What’s the point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around; work that will need to be done at some point anyway?

Well, yes and no.

Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub.

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It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix.

Today, it’s very different. Most of you reading this will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain.

And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem.

I remember when I worked in a law firm, I often caught the bus home and spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem.

When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy time with your family and friends.

Today, it also means there’s no barrier (except our own willpower) to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night.

In the past, the factory gates were locked, and it wasn’t possible to work beyond our regular working hours.

Time management was much easier. Not so today.

But that does not mean you cannot bring back some barriers. Here are a few tips to install some barriers:

• Before ending your workday, give yourself five to ten minutes to write out what needs to be done tomorrow. Review your calendar for appointments and your list of tasks to ensure what you have scheduled for tomorrow is realistic.

• Go through your inbox to make sure that there are no “fires”. You don’t have to process everything; check to make sure you have not forgotten anything urgent.

• Clear your desktop. This will ensure you haven’t missed anything and that when you start a new day, you have a clean desk.

• Have something to look forward to when you get home. That could be a delicious dinner, a night out with your partner, a games night with your kids or a good book to sit down with.

Knowing what to do is often easier than making it work in your own life. Inside my Productivity Academy, I work more closely with members to solve the difficulties they face and build a calmer, more dependable way to work and live.

See how the Academy could help you.

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A quick heads-up.

I recently opened my Productivity Academy, where members receive access to all my programmes, monthly live training and continuing support. Tomorrow, I’ll be holding our first live session, covering where to start, followed by an open Q&A.

You can learn more about the Productivity Academy here.

Author Jeffrey Archer flies out to Portugal each December to begin a seven-week writing marathon. Over the following few weeks, he will start writing at 6:00 am and will write throughout the day every day. By the end of those few weeks, he will have written the first draft of his next book.

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Jeffrey Archer is not measuring the number of words he writes each day. He focuses on being at his desk and writing by 6:00 am. He knows that if he follows that routine for the next six weeks, he will have a finished manuscript by around mid-February.

It’s a simple formula based on just turning up daily.

It is the “secret” to getting anything done consistently. Whether that is your work or getting yourself fit. You need to turn up each day and do the work to achieve anything. There is no other way.

If you measure your productivity by what you produce each day, you will set yourself up for disappointment. You are going to have good and bad days. You will also have “meh” days—days where you get stuff done, but it feels like you’re constantly pushing a large stone up a hill.

The trouble is, you never know when you will have a good or bad day. You may have slept badly or fought with your partner at breakfast and are distracted all day.

Some days, Jeffrey Archer may only write three hundred words; others, he writes over two thousand. On a daily basis, it doesn’t matter. He knows if he turns up each day to write, after a few weeks, he will have achieved his objective.

Most people’s struggles with managing email are a result of inconsistency. If you dedicate an hour a day to clearing your actionable email, while some days you may not clear them all, most days you will, and you will never have a build-up of backlog.

The alternative is a gradual build-up of emails demanding replies that sit around for days, sometimes weeks, and soon you have hundreds of emails that require replies and no time to do it. To clear all that would require at least a day of nothing but responding to email. Who has time for that?

Let’s imagine you dedicate an hour to deal with your communications at 4 pm every day. If you begin with the oldest email and work your way down your list, most days, you will clear them all; some days, you won’t. However, because you always begin with the oldest email, no one will wait more than twenty-four hours for a response.

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Social media is often cited as the culprit behind our weakening ability to focus, but I suspect it isn’t the only culprit.

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If all your work is done in front of a screen with pop-ups, red badges on communication apps, and endless lists of to-dos and documents. Is it any wonder we struggle to focus?

The smart ones of you will have turned off these notifications, but if all you have to do is move your mouse or open your phone and, BOOM, you’ve opened Outlook or Slack, only those with the discipline of David Goggins or Abraham Lincoln will be able to resist.

Bringing pens and paper into your productivity mix lets you shut out this incessant noise, go to a quiet place, or close your laptop lid and do some deeper thinking and planning.

What surprised me most about this was how focused I became.

I use a “day book” to handwrite my confirmed appointments and time blocks, as well as my most important tasks for the day. This means I can see at a glance where I need to be, what I should be working on, and when, without the need for a screen

No need to open apps or windows that risk distracting me with a low-value, easy task or one of those tempting messages.

What’s more, with pens and paper, you can buy very cheap or very expensive ones without a loss of performance, yet retain your own personality and style.

(Although I must caution you that getting the stationary bug can be very expensive! People fly to Japan just to visit Itoya in Tokyo, the World’s largest stationery store.)

