Your Time, Your Way

Afleveringen

• Why Your Standards Matter and How Arsenal Won the Premier League. 31.05.2026 13min

  If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago.  It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan.  He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set. In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived 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 | 419 Hello, and welcome to episode 419 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’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards.  Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example.  It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things.  My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day.  This week’s question is related to these approaches. 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 Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent?  Hi Sonya, thank you for your question. As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done.  Let me explain.  It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things.  And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things.  If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long.  Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them.  That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true.  The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what?  I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away.  That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without d
• A Calmer, More Human Approach to Time Management 24.05.2026 14min

  Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding?  I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived   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 | 418 Hello, and welcome to episode 418 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.  Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again.  It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round.  One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am.  I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours. I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster.  Fair point.  But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing.  This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace.  Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha.  In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure.  If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him. Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant.  Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there.  It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is.  So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible.  You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life.  And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water,
• How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way 17.05.2026 15min

  There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive.  It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.” While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive.  It’s this that we will be looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 417 Hello, and welcome to episode 417 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  I’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it.  We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan.  And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend.  Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens.  Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected.  The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now. Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening?  Hi Tim, thank you for your question.  You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings.  A maker’s role is to produce the work.  The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing.  In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal.  The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions.  You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them. I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said: “My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.”  Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager.  Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required.  AI doesn’t magically p
• How to do a Reset. 10.05.2026 14min

  If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance you’re a human being. (Although the speed at which AI is developing may be not all of you… A big hello to Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (As Boris Johnson would say it) And, as a human being, you’re attacked every day by emotions, fatigue, viruses and micro-managing bosses and demanding colleagues. You’re not going to be able to stay consistent with your productivity systems and processes. (And even AI gets confused from time to time)  You WILL fall off the wagon from time to time As David Allen, of Getting Things Done (GTD), often emphasises, falling off the productivity "wagon" is normal and expected. His most famous quote on this topic is: “If you don't fall off the wagon regularly, you're not playing a big enough game.” So, what can you do when you do fall off? How can you quickly get back on track? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 416 Hello, and welcome to episode 416 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  One of the most common questions I get is what to do when your systems become neglected following a particularly busy period, a holiday, or illness or even plain, good old-fashioned laziness.  It happens to everyone from time to time, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.  Yet it can leave you feeling that there’s something lacking, that perhaps there’s something wrong with you.  Of course, simply not true. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. It’s another sign that you are a functioning human being. (That’s a good thing, by the way)  All that’s happened is you got very busy and attended to the most important work that needed doing in that moment, or that you’ve just got back from holiday (vacation), and there’s a lot of catching-up and cleaning up to do.  Both scenarios can leave you with some tidying up to do. That doesn’t mean everything has failed. It just means there’s some tidying up to do.  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 Ernesto. Ernesto asks, Hi Carl, thank you for the Time Sector System. Finally, I have a system that works after many years of trying. My question is, what do you do when, for whatever reason, you fall off the wagon and let things slip? Is there a quick way to get back on track?  Hi Ernesto, thank you for your question.  Firstly, as I mentioned, this is perfectly normal. So many things can cause us to stop following our system, leaving us feeling anxious about everything that needs cleaning up.  The first place to start is by cleaning up your to-do list for today. This is what I call the business end of any task management system. Your today list.  With the exception of your inbox, all your other lists are just holding pens of tasks that you have processed and decided do not need doing today. Your inbox is where unprocessed tasks sit until you decide what to do with them.  So get your list of tasks for today cleaned up. Reschedule tasks that do not need to be done today, and delete or check off those that have been completed or are no longer needed.  This one step will clear the runway and give you a curated list of things that do need to be done today. One of the tricks I have to help me here is to give myself a few minutes each evening to clear this list. Anything I have not completed that day is either checked off if done, resch
• The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About 03.05.2026 15min

  What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know?  This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   What is Time-Based Productivity? Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 415 Hello, and welcome to episode 415 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that?  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast.  It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day.  Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete.  Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else?  Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters. This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, 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 Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached. Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.  I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there.  Let me give you an example of this working.  I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”. Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it.  Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list.  (You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail)  This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there.  However, because you start wit
• The Best Ways to Organise Your To-Dos 26.04.2026 14min

  Podcast 414 "Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'." That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week.  Let’s go,    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Time Sector System  Take the Time Sector System Course   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 414 Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How do you organise your work?  There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc.  Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them.  Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk.  All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off.  Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work. Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage.  Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, 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 Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method? Hi Ken, Thank you for your question.  I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail.  They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised. You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy.  The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on.  This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week.  Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens) To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning.  Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer.  But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel
• How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity 19.04.2026 15min

