire to his study after dinner to read through all the papers he’d received that day and send out letters to his agents around the world, often until 2 in the morning.  Yet Cumming was famous for two to three-hour lunches and late starts to the day.  The problems we have today are caused by on-demand entertainment. There’s always something to watch on YouTube or Netflix. And our sofas are very tempting after a nice dinner.  Once there, it’s a real challenge to get up. Take those temptations away, and what else will you do?  If you think about that for a moment. If a family had dinner together at 7:00 pm, discussed the day, and afterwards joined in an activity, they would be spending quality time together every day.  Then at 9:00 pm, you could go back and clean up your messages, clear any admin tasks for an hour or so and still have time for reading or a hobby.  It’s often our fixation with work-life balance that puts unnecessary barriers in our day. No personal stuff during office hours and no work stuff in our personal time.  And yet, what do we do in our personal time? Spend hours in front of a screen, not talking with our family or friends, instead sending WhatsApp messages and commenting on social media posts.  Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss write their books late in the evening. In Cal Newport’s case, he spends time with his young family until they go to bed, and then goes to his home office and writes for two or three hours.  Cal Newport is a good example because he’s completely rejected social media, so he has time to write after his kids have gone to bed.  Rest was taken very seriously in the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it was social. Parties and weekend getaways.  I’ve spoken about Ian Fleming’s work habits before, particularly when he was in Jamaica writing the next James Bond book. But when he was back in London, he still worked in very much the same way.  Mornings were intensely focused work, followed by a long lunch, then letters, and then home for dinner, or out with a friend. Afterwards, he would go to his study and edit a manuscript or read through the papers he’d received from his foreign correspondents around the world. (He was the foreign news editor at The Sunday Times Newspaper) The most noticeable thing I learned from this era has been to structure your days around meal times. I now do intense creative work in the mornings, followed by more leisurely afternoons, and then, after dinner, go back to doing some work for an hour or two.  I still work for around eight to ten hours a day, but I find that my energy levels remain strong whenever I am working. There are plenty of breaks throughout the day where I can socialise, spend time with my family and still get a lot of work done.  And then there was movement. A lot of movement.  The 1920s and 30s were a lot less convenient than they are today. This meant we had to walk a lot more than we do now.  Weirdly, people have become obsessed with their step count today. They struggle to get even 8,000 steps in. And gyms are everywhere. There were no gyms, and nobody was counting steps back then. They didn’t have to. It was natural to walk 10,000+ steps every day. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it; there was no app to order it.  Although the upper classes did have servants who could produce it for them when necessary. But given that refrigerators and microwaves were not a thing then, a sudden order of food would have resulted in a cold meat salad and not much else. As an aside, just do a search for 1950s New York or London and look at the images. There’s a significant difference between the size of people then and people today. Yet, no gyms, no smartwatches calculating steps, sleep cycles, or anything else.  It was purely natural. Real food, not processed rubbish, plenty of natural movement, and no gyms.  If you want to be more productive every day, move more. This is really what balance is all about. The so-called work-life balance is a modern concept, but what really

Podcast 412 Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme   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 | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 412 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.  Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.  When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.  The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.  It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.  I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.  Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live. Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.  It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.  In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?  Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.  I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.  Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.  The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.  However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject.  Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are:  The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli.  The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something  And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow.  When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough) I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose.  All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle.  That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week). Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning.  This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn.  A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out.  And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others.  When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week.  When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success.  Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress.  If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear.  For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely.  Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed.  The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on.  For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme.  He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science. For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf.  Which then leads us to the second problem here.  When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that.  You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in.  Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest.  Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations.  His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams.  There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose.  In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on.  The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable.  One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel.  The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production.  As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in.  So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able t

Podcast 411 Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do.  It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith   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 | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 411 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.  I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives.  It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely?  This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose.  But what do you want to do?  As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”.  So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do?  And this is important.  My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day.  He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done.  At the age of 60, he retired.  His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy.  That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist.  And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead.  He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation.  I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person.  It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair.  That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith.  Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did.  In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year. I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the horse racing calendar.  But not only that, Harvey’s written at least four books, and he still doesn’t spend much time in his armchair.  If you want to hear Harvey’s words of wisdom, there is a superb YouTube video in which he and Sue are interviewed. I’ll put that video link in the show notes. Harvey is a true Yorkshireman with the wonderful Yorkshire wit.  Retirement is not the end. It’s the start of a new chapter in your life. You have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience and likely collected quite a few interests along the way. Retirement is your time to use that knowledge and work on the things that interest you.  So what interests you?  I’ve had a love of bonsai trees since I was in my twenties. I was probably inspired by the film The Karate Kid.  While I have a couple of trees now, I don’t have the time to properly learn to nurture and grow them. However, when the time comes for me to slow down and retire, one thing I will do is spend a couple of weeks in Japan learning from the masters.  When I was researching retirement for my father-in-law, I came to see that there are three pillars you need to ensure are built into any plans you may have. The first is mental. This does not mean mental health as it is discussed today; it is about learning.  Learning something new.  That could be a foreign language, art history, or how to train racehorses. It doesn’t matter so much what you learn; it is about learning something challenging. Something to get your brain around. Something that will make you think.  The dangers today are AI and the loss of critical thinking. In retirement, you do not want to lose the ability to think critically.  Go out and buy the textbooks, enrol in courses, listen to podcasts and do the hard work of learning. Keep your brain active.  It’s this that will keep you sharp and cognitive. As the saying goes, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”  The second pillar is physical. After we reach 30, we start to lose muscle mass. Again, it’s the “if you don’t use it, you lose it” problem.  Unfortunately, for most of us, around thirty, we get chained to a desk and a computer, and we use our arms to help us get out of a chair. We stop using most of our muscles. This weakens our strength, and it is gradual. Hardly noticeable. So we don’t see the damage we are doing to ourselves.  When we reach our mid-fifties, that muscle loss accelerates. We can lose as much as 10% of our muscle mass over five years. It’s scary.  The consequence of this is that the risk of falling rises, and one of the biggest killers of older Adults is the complications of dealing with the injuries caused by falling. Broken hips, legs and shoulders. Not at all nice.  By adding in a daily exercise session that focuses on your core strength—stomach, legs and ankles, and doing some cardio such as walking up hills to the point where you become out of breath, is all you need.  Thirty minutes a day. That’s it.  If you add in some stretching exercises later in the day, you are building a natural defence against one of the biggest underlying killers among older people.  Your muscles are your natural defence against many lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and gout! Yes, gout is making a comeback. A disease prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries is making a comeback because of how we live today.  Build in some exercise every day.  If you want a simple exercise programme, the one that the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, used every day from his time in the Royal Navy, then look up the 5BX. Look for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube. It’s brilliant and very quaint.  If you want to know how effective this exercise programme is, look at Prince Philip at his final public engagement. He was 97 years old then, and you can see from the way he walked just how fit he was.  The final pillar is social.  When we are at work, there is a natural connection with our coworkers. There’s a camaraderie and a social aspect to working with other people.  We may not like our coworkers, but there’s still the connection.  When we retire, that disappears, and it’s important to replace it with new connections.  However, there’s a danger here. It can be tempting to replace all those meetings on our work calendars with volunteer work in retirement. Don’t do this.  Go back to asking yourself what you want to do. Hopefully, what you want to do excites you. If you are replacing those work connections with volunteer work you do not find interesting, you will soon find yourself swamped.  Not what retirement is all about.  Be very strict about what you will get involved in. Be clear about what you want out of this chapter of your life.  Perhaps some of the hobbies you try will bring with them exciting connections. Imagine how many new people Harvey Smith has met through horse racing.  But do not rush into it. Take your time. This period of your life is about you and what you want from it.  If you are worried about retirement, or are retired and have found yourself overwhelmed by all the activities you have embarked on, I have just launched a brand-new programme to help you.  Ever since I started writing about time management and productivity ten years ago, I have had many people ask me to put together something for retirees.  It was my conversation with my father-in-law last year that started my research. And that research uncovered some of the most inspiring stories of people I have come across.  There was Jack Weber, a retired dentist who wrote a memoir of his life and published it on Amazon at the age of 100.  And then there was the gentleman who inspired me when I was fifteen years old.  I was a competitive track and field athlete back then, and this gentleman w

Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day. Let’s begin… Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The 2026 Spring 50 Sale 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 | 410 Hello, and welcome to episode 410 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.  It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up.  Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools.  Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long.  For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week.  Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four.  If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.  Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today.  This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family.  Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar?  Hi Aaron, thank you for your question. Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges. I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done.  The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff.  Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night.  John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did.  One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute.  Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute!  As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents.  Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader.  Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning.  President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am.  The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet.  One thing you could do is set aside time somewhere in your day for undisturbed quiet work. Whether that is reading, working on a project or simply replying to your emails and messages.  Just this one change in your day will relieve some of the pressure you may be feeling. It will give you time to work on the non-urgent things that, if you ignore, will soon become urgent and add to the stress and anxiety that working reactively inevitably causes.  Now let’s talk about structuring your day.  This is something that, if you’re not doing, you’ll find yourself getting pulled all over the place with no chance of getting on with anything important.  Structuring your day means planning out what you will do and when. When will you do your most important tasks of the day? When and where are your meetings? When will you take time to rest and relax with your family?  If you begin any day not knowing this, your day will run away with you.  Again, let me give you an example of a US president.  Jimmy Carter would disappear into the living quarters of the While House at precisely 6:30 pm every evening to have dinner with his family.  No matter what was going on in the world. Whether it was a Middle Eastern oil crisis, spiralling inflation or some other world crisis (sound familiar?), Carter would never miss his family’s dinner hour. It was sacred.  During that time, nobody from his office was allowed to interrupt him, no matter what was going on in the world. That could wait an hour. Spending some quality time with his family could not. His daughter was young at that time, and she would go to bed around 8 or 9 pm.  Could you do that? Could you “disappear between 12 pm and 1 pm, cut off from the outside world; no phone or computer for one hour, so you could stop and enjoy lunch with your family or friends? It’s easy to believe that we have to be “available” all the time. No, you do not.  Not even the leader of the Western world needed to be available every hour and minute of the day.  You’re not dealing with a world crisis where people’s lives are at stake. You’re likely dealing with more mundane issues, like a customer who is frustrated because their ordered electric window motor hasn’t arrived as promised. Or a boss who suddenly becomes agitated because sales dropped 12% last month.  Gee whizz! What can you do right now? Probably nothing. You’re not going to be able to miraculously produce an electric window motor in a few seconds, nor can you change last month’s sales figures.  These things can wait an hour or two. They really can!  This is why, when I get clients to do the “perfect week” exercise, I ask them to do their personal life first. This is the one area most people will sacrifice for their work.  When will you spend time with your family? When will you exercise? When will you spend time on your hobby?  These should be your non-negotiables every day.  President Eisenhower would stop work at 3:30 pm every day to spend an hour or two practising his golf on the White House putting green. President Johnson would go for his daily swim at 2:00 pm every day.  And Gerald Ford would start his day with an hour on his custom-built static bicycle and finish off with 50 push-ups. Every day!  It did not matter what was going on in the world; these presidents knew that exercise was important for them to function, and they made sure they were clear-headed enough to make the right decisions on some of the world’s biggest and most urgent problems.  Your customer’s missing electric window motor or your boss fretting about a 12% drop in sales is nothing compared to what these presidents had to deal with every day.  Make sure that what is important to you is prioritised, time protected and non-negotiable.  Urgent events will pass, and your being unavailable for an hour or two is not going to significantly affect the result one way or the other.  Another part of all these presidents’ days was taken straight out of Winston Churchill’s daily routine.  The daily nap.  When you are tired, stressed, anxious, and worn down by the constant noise and decision-making, you will no longer be able to make good, rational decisions. It’s as if your brain tightens up and can no longer access your creative thinking.  Winston Churchill discovered this while serving in the army in India in the early 1900s. India is very hot during the day, and it was customary among the officer class to take naps during the warmest part of the day.  Churchill discovered that by taking a proper nap mid to late afternoon, you could do high-quality work well into the evening. And so, when he returned to the UK, he continued to take naps.  As Churchill said, "Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that ref

Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work.  What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Email Mastery Course Here The Hybrid Productivity Course    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 | 409 Hello, and welcome to episode 409 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session.  During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes.  The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work.  You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time.  Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise.  However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department.  The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs.  To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change.  The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic?  Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day. In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in.  For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me.  The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with. Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails.  Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond.  If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with.  This is working with the data I have.  But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it. Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done.  If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes to make an adjustment, that will take up around four hours of your day just focused on writing proposals.  That does not take into account having to request any further information you may need to complete a proposal.  Now here’s where things get interesting. Not all proposals are equal. If you were asked to write proposals for a $10 million project and a $1,000 one, the $10 million project would likely take priority.  I’m also pretty sure the person asking for the $10 million project proposal will be chasing you to get it done faster.  If you already have a two-day turnaround on proposals, moving that project up would delay one of the other proposals. What do you do?  The problem here is that while you are fielding messages from the people wanting their proposal done today, you are not writing proposals. Everything is getting delayed.  Now, I’ve worked at companies with strict processes for these situations. Salespeople had to follow the process and inform their customers when to expect proposals or invoices. They were not allowed to contact the sales admin team to chase proposals unless they were overdue.  I’ve also worked in companies where there were no such processes. In those companies, nothing ever seemed to get done on time.  There needs to be time for things to get done, and in order to ensure they do get done on time, a process should be put in place.  For example, if your proposal turnaround is within 24 hours, then there needs to be a cutoff time. If you want your proposal done by tomorrow at 4:00 pm, it needs to be in by 4:30 pm today.  This puts the responsibility onto the person asking for the proposal. If they do not get the proposal in on time, the delay will be entirely their own problem.  When you do not have these processes in place, you risk running into a company that plays the blame game.  I remember working for an English Language training company here in Korea, and I wanted to launch a new Business English Programme in August.  We had a meeting at the head office and the CEO told me that if we wanted to launch on 1st August, then I would need to get the curriculum and artwork to the marketing team by the 15th June.  Brilliant! As long as we got the necessary work over to the Marketing Department by 15th June, then the responsibility for the marketing was on the marketing team. They delivered, and we had a fantastic launch. From my perspective, handing over the materials to the marketing team before the 15th took a huge weight off my shoulders.  It was a superb team where both parties respected each other’s boundaries and, more importantly, timelines. Everyone involved knew each other’s deadlines, and these were respected.  Another way to deal with communications is to set some rules. A sort of “if this then that” rule.  For example, I have a rule that any message relating to lost passwords or money, I will deal with the moment I see it.  Fortunately, I do not get many of these, but I do get around three or four a month. When I see them, I act on them immediately. They don’t take long to deal with, but I know how frustrating it is to wait a long time to access a course or get a refund.  