Once You’ve got Yourself Organised, How Do You Stay Organised?
This week, we’re focusing on doing the work instead of organising the work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin 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 227 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 227 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. Most productivity advice, tips and tricks focus on how to organise your work. And while this is important to some degree, it is the least important part of the three areas—collecting, organising and doing. You see, you can have the best organisation structure and still be unproductive. That’s because in order to keep everything organised you spend far too much time organising and adjusting. You might feel good while you are collecting all your files and notes and moving them into an organisational structure, but you won’t be getting anything done. Obsessively organising your stuff is another form of procrastination because it means you are not getting your work done. And that’s what this week’s episode 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 Jade. Jade asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently finished your From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, and now I feel organised (I now know where everything is), but I don’t feel productive. How do you keep everything organised and get your work done? Hi Jade, thank you for your question. Congratulations on completing the Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course. I know with that course you now have everything you need to build a great system. And you are now ready to move to the automation part of productivity. You see, when we start doing something new—such as having all our files, documents, notes and everything else organised and in a place where we can find them, it will mean that you will need to consciously think before you do anything. You will need to think about where you will put something and that takes time. However, this is just a part of the learning process. You’re changing old habits for new ones. The key here is to consistently do some organising each day. This will likely involve processing the files and documents on your desktop into their rightful place. It will also entail clearing your inboxes and making sure everything is in its rightful place. When you first start doing this, it will take quite a lot of time. However, if you are consistent with this, you will get faster. Now a lesson I learned years ago when I was in sales. During my induction training with one company, they sent me out with one of their salespeople for a day. That day coincided with the expense reporting day and I vividly remember the salesperson training me pulling up in a car park after lunch and suggested I go for a walk for a couple of hours. She then opened the glove box and out poured what seemed to be hundreds of receipts. She had to transfer those receipts from that glove box onto an expense reporting form. That taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t pile work up. Do a little every day and instead of it taking you two to three hours up close to a deadline, it will take you less than ten minutes to add that day’s receipts to the expense report. To give you another example, many years ago, when I first began using a digital task manager, it could take as much as forty minutes to clear its inbox each day. When you tagged on all the notes I had written, I was spending more than an hour