  “I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.” I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself. In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 413 Hello, and welcome to episode 413 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving.  The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends.  And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life.  It could be asked, what went wrong? I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey.  Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”.  What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination.  You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well. The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times. Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break.  Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together.  Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people.  But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”.  It was down your tools and go out.  This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available” If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour. What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect.  If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write.  This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those m
• How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement 12.04.2026 13min

  Podcast 412 Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 412 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.  When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.  The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.  It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.  I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.  Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live. Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.  It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.  In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?  Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.  I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.  Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.  The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.  However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject.  Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are:  The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli.  The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something  And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow.  When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily
• Lessons in Purpose and Productivity When Planning Your Retirement 05.04.2026 14min

  Podcast 411 Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do.  It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 411 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives.  It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely?  This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose.  But what do you want to do?  As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”.  So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do?  And this is important.  My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day.  He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done.  At the age of 60, he retired.  His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy.  That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist.  And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead.  He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation.  I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person.  It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair.  That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith.  Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did.  In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year. I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the hors
• How to Time Block Like a Leader 29.03.2026 16min

  Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day. Let’s begin… Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The 2026 Spring 50 Sale Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 410 Hello, and welcome to episode 410 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up.  Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools.  Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long.  For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week.  Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four.  If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.  Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today.  This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family.  Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar?  Hi Aaron, thank you for your question. Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges. I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done.  The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff.  Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night.  John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did.  One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they
• How to Easily Manage Your Communications 22.03.2026 14min

  Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work.  What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the Email Mastery Course Here The Hybrid Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 409 Hello, and welcome to episode 409 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session.  During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes.  The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work.  You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time.  Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise.  However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department.  The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs.  To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change.  The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic?  Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day. In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in.  For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me.  The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with. Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails.  Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond.  If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with.  This is working with the data I have.  But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it. Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done.  If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes
• How to Protect Your Time for What Matters 15.03.2026 14min

  "The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."  Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time.  This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 408 Hello, and welcome to episode 408 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table.  In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple.  Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought.  Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role.  When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over. In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help? Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed. The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably.  This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do.  The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too oft
• Where AI Can Help Your Productivity and Where It Won't 08.03.2026 13min

  “By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity?  That’s the question I am answering today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap.  It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work.  But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future?  That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future?  Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down.  Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more.  That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily.  Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out?  To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want.  No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go.  I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes.  I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are wr
• How To Stay Focused on Your Day 01.03.2026 14min

  Steve Jobs once said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do”, and that quote has been, and still is, a cornerstone of my whole time management and productivity philosophy.  Today, I answer a question about dealing with all the little things that pop up each day while staying focused on what is important.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 406 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 406 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  What happens when your productivity system collapses? Do you go looking for new apps, or do you give up and just think you’re not the organised type or lack self-discipline?  People react in many different ways when their systems become backlogged and overwhelmed, yet this is a state that will happen to all of us from time to time.  Life has a bad habit of getting in the way. It throws up all sorts of problems to test us. No one week or even a day will ever be the same. Only five minutes ago, my plan to take Louis out for our walk at 2:00 pm was changed by my wife asking if we could go at 12:30. That way, I could pick her up from her dance class and then go to the reservoir for his walk.  And that was a small change.  These little things are hitting us every day and disrupting our systems, yet that doesn’t mean our systems are broken. It just means we need to ensure that we have sufficient buffer and flexibility built in. This week’s question is all about what to do when, for whatever reason, your system begins to collapse, and you have backlogs of work, emails, messages and commitments, and you have no idea how to regain control.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a heads up to say if you are considering joining next week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop, there are only seven days left before the first session.  The workbook will be going out next week, and I would love for you to join me. This is your opportunity to get to grips with the COD and Time Sector Systems, where you can ask questions and come away with not only the knowledge, but with a rock solid system that is flexible, automatic and leaves you with enough time for the things you want to do.  PLUS, you also get, for free, four of my courses to help you go deeper in your own time.  I will put the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you next Sunday.  Now, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Nick. Nick asks, “ Hi Carl, all my professional life I have tried to be organised and focused, but every time I feel I have found the solution, something happens either at work or at home that destroys my plans. How do you suggest someone go about dealing with disruptions all the time?  Great question, Nick, and thank you for sending it in.  Much of what causes us these issues has little to do with our systems. It’s just life getting in the way.  Yet, what we are aiming to do is turn managing our time into a routine. Something we just do.  For instance, I would feel uncomfortable going to bed not knowing what my appointments and important tasks are for the next day. It doesn’t take long—five minutes tops —but most days it’s likely less than two minutes.  This is why I cannot get my head around it when people tell me they are too exhausted to plan the next day. It’s no more than five minutes! You only need to know when and where your
• How to Get Control of Your Priorities 22.02.2026 17min