Another rule I have is that if I get a student question, I will respond within 24 hours.  With AI, it can be tempting to set up an AI system to respond to these for me, but I have a red line I will not cross. That is, I will personally respond to all questions within 24 hours and never farm them out to a chatbot.  That goes to my professional integrity. I would feel awful knowing that I am not communicating directly with my students. It would feel like I am cheating.  However, by far the most effective way to deal with the interruptions messages can cause, whether they are emails or messages, is to set your own communication response times.  For example, mine are: Email within 24 hours, instant messages (Teams, Slack, etc.) within four hours and phone calls within an hour if I cannot answer immediately.  Those response times have worked for over ten years now. I’ve never received any pushback, and most of the time I get a “thank you for your quick response”,—which suggests people are really back at responding to emails.  If you do decide to set your own response times, communicate them with your colleagues and customers. This way, you can be held accountable for your standards. That’s a great motivator.  Let’s get back to checking messages.  If you do need time to do work that requires your focus, then, when you are doing that work, you do not check your messages. Period. Turn off notifications when you are doing that work, close down your email, Teams or Slack and any other messaging system.  Your phone can be set up to allow only a vetted number of people through. For instance, when I put my phone or computer on “focus time”, only my wife and mother can get through. Only my mother or my wife would call me with a genuine emergency.  Most people can only do real focused work for around ninety minutes. At that point, you can check your messages.  According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, we work in 90-minute cycles. (We also sleep in 90-minute cycles). This means our brain begins to run low on energy after we have been intently focused on something for more than 90 minutes, and we need to change our focus.  I use this time to quickly check my messages and do some chores. Most of the time, I process my inbox, then respond to my team’s messages on my phone while I am doing the chores.  The reality is you cannot be constantly checking your messages and doing meaningful work at the same time. Something has to give.  If you are in a position where others cannot do their work until you have authorised it, you are the bottleneck, and that needs to change.  Working in a law office, we needed to get cheques signed by

"The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."  Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time.  This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  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 | 408 Hello, and welcome to episode 408 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.  Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table.  In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple.  Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought.  Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role.  When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over. In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help? Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed. The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably.  This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do.  The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too often, and the line between what you are responsible for and what you volunteered to do becomes blurred.  A few years ago, I worked with a client who was a product manager in a pharmaceutical company. Her core work was to ensure that her product’s labelling, literature, and local branding were accurate and up to date. She was also responsible for three sales campaigns each year.  Unfortunately, Sam was a people pleaser. She couldn’t say no to anyone. She volunteered to be on the Annual kick-off event committee (each year the company had an off-site retreat to motivate the team for the new year), she volunteered to be the lead of a breast cancer awareness campaign her company wanted to run, and if a sales manager asked her to do a presentation to their sales people, she’d always say yes.  But her people pleasing was not confined to her professional life. She volunteered to help organise events at her church, committed to watching her husband play football every weekend and would help her friends out at the drop of a hat.  When I began working with Sam, she was a mess. Her weight had ballooned because she had no time for any physical movement or to watch what she ate; she wasn’t able to sleep properly, and she was suffering quite badly from eczema, brought on by stress and a lack of sleep.  The first thing I did was get Sam to write down her original core work. I remember her having to pull out her job description to remind her what that was.  When she looked at it, she began to cry. She confessed that what she did at work was nothing like what was written on those sheets of paper.  So that’s where we started.  I also got her to talk to her boss about stepping down from all the volunteer roles she’d accepted so she could focus on the work she was employed to do.  Her boss was brilliant. She helped Sam remove herself from the volunteer roles so she could focus on what mattered.  Within six months, Sam’s product was the top-selling product in the company. She’d lost 20 pounds in weight, she was sleeping well, and her eczema had all but disappeared.  She was focused on what mattered and did that brilliantly. So much so that she was promoted after a further year.  I tell that story because it demonstrates why defining your core work is so important. If you are not clear about what you are employed to do, in an effort to look busy and not upset anyone, you will keep accepting more and more roles outside the scope of the job you were employed to do.  This does not mean that you should never accept voluntary roles or help out your colleagues from time to time. It means you should never lose sight of what you are employed to do. And to do that, you first need to identify what it is, then take it to the next level.  That level identifies what doing your core work looks like at the task level. In other words, what do you actually do to perform your core work? So, returning to your role, Chris, as a sales manager, a part of your role will be to support your sales team. What does that look like at a doing level? Does that mean you need to schedule weekly one-to-ones with your team? Maybe you are also responsible for ensuring that the sales data is correct and up to date.  Scheduling weekly one-to-ones is relatively straightforward. You may choose to dedicate a day to doing this, so your focus is on supporting your team and, in doing so, removing a weekly decision.  For example, if you choose to hold your meetings on Mondays, you can block your calendar on those days and get them all done in one day.  Maintaining your sales admin may involve 30 minutes a day of updating your company’s internal reporting system. If so, when will you do that?  You may also be responsible for the training of your team. I know many managers are. If so, what does that involve, and what do you need to do personally to ensure it happens?  So what you are doing is looking at the type of work you do and then asking yourself what that looks like at a doing level.  Many medical doctors I speak with tell me their work is more than just seeing patients. Some of their additional roles include renewing prescriptions, completing insurance claims, and sorting out referrals to specialists.  This means being a general practitioner is not as simple as walking into their clinic, going to their office and examining patients all day. They need to find time to do the additional work, which is often an extra 2 hours or more each day.  Once you have identified your core work and pulled out what that looks like at the task level, the next step is to calculate how much time you will need to complete those tasks each week.  In theory, this is easy. After all, if you have done something before, you should be able to figure out how long it will take you to do the same task in the future.  Hahaha, not so easy. We are not machines, and some days we are not at our best. We might be tired, distracted or feeling ill.  And those distractions may not even be of our own choosing. Other people interrupt you, ask you questions, or you are prevented from doing one of your critical tasks because a colleague has not given you the information you need.  I remember talking with a gentleman who ran a car servicing business, and he told me that the biggest issue he had each day was something called “back orders”. This is where a part for a customer’s car was out of stock and on order.  Nobody knew when the part would be back in stock, so they could not tell the customer when to bring their car in for the repair, or, worse, the customer could not come in to pick up their repaired car.  In these situations, all you can do is work on the averages.  I’ve been writing a weekly blog post of around 1,000 words each week for over ten years. You would have thought I would know how long writing a blog post would take b

“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity?  That’s the question I am answering today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  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 | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 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.  You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap.  It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work.  But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future?  That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future?  Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down.  Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more.  That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily.  Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out?  To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want.  No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go.  I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes.  I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written.  I rarely accept Grammarly’s sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling.  Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else. I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife’s a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she’s learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms.  She’s using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google’s Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations.  So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example.  However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I’m not sure you would want AI getting involved.  One thing I’ve always been acutely aware of is that much of what makes us feel overwhelmed is the sense that we have no control over how we spend our time.  We have calendars full of meetings, and sometimes we find ourselves double and even triple-booked. And then we have long lists of to-dos in our task managers with no sense of when or even how we will ever get that work done.  At best, AI may be able to break down those tasks into what it thinks are manageable chunks, but that won’t take into consideration how you are feeling physically, whether you slept well last night or had a rather heavy lunch with an important customer.  AI can certainly suggest ways to manage your tasks and calendar, but you will still need to show up to those meetings and do that work.  Yet that will inevitably leave you feeling less in control of your time. Particularly if you use one of those AI-enabled calendars that suggest when you should be doing something.  What happens if you disagree with the suggestion, or you cannot make it? You feel guilty, or you start to think something is wrong with you.  Yet, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re human, and you are going to feel tired sometimes or not in the mood to do that type of work.  The one area I would say you want to avoid AI getting involved in is how you manage your time. That should always be your responsibility and choice.  