Your Time, Your Way

How often do you take a mid-morning tea break? I mean a proper break, where you stop work for fifteen minutes or so mid-morning? 

It turns out very few people do this these days. And if they do get themselves a cup of tea or coffee, it’s done on the go or at their desks while continuing to work. 

Complete madness. Is it any wonder why so many people feel burnt out, exhausted and unable to spend any quality time with their nearest and dearest? 

This week, we’re looking at why bringing back your mid-morning and afternoon breaks might be the most productive thing you could do. 

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Script | 433

Hello, and welcome to episode 432 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. 

Back in the day, in traditional knowledge work jobs, most people had to be at their workplace by 9 AM. You would get a tea break mid-morning, usually around 11 or 11:15, then you would get a lunch break, probably 12:30 or 1 PM, then in the afternoon there'd be another tea break around 3:00 pm, and finally you would finish work, perhaps at 5:30 PM

Our days were structured. Time anchors marked our day: start times, mid-morning breaks, lunchtimes, afternoon breaks, and when we finished work.

 Over the last few years or so, and certainly since the pandemic, these natural time anchors have been disappearing. Working from home, having more flexible working times, and working across multiple different time zones have all accelerated the erosion of these natural breaks.

But these time anchors mattered. They told your brain to take a rest. Today, because those time anchors have practically disappeared, we end up switching our attention from one problem to the next. To an email or a message, back to the report we’re supposed to finish today, then to the presentation due next week, a quick check of a project that we're working on to answer a question. It's just non-stop.

No time for a tea break or sometimes even a lunch break. 

Now, because there are no natural rhythms in our days, and no time anchors to give us a break, we end up feeling completely exhausted at the end of them.

But it didn't just happen at work. We also had time anchors at home too. We would wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and sit down to watch our favourite TV shows at the same time. 

We'd also eat our lunch, breakfast, and dinner at the same time. These were mini time anchors that told our brain to rest. When you remove those anchors, your brain doesn't know when to rest, and it just gets completely worn out.

This week’s question is about why you feel so exhausted and tired, with no energy left to even decide what to have for dinner and what to do about it to bring some sense of calm back into your days

So, without further ado. I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s Question, but she’s once again on one of her little holidays. So, I’m afraid you’re stuck with my voice this week. 

This week’s question comes from Paul. Paul asks, hi Carl, I was recently promoted, and now my days just feel like a blur, and I struggle to see if I have done anything important or not. It just feels like I spend all day putting out other people’s fires. I rarely get time for a proper lunch break, and I feel completely worn out by the time I get home. What can I do to bring some focus back to my days?

Hi Paul, thank you for your question. 

To get us started, let’s step back in time a little. 

Office work in the 1950s and 60s in the UK was pretty structured for most people. You were expected to arrive at your desk on time every day. Habitual lateness was a serious disciplinary offence. 

Then there were recognised mid-morning and afternoon breaks, where we’d meet colleagues from other departments and talk football, cricket or what was on the TV last night. We rarely talked about work during those 15 minutes or so. 

Those anchors were like shared signals. You started together, breaked together, and finished together. Now, everything is blurred. Remote work, flexible hours, global teams, all great in theory. But in practice, it means people are never really off. 

And never really on either. It's just a permanent in-between. That mushiness can really wear you down.

We’ve lost that daily rhythm. Even if it felt rigid, there was a kind of contained calm. A boundary around tasks. Now we just dip in and out all day. Messages, calls, emails all blending together. And this isn’t just nostalgia.

In many ways, I was lucky to be a smoker in my early days of work. My breaks were a chance to grab a crafty cigarette, meet other smokers, and talk about our weekends and the crazy things we did. 

I remember, as a salesperson, always heading out back for a cigarette after each appointment. It was a chance to reset after a meeting with a customer and prepare myself for the next appointment. 

And while the phenomenon called “attention residue” wasn’t recognised in the early 90s, we now know that our brains don’t simply turn off from one context to the next; we tend to think through what happened, perhaps plan out when we will do what we committed to, and process our emotions. 

And as a salesperson, there were often a lot of emotions, usually around frustration and disappointment—I wasn’t a great salesperson. 

 Our new way of working carries a real cognitive cost with all that context switching. There’s no time to reset or deal with that inevitable attention residue.

Without natural breaks in the day, your brain never gets to rest or reset. You might think, “Oh, I'm being flexible”, but what your nervous system feels is a constant low-level of anxiety. 

It's like eating all day but never having a proper meal. You're full, but unsatisfied and somehow exhausted.

So, Paul, to get things back under control, recognise that you do need to give your brain a chance to catch up. It needs a break and time to reset so you can start the next task or meeting prepared. 

Now, we’re not talking about a lot of time. Ten to fifteen minutes; that’s all you need.

I was recently working with a new client, and she shared her calendar with me. From the moment she began work on Monday morning, she was in back-to-back meetings. 

There was no break or buffer time between meetings. 

We discovered that all these meetings had consequences. There was no time to prepare for future meetings, and because she never got a break, by the time the meetings were over, usually around 3:30 pm, she was so exhausted that all she did was read through her emails and messages. 

