Your Time, Your Way

Podcast 436

Learn more about the How To Get Back On Track Course here:

https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/when-things-fall-apart/2/10/2026

 

Perhaps the biggest difficulty people face when managing their work is not creating a system or building processes. It’s maintaining those systems and processes when they become overloaded by work and personal commitments.

In this week’s episode, I’m sharing a few ideas that have helped me regain control over the years when things have become a little bit frazzled, and the work coming in is greater than the amount of work getting done. 

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Script | 436

Hello, and welcome to episode 436 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 read the books, taken the courses and watched the YouTube videos. You know what’s needed to create a way to manage your workload, and you have all the tools to contain everything.

Then, something goes wrong. A major client threatens to go to a competitor, your boss decides to change your responsibilities, or your son or daughter gets sick, and you need to stay at home for a couple of days while they recover, and you have to start cancelling meetings and postponing deadlines. 

It happens to all of us from time to time. The stress this creates just adds to the sense of overwhelm and leaves us not knowing which way to turn. 

Suddenly, our system and processes no longer seem to work, and we’re running around in circles, not knowing which way to turn. 

And yet, it’s times like these that our systems are built for. 

This week I launched a brand-new course called How to Get Back on Track, and the inspiration for developing this course was my coaching clients. 

My clients come to me when they are stuck and don’t know how to get out and back on track. And over the years, I’ve developed a few ideas that have helped hundreds of my clients get back on track quickly and without adding more stress or hours to their already busy schedules. 

The first thing to do when you find yourself off track, so to speak, is to stop. 

Yes, I know that seems to be the last thing you should do, but there is an old saying that goes, “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”

And it’s true. 

Running around in circles not knowing what you should work on means nothing is getting done. The pile of work is growing, and all you are doing is looking at a growing list of things to do, and nothing is happening. 

Stopping gives you time to look at everything coming in and make a decision about what needs your attention right now. 

You can only give one thing your attention at a time. If you’ve hundreds of unread emails and messages sitting in your inbox, several quotes to get out, and a boss who wants you to send her a list of all the quotes in play today, you’re not going to be able to do all of those things at the same time. 

You are going to need to decide which one deserves your attention right now. 

Stopping allows your brain to slow down for a moment to look at what you have and to decide objectively what you should begin with. 

Often we will pick the easiest thing because that gives us a sense of progress, yet the easiest thing is likely to be the least important. (Unless you’re lucky.)

Now, when I say stop, I don’t mean stop for long. All you need is five to ten minutes where you stop, look at what’s on your list of things to do and make a decision about what you will work on for the next hour or two. 

Ultimately, what matters is what you can do today to begin reducing the list. And that will depend on how many meetings and appointments you have today. 

There’s an interesting human behavioural instinct that comes into play when we are faced with declining an invitation from someone. 

There’s the easy way out; that’s to say, “Yes, I can meet with you.”, even though we know the best thing to do is to say no and offer an alternative time next week. 

Or the alternative is to say, unfortunately, I’m very busy this week; could we meet next week instead? 

The “fear” of having to negotiate with someone overcomes the common-sense answer of “no, not this week”. 

So we add more commitments to an already full schedule. Now you have to move some other things around, allowing your emails and messages to continue to grow; after all, you’ve got no time for dealing with that, but you’d better keep checking them to see if anything important or urgent is in there. (As if you’ve got time to deal with it if there is) 

Oh, and we are so good at justifying these decisions to ourselves. 

We’ll tell ourselves that we had no choice. It’s my boss. I have to do everything they ask of me, don’t I? Or it’s an important customer. I can’t tell them I can meet with them next week. I have to meet them today!

And those reasons may be valid. But have you ever tried to negotiate with any of these people, or are these reasons just reasons you made up with no evidence as to their truth?

Stopping and stepping back gives you some space to think these decisions through and to better prioritise what you will do next. 

Strangely, one of the most effective ways to deal with this situation I’ve found is to grab Louis’s lead and go out for a walk. We usually walk for 45 to 60 minutes, and it’s just him, sniffing the trees and lamp posts, and me thinking through the pile of work I have to get done and mentally mapping out what I will do and when I will do it. 

