Episodes

  • You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.

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

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

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

    Why You’re Still Overwhelmed After Trying Every Productivity System
    Aug 2 2026
    Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy 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 |427 Hello, and welcome to episode 427 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. Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity. In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier. This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated. AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not. When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist. For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut. I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year. I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it. Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do. No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin. No need for AI to get involved. AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change. There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time. Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep. The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time. And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot. Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives. Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive. As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning. They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course. Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system. This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised. Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed. A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor. YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity. Now the trend is to have ...
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    15 mins
  • Why You’re Too Tired to Plan Tomorrow

    Why You’re Too Tired to Plan Tomorrow
    Aug 9 2026
    “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |428 Hello, and welcome to episode 428 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 this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements. If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically. And this is important. Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”. And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions. When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions. In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling. And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks. It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should. When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed. When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex. And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day? Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question. When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided. Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day. If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions. And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow. So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there. However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything. This is where routines, processes and rules come into play. Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions: What deserves my attention?What can wait?What should I ignore?What should I delegate?When is “good enough” truly good enough? If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves. And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up. This is why pre-establishing what your ...
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    14 mins
  • How to Keep Going When the Motivation has Gone

    How to Keep Going When the Motivation has Gone
    Jun 28 2026
    You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor. Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going. This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2026 Summer Sale page The COD Productivity Method 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 |423 Hello, and welcome to episode 423 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 consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new. That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening. All seemingly easy to do. And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it. It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas. It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation. Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend. Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult. The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do? Hi Fran, thank you for your question. To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day. Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!” Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day. Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there. In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox. It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again. I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry. Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.” The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning. Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed. Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes. And yet, people still struggle. Why? Because they are relying on motivation. I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your ...
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    15 mins
  • How to Stop Interruptions.

    How to Stop Interruptions.
    Jun 21 2026
    Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day” When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue. Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The COD Productivity Method 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 |422 Hello, and welcome to episode 422 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 first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus. There are eight areas that we all share. These are: Family and relationships.Career or businessHealth and fitnessFinancesLifestyle and life experiencesSelf-developmentSpiritualityLife’s purpose The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you. The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ. This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up. Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose. This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me? Hi Annie, thank you for your question. This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do. This is where having some structure built into your week can help. Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week. From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example. The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable. For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days. Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training. Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm. I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture. I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university. University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night. There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse” And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true. You will find what is important to you by looking at what you ...
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    14 mins
  • How to Build a Plan That Actually Bends

    How to Build a Plan That Actually Bends
    Jun 14 2026
    "A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills." That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his. Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line. The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level. And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The COD Productivity Method 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 |421 Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set. Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear. Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy. Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new. This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice. Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk. If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined. The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic? Hi Kathy, thank you for your question. This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems. One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard. After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems. Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits. The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions: What is it?What do I need to do with it?When will I do it? When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place. Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns. In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun. The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond. The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster. How was Scaramanga faster? Practice. How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that ...
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    15 mins