She just didn’t have the energy to think about replying to any of them. 

The solution was to enforce a ten-minute break between meetings, a 30-minute mid-morning buffer break and a proper lunch break. 

While this ultimately reduced the number of meetings she attended each day, it also reduced her exhaustion and gave her energy later in the day to think and respond to emails and messages. 

When I spoke to her last week, I asked her if she felt she needed to add more meetings back into her day, and she laughed before replying, “Not a chance!”

She is getting more work done, feeling less tired, and has time to read through the next day’s meeting agendas. 

It is often a case of taking one step back to move two steps forward. Remove one meeting a day to free up time and allow your brain to catch up with everything coming at you. 

A lot of this comes back to the principles I teach in my Quiet Productivity Method programme. Slowing down produces better results, allows for better thinking, and that leads to fewer mistakes. 

If you watch interviews with CEOs of large companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, they all seem so relaxed and laid-back. 

These people run huge companies, yet you sense that if a catastrophe were to occur at any of them, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or, until recently, Tim Cook would calmly assess what happened before offering a calm, well-thought-out response. 

And yet, if you were to search for the daily routine of these CEOs, you’d find a well-structured day with plenty of breaks, including lunch breaks that avoid talking shop and plenty of quiet thinking time. 

Another tip I can give you here is to use pen and paper to map out your day. 

You don’t need anything as sophisticated as a Franklin Planner or Bullet Journal, a simple A5 notebook would do. 

Before you end the day, give yourself 5 to 10 minutes to draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left, write out your appointments for tomorrow, and on the right, list out the tasks you need to or should do.

By writing your appointments first, you can see how much time you have available for doing tasks. 

If you had six hours of meetings, took a 1-hour lunch break, and had at least 10 minutes between meetings, you would likely have only 30 minutes for tasks. 

You’d see that and would design a day that reflects that. 

That’s often the problem with a 100% digital system. You get lulled into believing you can do more than is possible, and you end up frustrated and disappointed by what you can actually do. 

There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the way digital systems are designed. You can throw 1000s of tasks in there without any problems at all. 

Your problems start when you decide you need to do those tasks and you realise there’s no time to do them. 

This is why, in my recent YouTube video, I talked about why I keep coming back to a Franklin Planner. It stops me from being overly ambitious, and I have a simple record of what I got done each day. 

I jokingly tell people who ask why I use such an antiquated planner—the Franklin Planner’s nearly 50 years old now—that my planner keeps me sane. And it does. 

It alerts me very quickly if I am trying to do too much in one day. 

One final bit of advice I can give you, Paul, is something that recently worked well with a client of mine who had a similar problem with fire-fighting all day. 

He was very sceptical about time blocking, believing he had to be available for his team in case they needed him urgently. 

The truth was he’d accidentally trained his team to come to him with all sorts of problems that didn’t need his input. So, we tested blocking 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning to do his most important work of the day. 

The caveat here was that he told his team that if they needed him, they had to come to him before 9:30; otherwise, it would have to wait until after 11:00. 

The first week was challenging, and people tried to interrupt. But the second week he began to see some serious results. 

He began getting his work done; backlogs disappeared, and his team began respecting his time. Fewer fires, fewer interruptions and a lot less stress. 

Often, the fix for our time management problems is a lot simpler than we may imagine. 

Give your brain a chance to rest and reset between meetings and sessions of work (you only need 10 to 15 minutes), protect time for your most important work, and ensure you have a 10- to 15-minute buffer between meetings. 

And remember, you may be able to rush from one problem to the next. But your brain is not quite as fast. It needs time to process your thoughts and emotions. Give it a chance. 

And take a tea break and your lunch break. Not doing so will leave you exhausted and worn out at the end of the day. 

By the way, I can recommend a nice cup of Yorkshire Tea mid-morning and in the afternoon. It’ll leave you feeling refreshed and ready for anything. 

Thank you, Paul, for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

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

What are the top 5 pain points with time management and productivity that over 400 of my past and current coaching clients have faced? 

The results may, or may not, surprise you. 

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Use the coupon code: planning26

 

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Script | 432

Hello, and welcome to episode 432 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. 

Before we get started, and linked somewhat to today’s topic, one of the top issues among the people I work with is inconsistency in planning weeks and days. 

Now, I understand why it can be a challenge to plan your week consistently. Life often gets in the way, and really, what’s the point of planning when, too often, whatever plan you set gets destroyed by an inconsiderate boss or client? 

Yet it still remains the case that those who consistently plan their weeks and allow a little time each day to plan the next day are the ones who get the right things done on time and have more time to do the things they want to do. 

So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been updating my Planning Course. 

It’s not a long course, and it now focuses on three main areas of planning. Daily, weekly, and project planning. Plus, given the time of year, I’ve added a bonus section on the Annual Planning Template. 

If you want to take a significant step up in your time management and productivity, I highly recommend this course. 

You can get it as part of my Productivity Academy Membership or buy it as a standalone course. 