I urge you to give this a go, particularly if you struggle to stay focused on what’s important and are easily distracted. Take a blank page in a notebook, write your appointments on one side, and list only your most important tasks on the other.

Do this every evening before you finish the day.

I can promise you, you’ll become much more focused.

If you want a step-by-step approach to doing this and to marrying your digital and analogue tools, my Hybrid Productivity Course will show you how to set up your day book, use a planning book, and plan your day and week in a hybrid way.

Want help putting what you learn into practice? Discover the Productivity Academy and learn how we can work together more closely.

You’ll find practical courses, monthly live training and ongoing support to help you put what you learn into practice. You can find out more here.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

Some of the worst productivity advice I’ve heard is ‘break down your tasks into smaller chunks’. This makes sense; on the surface, when we have tasks that take only a few minutes, you would think we would be more motivated to do them. The trouble is we don’t do them.

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The reason we don’t do them is not the length of the task; it’s getting started. It’s switching between different work modes that causes us to procrastinate and not do the tasks.

Imagine you have spent the last four hours in an intense meeting. Emotions were high, tempers were lost, and now you are tired. When you finally leave the meeting, the last thing you want to do is start doing a task.

What is likely to happen is that you will open up your email or Slack messages and look for some low-hanging fruit to do: the dopamine hit you are craving.

There is, however, a more significant issue. Often, the tasks you create as you break down the bigger tasks are what I call “checklist tasks”. These are tasks that would be better placed on a checklist, so you can instantly recall what has been done.

Task managers generally do not keep tasks in the task list once they are completed; they disappear into a completed section. This makes it hard to know what has and has not been done.

When I change my computer. I don’t copy my old computer’s hard drive to my new one; I do a clean install. This does create a little extra work, but doing things this way ensures all my apps are new, fresh, and in full working order, not suffering from bugs picked up over years of use.

The first apps I install are always the same. 1Password, Todoist and Evernote. Once these apps are installed, I set up my email accounts. After that, I keep a list of essential apps in a note in Evernote that I can pull up, and as I install them, I check them off.

In Todoist, I have a single task that says: “continue setting up new computer”. When I have time, I click the note link and am taken directly to my checklist in Evernote.

Installing new apps is one thing, but configuring the right keyboard (I use the UK keyboard) and other system settings I like requires a few steps, and since I only do this once every three or four years, I forget how to do it.

If I add all these tasks to my to-do list, not only would I lose the information once they were checked off, but the list would also become overwhelming. This way, I have a checklist of what I have done, and I can use it again next time I change my computer.

Your task list should be tight, with clearly defined work to be done. You don’t want to fill it with small tasks; once you begin working on a project or a more significant task, the next steps will be obvious.

If there are steps to take, add them to a project note as a checklist and link it to the main task. This way, when you open your task list, you know what work needs to be done, and you can get straight on with it.

“Continue preparing for next week’s board meeting” is a lot less overwhelming than twenty associated tasks that fill your day’s list, and it would be pretty obvious once you open your board meeting project note or the document you are working on.

The most common reason I find people struggling with their work is that they have far too many tasks in their task manager. Not only does this generate enormous lists of things to do, but it also causes stress and overwhelm.

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In 1986, Manchester United were in the bottom half of the football league and had not won the league title for almost two decades.

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The club was in dire straits. The culture was broken, discipline was nonexistent, and there was no structure to develop young or existing talent.

The club’s focus was on quick wins at any cost, yet they were not winning, and the attitude was that the cost of developing future success was too high and wouldn’t solve the immediate problem.

Enter Sir Alex Ferguson.

In Ferguson’s first four years, nothing significantly improved on the playing field. Manchester United were still losing, and in 1989, they were almost relegated to the lower league.

Yet off the playing field, a lot was changing. Ferguson instilled discipline into his team. They were required to wear their club suits and ties when arriving and leaving the ground on match days. Fines punished poor timekeeping, and he began building one of the most successful youth development structures in professional football.

In 1990, Manchester United won their first trophy in many years, the FA Cup, and in 1993, they won their first league title in over twenty years. That success continued throughout the 90s, with more league titles and European Champions trophies.

Ferguson’s success at Manchester United was not built on elaborate tactics, buying expensive players or outstanding set pieces on the playing field. It was built on getting the basics right and allowing time for talented players to come through into the first team.

The likes of David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs were all products of the youth development programme Ferguson brought into the club.

If you’ve woken up to the fact that you’re struggling to get things done and feel stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted all the time, go back to basics.