The idea that a computer tells you what to do and where to be is scary. Deciding what you do right now is what makes you human. You’ve chosen to listen to this podcast at this time. AI would likely tell you that, rather than listening to this podcast, you should be finishing that report you’ve been trying to finish all week. I also read about the excitement over the idea that AI could reply to your emails for you. Hmm, for me, that is a red line I will not cross.  Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that if someone has taken the time to write to me, I have an obligation to reply personally. That is just basic integrity. Now, it is true I don’t reply to all emails. I don’t respond to spam emails; for example, I simply delete them if they get through. How hard is that?  I’m fortunate that I’m old enough to remember several technological advancements. It started with the Internet, then email, the smartphone and cloud computing.  I cannot remember a technology being forced upon us, but it feels like AI is being forced on us, whether we like it or not.  And then there are the frightening ads that claim if you are not on board with using AI, you will be left on the career scrap heap by the end of the year. Nobody needed to do that with smartphones or email.  Companies, focused on making the technology user-friendly in such a way that we all wanted to adopt it eventually. The fear-mongering I see around AI makes me deeply suspicious of it. Why do they need to do that?  Perhaps that question is for people better qualified than I am.  Anyway, AI is here, and it’s not going to go away.  Where I think AI will be a huge help to us is in repetitive, mundane work. I mentioned that I use AI to create subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. That’s been a huge time saver for me.  But if you follow my email processing system, you will find that you are faster than AI. I can clear 80 emails in my inbox in less than 10 minutes. It’s also important that I do this, as I want to get a heads-up on my day. To know if there are any emergencies, what I want to read later and what I can delete.  What AI would do is categorise your emails between what it thinks is important and what is not. Trust me, you will do a far better Job of that than AI will.  The problem here is that you will not trust AI 100%, so you will still go through the emails it thinks are not important, just to check that it got it right.  And that’s a big problem with AI today, although I accept that in time this may change; people don’t trust it, which is a good thing, as AI can hallucinate and give you incorrect information. This means you spend time coming up with the right prompt, get the answer, and then have to check that it’s correct.  The question then is: did it really save you time?  I am monitoring AI carefully. I know that in time, it will bring us some productivity benefits, new technologies always do. But there are a few areas where I won’t use AI personally.  Writing emails and answering user comments. That’s a personal integrity thing to me. Your principles should tell you that.  Managing my calendar. That’s another personal thing, and giving control to any outside influence would always be problematic at a human level.  Creating content. If you’ve read an AI-generated blog post or watched an AI-created YouTube video, you can tell. Large Language Models will always default to the average, not just in the content, but in the words used. It’s horrible, and nothing unique will ever come

Steve Jobs once said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do”, and that quote has been, and still is, a cornerstone of my whole time management and productivity philosophy.  Today, I answer a question about dealing with all the little things that pop up each day while staying focused on what is important.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course  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 | 406 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 406 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  What happens when your productivity system collapses? Do you go looking for new apps, or do you give up and just think you’re not the organised type or lack self-discipline?  People react in many different ways when their systems become backlogged and overwhelmed, yet this is a state that will happen to all of us from time to time.  Life has a bad habit of getting in the way. It throws up all sorts of problems to test us. No one week or even a day will ever be the same. Only five minutes ago, my plan to take Louis out for our walk at 2:00 pm was changed by my wife asking if we could go at 12:30. That way, I could pick her up from her dance class and then go to the reservoir for his walk.  And that was a small change.  These little things are hitting us every day and disrupting our systems, yet that doesn’t mean our systems are broken. It just means we need to ensure that we have sufficient buffer and flexibility built in. This week’s question is all about what to do when, for whatever reason, your system begins to collapse, and you have backlogs of work, emails, messages and commitments, and you have no idea how to regain control.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a heads up to say if you are considering joining next week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop, there are only seven days left before the first session.  The workbook will be going out next week, and I would love for you to join me. This is your opportunity to get to grips with the COD and Time Sector Systems, where you can ask questions and come away with not only the knowledge, but with a rock solid system that is flexible, automatic and leaves you with enough time for the things you want to do.  PLUS, you also get, for free, four of my courses to help you go deeper in your own time.  I will put the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you next Sunday.  Now, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Nick. Nick asks, “ Hi Carl, all my professional life I have tried to be organised and focused, but every time I feel I have found the solution, something happens either at work or at home that destroys my plans. How do you suggest someone go about dealing with disruptions all the time?  Great question, Nick, and thank you for sending it in.  Much of what causes us these issues has little to do with our systems. It’s just life getting in the way.  Yet, what we are aiming to do is turn managing our time into a routine. Something we just do.  For instance, I would feel uncomfortable going to bed not knowing what my appointments and important tasks are for the next day. It doesn’t take long—five minutes tops —but most days it’s likely less than two minutes.  This is why I cannot get my head around it when people tell me they are too exhausted to plan the next day. It’s no more than five minutes! You only need to know when and where your appointments are and what your one or two most important tasks are. It takes a minuscule amount of energy to do it.  Those two minutes have a profound effect on my day.  Last night, I went to bed knowing that I had six hours of meetings today and one critical task to do. I knew if I was diligent, I would be able to complete my meetings and that one task.  The fact that my wife has already changed my plan has not caused me to drop the task. My original plan to do it after my morning calls finished has changed. I will now do it when I get back from taking Louis for his walk.  What matters is that when I finish today, I can look back knowing I have what matters done.  This all begins with respecting the basics. Those basics are contained in COD. Collect, Organise and Do.  You need a way to collect everything that comes your way throughout the day. This needs to be something you trust. That could be a task manager or a daybook (a notebook you use to manage your day).  Then, at some point in the day, you process and organise what you collected. That could be the first thing in the morning or the last thing you do before you finish your workday. If you’re doing it every day, you won’t need a lot of time for this part of the process.  If you’re inconsistent with it, you will need more time. This is why I suggested you turn these things into routines—things you just do every day. Like brushing your teeth when you wake up, or washing the dishes before you go to bed.  Finally, the daily planning, where you decide which tasks you must do that day and review your calendar for the next day’s appointments. These steps give you a clear plan for doing the work.  The great thing is that none of these steps takes a lot of time. Perhaps the processing and organising will take about 10 minutes. However, I find that this step is calming. It allows me to ensure I am not trying to do too much or limiting my flexibility.  So, step one, Nick, is to make following the principles of COD a non-negotiable part of your day.  For those of you who have not discovered COD yet, I have a free 45-minute course that walks you through the process and shows you the tools and formulas to build this into your day. I will leave the link in the show notes. The next consideration is how you are organising your work.  There are some things that need to be done every day. Responding to your actionable messages (email, Slack, Teams, etc.) and any daily admin, for example. Salespeople often need to record their daily activities. Now you could do this once a week or do it daily. I find that doing it daily keeps the time required to a minimum.  Then there are your tasks. Now, some of these may need to be done today or before the end of the week. Others may not be quite as urgent, so you can push them out of sight until next week or even next month.  This is why I recommend you organise your task manager by when you will do something. Anything that needs to be done this week goes into a folder called “this week”. This means you are not being distracted by tasks that don’t need to be done this week, and it helps to keep your task list to a minimum. This prevents your lists from becoming overwhelming.  The other good thing about this approach is that the 40% of the tasks you think you will need to do that never actually need to be done can be deleted during your weekly planning. (That’s one of my favourite parts of doing the weekly planning) This is the essence of the Time Sector System. It’s not about how much you have to do; we all have far more to do than the time available to do it. It’s about when you will do it.  There are two sides to the time management equation. Time and stuff to do. The time side of the equation is fixed. You cannot change that. There are 24 hours a day and 168 hours a week, and that’s it.  The only variable you have is stuff to do. That’s what the Time Sector System focuses on. Getting you to decide what you will do and when.  I can now give you an update on my changing day.  When I started today, I had three meetings between 8:00 and 11:30 am.  It’s now 10:30 am, as I write this, and my 8:00 am meeting went ahead as usual, but my 9:30 and 10:30 meetings have both cancelled.  When I planned my day yesterday, I accounted for all my meetings going ahead, and I would write this script before taking Louis for his walk. I would start the script between 8:00 am and 9:30 am, and then finish it after all my meetings ended.  I’ve been given 90 minutes back, so this script will be finished before I pick my wife up from her dance class. It also means I can work on an important project this afternoon, which I thought I wouldn’t have much time for.  Some days you win, others you have to fight for. Today’s a win. On the days you have to fight for it’s important to stand your ground as much as you can. For example, had all my meetings gone ahead as expected today, I would still have had time this afternoon to write this script.  The consequences of not protecting time to write this script would be squeezing my day tomorrow, and I would likely have to work on Saturday just to catch up.  I’ve played that game too often in the past, and it’s not worth it.  It would be tempting to blame my system, but ultimately, my decisions would have caused the problem.  So, as you can see, Nick, life will always get in the way. You can only work with the information in front of you.  But if you are consistent with your daily and weekly planning, you are putting yourself in a position to be clear about what matters each day.  Yet, your daily and weekly planning only works if you are collecting everything that needs to be collected. Appointments are on your calendar, and tasks are in a task manager. That way, you will have all the information you need to plan y

