Episodes

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

    Why Your Standards Matter and How Arsenal Won the Premier League.
    May 31 2026
    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 doing it. One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day. That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be. That’s it. Five minutes tops. This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary. Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway. Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic. One way to do this is to set minimums. Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually ...
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    14 mins
  • A Calmer, More Human Approach to Time Management

    A Calmer, More Human Approach to Time Management
    May 24 2026
    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, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation. That’s not what life is about at all. One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day? There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry. But what other things would be non-negotiable for you? For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level. At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is...
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    14 mins
  • How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way

    How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way
    May 17 2026
    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 produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work. The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking. Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something. This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse. Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails. It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive. Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work ...
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    15 mins
  • How to do a Reset.

    How to do a Reset.
    May 10 2026
    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, rescheduled if not, or deleted if no longer needed. Doing this every day ensures it takes only a few minutes, and by the start of the new day, my today list is curated, accurate, and focused. I’m reminded here of a story I learned from friend of this podcast, Simon Jeffries, a former UK special Forces officer, who mentioned that when he joined the Royal Marines, from day 1, the training instructors began teaching a simple habit that all marines live by: As Simon says, “the military doesn’t take civilians and turn them into soldiers overnight. It can't. Day one of training, the standard is simple... Turn up on time. Keep your kit clean. Look after your rifle. That's it. A few weeks in, the expectations layer. Month after month, the load increases. The standards compound until discipline is second nature — under fatigue, under pressure, under fire. Centuries of trial and error went into that approach. And the ...
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    15 mins
  • The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About

    The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About
    May 3 2026
    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 with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to. Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order. It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response. Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it. This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be...
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    16 mins
  • The Best Ways to Organise Your To-Dos

    The Best Ways to Organise Your To-Dos
    Apr 26 2026
    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 overwhelmed. This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing. Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”. Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list. The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary...
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    15 mins
  • How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity

    How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity
    Apr 19 2026
    “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 mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate. What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump. Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know. Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic). This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner. After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the ...
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    15 mins
  • How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement

    How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement
    Apr 12 2026
    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 enough) I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose. All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle. That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week). Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning. This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn. A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using ...
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    14 mins