Fix your sleep schedule, move more (sitting at your desk all day is not a good strategy) and avoid high-carbohydrate lunches. These are simple fixes, but do require improvements to your self-discipline.

At the same time, go back to the basics of collecting, organising, and doing.

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When organising, ask yourself whether what you collected really needs to be done (it’s surprising when you ask yourself that question how much does not need to be done).

You don’t need to change things radically. Like Sir Alex Ferguson, you just need to return to basics. Be disciplined in your daily and weekly planning, and focus your efforts on spending more time doing the work rather than organising it.

Most importantly, be patient. Things won’t change overnight; they take time (hopefully not four years, though). Following a few simple daily practices will bring you huge rewards if you stick to them.

If you’d like me to help you build a time-management system that works in the real world, take a look at my Productivity Academy.

You’ll find practical courses, monthly live training and ongoing support to help you put what you learn into practice. You can find out more here.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

What’s the biggest thing on your mind right now? What could you do in the next five minutes to get it off your mind?

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Our brains are incredible things, but they do have their downside. Evolution created a brain with a primary goal to keep us alive. It does this by constantly analysing threats around us and bringing anything untoward to our attention.

Now, this was an impressive feature thousands of years ago. After all, if we were not constantly alert to dangers, we would likely become the dish of the day for some predator.

Today, most of those threats no longer exist, yet our brains are still searching and analysing the dangers around us. However, because there are very few predators in our everyday environment, it decides that an upset customer or an angry boss is a threat and then initiates the same stress response it would if we encountered a hungry predator.

Angry customers or bosses, giving a presentation, or running very close to a project deadline are not life-threatening.

What we need is to slow down our thinking.

Daniel Kahneman described this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Our faster thinking responds automatically. It sees an angry customer or boss or an overdue deadline as a threat and reacts with stress and automatic responses, which may not be the right response.

Instead, at that moment Kahneman’s recommends a slower, more deliberate way of thinking. This is where we pause and draw on our knowledge and experience to find an appropriate response. This is a far better approach than panicking, which won’t get a late project back on track or calm an angry boss or customer.

So, how do you slow things down?

You ask three questions:

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If you were to take a long-haul flight (12 to 18 hours), a lot would happen before the pilots enter the cockpit.

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Prior to the flight, the pilot and copilot go through a number of checks, including contingency planning (if they lost an engine), weather, route planning, and identifying waypoints as they cross continents and oceans.

This is the same purpose of your daily planning.

What’s your destination?

What is it that you want to complete today? Where are your appointments (waypoints)? These should be locked in before your day starts. It’s where you set your destination (objectives) and anticipate any potential issues that may arise throughout the day.

It sounds a lot, but it gives your day a purpose.

micro-adjusting.

Passenger airlines use a computer system called the Flight Management Computer (FMC). This controls pretty much everything. It ensures the flight remains on course and makes the micro-adjustments required to keep it that way.

No matter what you have planned to do and when, there’s going to be constant pulls on your plan for the day. A meeting may run over, an unanticipated conversation with a colleague, or a tech issue may slow you down.

We are our own Flight Management Computer. We will often need to make adjustments in the day. Sometimes a time block needs to be moved, a meeting may be cancelled, giving you an hour back, or your boss may call an urgent meeting.

No matter what happens, it’s rare that your day will go exactly to plan or be completely destroyed. The ultimate goal is to stay focused on your destination and do what you can to stick to it.

And in the worst-case scenario, do you need to change your destination and have an unforced stopover?

But if you treat your daily planning as airline pilots treat their pre-flight planning, you will find your days run smoother, you are more focused, and you reach your destination without too many dramas along the way.

Isn’t that all we are looking for?

If you’d like me to help you build a time-management system that works in the real world, take a look at my Productivity Academy.

You’ll find practical courses, monthly live training and ongoing support to help you put what you learn into practice. You can learn more here.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

Whenever I post a YouTube video about using a calendar, some viewers will inevitably comment, saying, “I wish I could connect my tasks to my calendar”.

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I can promise you that you do not want to be able to do that. And that’s why so few companies build apps that allow you to do this; they are protecting you from yourself.

There is a clear distinction between a task and an event. An event needs to be done at a specific time on a given day, for example, an appointment with your doctor or a meeting with your colleague/boss or client.

A task, on the other hand, can be done at any time. You may want to do a specific task on a particular day, but when you do it doesn’t matter; booking your car in for a service could be done at 9:30 am or 3:15 pm. The only thing that matters is booking your car for a service that day.