I’m not suggesting you go out and buy yourself a dog, but the idea is you get away from your workspace for a time, go for a walk outside and mentally map out what you will do and when. 

In evolutionary terms, this is how humans have historically done their thinking. We are designed for it. 

When we were living in caves, and there were threats to our lives everywhere, we had to make decisions about escaping the fast-approaching predator while on the move. (Often while moving very fast) 

That instinct has not left us. So, if you want to make better decisions, get outside and move. 

To give you something from the How to Get Back on Track course, here is a checklist-type procedure you can follow. It’s designed to quickly get you back on track and help you focus on what matters this week.

The first is to ask: What are my most important commitments this week?

This could be meetings, appointments or an impending deadline. All you want to know is what these commitments are for this week. Do not worry about next week. You can reassess those later. All you need to know is what your critical commitments and deadlines are for this week. 

Everything else should be postponed. For that, you will need to send out some messages apologising and explaining that you are not going to be able to make it this week. More on that in a moment.

Next: Are your next 7 days’ tasks realistic? This means removing anything that is not critical this week. This will likely need some compromise, but the goal here is to reduce your to-do list so that what remains are only the tasks that will have to be done this week. 

Hint: most things do not need to be done this week. For example, if your boss has asked you to send them a report by the end of the week, a quick message or conversation with your boss could have that report delayed until Tuesday next week. 

Then: Have the people affected by delays been informed or updated? Now, in the course, I have given you a list of suggested scripts you can use, but when you put requesting extensions to deadlines as a separate task, you will tend to look at it less personally and more objectively. 

I remember back in my 20s when I abused my credit cards. There were a few months when I was unable to pay my cards, and I remember my bank manager telling me all I had to do was call the bank and tell them you were going to be late and you’d be fine as long as you kept your promise to pay. 

And he was right. It was the times I tried to hide from any repayments that got me into trouble. Get ahead of it. Ask for an extension or a meeting postponement upfront. What’s the worst that can happen? 

The worst is they refuse your request for an extension. That’s unlikely, though. 

Finally, when the day starts, the only thing that matters is what you do today. So: Do you have a realistic day today? 

Have you reduced your meetings to the minimum, and are you clear on what tasks must be done today? 

I know asking for extensions and to be excused from meetings is hard. But what’s the alternative? 

You see, the issue is not the amount of work you have to do. That’s always going to be more than you can do. The problem is time, or rather, that time is fixed, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. 

All you have control over is what you do today. You can choose that. 

Ultimately, what you are doing is buying yourself time to get back on top of things. 

Looking for new apps or changing the way you organise your notes won’t help you when you’ve become overwhelmed. What will help you is to step back, look at what’s on your plate and decide what you need to eliminate.

That’s the hard part. Letting go of things that are not serving you. 

I mentioned in a recent blog post that the one thing that destroys someone’s career is an inability to manage their time as their responsibilities grow. It’s rarely because they don’t work hard enough or are lazy. 

After all, if you don’t work hard or are lazy, it’s unlikely you’ll get promoted. 

With each promotion, you take on new responsibilities and the scope of your work widens. Yet, you don’t get more time when you’re promoted. That stays the same. 

To maintain your trajectory, managing your workload will be an essential skill. There will be times when everything seems to be happening all at once; we all go through those phases. Having a strategy that helps you stay on track is a key skill that will keep you moving forward. 

If you want to learn more about this brand-new course, a course I feel is the missing piece in my course library, then I will put a link in the show notes where you can learn more. 

Over the last eight years, I produced courses around systems and strategies to help you organise your work; the piece I realised that was missing is what you can do when things break down. After all, even Rolls-Royces break down from time to time.

Even the best systems have a breaking point, and with the amount of work seemingly increasing each month, having a procedure to help you through those busy times will ensure that you won’t be the one left at the side of the road wondering what to do. 

Thank you for listening, and I wish you all a very, very productive week.

This week's episode is a special one. 

Taken from my Annual Planning episode last year, this will show you how to make next year a productive, focused one that will leave you energised and fulfilled. 

 

“I used to say, ‘I sure hope things will change, ' then I learned that the only way things are going to change for me is when I change."