“If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it?  In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course    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 | 405 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) 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.  How many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few.  The question is: why are they overdue? You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them. This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user.  The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control?  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix).  Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes.  And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion?  Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.  As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it. With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag.  When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned.  Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that.  Now, this is where many people go wrong.  It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it.  Not true. Priorities change.  You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now?  Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen.  Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposal is on hold for a few months, so there is no urgency. But new priorities will come along, don’t you worry.  This is why adding your flags should be done at a daily planning level.  Now I will caveat that.  There are times when I know something will be the priority for the day. The script for this podcast, for instance, is today’s priority. I knew that when I planned the week, and I flagged it. It doesn’t matter what other things pop up through the week; when it comes to writing this script, it’s the priority for the day.  Your core work will always be a priority. This is why I have people spend time working out what their core work is. After all, your core work is the reason you are employed. If you didn’t do your core work consistently, you would not have a job for very long.  Even retired people need to consider what their core activities will be each day.  I’m reminded of this following a conversation I had with my father-in-law over the weekend. We’ve just had the lunar New Year here in Korea, and my parents-in-law stayed with us over the holiday.  During that time, my father-in-law mentioned he planned to hang up his silicone gun and tiling trowel at the end of the year. He fits bathrooms and was thinking about what he would do when he no longer needs to wake up at 5:00 am each morning.  The first thing I said was that he needs to prioritise exercise. His job ensures he’s getting plenty of exercise. Walking up and down stairs carrying sinks, shower kits and tiles is hard physical work. His job currently ensures he’s getting his exercise.  The moment he stops doing that five days a week, he will need to find a replacement activity to prevent muscle loss.  Losing his muscle mass will lead to him losing his independence very quickly.  We all have priorities that recur. Those tasks can be pre-flagged. They are critical, whether you are working or retired. Having a few tasks already prioritised helps you plan the day, since you can decide whether they will be the priority or not. Let me explain.  All of us are limited by the same thing each day. Time. It’s the one thing none of us can change. Writing this podcast script takes about 2 to 2.5 hours. That eats a big chunk of my work time each week.  At the same time, we all have to deal with communications, meetings, admin and other day-to-day tasks. I need to include an hour each day for taking Louis for his walk, and next week, he also has a grooming appointment, which will take time out of my week.  Looking at next week’s calendar today, I can see where my appointments are and already guess which tasks will be a priority. When I do my weekly planning, I pre-flag what I think will be the priority for each day, but I am aware that when I do daily planning, I may need to change it. There has to be a degree of flexibility.  It could be that I get an email on Monday asking for a proposal to work with a company and design a workshop for them. That would become a priority for that week.  I would add a task, “Begin work on company workshop”, and schedule it. Yet, I would not flag it then. When the day comes, and I do my daily planning, I then get to see the real landscape of my day.  It could be that I have five hours of meetings that day and two or three pre-planned, prioritised tasks. Now I have to make a decision. What is my REAL priority that day?  If I have promised to get the workshop outline to the client by the end of the week, that will be my red-flagged task that day. I made a promise, and I will deliver on that promise.  Given that I have five hours of meetings and need two hours to put together the outline and proposal, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else that day. I need to re-prioritise my day.  So I add the flag to the workshop’s proposal and decide on what needs to be rescheduled.  It’s likely that, in that given scenario, I would not flag anything else. I know I don’t have time to do much else.  This is why daily and weekly planning complement each other. The weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives. The daily plan is about ensuring you prioritise your day so you work towards meeting those objectives—given the new information, ie, new tasks that will inevitably come in.  Now I know many of you will add a flag to a task because you keep rescheduling it and just do not want to spend the time doing it. The thinking goes that if you flag it, you will do the task. Hmmm, how often does that work?  This is often the reason many flagged tasks become overdue. The only change is that the task now has a flag. Yet you still don’t want to spend the time doing it. When you use your daily planning time to prioritise your day, you’re using real, up-to-date information to guide you. You can remove flags from tasks you thought were important but are no longer, and add a flag to the tasks that are important that day.  I mentioned that you can pre-prioritise your week by flagging tasks at the weekly planning session. When you do the daily planning, you decide if your priorities have changed and, if so, remove flags or reschedule those tasks.  What I like about this approach is that it feels like your task manager is supporting you rather than the other way around. You retain control over what you will and will not do each day.  This works particularly well if you find yourself behind on something or have a backlog that needs dealing with. When you plan the day, you get to decide what to place on your task list and in what order. Now, how many flags should you allow each day? Several years ago, I decided to find out how many tasks I could consistently do each day for a week. I began with fifteen and soon discovered that if I wanted to be consistent, then that number was ten.  This number does not include routine tasks s

Podcast 405 "Pen and paper will solve almost anything. Or at least start the process." - Nicholas Bate This week, I have a special episode for you about what I have discovered over the last two years from bringing pens and paper back into my productivity system. It’s certainly been an eye-opener for me.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Hybrid Productivity Course    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 | 405 Hello, and welcome to episode 405 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.  A week ago, I launched a brand new course called the Hybrid Productivity Course. The purpose of this course was to help those who have found that a digital-only approach has led to a loss of focus on what’s important and a sense of extreme overwhelm and distraction.  As in most areas of life, a one-size-fits-all methodology rarely works. All humans are unique. We think differently, have different life experiences, grow up differently and experience life through many different cultures.  It stands to reason that none of us will have exactly the same needs as everyone else.  We saw this during the pandemic. Around 50% of people loved working from home. They thrived and became much more productive. The other 50% struggled, found it hard to do their work, and lost their enthusiasm and energy for it.  This highlighted the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts bounce off the energy of other people. They need the bustling office environment to operate. Take that away, and they slump.  Introverts, on the other hand, thrive in the opposite conditions. Quiet spaces and solo environments are where they thrive.  I always struggled in an office environment. I found it difficult to concentrate and focus. When I began working from home in 2015, my productivity went through the roof. I suddenly had the freedom to work when I liked, where I liked and in the quiet solitude of my front living room.  One advantage of an all-digital system is that you can easily add many features to your digital tools without much thought.  I noticed this while testing Todoist’s new feature, Ramble. Ramble lets you have a conversation with Todoist, and it pulls out all the things you indicate need to be done. Sounds great in theory, until you test it out.  Just a two-minute “conversation” with Ramble led to 15 tasks!  When I went back into my inbox to sort them out, I realised that the majority of those tasks were low-value, would-be-nice-to-do tasks, but realistically, there was no way I would have the time to do them.  I edited down that list of 15 to 6 tasks.  The problem is that most people will not edit these lists. It’s time-consuming, and you have to think it through. Two things that are out of fashion these days, it seems. This is where I found bringing a pen and notebook back into my system really helped. It forced me to edit down my list of tasks for the day. It also made me smarter when writing my lists.  If I had five people to call today, in the digital system, I would write out all five calls independently. It didn’t take long, and most of those would already be in the digital system. All I had to do was add a date.  In a paper system, it would mean writing out all those calls individually. You soon find that rather than doing that, you would write “do my calls”. Writing those three words strangely reinforced the action. All you then needed to do was to ensure that any communication tasks were correctly labelled in your digital system.  This is where the seeds of a hybrid system began to take shape.  If it were easier to collect using digital tools, then why stop doing it that way? If you were more focused when writing out a daily to-do list than using a digital to-do list, why stop doing that?  My idea was to marry the two.  This led to the development of what I call my Day Book. However, before I got there, I went back to my roots and used the Franklin Planner for eighteen months.  The strength of the Franklin Planner is in the way the daily pages are laid out. You have your daily prioritised task list on the left, your calendar for the day next to it, and, on the right page, a place to keep notes and ideas.  This means that once you have written your appointments, you can see how much time you have available to do tasks. It forces you to be realistic.  If you had seven hours of meetings and began writing out a long list of tasks, you would instantly see that you were creating an impossible day.  If you were to consider meeting overruns, the “urgent” messages and “quick questions” that will inevitably come your way that day, it’s likely you won’t be doing any tasks.  Yet the digital system won’t show you that. All it shows you are the tasks you have dated for today.  And let’s be honest, most people are adding dates to tasks, not because they need to be done that day, but because they are afraid they will forget about them or they will get lost in the system.  That’s not how a to-do list is meant to work. It’s meant to give you a clear indication of what needs to be done. On a day-to-day basis, that means what needs to be done today.  The act of writing down on a piece of paper the tasks that need to be done today forces you to be realistic.  When it comes to storage, though, paper is not so great. It’s here where digital tools shine. You can easily store files and documents. You can keep meeting notes together in one place and create a master project note for all your projects, so everything is kept together in one convenient place.  And of course, digital’s piece de resistance, search.  