Do This To Be More Productive
This week’s question is about deciding what to work on and prioritising You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin 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 216 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 216 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. We’ve covered prioritising before in this podcast and it is an important part of being more productive and ensuring that what you are working on is meaningful and moves the right things forward. However, for those of you who have created a good solid system, you are likely struggling with deciding what to work on. If you are collecting a lot of inputs—tasks, events and ideas—at some point you will have to make a decision about what to do about those collected inputs and, more importantly, when you will do something about them. And those decisions can be very difficult. So, that is what we will be exploring in this week’s podcast. Don’t forget, if you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Not only do you get a summary and link to my weekly blog post, YouTube videos and this podcast, you also get a free productivity or goal-setting lesson each week. And best of all… This newsletter is completely free. All you need do is click the link in the show notes enter your details and you’re in. Doesn’t get any simpler than that. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the work you produce each week, I have a question about choosing which tasks to work on. I usually begin the day with around thirty tasks in my to-do list and I never complete them all. I feel guilty about rescheduling a lot of tasks. How do you choose which tasks to work on each day? Hi Shelly, thank you for your question. This is a great question because it touches on a hidden aspect of productivity and time management. All productivity and time management systems focus on collecting and organising stuff. Writing everything down and then organising it in a way that means something to us. What often gets forgotten is finding the time to complete these tasks we collect. And, more importantly, deciding which is important and which is not. How do you do that? Well, time sensitivity is one way. Due dates and deadlines are great motivators for getting things done. If you have a deadline for something, you are going to be more likely to complete it. This becomes even more important if the deadline was given to your by your boss or someone in authority over you. Your life would be easier if you spent a little time each week doing your taxes—organising your receipts and income and expenditure—rather than leaving a year's worth until a few weeks (or days) before the tax assessment deadline. But, hey, when I don’t have to submit my tax information for ten months, why would I spend an hour every weekend pulling together everything I spent and earned this week? There’s no imminent deadline, so there’s no urgency and therefore it’s not a priority. So we leave it until a week or two before it’s due and now it’s not an hour, we are talking days if not a whole week doing work on submitting taxes. If you want to stop the tyranny of tax assessment time, then do a little each week (or month) to keep it organised. It’s not about making it a priority, it’s about making it something you do regularly. A bigge