A Few Of My Favourite Productive Habits.
This week’s question is about all those little secrets I’ve discovered over the years that make getting work done on time, every time, easy. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 259 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 260 of the Working With 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 for this show. Over the years, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that have adopted have helped me to fine-tune my system and greatly improve my overall effectiveness and productivity. This week’s question asked me directly about some of my lesser-known secrets. It was an interesting question because many of the things I do each day I’ve absorbed into my system and never really think about it anymore. It’s a little like learning to drive a car. At first, you have to consciously remember to put the key in the ignition, or to put your foot on the brake and press the start button; after a while, those steps are done unconsciously. And BOOM! I’ve just given you the first tip, and I haven’t even revealed the question. The secret to mastering productivity or anything else is repetition. However, before I explain that a little more, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Craig. Craig asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for a while now, and I have always wondered, beyond what you share through your YouTube and blog if there are any other little nuggets you use every day that you haven’t revealed in some form or another? Hi Craig, good question. I’ve never thought of that before. I’m sure there are things I do do every day that I do unconsciously that help my overall productivity. You set me quite a challenge here. Well, let me return to what I was saying in the introduction. “The mother of mastery is repetition”. The more you do something, the better and faster you will get at it. Take, for example, the humble weekly planning session. When you first do one, it will take you a long time. There are a lot of things you need to go through for the first time, and you will have to consciously think about what you are looking at and will likely read through everything. Over time though, you learn what needs looking at and what can be skipped. If you come from a GTD background, you will feel you must go through all your open projects. And again, if you are a GTDer, pretty much everything you want to do will be a project—the anything involving two or more steps being a project idea. That means you are going to have to go through hundreds of projects each and every week. Good luck with that one, my friends. Now a more pragmatic way of doing your weekly planning session is to look through only your active projects. And here, you really only need to ask yourself what needs to happen next and when do I need to do it. This dramatically reduces the amount of time you need for a weekly planning session, and as you get consistent with it, i.e. you do one every week, you know exactly what needs looking at. It just becomes natural. You know where to start, and that triggers everything else. Incidentally linked to your weekly planning session is timing. When should you do yours? Now, over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of different times. I discovered the worst time to do your weekly planning is Sunday night. Yes, I know many of will be shouting at whatever device you are listening to this on. But bear with me. Doing your weekly planning on