If you were to keep all your notes in notebooks, you would soon have notebooks all over the place, and notes would be difficult to find unless you carefully indexed every notebook you used. Perhaps not the best use of your time.  Instead, you can keep all your notes in a notes app, and allow it to use keywords, date ranges or titles to find what you need when you need it.  However, I have discovered that paper is a great planning medium. This is where I always used to struggle.  When I first began teaching, there were no such things as Evernote or Apple Notes. They didn’t come along until five years after I began teaching. I therefore used my old counsel notebooks. These were what would be described as foolscap in size, slightly taller than A4, and had a royal blue cover.  Given that throughout my school and university days, I would always plan out my essays on paper, it was perfectly natural for me to make notes on paper when planning my lessons. Then we had the digital explosion. Smartphones became a thing, followed shortly afterwards by apps. I began using Evernote in 2009, and I started planning digitally.  It was certainly convenient, but I did notice I rarely went into any depth. I tried using mind-mapping software, but it didn’t help.  I thought there must be something wrong with me.  Then, a couple of years ago, I began seeing studies about how our brains work differently between digital and physical tools.  The most striking studies found that when you write on paper (or a whiteboard), you activate the same areas that artists activate when creating art. This is the creative centre of your brain.  When you tap on a keyboard, you don’t. Tapping is formulaic and monotonous. If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. When you handwrite, you are forming shapes. Letters are shapes. When you write via keyboard, all you are doing is tapping. There’s nothing artistic about that.  This was when the penny finally dropped for me. There was nothing wrong with me! It was science.  Now, I would never consider opening up my phone or laptop to sketch out an idea. I would open a notebook.  One of my favourite ways of doing this is to grab a notebook, a few pens and a pencil and head off to a local cafe for an hour or two. I can sit in a corner and brainstorm ideas for new courses, YouTube videos and blog posts.  Since I began doing this, my productivity has improved significantly. It helped because I have fewer re-edits to do. When I sit down at the computer to write, I now have a fully planned-out structure and well-thought-through points, and I am writing the first draft much faster. It seems that planning works best on paper, yet storage and output are best digital. Again, leading to the conclusion that there is a place for both digital and analogue tools in a solid productivity system.  I saw this all in action recently. I was watching a UK Supreme Court session, where a barrister (a lawyer who speaks before a judge, not someone who makes coffee) had an iPad in front of him containing all the case files and documents. Yet his speaking notes were on paper. As he made his arguments before the judge, he marked off the points with a pencil and added notes.  The opposing barrister was also using the same tools. Her case files were on an iPad, yet as she listened to her opposite number, she was taking notes in a notebook and appeared to be adding revisions to her own speaking notes.  What’s more, if we’re being honest, stationery is much more fun than digital tools. Digital fonts, screens and keyboards are not really all that exciting.  But the many different types of pens, pencils, notebooks, and pencil cases at all different price ranges give you the ultimate way to make your tools truly personal.  I’m sure you already know I love

Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else”  How is your management of time?  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity Course    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 | 403 Hello, and welcome to episode 403 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure?  Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility.  Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important.  If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done.  But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take.  This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so.  The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind.  Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar?  Hi Alex, thank you for your question. Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day.  Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness.  The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when.  You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much. And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment.  I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that.  I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that.  One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have.  That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment.  When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do.  It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality.  If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it.  If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour.  It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work.  The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters. The best salespeople block time every day to prospect and follow up with their customers. That’s why they are the top salespeople. The best CEOs block time every day for working on their top priority task. That’s why they are the best at what they do. Best-selling authors block time for writing every day. That’s why they sell a lot of books.  Now, as I eluded to at the beginning, there will be some days when things don’t go according to plan. You might be sick, had an argument with a loved one or just be distracted for whatever reason.  Or there could be a good old-fashioned emergency that needs your attention.  It happens. That’s life.  However, it’s not really about what you do or not to do in one day. The purpose of time blocks is to get you to show up and do the work. It’s not about volume.  Spending twenty minutes on your actionable email is better than spending zero minutes. It’s surprising how much you can get done when the pressure of time is on you. You don’t dilly-dally around. (Wow! That’s a phrase I haven’t used for a long time!)  Ultimately, the measure is how well you did against your plan for the week, not necessarily an individual day.  Let me give you an example.  I have two blog posts, two newsletters, this podcast and a YouTube video to produce each week. They are my measurables. Six pieces of content. I know I need about 12 hours a week to produce that content. I also have 15 hours of coaching appointments. So, in total, I need 27 hours protected before I begin my week to complete my professional work.  It’s doable, and based on my completion rates, I complete this work around 87% of the time over 12 months. I’ll take that. (I measure it at the end of every year)  I work with one highly successful CEO who writes a LinkedIn Newsletter every week. Her company has over 50,000 employees in six different countries. She protects two hours every week to write that newsletter. One hour for the first draft and one hour later in the week to edit it.  Last year, she didn’t miss one newsletter. She had a 100% completion rate. And that was her goal.  How did she do it? She protected her writing time every week. She would protect Monday mornings when in the office, and when travelling, she would take advantage of jet lag and write when she was wide awake in the early morning or late at night.  She time-blocked the time. She knew the only way to achieve a 100% completion rate was to make sure each week she had protected the time to do the work.  However, time blocking only works if you are planning your week. Not planning your week leaves you open to other people hijacking your calendar, and as I am sure you are aware, other people are often very persuasive… or demanding.  When you sit down to plan the week, you first look at what meetings and appointments you have scheduled. How much time does that leave you?  That will tell you what you could realistically get done that week.  If you’re away at a conference for three days, you really only have two days to work with. However, one of those days will probably be needed for catching up, so realistically, you’ve got one solid work day.  But let’s look at a typical week when you are at your usual place of work.  How much time do you need to do the work you are employed to do each week? A journalist may be expected to write an article a week. How long does it typically take to write the article, excluding the research and interviews? That would be their starting point.  Doctors I work with often need 2 hours or more after seeing patients to handle paperwork. If they want to get home at 7:00 pm each evening, then that will affect the time they need to stop seeing patients and do paperwork.  Salespeople are focused on seeing clients most of the day, but they also often have paperwork and follow-ups to do. Where can they fit the time they need for paperwork and follow-ups? Knowing what you are expected to do as part of your job and ensuring you have sufficient time to do it each week is what I call protecting time for your core work, and it goes back to the birth of humankind. Our ancestors on the Savannahs knew their core work. To hunt for food. If they’d had a big kill one day, they may have been able to take a day off, but when they started their day, they knew their job was to go out and find food. It was a non-negotiable part of their day.  That’s what time blocking does for you. It gives you clarity on what you need to do that day. All you need to do is show up.  One tip I can give you about time-blocking is to keep your time blocks general. For instance, the CEO I mentioned a moment ago calls her newsletter writing time simply “writing time”. That gives her some flexibility.  If she needs to write a report for the board and is up against a tight deadline, then that is what she will write in that time. She will then find another space for the newsletter writing. I do something similar. I have writing time and audio/visual time protected on my calendar. I can then choose what I write or record on the day as part of my daily planning routine.  If you’re in sales or a client-facing role, the

You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year?  That’s what I’m answering this week.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Take the Time Sector System Course  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 | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today.  Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”.  All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more.  I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself.  And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be.  Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers.  It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from.  Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task.  Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary.  It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question.  AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised.  It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially.  I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious. There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes.  Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails.  However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today.  I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time.  It doesn’t mean we should reject these new ways immediately. We are in the experimentation stage. It’s the fun stage. Testing new ideas, playing with tools and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t.  However, some fundamentals remain in play.  The first, and the one that will never go away, is that we only have twenty-four hours a day. We are human. We need to sleep, eat and bathe. All of which takes time out of those 24 hours.  The second is that we can only focus on one thing at a time. We have the freedom to choose what we focus on, but we can only focus on one thing.  So the question is, what will you focus on and when?  We may not be able to stop all this AI-generated work, but we can choose when to work on it. This is where categorising your work helps you choose the right things to work on.  For example, pretty much all of us will have to deal with communications, and it’s a great example.  