In the pre-digital age, we used to carry around A5 or A4 desk diaries that showed the week over two pages. Two-thirds of the page was dedicated to your calendar, and at the bottom, there was space to add six tasks for the day.

The reason there was space for six tasks was down to a gentleman called Ivy Lee. Ivy Lee developed possibly the most effective task management system ever created. That system is called The Ivy Lee Method.

This structure was not created by accident; it developed over hundreds of years and worked brilliantly.

The key was to keep your appointments and tasks separate unless a task needed to be done at a given time, in which case it was added as an event in the calendar part of the diary.

Followers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done will know that date-specific tasks should be put on your calendar and everything else kept on a list to be done as and when you can do it.

Maintaining this separation between tasks that can be done at any time and events that need to be done at a specific time means you avoid being overwhelmed. Your calendar takes precedence over your task list. It’s your primary time management system, and you want to keep it clean.

Another issue is that when you take tasks from your task manager and add them to your calendar, you duplicate things. Now you have a task in your task manager and an event on your calendar. What is it? Is it a task you can complete any time, or must it be done at 2:30 pm today? Do you really want to make that decision when stressed out and under pressure?

Time Blocking

That said, there is a way to make this work for you. Time blocking. Time blocking is a technique where you block time out on your calendar for doing specific types of work. For example, I have a two-hour block in my calendar for writing today. All it says is “Writing Time”. This means I get to decide what I write in this time block.

If I received an urgent request from my boss this morning to send her a short report on a sales campaign we did last week, I would have the flexibility to write that report in that two-hour block.

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In the UK, before the 1950s, there wasn’t a great deal you could do in the evenings. No TV, no internet or PlayStation. Just you, your family, perhaps a few books, a radio and board games.

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Yet, reading the published diaries and journals of people of that era, one never finds them writing about being bored or feeling frustrated about having nothing to do. They wrote about taking a quiet “relaxing” walk after dinner or settling down to a good book.

Beyond Our Ken, The Navy Lark and The Goon Show were staple radio shows. (Look them up; they’re still hilarious in a quaint way)

Many people now consider a quiet evening stroll or reading a book a chore that needs to be scheduled, as if it were a colonic irrigation appointment!

Today, we have an infinite number of possibilities for what we could do in the evenings and at weekends, and yet, we’re more stressed and overwhelmed than ever.

What’s the problem?

Choice. Barry Schwartz wrote about this 25 years ago in his book The Paradox of Choice. Schwartz argued that all this choice has not made us freer, but more paralysed. Nor has it made us happier.

It turns out, having fewer choices and fewer things to do allows us to slow down. If the only choice you have in an evening is to either read a book, listen to the radio, or sit outside and watch the birds, you’re never going to feel rushed and overwhelmed.

Your brain will relax, and you will feel like things are slowing down.

So, what does relax you? A soak in a warm bath at the end of the day? Pulling out some water paints and painting? Needlework? Lego? Writing a journal? Flower arranging? What’s stopping you from doing it tonight?

The less digital and the more handiwork your relaxing habit is, the better for you. It turns off your “knowledge work” brain and turns on the brain that’s evolved over thousands of years: your handicraft brain.

You focus on one thing, which is, in essence, the same as meditation. It’s why many people who do some form of craft or art will tell you it’s meditative.

So, if you struggle to “turn off” at the end of the day, create a SHORT list of non-digital things that you find relaxing: Cooking, reading, writing, knitting, quilting, walking or drawing, for example.

Then whenever you feel anxious, stressed or overwhelmed, go to your relaxation activity of choice and relax.

I’ve recently opened the Productivity Academy, a new way to access all my courses, join monthly live training sessions and get ongoing help putting what you learn into practice.

If you’d like to learn more and see whether the Academy is right for you, you can find all the details here: LEARN MORE

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

After leaving school, I was fortunate in my first job to work in a hotel. The hotel was four-star, and I spent the first week learning about standards.

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These standards included always serving a small pot of hot water with tea, ironing the newspapers before hanging them in the lounge, and placing the handle of the teacups so they were on the right side of the cup, with the teaspoon resting underneath the handle.

These were minor details, many of which would not be consciously noticed by the guests, but they were important to all employees within the hotel.

I was reminded of the importance of standards while watching a documentary on Rolls-Royce motor cars. In that documentary, I noticed all the salespeople wear white gloves when showing a customer around a vehicle, and the CEO writes personal letters to each new customer. (I also observed he used a Mont Blanc Meisterstück 149 fountain pen). Rolls-Royce sells around 6,500 new cars a year, leading to writing about twenty letters daily.