That’s a quote from the wonderful Jim Rohn. A strong proponent of developing a plan for your life, and a part of that is creating a strong plan for the new year. 

In this special episode, I’ll walk you through the steps for the Annual Planning Season, which began on October 1st. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.

Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.

 

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The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary

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Script | 388

Hello, and welcome to episode 388 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

A mistake I used to make was to come up with some ideas about what I would like to change in the new year in that gap between Christmas and the New Year. 

The only reason I ever did that was because my friends were asking, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” I never really had any, so I used to quickly think up some cool-sounding ideas and say that was what I was going to do. 

And yet, it wasn’t always like that. 

When I was a competitive athlete in my teens, each year in December, I would sit down with my coach and plan what we would achieve the following year. 

What times we were going for and which races were to be the “big ones”. 

I still remember the year I broke 2 minutes for the 800 metres and 4 minutes for the 1,500 metres. We knew I was close, having ended the previous year at 2 minutes 3 seconds for the 800 and 4 minutes 6 seconds for the 1,500. 

All that was needed was a good, strong winter and pre-season training. I remember going into 1986 in one of the most positive frames of mind ever. 

Then, when I stopped running competitively—one of my biggest regrets—I stopped planning the year. And that coincided with my not achieving very much. 

I drifted from one job to another. Had no idea what I wanted to do, and I remember feeling unfulfilled and lost. 

Fortunately, I rediscovered annual planning. The sitting down and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish. It was that restart that resulted in me coming to Korea, and discovering my passion—teaching. 

Everything I have achieved over the last 23 years can be traced back to following my annual planning method. 

From finding a career I loved, to getting married and moving to the East Coast of Korea—one of the most beautiful places in the world—and starting the company I run today, now employing four people. 

All of these ideas began with the annual planning method.

So, what is the annual planning method? Well, it’s five simple questions you ask yourself and give some thought to over two months—October and November. 

Those five questions are:

What would you like to change about yourself?

What would you like to change about your lifestyle?

What would you like to change about the way you work?

What could you do to challenge yourself?

What goals would you like to achieve? 

Let me explain the kind of things you can think about.

What would you like to change about yourself? This is about you. Your current habits and routines. Are these delivering the results you want? 

When I sat down to write Your Time, Your Way, I knew I had to sacrifice some exercise time in order to write. I was okay with that, and I also knew a consequence of reducing my exercise time would be a gain in weight.

Two years later, I had gained eight kilograms (about 17 ½ pounds)!

Not good. If my weight exceeds 83 kilograms, I feel sluggish and quickly become tired. 

So, in my planning last year, I made it a non-negotiable to get my weight back to my regular weight of 80 kilograms (about 176 pounds or 12 ½ stone) 

Today, as I write this, my weight is 80.5 kgs. Well within my weight window. 

That all started with asking myself, “What do I want to change about myself?” The answer was to get back into my regular exercise routine. 

So, what would you like to change about yourself? Are you doing things that are not contributing to the results you want? Are you not consistently planning your days or weeks? 

Are you not moving enough? Are you spending too much time sitting down in front of a screen and not enough time in nature? 

Another one is how you dress. The pandemic saw a collapse in the way people dressed. This may not interest you, but perhaps you’d like to dress better when you go out. What could you do to improve your dress sense? 

Maybe you’d like to begin journaling or meditation. Write anything you consider down. You’re not committing to anything yet; you’re brainstorming ideas. The commitments you make come in December. October and November are all about developing ideas and going deep. 

The next question, “What do I want to change about my lifestyle?” Is about how you live your life every day. Is your house a mess? Do you leave your bed unmade when you get up in the morning? What about your car? Is it a garbage can on wheels? 

Perhaps you’d like to come home to a clean home at the end of the day? If so, what could you do to change things?

One idea that my wife and I had at the end of 2019 was to move to the East Coast of Korea. To do that, we knew we’d have to finally get a car. Living in Seoul, the capital city, with its superb public transport system, meant that having a car was not a high priority for us. 

Yet, for us to get out of Seoul and live in a cleaner, quieter city, we needed to explore Korea. So, that became the plan: to buy a car and begin exploring possible places to live. 

By the end of 2020, we had a car and moved to the East Coast. 