What happens if you don’t respond to your emails and messages for a day? Perhaps you’re travelling, or are caught up in meetings. That’s right, you create a backlog.  The problem with emails and messages is that they never stop coming in, and unless you have a process and time to deal with them, you will miss deadlines and opportunities, and probably upset a lot of people. There are consequences for ignoring your messages.  The solution is to set aside time each day to deal with them. How much time will depend on how much time you have and perhaps the volume of messages that require your attention.  If all you have is twenty minutes between some meetings, take it. You’re not going to get much else done. So take advantage of those twenty minutes and clear some of those messages. You may not be able to clear them all, but one is always greater than zero.  If the AI tools you use include suggestions for responses, take advantage of them for the shorter replies.  But, be careful of the longer replies that require your knowledgeable input. AI can respond to some of these, but its responses often sound a little inhuman or, worse, give the wrong information.  Always check the AI-generated responses.  AI can also organise your calendar for you. Personally, I’ve not had much luck with this, as it doesn’t have enough variable information about me to be accurate. What I find AI does is look at what I like to do at certain times of the day and suggests I do that every day, and then fills in everything else around that.  The last time I played with this AI, it recommended I get up at 6:00 am and do my workout. Pu ha ha! I am not going to get up at 6:00 to do any exercise. I hate exercising in the morning.  To get my AI calendar to be reasonably useful, I had to spend far too much time telling it what I wanted, and I realised in the end the fastest way was for me to do it manually.  Going back to the categorisation of your work, if you categorise it by the types of work you do, you can then match your calendar to your categories.  For instance, if you were a doctor, seeing patients would largely take up most of your workday. But you will also need time to complete your prescriptions, update patient notes, respond to messages, deal with any health insurance claims, and so on.  If you don’t want to be working late into the night, you will need to be disciplined with your calendar and protect time for the admin and communication tasks.  If you find AI is recommending a lot of tasks for you, from, say, meeting summaries, I recommend you first audit the list, then allocate a category to the work suggested.  Why audit the list?  Well, as I mentioned, AI is like that new recruit trying impress the boss by suggesting more work than is necessary. It will create a lot of tasks.  Your experience will tell you that a lot of those tasks will not need to be done. It’s these that need to be removed.  I recently did an experiment. I asked Google’s Gemini to give me a list of tasks, spread over four weeks, to start a blog.  This prompt resulted in 29 tasks! And the task of actually writing a first draft was not suggested until the start of week four.  While many of the tasks listed, such as choosing a domain to host the blog and your niche, do need to be done, in the real world, most people who want to start a blog will already know this. It’s part of the thought processes that lead to deciding to start a blog. When I audited the list, I reduced it from 29 tasks down to 12. I also found I needed to move some tasks around because they weren’t in a logical sequence.  I’m sure over time, AI will get better at this, but always remember that your experience about doing your job will still be better at predicting what needs to be done than AI will.  If you’re using the Time Sector System, you will find that your processing naturally fits with AI’s met

Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course 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 | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files.  In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic.  The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today.  And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes.  The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents.  The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated.  Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find.  So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question.  A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year.  Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know.  What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated.  So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries)  Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year.  Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales.  All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened)  I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates.  If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year.  You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder.  Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015.  The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders.  For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder.  How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them.  I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are slim. The need to find a 2025 document would be much higher.  So start with your 2025 folder and work backwards. Don’t be tempted to pre-set up your year folders with subfolders by topic. No one year will be the same.  In 2016, I was teaching English to executives in Korea—something I no longer do. I have a lot of teaching materials; I don’t want to throw away those, and they go up to 2020, so I have folders for those years related to my English teaching activities. After 2020, those folders are no longer in my files.  Once you have the year folders set up, it’s relatively quick and easy to get things organised. The important thing is not overthink this or to develop an overly complex folder structure.  My advice is two levels and no more. The year folder and the subject material. For example, 2024 > Electric bills.  Now, there is a category of documents that you need access to across multiple years.  For example, my car’s manual is something I will need to keep for as long as I have my current car.  For these types of documents, you can create a folder called “current” or “active” (you decide the best name for it) and keep these in there.  So, in my current folder, I have my company registration documents, my car’s manual and registration documents, current insurance certificates, and other miscellaneous files I need access to regularly. This folder is pinned to the top of my file folders (you can do this by adding a 00 before the word Current, then setting the list to organise by name).  Now for your work documents.  This one is more challenging, as you’re likely to be collaborating with others.  There may also be legal requirements regarding document storage and archiving. When I worked in a law office, there were strict rules about how files were organised and stored, and for how long they were kept.  However, that was not my concern. There were procedures that my colleagues and I followed for each file, and they were then sent to the archivist, who made sure that everything was stored in the correct way.  My advice here would be to follow your company’s procedures; if there are none, use the system I described above for your personal files.  Another challenge we face today is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are encouraging us to keep files within their app containers.  For instance, if you create a Word document, Microsoft wants you to save that file within your OneDrive’s Word folder.  That makes sense, and for the current documents I am creating, I use that system.  However, once I’ve sent feedback to my coaching clients, I save the original Pages file in that client’s folder (I work in the Apple ecosystem).  These folders are not year-specific. Many of my clients have been with me for years, and many of them come back from time to time.  That is why, with work-related files, using years to organise your documents doesn’t always work—particularly with ongoing projects, campaigns and clients. Given that most work related files and documents are shared with others and are kept within the company’s own file storage system, the best solution is to ensure that the title you give to these files is something you would naturally search for. Think how you would find this document in twelve or twenty-four months time.  For example, each year I write a workbook for my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The title of that document is “2026 Ultimate Productivity Workbook”.  I put the year first because if I were to search for “workbook”, within the results, I would find that the Productivity workshop’s workbooks would all be grouped together by year, making it easy for me to select the right one.  And that neatly leads me to another facet of working with digital files.  Your computer is built for search. It’s the biggest advantage computers have over your own brain. If it’s within your computer’s search scope it will find it within a split second.  Really the only thing you need to do is ensure that you have given the document a title you will be able to search for. One of my favourite features of this computerised search is to use the “recents” smart list. This shows you all the documents you have worked on recently.  The chances are something you are looking for at work will be something you have worked on recently. You might be writing a report or a proposal in Word, then in the Word app those documents will be at the top of the list.  You may need to change the search setting in the list to last modified, not date created to see this, but it’s a phenomenal way to find a document you need quickly.  What about your notes? Last weekend, I watched a documentary on the beloved British comedian Sir Ken Dodd. A brilliant comedian and a man who left millions of people in laughte

WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey. And now, let us begin.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free 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 | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 400 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years. This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points.  Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure. It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important? Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question.  When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation.  Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them.  Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes.  Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists.  And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world.  It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough.  Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection.  That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today.  Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents.  These were all original thoughts and observations.  Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books.  What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini.  This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude.  But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes.  Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored.  When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45.  And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later.  And that’s where our digital tools today are so much better than the paper notebooks we kept. We can find anything, any time, from any digital device we have on hand.  I remember reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography, and he often travelled to other parts of Italy. If he needed to reference a note he had made—and he made copious notes—and he did not have the right notebook with him on his travels, it would have taken him days to retrieve the information.  We don’t have that problem today.  So, when it comes to collecting, be ruthless in what you keep.  I have a notebook in my notes app called “Suppliers”. This is where I store the names of the companies I regularly buy things from.  For example, I get my clothing from several preferred retailers. I buy my woollen jumpers (sweaters) from Cordings of Piccadilly. In the note I have for Cordings, are my sizes and the website address.  