Having high standards is what sets you apart from other people. It gives you an edge, and when it comes to productivity, your standards guide you towards greater efficiency.

For example, if your standard is to reply to an email within twenty-four hours, you will not procrastinate on replying. You will ensure that no matter what, you respond to an email within twenty-four hours. If you need more time, you would write to the individual involved and explain that you need more time. You will not sit on an email. You act on it.

Developing standards for yourself gives you an operating manual which guides you through your day. For example, my standard is to respond to my email within twenty-four hours. This means I must ensure an hour daily dedicated to writing emails.

Torsten Müller-Ötvös, the former CEO of Rolls-Royce cars, knows the importance of personally writing to new customers, and he ensures he has the time to do that each day.

What are your standards for meetings? Do you prepare meticulously or ‘wing it’ by going in unprepared? What are your standards for managing your calendar? Do you protect time each day for focused work, or do you allow events to control your day?

Your standards give you a blueprint for your day. For instance, the most productive authors I’ve encountered, such as John Grisham, never allow anyone or anything to disturb their writing time. John Grisham begins his writing day at 6:00 am and will write until 10:00 am. During that time, nobody can contact him.

That’s his dedicated writing time. Similarly, Ian Fleming would write between 9:00 am and 12:00 pm, and everyone knew he was not to be disturbed during those hours.

John Grisham and Ian Fleming still had time to meet with people, respond to correspondence (letters or emails) and interact with others. But their standards ensured they had at least three hours of undisturbed writing time each day.

I’m always surprised by how many excuses people will find for not establishing standards for themselves. Ranging from how they have to be available for their customers at a moment’s notice (as if they were emergency room doctors saving lives) to being so afraid of their boss that they take their phones to the bathroom just in case their boss calls them.

These are just excuses. Setting high standards for yourself is the easy part. Living those standards is the challenge. Yet, your standards will ensure you are not replaced by a computer or a new AI way of doing your work.

Here are a few highly productive standards you could adopt:

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A concept of daily planning I learned many years ago was first to schedule your day and then fit tasks around that schedule.

In other words, review your appointments before deciding which tasks you will commit to.

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If you begin the day with five hours of meetings, you will have three hours to do your work. Given that you will likely need an hour to deal with your communications (email, Teams/Slack, etc.), you will have at most two hours to do your tasks.

Would you have sufficient time to complete twenty or thirty tasks? Probably not.

This is where the Time Sector System is powerful. Because you are not managing tasks by project but instead by when you will do them, you are forced to consider how much time you have available for your work.

If you require four hours to complete your employee evaluations this week, protecting that time on your calendar is critical. Relying on the hope that time will miraculously appear is not a reliable strategy. Instead, proactively block those four hours on your calendar before the week begins. This ensures you have dedicated time for important tasks and avoids a last-minute rush.

This means you refuse any meeting requests that may prevent you from doing the work you know must be done.

Setting a daily task limit is a powerful strategy. This limit will vary depending on the nature of your work. For instance, I usually have two to four hours of meetings a day. On days when I have four hours of meetings, I set my task limit to ten (including small routine tasks). This approach helps me manage my workload and maintain productivity.

I will allow up to fifteen tasks when I have two or fewer hours of meetings.

These limits allow for unexpected “urgent” tasks that pop up throughout the day while still allowing time to complete necessary work.

This is what managing time is: setting parameters around your day so you have time to do essential things. It’s about learning to prioritise effectively and to say “no” politely.

This concept was also the basis for creating the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is where you have two must-do tasks. Two tasks that are non-negotiable and must be done. And eight tasks you should do, but if you are prevented from doing them, they would not be critical. The goal, however, is to complete all ten tasks.

The 2+8 Prioritisation Method trains you to prioritise. By only allowing you ten tasks daily, you’re forced to decide what those ten will be. If it comes to choosing between starting your employee evaluations and restocking the stationery cupboard (remember doing that?), hopefully, you will make the right choice.

Try This:

Where will you set your limit? How many tasks will be your maximum each day? You cannot do everything in one day, so pick what you will do. Make sure you base that on the number of meetings and other commitments on your calendar.

After that, start training yourself to be consistent. You won’t succeed every day, but at least you are now conscious of time limitations, and that’s a great place to be.

Further help.

Here are a few resources on the 2+8 Prioritisation Method.

VIDEO: Why The 2+8 Prioritisation System Works And How It Can Work For You

PODCAST: How To Prioritise Your Most Important Work.

BLOG: Are You Working Forward Or Backward?

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

One reason you feel stressed out and overwhelmed is likely that most of what you are doing each day is reactive work.