That change brought some tremendously positive changes in our lives. 

Yet, I know that had we not sat down to talk about our future plans, we’d still be living in a crowded, noisy, polluted city. Seoul is a great city, don’t get me wrong, but with 11 million people sharing it, you can imagine how noisy and crowded it can be. 

Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do relating to your lifestyle that you’ve never considered what you need to do to make happen? Write that down. 

What would you like to change about the way you work? A great question if you’ve found yourself stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling dead inside. 

Some people I know have decided to completely change their careers when answering this question, while others have started their own businesses. 

It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, though. Perhaps you don’t like the structure you have in place to do your work. It could be a tools thing, too. Do you need to upgrade the way you manage your tasks and projects?

What about your workspace? Does it need an overhaul? I’ve done that a few times. Does your current workspace feel sterile and cold? Could you change your desk or your chair? 

If you work from home, can you do anything to make your workspace more stimulating? Perhaps move your desk nearer a window or change the lighting? 

All these ideas can lead to some fantastic changes. However, you do need time to think things through, and that’s what October and November are for. 

The fourth question is What can you do to challenge yourself?

This question is there because often we get stuck in our comfort zones. We become afraid to change anything because we fear what those changes may bring. Yet, if you’re not challenging yourself, you soon find yourself trapped in stagnation.

Physical challenges are a great place to start. If you feel you’ve become a little too sedentary, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a park run in March. 

Or for those of you who are more ambitious, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a triathlon or a full marathon in 2026. 

What about going back to school and getting a degree? One such challenge that comes up each year on my list is to do a master’s in contemporary British history. I’m sure it will be on my list this year, too. 

Think of the things that frighten you. Is there anything you could do to overcome that fear? 

The final question is What goals would you like to achieve in 2026? 

There’s a reason this is the final question. That’s because after you’ve thought about the previous four questions, you’re more likely to think about how you can measure success in the changes you want to make. 

One such goal my wife and I have already added is to have a big savings goal in 2026. This will affect both our spending habits—no more fountain pen purchases for me (oh no!) We haven’t settled on an amount yet, but we’re thinking about it. 

Perhaps you want to set the goal of getting a promotion next year or finally starting that business you’ve been thinking about for years. 

Or it could simply be a bad habit that you want to stop. Doom scrolling, the new smoking bad habit, or going to bed earlier. What about reading books? How many would you like to read in 2026? 

The purpose of these questions is to get you to think. Think about what you want out of life. 

You are amazing, and there’s so much you could do. Yet, you will only be able to do those incredible things if you externalise them and begin to think about how you could make them happen. 

The best place to keep this list of questions is in a paper notebook. I used to do this digitally, but found I was too easily distracted when trying to write them out on my iPad or phone. 

When I switched to writing these questions out in my Planning Book—an A4 notebook where I keep all my initial project plans, weekly planning sessions, and YouTube video plans—I found I thought more deeply and better. 

But, if you prefer digital notes, then by all means use that. 

Remember, now is not the time to make any firm commitments or even to think about how you will accomplish any of these things. Now is about idea generation. 

Many of the things you write down may not be practical or realistic next year, but they may begin a chain of thought that leads you towards achieving them in future years. 

That’s why it’s important to write your thoughts down in a place to return to next year. It’s a starting block. I’m always amazed at what I accomplished when I review my previous years’ notes on 1st October. And yes, occasionally disappointed that I didn’t follow through with something. 

The focus, though, is ultimately on 2026. What do you want to accomplish?

Now, for those of you who have taken my Time And Life Mastery programme, October’s a great time to retake it. 

When I developed that course, my purpose was to create something you could return to each year to help stimulate ideas and remind you of what you want to do in your life. 

I must confess, even though it’s a course I created and wrote, I use October to go through it myself. It reminds me of my long-term vision of the life I want to live and refocuses me on my objectives. 

If you haven’t joined the programme yet, you can do so today. And if you use the coupon code “codingreat,” you’ll get 50% off your purchase. 

I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you. 

And there you go. That’s how to plan out a fruitful, exciting year. Start now and begin thinking about what you want to change. Don’t hold back either. Be as wild as you can be. You do not have to commit to anything right now. That’s for December. All you are doing now is preparing the land, if you like. You can choose what to sow later. 

