Your Time, Your Way cover art

Your Time, Your Way

Your Time, Your Way

By: Carl Pullein
Listen for free

Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.Copyright 2024 Carl Pullein International. All rights reserved. Economics Management Management & Leadership Personal Development Personal Success
Episodes
  • You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.

    You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.
    Jul 12 2026
    Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said: "The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want. This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Perfect Week Calendar Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |424 Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do? And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything. In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once. This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day. And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep. In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness. I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints. This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be. Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes. What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked. I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had. Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!) 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 Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week? Hi Scott, thank you for your question. I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it. This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them. Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this. This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between. What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic. I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days. Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day. Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them. Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden. During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with...
    Show More Show Less
    14 mins
  • How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan

    How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan
    Jul 19 2026
    The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up." Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life. No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences. A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill. These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day. Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for. In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through. Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |425 Hello, and welcome to episode 425 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. Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative. They usually go something like: “Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster” Well, was is a disaster? Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned. It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster. The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan. And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events. But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again. This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?” Hi Will, Thank you for your question. Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week. You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that. The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has. There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too. We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week. There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting. None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate. If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story. One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings ...
    Show More Show Less
    14 mins
  • Your To-Do List Is Hiding the Truth About Your Time.

    Your To-Do List Is Hiding the Truth About Your Time.
    Jul 26 2026
    What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Time Sector System here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. 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 |426 Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes. And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time. Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days). Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work. I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office. Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home. I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s. In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen. It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you. If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot. Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus? Hi Judy, thank you for your question. There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication. Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done. Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do. Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics. Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists. All great features. And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do. Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar ...
    Show More Show Less
    14 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.