And if you’re fast, you can get the standalone course for just $50.00 with the early bird discount. (I’ll put the link and the code in the show notes for you) 

And a quick tip. Get the course today and do the Weekly Planning Section. It will take you around 15 minutes to do the section, will give you a downloadable Weekly Planning Matrix sheet and will inspire you to do a proper, practical Weekly Planning Session today. 

Okay, on with the episode. 

Last week, I hosted the inaugural live training of my Productivity Academy. In that session, I shared some research I had done on around 500 of my past and present coaching clients. The question I asked was: “What were the top five struggles (or pain points) they faced?” 

The results were not unsurprising, or not that I thought. What surprised me was that the cause of those pain points almost always comes from the same place. 

Let me explain. 

First, what were the five? They were:

In 5th place, Tool overload and fragmented workflows

This means using multiple apps, duplicating task lists, having unclear homes for information, and excessive system tweaking, which undermined trust in their productivity setup.

All of this results in information all over the place, which causes a sense that they lack clarity and control. 

In 4th place, Interruptions and lack of protected focus time

Meetings, emails, messages, emergencies, and context switching push deep or important work out, leaving no time for doing that important work. 

Yet one irony is that if the focused, strategic work were prioritised over interruptions, there would be fewer interruptions. Nobody chasing you, telling you something was urgent, and less time for meetings because the work was getting done instead of being talked about. 

In 3rd place, Unclear priorities

If you don’t know what matters most, the urgent or “loud” work of other people will always crowd out meaningful progress. If you do not know what your priorities are, then someone else’s priorities will do. At least they appear to be urgent, right? 

In 2nd place, Planning and review routines that don’t stick

When daily and weekly planning are skipped because, perhaps, life gets busy, it causes your system to break, which then requires repeated restarts.

Restarts are time-consuming, often overwhelming and never address the underlying problem. (Which we will come to in a moment)

And in 1st place… Wait for it… Overwhelm from competing tasks and projects

My clients face large backlogs, scattered lists, frequent rescheduling, and a persistent sense of being behind. 

Now, as I said those five issues, I am sure you were nodding along to many of them. But the question is, why? Why do these pain points keep popping up? 

The simple answer is a lack of clarity on what is important to you. 

Let me explain. I value punctuality. It is a standard I have had since it was instilled in me at school. If I have a meeting at 9:00 am, I am ready to go at 9:00 am. Not 9:02 or 9:01. I am ready to go at 9:00 am. 

I turn up a few minutes early, make sure everything is ready to go and then we start. 

My wife, on the other hand, treats time as abstract. If she says 9:00 am, that could mean anything from 9:05 to 9:30 am. 

I treat punctuality as something important; she doesn’t. 

This same principle follows those who are incredible at keeping things organised. They give higher importance to putting things away after they have used them than someone who you would describe as being disorganised. 

When it comes to your work, what are your priorities? 

Now, someone who finds themselves running around all day looking for something to get anxious about has no clear plan for the day. They’re waiting for a fire so they have something to put out. 

Yet someone with the same kind of work who starts the day with a clear plan is the one quietly getting on with the work they identified as important. Because they are doing that, they rarely come across any fires to put out. This, in turn, leaves them with more time to do the work. 

That becomes a positive circle. More work gets done, fewer fires occur. 

With the number 1 issue, Overwhelm from competing tasks and projects: Why do you have competing tasks and projects? 

Let’s say that you have two big projects with the same deadline. Why did that happen? You said yes to both projects; you agreed to the deadlines. 

Now, you can’t do two things at once; there must have been a time when you realised that there was a conflict. What did you do when you discovered that conflict? 

Imagine I was asked by two different companies to develop and deliver a training programme. The dates for each session were to be on 30th September. 

Theoretically, I could do it as long as the times were different. But accepting both would mean that I would be unable to do anything else in September, and the quality of the training would be compromised. 

So, I would have to say no to the 30 September date to at least one of the companies. 

Now, I’ve worked with many companies, big and small, and I know that when it comes to setting training dates, there is a significant degree of flexibility from both sides. 

Now, if one company insisted that the only date the training could take place was the 30th, that’s good. The decision has been made for me, and I would have to ask the other company if we could do a different date. 

If, in the very unlikely event, the other company also insisted on the 30th, then I would have to decline the invitation. 

From a practical, realistic perspective, there would be no way I could prepare two separate training sessions for two different companies, each involving a different HR department or organiser. 

This is why knowing your limits and being aware of what you are currently committed to are key to being productive, improving your time management, and staying organised. 

Yet, if you do not do your daily and weekly planning, all these issues will “accidentally” keep happening. You don’t know what’s coming up, think you have plenty of time, and keep saying yes to more and more commitments. And everyone loves you. 

Until you don’t deliver. Then you’re the problem. You’re the bottleneck. You said you could do it, but you didn’t. You missed the deadline, and all trust is now broken. 

And all this started from not knowing what your priorities are. 

Another example. My professional priorities are: clients, content and then business admin. In that order. 

My client work will always receive top priority, then content creation, then the admin associated with running a business. 