And, one more thing… Have fun with this and talk with your partner and loved ones. I involve my wife because the lifestyle question involves both of us, and the things I want to change about myself can often be stimulated by asking her what she thinks. My wife can be brutally honest, frequently leading to some excellent changes. 

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

"It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope... Each letter was then extracted, unfolded, smoothed flat with the palm of his hand, and read with deliberate, unhurried precision. Only when one piece of correspondence was thoroughly digested and placed in its neat, appointed stack would he permit himself to move on to the next."

That’s an extract from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot’s continuation novel, The Monogram Murders, which captures a part of Hercule Poirot’s morning routine with his letter-opening ritual. Something he did at the same time each day, at the breakfast table. 

And it connects nicely with today’s episode. So let’s begin. 

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Use the early-bird discount code caps27eb to get $25.00 off 

 

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Script | 434

Hello, and welcome to episode 434 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 begin, with Apple launching their latest operating systems last Monday, I have updated my Apple Productivity Course. 

The course is not about tips and tricks; you can get all those on YouTube. This course is about helping you to build a 100% Apple productivity system that will keep you focused on what matters, when it matters and help keep and store important information so you know where to find it when you need it. 

No subscriptions to third-party apps, just a simple set of productivity tools that do exactly what they were designed to do. Keep you on time and organised.

I will put a link in the show notes to where you can learn more about this; if I may say so, fantastic course.

Okay, on with the episode.

Something that many people miss about time blocking is that it’s not just another way to organise your calendar. It’s actually a way to reframe how you approach your work.

Over the last 26 years or so, certainly since the explosion of digital task managers, many people have become focused on the number of things they have to do. 

Yet, that wasn’t always the case.

For example, if you had to go into town to buy something, you would also naturally look for other things you may have to do while you were in town. Perhaps drop some dry cleaning off, or buy some stamps at the post office.

You would do as many of these chores as you could in the time that you had available.

I’ve spoken before about how the likes of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and CS Lewis had time set aside for dealing with their correspondence. It was never about how many letters they replied to. It was simply spending an hour or so each day writing replies. 

If they didn’t get through their pile of letters in the time they had, they would leave what was left until the next day when they replied to their letters.

Yet today, I find that so many people are stressed out and worried about the number of things they have on their lists and the size of their backlogs.

Yet, it really doesn’t matter how many things you’ve got to do; if you’re like most people, you will have far more things than you will ever have the time to do anyway. 

What really matters is how you use the time you have available to do the things that really matter. 

That leads me nicely on to this week’s question. Unfortunately, the Mystery Podcast Voice is locked away in a room preparing for an important exam tomorrow, so once again, you’re stuck with me asking the question. 

This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried organising my calendar and protecting time, as you call it, for doing my email and messages and focused work. Yet, I really struggle. I find I ignore the time blocks and then feel guilty at the end of the day because I didn’t get done what I wanted to do. What am I doing wrong? 

Hi Jim, thank you for your question. 

Well, the simple answer, and I know this will be a bit harsh, is that you are ignoring your protected time. 

Time blocking only works if you respect the time blocks you set for yourself. 

However, let me take you back to the opening of this podcast and the excerpt I shared from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot continuation novel. 

“It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope…”

The key part of this was “it was Hercule Poirot’s custom…”

The key to succeeding with time blocking is consistency. If it was your custom to drink a cup of tea or coffee each morning when you wake up, it would never be something you would ignore. It’s your “custom” to drink tea or coffee when you wake up. 

If someone dragged you out of bed for whatever reason, it would not be long before you were structuring your day mentally, wondering where you would get your morning tea or coffee. 

As I write this script, my mother is currently at Dublin Airport waiting for a flight to Paris. She’s travelled through the night by bus and, on arrival at the airport, the first thing she did was to go and get herself a cup of tea.

Why? Because it’s her “custom” to have tea first thing in the morning. And while it is not a normal day, she still follows her routine. 

The most successful coaching clients I have are the ones who decide to protect the same time each day for doing their most important work. 

