Episodes

  • Why Everything Feels Like It Needs to Be Done Today

    Why Everything Feels Like It Needs to Be Done Today
    Aug 23 2026
    Have you ever wondered if your time management and productivity issues might not be about the amount of work you have to do, but rather the way you think about that work? That’s what we’re looking at today. 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 |430 Hello, and welcome to episode 430 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Since I began helping people directly with time management and productivity, I would say that around 60% of people’s struggles come down to the way they organise their work, around 35% come down to the way they think about it, and only 5% come down to the volume of work coming in. Talk to practically anyone today, and they will tell you they are busy. It’s almost like a badge of honour. The number one reason people say they don’t exercise is that they don’t have enough time. Is that really true, or is it that they value doing something else more? I’m reminded of something the legendary Jim Rohn used to say: “Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?” If I look at my to-do list right now, I guess I am busy. I have this script, a newsletter and a long-form article to write. I also have to record three YouTube Shorts videos, edit them and record this podcast. I have around five pieces of feedback to write for my coaching clients, do my exercise, take Louis for a walk, and cook dinner. Yet, I don’t feel busy. The reason is that I understand that it doesn’t all have to be done today. All I have to do is decide what can be done today and do that. The truth is, we all have far more to do than we can do at any one time. And equally true is that it doesn’t have to be done right now or even today. So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who is always busy and never has time to do their most important work? Hi Elaine, love the question. Short and sweet. I would first refer you to the Jim Rohn question ” Busy doing what?” If you feel constantly busy from the moment you wake up until you go to bed, the first thing I would suggest is to look at what you are doing during your waking hours. Write down what you are doing over a period of 48 hours or so. Not just your professional work, but your personal things too. I would also add that you write out what you would prefer to be doing instead. Write these down side by side. Draw a vertical line down the middle of a page, and on the left write what you spend your days doing, and on the right what you would prefer to be doing instead. Be completely honest. If you discover, for example, that you spend 90 minutes a day on social media and a further 2 hours watching TV, write that down. You’re not going to necessarily remove those. Instead, what you want to be asking yourself is whether spending time on the activities you currently spend time on is worthwhile. Initially, you will try to justify spending time on these activities. This is the same response we have when someone challenges one of our opinions. Our natural instinct is to defend ourselves. When you first write down these activities. Don’t judge. Just write them down. All you want to know is precisely where your time goes. I’ve found that if you leave it for a few days and come back to it, you will begin to look at things a little more objectively. Instead of trying to justify the expense of your time, you begin to ask questions such as: Do I really need to do that? And is this regular event I attend worth all the extra work it produces? Often, the problem for many people is that everything they want to do requires time. Just sitting and thinking requires time, as does making a cup of coffee. Time never stands still. And the problem with time, or rather, the way we measure time, is that we have 24 hours each day. That’s the one immovable part we have to deal with each day, but at least that gives us one constant. That can be worked with. If you were to study the habits and routines of highly productive people, you would notice that they all have strong barriers between the three basics of their lives. There’s time for work, time for family and social life, and time for self. There’s no discipline involved. It’s ...
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    14 mins
  • Why You Never Have Time for Your Most Important Work

    Why You Never Have Time for Your Most Important Work
    Aug 16 2026
    When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off. Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat. Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week? Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |429 Hello, and welcome to episode 429 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did. It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days. Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness. And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm. To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about. So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails. Hi Sarah, thank you for your question. This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars. That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them. The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar. You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours. Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day. So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar. However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage. Let’s break this down. When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment? If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar. This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point. So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity. Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity. Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself. A one-hour meeting, for example, often ...
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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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 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