This means that before I begin a day, week or year, I already know my priorities. 

What about you? What are your professional priorities and in what order have you set them? 

Competing priorities can often be an issue. What criteria can you set to make the decision easier? For instance, a customer seeking a $20 million proposal will likely be a higher priority than one seeking a $2,000 proposal. 

You could argue that all proposals are equal, yet you can work on only one at a time. So how do you choose? Perhaps you can operate a first-in, first-out (FIFO) system and process them in the order they arrive. 

Whichever way you decide, you are saving yourself time. No decisions have to be made. Just start and get on with it.

If you look carefully at the five pain points, knowing your priorities and ensuring they get done before anything else will reduce much of the friction you face. 

The second cause of these is often one of capacity. Yes, we can do almost everything asked of us, but not all at the same time. There’s a limit to what we can do each day, week and quarter. 

Most people I work with are trying to work at overcapacity. 

For example, being expected to answer emails and messages and respond to customer calls within minutes of receiving them never works. 

I’m reminded of one of my early jobs working in car sales. 

When I first started, the company employed a receptionist to answer telephone calls. She would find a salesperson who was free to take the call, or, if there were no free salespeople, she would take a number and tell the caller that someone would call back as soon as possible. 

Then the company decided to install a new system, which meant that when a call came in, the telephone would ring on a central speaker, and the salespeople would be responsible for answering the calls themselves. 

To ensure calls were answered quickly, a rule was set requiring them to be answered within 5 rings. 

They then let go of the receptionist. She was no longer needed. 

Then the problems started. Sales began to drop, and salespeople were unable to focus on selling. Every time the phone rang, you could see everyone counting the rings, desperately hoping someone would answer. 

Within 6 months, the receptionist was back. And guess what? Sales began to rise. Funny that. 

People are perfectly happy to wait for you to return their call or message. And it’s worth remembering that a quick reply often suggests desperation. 

The reality is that we are collecting far too much and believing that everything we collect must be done. No, it does not. 

Looking at task managers from the 1980s and 1990s, there were around 4 or 5 items on a list. These were bigger things, such as working on this project or calling that client to sort out the issue. 

Nobody put letters to reply to or calls to return on a to-do list. These were self-contained. Your letters would be in an in-tray, and you would set aside some time each day to reply to them. 

You can do the same today with email and messages. They are still self-contained. You do not also need to add them to your task manager. Now you’ve duplicated a task.

I remember my boss at the law firm I worked at popping his head out of his office door to ask his secretary for his messages. He would do this around 2 pm each day and, for an hour, would return the calls that had come in while he was in meetings. 

The lesson here is to take some time to decide what is important to you as an individual and a professional. Pre-decide your priorities. Create some if-this-then-that rules, 

If this happens, then I will do that.

This then reduces the decisions you need to make each day, and that will help reduce the mental fatigue that builds whenever something new comes in and you have to make yet another decision. 

And if you want to reduce the ultimate friction, remember the phrase: A place for everything, and everything in its place."

How much time is wasted just looking for a document, your glasses or keys? Come on, this should be your basic norm. Know where you put things so you can retrieve them when you need them. 

You don’t have to be as obsessed as Hercule Poirot, who kept his bank balance at £444, 4 shillings and 4 pence. Although there might be something to be said for keeping order in everything, you always have the capacity to deal with any unexpected events. 

Thank you for listening. And if you are interested in learning more about my coaching programmes, you will find all the details on my website, carlpullein.com. You’ll also find details on how to join my Productivity Academy there too. 

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

An overflowing task manager and a crowded-out calendar are rarely ever caused by using the wrong tools. The problem happened well before you entered the task or added the appointment to your task manager or calendar. 

And that’s what we’re looking at this week. 

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Script |431

Hello, and welcome to episode 431 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 your appointments for tomorrow right now, how much time do you have that is not already committed? Two, three, four hours? 

Now look at your task manager: how many tasks are overdue or scheduled for tomorrow? 

In the uncommitted time you have tomorrow, are you confident you can complete all those tasks? 

Most people who do this little exercise, if they are being honest with themselves, will answer “no chance”. 

And this is the top reason why so many people are struggling with time management and productivity today. And there is a word for it: Overcommitted. 

It’s not the tools they use or any other complex reason. It’s simply because they’ve allowed themselves to become overcommitted. 

This week, I’m looking at how this happens and what you can do to unravel the problem so you are operating within your natural capacity, not overworked or under pressure, and not feeling like you are sinking under the weight of unrealistic deadlines and commitments. 

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

This week’s question comes from Douglas. Douglas asks, “Hi, Carl, I know you tell people to keep their task manager clean and tight, but I find that impossible. I’m collecting 20 or more things into my inbox each day; I often have 4 or 5 hours of meetings, and I have to deal with at least 130 emails and messages each day. How would you get all that under control?”

Hi Douglas, thank you for your question. 

I did some quick maths on the numbers you provided and noticed that if you are collecting, on average, 25 new tasks a day, have 130 emails and messages to deal with and only have 3 ½ hours of non-meeting time each day, that would mean you would have only 1 minute and 13 seconds to spend on each item. 