Now, the CEOs among these clients find this easier, as they are in a position of authority and find saying “no” to interruptions easier than most. 

One client of mine gets to his office at around 8:00 am and from 8:30 to 10 am he closes his office door and does the most pressing pieces of work he has that day. 

Because he knows there will be no interruptions—everyone in his office knows not to interrupt him during this time—he can sit down and give 100% focus to the work he is doing. 

And because he does this every day, none of his team ever considers interrupting him. 

But time blocking goes beyond this. 

I mentioned earlier that time blocking is not another cool way to organise your calendar. It’s a reframing exercise. 

What I mean by this is that the purpose of time blocking is to say I have this large pile of work to do. I am going to work on it for the next two hours. When the two hours are up, I will stop. 

It doesn’t matter whether there are twenty, thirty, fifty or a hundred things to do. You do as many as you can in the time that you have. Stop, and return to the pile the next time you have a time block for working on the pile. 

Now there is an interesting shift that happens to your mind when you focus on the time you have rather than the number you have. 

Let’s imagine you have twenty things to do and you have 90 minutes protected for doing them. 

As you begin, you’re not that aware of the time. But once you go past sixty minutes and you see you only have 30 minutes left, your focus narrows. You tense up slightly, and you speed up. 

It might have taken you an hour to do eleven tasks; I can promise you that if you have nine tasks left and only twenty-five minutes in which to do them, you will finish. 

You become hyper-focused, blocking out all external distractions. 

This is the reverse of what happens when you don’t have a time constraint. With no time constraint, you will let in all sorts of distractions. 

Oh, I must check to see if those shoes have come back into stock.

Oh, I’ll just message Jessica to see how her presentation went yesterday.

Oh yeah, how did Arsenal get on last night in the FA Cup?

I’d better go and refill my water bottle.

And how much time do all these little things swallow up? Just those 4, if all you did was exactly what those four things said, that’ll be ten lost minutes, at least. 

But you know Jessica will reply, and you will feel obliged to reply to her reply, and now you’re in a full-blown conversation. You’re suddenly focused on trying to do your tasks and thinking of your replies to Jessica. 

That’s why you should never begin a message thread just before sitting down to do some focused work. Do it when you’re finished, or else you’ll find yourself splitting your concentration and not doing either thing well. 

Another mistake with time blocking is to block too much time in any given day. 

Really, for time blocking to be effective, I would advise caution. 

Two hours for focused work and another hour of admin and communications is a good balance. That leaves you with at least five hours where you can attend meetings, deal with sudden and unexpected emergencies and the regular daily workplace socialising. (And of course your mandatory mid-morning and afternoon tea breaks)

I’ve seen people try and protect far too much time, which then leaves them with little to no flexibility.

Days never go according to plan. Each day will throw something unexpected up. That could be a traffic jam, a colleague calling in sick, or Andy from the accounts cornering you in the staff canteen to tell you a bit of gossip. 

Or your computer crashes, the Internet goes down, your boss calls an urgent meeting in 30 minutes in meeting room five—the one where they keep the difficult questions and uncomfortable chairs. You know the kind of meeting they can be. 

I’ve found, after working with nearly 500 clients over the years, that the optimum time for time blocking is three hours a day. If you can get to that level and be consistent with your times, you’ll find that adopting time blocking techniques quickly becomes a custom you follow every day. 

You don’t become more productive and better at managing time passively. It requires action. It’s up to you to decide whether you will shut off potential interruptions, say no to a spurious meeting request or allow yourself to be distracted by low-level things like checking football scores or shoe availability. 

Yet the thing to always remember is that of all the things in your control each day, the one thing that will remain constant is the passing of time. Time does not recognise a vacuum. It continues whether you stare out the window wondering what to do next, scroll through the news or take a nap. 

It’s fixed. All you have are your 24 hours each day. 

The one variable you have is what you do each day. That remains your decision. 

If you give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of each day to decide what your priorities will be tomorrow and what you will do in your protected time, you will find that, on the whole, you will get a lot of what you planned to do done. 

I hope this has helped, Jim, and 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.

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. 

Links:

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You can learn more about the Planning Course here

Use the coupon code: planning26

 

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Learn more about my private coaching programmes here

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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.