  “If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it?  In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Hybrid Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few.  The question is: why are they overdue? You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them. This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user.  The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control?  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix).  Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes.  And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion?  Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.  As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it. With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag.  When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned.  Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that.  Now, this is where many people go wrong.  It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it.  Not true. Priorities change.  You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now?  Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen.  Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposa
• Why Hybrid Productivity Systems are the Most Effective Systems 14.02.2026 14min

  Podcast 405 "Pen and paper will solve almost anything. Or at least start the process." - Nicholas Bate This week, I have a special episode for you about what I have discovered over the last two years from bringing pens and paper back into my productivity system. It’s certainly been an eye-opener for me.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Hybrid Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  A week ago, I launched a brand new course called the Hybrid Productivity Course. The purpose of this course was to help those who have found that a digital-only approach has led to a loss of focus on what’s important and a sense of extreme overwhelm and distraction.  As in most areas of life, a one-size-fits-all methodology rarely works. All humans are unique. We think differently, have different life experiences, grow up differently and experience life through many different cultures.  It stands to reason that none of us will have exactly the same needs as everyone else.  We saw this during the pandemic. Around 50% of people loved working from home. They thrived and became much more productive. The other 50% struggled, found it hard to do their work, and lost their enthusiasm and energy for it.  This highlighted the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts bounce off the energy of other people. They need the bustling office environment to operate. Take that away, and they slump.  Introverts, on the other hand, thrive in the opposite conditions. Quiet spaces and solo environments are where they thrive.  I always struggled in an office environment. I found it difficult to concentrate and focus. When I began working from home in 2015, my productivity went through the roof. I suddenly had the freedom to work when I liked, where I liked and in the quiet solitude of my front living room.  One advantage of an all-digital system is that you can easily add many features to your digital tools without much thought.  I noticed this while testing Todoist’s new feature, Ramble. Ramble lets you have a conversation with Todoist, and it pulls out all the things you indicate need to be done. Sounds great in theory, until you test it out.  Just a two-minute “conversation” with Ramble led to 15 tasks!  When I went back into my inbox to sort them out, I realised that the majority of those tasks were low-value, would-be-nice-to-do tasks, but realistically, there was no way I would have the time to do them.  I edited down that list of 15 to 6 tasks.  The problem is that most people will not edit these lists. It’s time-consuming, and you have to think it through. Two things that are out of fashion these days, it seems. This is where I found bringing a pen and notebook back into my system really helped. It forced me to edit down my list of tasks for the day. It also made me smarter when writing my lists.  If I had five people to call today, in the digital system, I would write out all five calls independently. It didn’t take long, and most of those would already be in the digital system. All I had to do was add a date.  In a paper system, it would mean writing out all those calls individually. You soon find that rather than doing that, you would write “do my calls”. Writing those three words strangely reinforced the action. All you then needed to do was to ensure that any communication tasks were correctly labelled in your digital system.  This is where the seeds of a hybrid system began to take shape.  If it we
• Time Blocking for People Who Hate Being Boxed In 01.02.2026 15min

  Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else”  How is your management of time?  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity Course    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 403 Hello, and welcome to episode 403 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure?  Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility.  Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important.  If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done.  But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take.  This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so.  The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind.  Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar?  Hi Alex, thank you for your question. Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day.  Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness.  The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when.  You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much. And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment.  I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that.  I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that.  One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have.  That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment.  When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much
• Managing "AI-Generated Work Bloat" 25.01.2026 16min

  You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year?  That’s what I’m answering this week.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Take the Time Sector System Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today.  Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”.  All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more.  I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself.  And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be.  Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers.  It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from.  Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task.  Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary.  It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question.  AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised.  It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of
• How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents 18.01.2026 15min

  Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin   Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files.  In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic.  The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today.  And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes.  The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents.  The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated.  Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find.  So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question.  A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year.  Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know.  What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated.  So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries)  Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year.  Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales.  All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened)  I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates.  If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year.
• Mastering GAPRA: A Simple Structure for Your Digital Life 11.01.2026 14min

  WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey. And now, let us begin.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 400 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years. This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points.  Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure. It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important? Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question.  When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation.  Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them.  Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes.  Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists.  And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world.  It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough.  Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection.  That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today.  Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents.  These were all original thoughts and observations.  Today, all that information is