This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for and order. I use Apple’s Password app to store my login details, so once I have found what I want, I can order it very quickly.  Amazon makes this even easier with a “Buy It Again” section, so if I am running low on Yorkshire Tea, I go to Amazon, click Buy It Again, and within a few seconds, I see Yorkshire Tea and can order straight away.  Ten years ago, I kept all that information in my notes. Today, I don’t bother as it’s faster to go directly to Amazon.  Another use I have for my digital notes is to keep all my client meeting notes. Each week, I will have around fifteen to twenty calls with clients, and I keep notes for each call as I write feedback, which I send to the client after the call.  These are unique notes, and each one will be different, so using the Darwin/Newton principle—keeping thoughts, ideas and observations in your notes—they will be kept in my notes in a notebook called “clients”. What’s great about this is I have over eight years’ worth of client notes in Evernote, which feed ideas for future content as they’re directly relatable to real experiences and difficulties.  Another useful note to have in your notes is something called an “Anchor Note”. This is a note where you keep critical information you may need at any particular time.  For example, I keep all the subscriber links to my various websites there, which can be quickly copied and pasted whenever needed.  I also have the Korean Immigration office website there, since it’s not easy to find, and I only need it every 3 or 4 years.  Depending on how security-conscious you are, you can also keep your Social Security and driving license numbers there, too.  How you organise your notes depends on you and how your brain works. However, the more complex your organisational system, the slower you will be at finding what you need.  Now this is where computers come into their own. Whether you use Apple, Google or Microsoft, all these companies have built incredible search functionality into the core of their systems.  This means as long as you give your note a title that means something to you, you will be able to find it in five or ten years’ time.  I remember once my wife asked me for a password to a Korean website I had not used in ten years or more. I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t have the password stored in my old password manager, 1Password.  As a long shot, I typed the name of the website into Evernote—the note-taking app I’ve been using for almost fifteen years—and within a second, the website with my login details was on my screen.  If I’d tried to find that information by going through my notebooks and tags, I would never have found it. I let Evernote handle the hard work, and it did so superbly.  However, that said, there is something about having some basic structure to your notes. I use a structure I call GAPRA. GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. It’s loosely based on Tiago Forte’s PARA method.  I find having separate places for my goals, areas of focus and projects makes it easier for me to navigate things when I am creating a note.  My goals section is for tracking data. For instance, if I were losing weight, I would record my weight each week there.  My areas of focus notebook is where I keep my definitions of my areas and what they mean to me, and it gives me a single place to review these every six months.  My project notebook is where I keep all my notes for my current projects.  The biggest notebook I have, though, is my resources notebook. This is a catch-all for everything else. My supplier’s notebook is there, as is information about different cities I travel to or may travel to in the future. As I look at that notebook now, Paris is the note that has the most information. (Although Osaka in Japan is getting close t

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in twelve months and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”  I first heard that quote from Tony Robbins, and it completely changed my approach to yearly goals. I stopped setting ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and began looking further ahead to see what I could do over the next twelve months that would move me closer to my longer-term dreams and goals.  In this week’s special episode, I will share with you why smaller steps over the next twelve months will do so much more for you than trying to do something big and scary that you ultimately fail at.  Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free 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 | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 399 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  What are the mistakes most people make when it comes to goals and resolutions for the New Year?  Well, the simple answer is that they overcomplicate things and try to do too much in one year.  Let me explain. Like most people, I used to set New Year’s resolutions when I was growing up. At various times in my life, they included losing weight and getting fit, quitting smoking, saving money and many more.  And, again, like most people, I failed miserably every time.  What Tony Robbins’ quote made me realise is that I was failing because none of these resolutions were connected to my long-term goals or vision.  I was in my twenties, and I believed I was immortal. It wasn’t until I reached my early thirties that three-day hangovers convinced me that I wasn’t immortal after all.  It wasn’t until I’d settled down, married and begun to see a life ahead of me that I started to wonder if I could control that life and the direction it would go in.  And yes, I could. And so can you. But you do need to know what kind of life you want to be living in ten or twenty years.  Hope is not a good strategy. It’s no good carrying on as you are and “hoping” you will one day reach the goals and the life you’ve always wanted to live.  To achieve that, you will need to take action.  To give you an example of what I mean.  I want to be active well into my eighties and nineties. I long admired Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh. He died in 2021, just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday. And yet he remained active throughout his eighties and nineties, being one of the hardest-working members of the Royal family.  The Queen allowed him to retire at 97.  How did Prince Philip maintain his strength and endurance?  He did something called the 5BX every morning for eleven minutes.  5BX is a series of body-weight exercises you can do anywhere that was developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1940s to keep their servicemen fit, healthy and strong.  I highly recommend you search for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube and watch it. It seems so quaint by today’s standards.  He also walked miles and miles every day, ate small portions of food based on a traditional balanced diet, limited his alcohol intake, and went to bed and woke up at the same time each day. If we were to break that down into daily activities, it was simple and doable. Because he was able to do it every day—even when he was travelling—it meant there were few excuses he could use not to do it.  You wake up, and after a few minutes, do your 5BX session, shower, have a small, healthy breakfast, and get on with your day, taking every opportunity to walk. And you do it every day.  Tie that to going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, and you would be setting yourself up for a long, healthy, active life.  And in that, there is nothing complicated or time-consuming.  There are also no goals involved. It’s just a shift in your daily routine, so these activities become part of your daily routine.  Although I would suggest you use January as a “test”. Often, we read or listen to something, think it’s a good idea and then find that because of our circumstances, we struggle to make it work.  That doesn’t mean it cannot work. It means we need to rethink the routine and make a few changes so it works for us.  I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and thought it was a good idea. And it was a good idea in 2016. I could get to bed at a reasonable time.  Then I started my productivity work and coaching programme, and it became challenging to get to bed before midnight. Something had to change.  I realised that the power of the 5 AM Club was not in getting up at 5 AM. It was what you did when you woke up. So, the only thing I needed to change was my wake-up time. And ten years later, I still follow the morning routine I developed after reading that book.  Another example would be with your personal finances. Davie Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, gives a simple step-by-step approach to getting your personal finances in order.  The first is to build a starter emergency fund—usually around $1,000 to $5,000. Then pay off all non-mortgage debts as quickly as you can.  The third step is to build a longer-term emergency fund. That would be three to six months of living expenses.  And then to invest in your retirement and live on less than you earn.  Within that framework, there would be a few key things you could do. For example, try to save the starter emergency fund in 2026 and pay down some of your shorter-term debts.  Around those areas, you could set some goals in 2026.  The bigger principle in The Total Money Makeover is to pay off all debts, including mortgages. That’s unlikely to be possible for most people in one year, but over ten years? It could be possible.  The good thing about something like this is that you can plan five or ten years ahead and set a goal to be completely debt-free by 2036.  Whether it’s health or finances, what you are doing is setting standards for how you live your life. You eat healthy, do some exercise each day, and live within your means.  And really, that’s what a new year should be all about. Not resolutions or goals, but reaffirming your standards. The standards you live your life by.  Standards don’t need motivation; they are just the way you live your life.  However, when setting your standards, you will likely need some help from motivation and self-discipline initially. There will be days when you forget to do something or cannot do it. That’s perfectly normal.  It’s not about hitting everything 100% of the time. That would be impossible anyway. I would suggest a monthly target of 80%+  A good example of this is when I travel to visit my parents. The trip from our home in Korea to where my parents live on the West Coast of Ireland takes about 26 hours door-to-door.  During that time, I am not able to go out for a run or to the gym. If my goal were to exercise every day, I would be setting myself up for failure before I begin. I travel to visit my parents at least once a year.  And if I were determined to do it, why put myself through that extra stress? Travelling is stressful enough.  Then there would be those occasions when I am ill or delayed when travelling domestically.  However, if my target was an 80% success rate, I’m in with a chance, and on those days when I’m exhausted or an emergency comes up, I wouldn’t be destroying my standards.  If you want to discover what is important to you in your life, I suggest you download my free Areas of Focus workbook. That workbook will take you through each of the eight areas of life we all share, help you define each one and then set some actionable steps you can take to keep your areas in balance.  It’s a great way to kick off a new year, as it will help you focus on what matters to you and identify areas where you can establish habits and standards that will be meaningful to you. A new year is a wonderful opportunity to review how things are going in our lives and reflect on what we could change to get our lives back on the right track, living the life we want.  If you’re entirely new to this approach to a new year, don’t really know what your longer-term vision is, or aren’t clear on what is important to you in life, and you’re ready to make changes, I would recommend my Time and Life Mastery online course.  This is a complete package that will help you explore what is important to you. Once you have established those, I then show you how to build your standards into your daily life.  Plus, you get my complete mini-course library for free when you join. And if you act now, you can save 50% with my End of Year Sale offer using the coupon code “codisgreat” (all lowercase, and one word).  I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you.  Thank you for listening, and let me wish you an amazing 2026.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.