Yet those numbers assume you are not taking time for lunch or coffee or a glass of water.

If you were to include a 30-minute lunch break and 15 minutes to get water and coffee each day, that would leave you with less than a minute available for each email, message, and task. 

Is that realistic? 

Based on that quick calculation, the issue here is one of capacity. You’ve no capacity left. All that’s needed to completely destroy your day is an urgent, last-minute meeting request, an issue that prevents you from doing any of your planned work or simply an IT problem that doesn’t allow you to do the work you planned. 

I can assure you, Douglas, you are not alone here. 

There are millions of people all around the world struggling with the same thing. They’re overcommitted. 

Which is why it’s completely irrelevant what tools you’re using. 

The first thing I would advise someone in this situation is to do the maths I did above. Now, I know I do not have all the information. I don’t know what work you do, your position in the company, or whether you lead a team. 

But what I do know is you’ve gone beyond your natural capacity, and now you will be building up enormous backlogs. You will be struggling to meet your deadlines, and I bet when you get home you’re exhausted. 

This exercise will tell you how much capacity you have. 

If the meetings you attend each day are non-negotiable, you will need to find a way to reduce the number of tasks you receive. Which means you will likely have to do something uncomfortable. 

Reject requests. 

Now I know this is very hard to do. Nobody likes disappointing someone. But the choice is: either you disappoint them when they ask, or you disappoint them when you cannot deliver what you promised on time. And I think failing to deliver on your commitments is the bigger disappointment.

Think of it this way. If you say no and they ask someone else who can deliver, then you’ve actually helped them. 

Sure, your pride may be slightly hurt, but this isn’t about your pride. This is about setting yourself realistic expectations on what you can and cannot do. 

However, there is another possible solution. Cap your daily meetings.

If, when you do the little exercise on how much non-committed time you have, you realise that you will need four hours of meeting-free time each day, then you cap your meeting time at 3 hours per day. 

This will then leave you with 4 or 5 hours for your tasks. 

Now there are various ways to do this. You could use a calendar service such as Calendly or Acuity to open blocks of time for people to schedule meetings with you, or you could tell people that you’ve reached your meeting limit for the day and ask if you could meet on another day. 

You will be surprised how accommodating people can be. 

Another consideration is to reduce the meeting times to 30 minutes. This has the added advantage that people will get to the point much faster, and you’ll find you still cover everything that needs to be covered. 

I’ve learned many things over the years I’ve been coaching and helping people with their time management and productivity, but one of those lessons stands out:

Every “yes” has an invisible “no”. 

In other words, every time you accept another commitment, whether it is a meeting or a piece of work, you are saying no to something else you could have done with that time. 

But it goes beyond that. Meetings have a nasty habit of generating more commitments. Another meeting, more emails and tasks, for example. 

And pieces of work generate what Cal Newport calls “admin costs”; these are the little extra tasks, such as finding information, following up, and answering questions. They are the invisible “nos” rarely ever considered. 

So in your situation, Douglas, there are a few questions to ask yourself:

Do all your regular meetings require your presence? If not, perhaps you could drop one or two of them. If you can, don’t allow the saved time to be replaced by other meetings. Protect that time. Save it for the things you have prioritised. 

The goal here is to gradually withdraw from these meetings. 

If you manage a team, perhaps you could delegate attendance at some of these meetings to one of your team members. They can then report back to you with a summary of what happened. 

What are you collecting? You mentioned that you collect around 20 new items on average each day. That seems like a lot. What are you collecting? 

There are some things that will need to be collected; you may need to contact someone for information or organise the purchase of new equipment. 

But if you are collecting emails to respond to and articles to read, then your task manager is not the best place for them.

Emails and messages have their own self-contained apps. Keep everything within these walls. For instance, if you have a Slack message to reply to but need to think about it first, flag the message.

Or you can use Claude or ChatGPT to find all your unresponded messages for today. You could even set this up as an automation 

With email, it’s easier. You can create an Action folder for emails you need to respond to and drop them in there. Then give yourself some time later in the day to respond to them. 

The goal here is to reduce the pressure on your capacity, and one of the fastest ways to do that is to reduce friction points. 

For example, if you get an email you feel you should respond to and then move it to your task manager, that’s a lot of additional time—remember “admin cost”?

It’s far faster to drag and drop it into an Action folder. 

A great question to ask yourself is: What has to come out of my week to make it more realistic? 

Juggling your current commitments around, fiddling with your task manager or trying new tools is not addressing the real issue. 

The real issue is a capacity one. You’re trying to do far more than you can do. You won’t find the solution until you address that. 

I would begin with: How much time do you need to stay on top of your work? That could be an extra five or six hours a week. Now you have something tangible to work with. 

For those of you who have watched the film Apollo 13, there’s a scene where the character Ken Mattingly is in the lunar module flight simulator, and they are trying to find a start-up procedure that would not draw more than 20 amps. 

This meant they had to find out what they could turn on and what they could not. 