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Reactive work is work that’s not planned, and all you can do is react to it. It gets thrown at you from the usual sources: Clients/customers, colleagues and bosses. It leaves you feeling like nothing is moving forward. You’re just waiting for the next crisis, and that leaves you feeling exhausted and disappointed.

To change that, you must take control of your time. Of course, this does not mean you will be able to plan everything; crises and emergencies will always come up. But when you control your time and what you do with it, you start to feel more empowered, more in control, more fulfilled, and a lot less stressed.

One effective way to take control is to set up a daily routine. There is a lot written about morning routines, and these are great to get your day started.

A daily routine gives you structure to your whole day and ensures you get your core work done (the work you are paid to do) and have time to work on your goals. (Remember those?)

However, before you can build a daily routine, you need to know what you want, what’s important to you and what you want time to do each day.

Work is part of that, but so is time spent with your family and friends. Time for exercise, and most importantly of all, time for yourself. These areas often get neglected, yet if you do not have balance in your life, things are inevitably going to break at some point.

Morning and night-time routines are great to give you time for yourself, but what about time for your family and friends? People like Gary Vaynerchuk, Casey Neistat and Shawn Blanc schedule time in the evening for family time. During this time, they are nowhere near a phone or screen. Instead, they are wholly focused on being with their families.

Time for exercise? Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Dwayne The Rock Johnson schedule this for first thing in the morning. It’s scheduled, and it’s non-negotiable.

Daily routines are about creating blocks of time for specific work categories that give your day structure. It’s a way to practice time blocking, and there are many ways you can structure this. For example, Mike Vardy, The Productivityist, uses a system called “Time Crafting” where each day has a specific theme. That could be Monday for recording his podcast, Tuesday for admin, Wednesday for writing, Thursday for coaching and Friday for everything else.

Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter and Square, and Elon Musk also manage their week by theme.

Having daily routines not only puts you in control of your time; it also creates momentum towards achieving your goals and completing your projects on time. It also gives you time to work with your customers and clients.

One simple trick you can try is to create for yourself a communications hour where

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For over 70 years, my mother has made her bed immediately after getting up in the morning. Whether she is at home, staying with friends, or in a hotel. The first thing she does after getting out of bed is to make it.

It would be unconscionable for her not to do it.

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Hollywood legend David Niven would kneel down at the end of his bed every evening to say a small prayer.

During World War II, on Christmas Eve in 1939, while serving in the British Army, Niven was stationed in a barn with 40 other soldiers. Despite his fear that the men would mock him for “Hollywood flamboyance,” he felt it was wrong to skip his routine. Before getting some sleep, he knelt and said a short prayer.

When he finished his prayer, he discovered that dozens of other soldiers had joined him in kneeling and praying in their own way.

Another Hollywood icon, Elizabeth Taylor, would insist on having her “ET Time”, or “Emotional Time”, every day.

She would go to her bedroom, close the door, and no one was allowed to disturb her until she was finished.

This was her way of “turning off the world.” She used this time to think and process her emotions, go horse riding, or simply “be” without the pressure of being a public icon.

Small rituals like these give structure to a person’s life. They are meaningful to the individual and ground them. They are part of what I call your ‘personal standards’, and they are non-negotiable.

For me, handwriting my journal every morning, spending at least 20 minutes responding to emails and messages, planning the day before I finish the day, reading a book, and getting a daily walk in nature are my non-negotiables.

Total time per day? Around two hours or less than 10% of the day dedicated to activities that ground me and bring a sense of calm.

These are not short-term, year-long rituals or ideas plucked from a YouTube video because they look cool or are trending. They are lifelong commitments centred around what you enjoy, find relaxing and where you can be you with no pretence.

You get to decide what they are. They mean something to you and are activities you do every day for the rest of your life. They become a part of who you are.

Gianni Agnelli, the stylish Italian industrialist, would spend the first hour of the day reading the newspapers and ringing round his famous friends to get the latest gossip.

Winston Churchill would take a two-hour nap at 3:00 pm every day (including during the war)

Cary Grant would never be late for any meeting or appointment, and enjoyed ice baths or cold water plunges decades before it became a trend

Maya Angelou would check into a small motel each morning at 6:30 am, spend the morning playing solitaire or lying on the bed before beginning her daily writing at around 2:00 pm.

Rather than attempting big, grandiose goals, perhaps take a look at your standards. It will do wonders for your self-esteem and confidence and perhaps give some calm in the otherwise chaotic and demanding lives we all seem to live today.

