Episodes

  • The Intentional Day: How Top Performers Plan Their Time Differently

    The Intentional Day: How Top Performers Plan Their Time Differently
    May 11 2025
    Podcast 369 What’s the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 369 Hello, and welcome to episode 369 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’ve often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don’t think I’ve answered a question about the best practices before. A practice is something you do each day. It’s just what you do. You don’t need to think about it. It’s automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I’ve come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don’t do. In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It’s the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day. Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas. And that is what we’ll be looking at in today’s episode. Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May. If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into the show notes. Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life? Hi Mark, thank you for your question. This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don’t do. Surprisingly it’s not work longer hours. That’s usually the domain of unproductive people. What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day. Let’s start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It’s your morning routine that sets you up for the day. Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent. The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day. Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work. For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm. Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That’s the challenge. Resisting demands. Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it’ll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time. And that’s a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone. If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen. For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings. Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do ...
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    14 mins
  • Breaking the Backlog Cycle: Never Get Behind Again

    Breaking the Backlog Cycle: Never Get Behind Again
    May 4 2025
    Backlogs. We all have them. But, how do you clear them and then prevent them from happening again? That’s what we’re looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 368 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. Organising your work, creating lists of things to do, and managing your projects in your notes are all good common-sense productivity practices. However, none of these are going to be helpful if you have huge backlogs of admin, messages, and emails creating what I call a low-level anxiety buzz. You’re going to be stressed and distracted and in no place to be at your very best. What’s more, this can become a chronic problem if those backlogs are growing. This is when critical things are going to get missed. I’m often surprised to get an email from someone asking me if they can have a discount code for an early-bird discount that expired three or four weeks previously. I mean, come on. If it’s taking you three to four weeks to get to an email—even if you consider it to be a low-value email—there’s a serious problem in your system. (Or more likely, you don’t have a system at all.) So this week, I want to share with you a few ideas that can help you regain control of these backlogs and, more importantly, prevent them from happening again. 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 Wyatt. Wyatt asks, hi Carl, how would you help someone who is backlogged beyond belief. I’ve got over 3,000 emails in my inbox, and my team are still waiting for me to finish their appraisals from last year! I feel so stuck. Please help. Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question. Sorry to hear you feel swamped. I know it can be a horrible place to be. Before we begin, let me explain the three types of backlogs we all have to deal with. The first is the growing backlog. This one is the worst because it’s getting bigger and unless you take action immediately, it’s going to overwhelm you. These kinds of backlogs will always be your priority. The next type of backlog is the static backlog. It’s not growing, but it’s there and it’s on your mind. It needs to be dealt with, but the urgency isn’t as big as a growing backlog. And then there’s the shrinking backlog. These are the best because if they are shrinking, they’ll soon disappear altogether. Now, one of the most common areas of our work that backlogs is our email. The last statistics I saw show that on average, people are getting 90+ emails a day. If you need an average of 30 seconds to deal with each email—which I know is low—that’s around forty-five minutes to deal with them. Do you have forty-five minutes today to deal with your email? Remember, that’s a small amount of time for each email. It’s likely you’ll need more than thirty seconds for most of those mails. Now the good news. If you’re starting with a backlog of over 3,000 emails, many of those emails will no longer require a response. The moment’s passed. What I would suggest is you take any emails older than a month, and move then to a folder called “Old In-box”. While my instinct it to tell you to delete them, I’ve never come across anyone courageous enough to do it. Although, if you think about it. Deleting them gives you a perfect excuse if someone follows you up—“sorry, I don’t seem to be able to find your email. Could you resend it?” Doing this means you’ve cut your list by a large margin. What’s left can be processed. Email is a two step process. Just like we used to do with regular letters. Open your post box, take out the mail and sort it between letters you need to read or respond to and throw away or file anything you don’t need to act on. And by the way, nobody left their mail in the mail box. Why do we do that with email? With email, it’s the same process. Clear your inbox. As you clear ask yourself two questions: What is it? What do I need to do with it? If you need to read or reply to an email, then move it to a folder called “Action This Day”. If you don’t need to do anything with it, either delete or archive it. This is the processing stage. All you are doing is processing. You are not replying or reading. That comes ...
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    14 mins
  • Beyond the Chaos: Building a Low-Maintenance Productivity System

    Beyond the Chaos: Building a Low-Maintenance Productivity System
    Apr 27 2025
    Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That’s what I’m looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 367 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 things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems. It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit. Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven’t explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it’s paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use. So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it’s simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working? That’s the topic of this week’s question and 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 Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don’t know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help? Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question. There’s a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I’ll put the video in the show notes) It’s quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants. David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be. What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting. And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system? I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English. What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that’s going to be largely digital stuff. If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn’t really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it) The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager. Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you’ve chosen’s inbox. Then process your inbox. Use the three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And then move the task to the appropriate folder. Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be. Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now’s not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you’re finished. One tip here is to think ...
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    14 mins
  • How To Be Productive And Organised.