After hours of testing, they finally had a start-up procedure that draws just under 20 amps. 

I will put a link to the clip in the show notes, as it is a great illustration of what we sometimes have to do with the time we have. It’s finite, and often the only things we can do are the essentials. There’s no time for the “would like to do” or low-value tasks. 

In many ways, an issue we all share is that we think time is infinite, when it’s the opposite. It’s finite, and how we allocate our time each day is largely our choice. 

The key is understanding that there are always trade-offs and consequences when we allocate our time. If we say yes to one thing, we say no to another, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. 

As I am writing this script, I am not responding to an urgent email or talking with my family. Equally, when I am chatting with my wife, I am not writing feedback for my coaching clients. 

So, Douglas, look at your calendar. How are you allocating your time each week? What can you remove to free up time for the things you want to spend it on? 

It won’t be easy, and you will feel uncomfortable doing it. However, I can assure you that it is possible and when you have done it, you will feel lighter, more focused and appreciate your time in ways you’ve never considered.

Plus, the bonus is that other people will begin respecting your time more than they do today. 

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Have you ever wondered if your time management and productivity issues might not be about the amount of work you have to do, but rather the way you think about that work? 

That’s what we’re looking at today.

 

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Script |430

Hello, and welcome to episode 430 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. 

Since I began helping people directly with time management and productivity, I would say that around 60% of people’s struggles come down to the way they organise their work, around 35% come down to the way they think about it, and only 5% come down to the volume of work coming in. 

Talk to practically anyone today, and they will tell you they are busy. It’s almost like a badge of honour. 

The number one reason people say they don’t exercise is that they don’t have enough time. Is that really true, or is it that they value doing something else more? 

I’m reminded of something the legendary Jim Rohn used to say: “Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?”

If I look at my to-do list right now, I guess I am busy. I have this script, a newsletter and a long-form article to write. I also have to record three YouTube Shorts videos, edit them and record this podcast. 

I have around five pieces of feedback to write for my coaching clients, do my exercise, take Louis for a walk, and cook dinner. 

Yet, I don’t feel busy. The reason is that I understand that it doesn’t all have to be done today. All I have to do is decide what can be done today and do that. 

The truth is, we all have far more to do than we can do at any one time. And equally true is that it doesn’t have to be done right now or even today. 

So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who is always busy and never has time to do their most important work? 

Hi Elaine, love the question. Short and sweet. 

I would first refer you to the Jim Rohn question ” Busy doing what?” 

If you feel constantly busy from the moment you wake up until you go to bed, the first thing I would suggest is to look at what you are doing during your waking hours. 

Write down what you are doing over a period of 48 hours or so. Not just your professional work, but your personal things too. 

I would also add that you write out what you would prefer to be doing instead. Write these down side by side. Draw a vertical line down the middle of a page, and on the left write what you spend your days doing, and on the right what you would prefer to be doing instead. 

Be completely honest. If you discover, for example, that you spend 90 minutes a day on social media and a further 2 hours watching TV, write that down. 

You’re not going to necessarily remove those. Instead, what you want to be asking yourself is whether spending time on the activities you currently spend time on is worthwhile. 

Initially, you will try to justify spending time on these activities. This is the same response we have when someone challenges one of our opinions. Our natural instinct is to defend ourselves. 

When you first write down these activities. Don’t judge. Just write them down. All you want to know is precisely where your time goes. 

I’ve found that if you leave it for a few days and come back to it, you will begin to look at things a little more objectively. Instead of trying to justify the expense of your time, you begin to ask questions such as: Do I really need to do that? And is this regular event I attend worth all the extra work it produces? 

Often, the problem for many people is that everything they want to do requires time. Just sitting and thinking requires time, as does making a cup of coffee. Time never stands still. 

And the problem with time, or rather, the way we measure time, is that we have 24 hours each day. That’s the one immovable part we have to deal with each day, but at least that gives us one constant. That can be worked with.

If you were to study the habits and routines of highly productive people, you would notice that they all have strong barriers between the three basics of their lives. 

There’s time for work, time for family and social life, and time for self. 

There’s no discipline involved. It’s just a strict division of time between the three. 

Their wake-up time is consistent. For example, if they wake up at 7:30 am, they wake up at that time every day, including weekends. Then they do something that I find most unproductive people don’t do. They follow the same routine. 

It’s their morning routine. 

Morning routines are interesting because each person’s is different. 

Yet, the most stressed-out, overwhelmed and exhausted people I work with have no morning routine. They crawl out of bed, rush out the door and start on their work. There’s no moment for themselves. 

These are the people who immediately pick up their phones to check for messages and start replying. 

No tea or coffee or even a bathroom break. Just open eyes, open phone, start the workday. 

Think about what’s happening there. You come into the conscious world, and before anything else, you allow other people’s priorities to take control of your day. 

And if you have young kids, when you leave the bedroom, your kids need attention; perhaps you need to get them ready for school, make their breakfast, all this with a brain full of all those messages you just read from your phone before you left the bedroom. 