What one thing, that will bring a positive impact to your life, could you commit to today? Do that.

Further help.

📖 What Are Your Standards?

🎧 Forget Discipline. Instead, Focus On Your Standards.

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Try this exercise: look at all the tasks you have completed so far this week and divide them into tasks you have done for others and tasks you have done for yourself. What’s the split?

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If you are like most people, 60% or more of the things you have done this week (and previous weeks) will have been done for other people.

The problem with today’s thinking on time management, and, by extension, productivity, is that we have moved away from being “self-centred” towards being “task-centred”.

It’s no longer about working towards becoming better, more balanced human beings and taking care of the things that matter to us: our family, health, personal development and dreams. Instead, it’s now all about checking tasks off a list and trying to juggle more meetings than there are hours in the day.

It wasn’t always like that. In the late 80s and early 90s, authors such as Stephen Covey and Hyrum Smith identified the same problem: we had moved away from focusing our time and attention on becoming better and towards being unhappy, stressed-out box-ticking automatons.

Something has changed over the last twenty years or so. In the 90s, most individuals and companies recognised the need for balance and personal development. The focus was on what mattered, not how much could be done in the minimum amount of time.

Today, it seems we’ve swung back to being focused on doing more and more and lost sight of what matters to us.

You can see the results of this change. More people than ever are suffering from mental health issues. Vast numbers of people are off sick for stress-related illnesses, and customer service across whole swaths of industries has been reduced to an anonymous AI chatbot. (Or, if you’re lucky, a ticket number.)

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can change this by going back to what matters to you. Your Areas of Focus are the eight essential areas all humans share. Family and relationships, health, personal finance, career, personal development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality and life’s purpose.

Aside from the basic human needs, you should feel fulfilment in these eight areas. When one or more of these become neglected, you will feel lost, stressed, anxious and overwhelmed.

It was this that people like Stephen Covey, Hyrum Smith, and Jim Rohn identified as the foundations of living a balanced, happy, and fulfilled life.

If you are more concerned about the number of tasks on your to-do lists and are trying to juggle countless meetings, it’s not sustainable.

To build a healthy, happy and balanced life, you must begin with yourself. What you want. What is important to you?

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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.

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Many task managers allow you to add a Flag. Some allow you to use multiple flags. This gives you a lot of potential power, but only if you do one thing.

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Adding a flag is easy. Respecting your flag, not so.

I frequently see many tasks flagged as the most important, yet they are two or three days overdue. Clearly, they were not important. If you are not respecting your flagged tasks, they are pointless.

We all have a lot of tasks, some important, many less so. If you want to build a task management system that keeps you focused on the important ones, then respect your flags.

I get it, you flag the difficult tasks, the ones you have already been putting off, in the hope that adding the flag will get you to take action and do it. But you don’t. You add the flag and still ignore it.

The secret to respecting your flags is to add them during your daily planning. It’s when you are planning the day that you will know what your most important tasks are; after all, priorities change.

However, caution is required. Use your flags sparingly, and if there is nothing of priority, don’t add a flag. Consider it an easy day. (You are allowed them.)

Here are a few quick tips to better use your flags:

• Flag no more than three tasks per day. Consider two the ideal.

• When flagging, make sure you have the time available to do them.

• If you don’t complete a flagged task by the end of the day, remove the flag.

• Consider any flagged task as a must-do, non-negotiable task. (It’s a mindset thing)

• If your task manager has more than one flag (Todoist, Asana, for example), be clear about how you will use the lower priority flags. (I use my P2 and P3 flags in Todoist to denote the time of day I want to do the task.)

• Use a small A7 notebook to write down your most important tasks for the day and keep it on your desk.

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If you are familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, you will know that quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) is the one we should spend more time in. Yet, circumstances and daily priorities prevent us from doing so.

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For those of you not familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, below is an illustration of how it works.

Essentially, the goal is to reduce the amount of time we spend in quadrants three and four and maximise our time in quadrants one and two.

If you sit down on a weekend, look at the matrix and plan out the week, it’s very easy to adhere to the principles. But unfortunately, when Monday morning comes around, and we begin the workday, we are almost immediately swamped by quadrant three tasks.

They are loud, noisy, and don’t stop. Before we know it, it’s 4:30 pm, and it’s time to begin wrapping up for the day.

If you froze your day at that moment and looked at what you had done, you’d be shocked at how much time you had spent in quadrants one and three. Nothing had been accomplished from the all-important quadrant two.

How can you prevent this from happening?

The thing about quadrant two tasks is they are not urgent. They don’t scream at you to be done, and if you skipped one for a day or two, your world would not come crashing down.