    How To Be Productive And Organised.
    Apr 20 2025
    This week, what does it take to be organised and productive? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary 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 | 366 Hello, and welcome to episode 366 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 thing you will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day. Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not. Instead, they find excuses. “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc. Yet, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it’s also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest. In essence, it’s about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. 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 Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it’s holding me back, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help? Hi Tammy, thank you for your question. As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself. This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need. The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then. This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there’s something about human interaction that raises our energy levels. You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it’s not the time you go to bed that matters, it’s waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle. If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity. Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days. A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done. One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more. Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on. This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he’s happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do. It’s simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy. Now, I know it’s unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It’s likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues. Demands such as wanting to know how you’re getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don’t trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them. What’s the most common reason you chase someone up? It’s most likely because you’re worried they’ve ...
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    12 mins
  • How to Build A Productive Team

    How to Build A Productive Team
    Apr 13 2025
    This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 365 Hello, and welcome to episode 365 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 work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing. There’s an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time. In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager’s need for information and the team’s need to work undisturbed. So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss? Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question. And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she’s asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Hi Sam, thank you for your question. It sounds like you’re caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively. Let’s start with the easier of the two. Managing a team. To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager’s role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do. At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered? And then to step back and let them get on and do it. Let me give you an example of this in play. I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication. In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for. That’s communication part. I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don’t care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I’m happy. If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me. And that’s the support part. It’s simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her. Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She’s never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me. If you don’t trust your team, who’s at fault? If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It’s that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity. It’s the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems. I’ve worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours. When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more ...
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    13 mins
  • The Fundamental Basics of a Productive Day

    The Fundamental Basics of a Productive Day
    Apr 6 2025
    Podcast 364 What are the solid basics of becoming more productive that anyone can use today? That’s the question I’m answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 364 Hello, and welcome to episode 364 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. When I was little, a police officer lived in our village. The police service provided his home, and his job was to look after the local community. Sargeant Morris was my first introduction to the police, and he taught me some valuable lessons—not least about the importance of being a law-abiding citizen. Yet, a lesson he taught me that I never realised how important it was until later was the power of daily routines. Each morning at 8:00 am, Sergeant Morris would walk up and down the main street in our village, ensuring that the schoolchildren got to school safely. He was also there when we returned from school at the end of the day. I’m sure there were days he was unable to be there, but all I remember is his presence on the street when I went and came back from school. He would wear his hi-viz jacket, chat with the parents and children, and make sure we crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and that the traffic didn’t drive too fast down the street. I also remember because of his presence, seemingly day and night, crime was almost non-existent in our village. It was the simple things—things that did not require a lot of effort or knowledge—that made Sergeant Morris a part of my childhood I will never forget. And that is the same for you and me today. It’s the little things repeated that make the biggest difference to our productivity. And 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 Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl. What would you say are the basics of becoming more productive? Hi Mike, thank you for your question. It’s funny you’ve asked this question as it’s something I have been thinking a lot about recently. What are the absolute basics of being productive? I would first start with something I wrote extensively about in Your Time, Your Way, and those are the three foundations: Sleep, exercise, and diet. How do you feel when you’ve had a bad night’s sleep? Perhaps you only get two or three hours of sleep. How does your day go? Probably not very well at all. You may be able to get through the morning, but when the afternoon comes around, you’re going to slump. If that poor sleep continues for a few days, and you’re going to get sick. Now let’s flip that. How do you feel when you get a solid night’s sleep? What does that do to your productivity? The difference between the two is huge. On the days you get enough sleep, you’ll focus better and for longer. You’ll make less mistakes and, something rarely talked about, you’ll make better decisions. That helps you as it ensures that when you decide what to work on next it will more likely be the right thing. When you’re sleep deprived, your decision making abilities sink. You’ll pick up the easy, low-value tasks—because you feel you’re doing something—but it will have little value and the important work will be left until another day. And then you have a backlog of important stuff to do, stuff that’s probably going To have deadlines which means you put yourself under pressure and a low level of anxiety sets in, distracting you and leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day. Exercise, or as I prefer to call it “movement” is another of those simple productivity enhancers often overlooked. Sitting at a table staring at a screen all day is not good for you. You know that don’t you? You’re a living, breathing organism that was designed to move. We know that exercise, and when I say exercise I don’t mean going to a gym or out for a run, I mean some walking, chores around the house or some light stretching in your home or office, helps your thinking and creativity. It also helps to reduce stress and resets your brain after a hard session of focused work. One of the best things you can do if you’re working from home is to do some of your chores in-between sessions of sit-down work. For example, do two hours of project work, then stop, and take your laundry ...
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    12 mins
  • Happy 5th Anniversary to The Time Sector System

    Happy 5th Anniversary to The Time Sector System
    Mar 30 2025
    How flexible are you? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 363 Hello, and welcome to episode 363 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 heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course. Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better. The Time Sector System works. It’s based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do. The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room. Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have. For example, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it. Makes sense, right? I could decide to write my next book today. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I’m not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours. Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week. One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work. Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies. The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day. The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed. This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work. In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I’m sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable. What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team. He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him. This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world’s best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it. Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else. There’s the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five. So, where does flexibility come into this? Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea ...
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    13 mins
  • "Inbox Freedom: Breaking the Chains of Digital Overwhelm

    "Inbox Freedom: Breaking the Chains of Digital Overwhelm
    Mar 23 2025
    This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 362 Hello, and welcome to episode 362 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. How often do you feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved. A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control. The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it. If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues. This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes? Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question. This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything. On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app. Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward. There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better. When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it? An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question. So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day. The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly. Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner. It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it? The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox. This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it. Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now ...
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    12 mins