One of my favourite YouTube channels is Harry’s Garage. The channel is about cars, and Harry often reviews very expensive Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Range Rovers, and Aston Martins. 

These are highly tuned performance cars, yet Harry will always remind us that when you start a car cold, before you can put it through its paces, you need to give it time to reach optimal operating temperature. 

Funnily enough, that’s the same for you and me. You’re not going to be at your best the moment you wake up, which means any decision you make first thing is unlikely to be the best decision you make. 

So, try starting your day slowly. Give yourself thirty minutes and make sure those thirty minutes are focused on you. 

When it comes to work, set a strict start time for yourself. 

So, to keep the examples in line, let’s imagine you start your work at 9:00 am. Then do not consider work before then. That may take a little adjusting to, but if you develop a strong set of morning routines, you won’t be thinking about work until it’s time for work. 

Then, here’s a trick. Do not allow anything to be scheduled for the first 30 minutes of your day. This is your getting a heads up on the day time. It’s when you can say hello and chat with your co-workers, deal with any emergencies and check to make sure there are no fires lurking in your inbox. 

Those thirty minutes are also a great time to review your plan for the day. 

Now, when I say “plan,” I simply mean making sure you know where your appointments are and what your must-do tasks for the day are. It’s a simple two-minute review and gives you time to map out your day. 

Mapping out your day is just about deciding when you will do your must-do tasks. Your meetings are fixed, so what you are looking for is the gaps in between and deciding what you will do in those gaps. 

Now here’s the thing: just as it’s important to have a strict start time, there also needs to be a strict closing time for work. 

Let’s imagine that you set 6:00 pm as your end-of-work time; this means that around 5:50 pm, you stop what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and reschedule anything you didn’t get to. 

Then look at what you have on your calendar for tomorrow, and decide on your two must-do tasks. That’s it. Done. 

Then it’s family and social time. 

Now, as you listen to these words, it may sound like a lot. But is it?

What you are doing is automating as much as you can so you are not rushing around trying to decide what to do next. It’s all this decision-making that’s mentally exhausting you. 

If you can automate these decisions by having a morning routine, a work closing-down sequence, and mapping out your workday, you’ll find that you feel less busy, more in control and much less tired at the end of the day. 

We feel so busy all the time because we tend to look at long lists of things to do. For example, if you look at your Slack messages or email, you are looking at each individual message. It’s natural. It’s a long list of stuff you feel you must attend to. 

Yet, if you were to treat your Slack or Teams messages and email as one task, all you need to decide is when you will handle them. 

For example, if you decide that at 4:30 pm you will work on your messages and spend an hour on them, then it doesn’t matter how many messages you have in there. You will respond to as many as you can. 

Another quick tip: start with the oldest first. These can often be dealt with much faster than messages that have just come in. Don’t worry, if you stay consistent with this, you’ll soon find yourself getting back on top of them. 

Now, for those of you who tend to procrastinate, the science behind it is fascinating. Procrastination is a perfectly normal human reaction. It has nothing to do with laziness or any other human condition. It’s actually what psychologists call an “emotional regulation response”.

When you look at a long report or a messy inbox, your brain sees a threat. It anticipates boredom, failure, or making a fool of yourself. And so your brain sets off an alarm to protect you. 

And how does it protect you? By pushing you towards easier tasks. Cleaning your desk or looking at social media, for example. (Or, in my case, cleaning a fountain pen and refilling it) 

Incredibly productive people aren’t immune to these negative emotions. Instead, what they have done is build systems and processes to do their work. “It’s 4:30 pm, time to do my communications.” Oh, it’s time to work on that report”. 

These systems make it extremely difficult to not do the work. 

This is why putting in place strict barriers around your personal, social and professional life works. You are not allowing your brain to set off an emotional response. You turn up, you know what to do and do it. 

And this planning does not take much time. Planning the day may take 5 minutes; reviewing your plan in the first 30 minutes of your workday may take 2 minutes. That’s it. 

Then you follow your plan. Sure, there will be interruptions, distractions and other people’s emergencies. Deal with them as best you can, then get back to your plan. If you have to revise your plan, do so. This does not mean you’ve failed. All it means is you’ve adjusted your plan. 

I hope that helps, Elaine. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

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

When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off.

Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat. 

Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week? 

Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week. 

 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Learn more about the Productivity Academy

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 |429

Hello, and welcome to episode 429 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

There was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did. 

It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days. 

Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness. 

And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm. 

To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about. 

So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails.

Hi Sarah, thank you for your question. 

This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars. 

That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them. 

The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar. 

You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours. 

Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day. 

So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar. 

However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage. 

Let’s break this down.

When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment?

If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar. 

This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point. 

So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity. 

Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity. 

Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself. 

A one-hour meeting, for example, often requires some preparation time, and then you need to be in the place where the meeting is being held, even if it’s an online meeting. 

I do my coaching calls using Zoom, and for each session, there is at least fifteen minutes of prep time and 2 or 3 minutes to set up the computer for the call. 

Today, I have four coaching calls; that means I need to find an additional hour beyond the four hours of calls. It’s not four hours; it’s five. 

You might think the proposal you must send today will only take thirty minutes to finish, but that does not take into account interruptions, the possibility that you need to ask someone for further information, and then have to wait for them to come back to you before you can finish. 

There’s a good chance that your thirty minutes turn into 90 minutes. 

What all this means is that if your calendar is packed with meetings and time blocks without any buffer time, you’re going to go beyond your capacity for the day. 

This relates to the difficulty we all have predicting how long a task will take. We don’t know. Not with any degree of accuracy. 

And that’s because each day is different, with different distractions, emergencies and interruptions. 

For me, recording and preparing a YouTube video generally takes six hours. Yet, yesterday it took me eight. 

I have a process for making my videos that I’ve developed over ten years, and I create a video every week. You would have thought by now I would be able to predict with accuracy how long a video would take to prepare. Not a chance. 

My wife was at home yesterday; there was an unexpected issue with one of the tools I use for making videos, and in the middle of making the video, there was an urgent message I needed to respond to. 

None of those disruptions was predictable. Yet they happened despite all the safeguards I have on my calendar and in my processes. 

The job still got done; the video was finished and handed over to my video editor for cleanup and polishing. 

Yet because of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, the one task I had to get done yesterday was the video. Nothing else mattered. 

What all this means is that it’s important to be in control of your calendar and be self-aware enough to know your capacity. If you don’t know where your limit is, you’ll be like a fuel tank with no air pocket. You’ll burst or, worse, explode. 

Not in a literal sense, but you’ll exhaust yourself, make more mistakes that need rectifying later (more pressure on your capacity) and miss deadlines, which is not great for your promotional prospects or for your business’s reputation. 

Unfortunately, the solution to this is not easy. It can go against all your human instincts to be helpful and courteous to other people. 

The first step is to look at your regular meetings. Ask: How did that meeting come into your life?  

Some meetings are unavoidable. A weekly team meeting where everyone updates the boss on their project progress, discusses progress on various proposals, sales or other work, and alerts colleagues of any unforeseen issues or delays. 

Yet, there will be other meetings where, when you ask yourself how they got into your life, you realise it was because you tried to be nice to someone, but a meeting that brings you or the other attendees no real value. 

These meetings should be removed. 

One-to-ones with your team members or boss may also be important meetings, as they add value to theirs and your work. 

Really, what you are doing is a meeting audit. Do you really have to be in all these meetings?

Given that you are in a leadership position, you may be able to delegate some of these meetings to your team. This is great, as it helps them develop their skills, removes a commitment from your calendar, and you only need a short summary from your team member about what happened. 

Next up, I would suggest putting a cap on your meetings each week. But before you do that, ask how much time, on average, do you need for strategic thinking and doing your important focused work? 

How much time, again on average, do you need each day to deal with your communications? 

I say “on average” because you can only work on averages. You will be interrupted; there will be days when your energy levels will be low, and conversely, there will be days with no distractions or interruptions, you’re feeling great, and you can get a lot of work done. 

For example, I allow six hours for doing my videos each week. Yet, some weeks it takes me four; others, like yesterday, it can take eight. The important thing is that when the week began, I knew how much time I needed for the important work I needed to do that week. 

Once you know how much time each week you want for your deeper, focused work and handling your communications, that will tell you how much time you have left for meetings and other appointments. 

However, don’t be tempted to fill all that time with meetings. Hold back. There will inevitably be some emergencies that require an ad hoc meeting. Protect time for those. 

So, let’s say you need 12 hours a week for your strategy work, admin and communications; that leaves you with around 28 hours for meetings. 

Remember, though, you will likely want an hour for lunch, so that reduces it to 23 hours. I would push back further and limit meeting time to 15 hours a week. That becomes your cap. 

Once you reach fifteen hours of meetings for the week, then you push any new requests to the following week. 

I know this can be difficult to do at first. It’s more so if you’ve always said yes to meetings in the past. Suddenly declining meeting requests can cause some surprise from your colleagues. 

But think about the consequences. Every thirty-minute meeting you accept, that’s thirty minutes you cannot work on anything else. Remember, there’s also the admin cost of accepting that meeting, which will likely steal a further 15 minutes from you. 

A question I teach my coaching clients to ask themselves when considering a meeting is: What are the consequences of accepting this meeting request?

Another question to ask yourself is: What would happen to my email and messages backlog if I were to spend thirty minutes or more each day dedicated to working on it? 

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to stay on top of it if you have a dedicated block of time for responding to your actionable emails. Sure, there’ll likely be a backlog at first, but this is where consistency soon clears any backlog. 

So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps. Find your limit, limit your meetings per week and protect time for the important parts of your work. 

I know, simple in theory, but difficult to do. You don’t have to do all this immediately; you can gradually reduce your meetings per week and slowly build up your strategy and thinking time. 

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

And just a reminder, if you want to learn realistic, practical methods for getting the most out of your time both professionally and personally, then I have places available in my brand new Productivity Academy. I will put the details of this in the show notes for you. I’d love to welcome you there. 

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