So when quadrant one and three tasks start rolling in, we feel obligated to deal with these first simply because they are noisy and theoretically urgent.

Jim Rohn often spoke about this when he discussed the secrets to success. He hit the nail on the head with this:

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practised every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”

The only way you will consistently do your quadrant two tasks is by scheduling them in your calendar.

For example, exercise is a quadrant two task. Maintaining your health, vitality, and energy is critical for leading a vibrant life. Yet, if you skipped exercise for a day or two, it would not be a catastrophic failure. You can easily pick it back up.

But if that day or two becomes a month or two, and then a year or two, you’ve repeated the same error in judgment every day for a few years. Now your health will suffer.

If you don’t schedule exercise, it will not happen. Daily “urgent” events will replace exercise every time. It’s the perfect excuse not to exercise.

Planning is another quadrant two task that is frequently neglected. Yet if you never plan your day or week, how do you know you are moving in the direction you want to go?

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In the Pet Shop Boys song, West End Girls, one of the lines is: “Which do you choose, the hard or soft option?”, and it’s a line that has always stuck with me in an inspiring way.

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Each day we get hard and soft options. For example, we can choose the easy option to live each day without a plan, not exercise, and eat unhealthily all day. Alternatively, we can choose the hard option: exercise, plan the day before we go to bed, and spend some time educating ourselves through books or courses.

We always have options.

However, while we always have options, each choice has consequences. If we choose to do the hard things that develop and nourish us, we feel a sense of accomplishment. If we choose the “soft” things, we feel regret and disappointment.

This is just the way life is. It’s where the expression, “Choose your pain”, comes from: “The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

The hard choices are waking up thirty minutes early, so you can give yourself some time each day to work on yourself. That could be meditating, writing a journal or doing some light exercise. It’s giving yourself 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the day to look ahead to tomorrow and plan what you will do. And it’s dedicating thirty to forty minutes each Saturday morning to a full weekly planning session.

The easy choice is to skip these fundamentals and hope everything will be okay.

And for a while, they might be. But soon, those easy choices will bring regret. You miss an important deadline; you find yourself pre-diabetic, suffering from hypertension or other modern-day illness.

One thing I can assure you, though, is the pain of discipline is fleeting. It doesn’t last long. It’s painful to get out of bed early to do a little exercise, but that “pain” only lasts a few minutes, seconds even. Once you start, it disappears and is replaced by a sense of achievement.

On the other hand, the pain of regret builds up; it leaves you feeling valueless and disappointed in yourself. This is not a place you want to go.

Be aware of your options each day and choose the hard ones. They will always leave you feeling better, happier and more confident in your abilities.

To learn more about developing a better way to manage your work, join my free COD (Collect, Organise, Do) course. It will show you how to create your own system that takes the pressure off you and helps reduce overwhelm and stress.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website, say hello on LinkedIn or YouTube, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter

I love researching and discovering ways highly productive people get their work done each day. How they focus on what’s important when there are so many distractions trying to get their attention, and ultimately, what it is that enables them to achieve such elevated levels of success.

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One thing I have noticed about these people is they don’t use the latest elaborate apps. Most use the built-in apps on their phones, such as a calendar and Google Keep or Apple Notes. Many use a simple paper notebook and a pocket diary.

And let’s be honest, if you think about it, what more do you need? A calendar to give you your schedule and a way to make a list of the things you must do and collect your ideas.

I’m a firm believer in learning from the most successful people. After all, these people have done it. They’ve broken through barriers, followed their dreams and got a lot done along the way.

A couple of years ago, I saw an interview Sylvester Stallone did with Tony Robbins, and Sly explained his writing process. (Sadly, the interview’s no longer available)

He’s always collecting ideas on scraps of paper, and for the screenplays themselves, he writes them out by hand at his desk at home. So, nothing elaborate there.

To get the work done, he sits down and bangs out the work. He knows there are no shortcuts. The only way to write a screenplay is to write a script. So, turn off all notifications, lock the doors and write the screenplay. Simple really.

Woody Allen writes all his screenplays using an old typewriter in an upstairs room at his home. Once again, all his ideas are scribbled down on scraps of paper.

It’s funny how all the things we are told not to do, incredibly productive people do. David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, goes on at length about how scribbling things down on bits of paper is not effective, yet the people getting results and churning out hits like Rocky, Annie Hall, and Midnight in Paris ignore this advice.

Picasso was an artist, and guess what he did all day? He worked on his art. Doors locked, phone off the hook (no mobiles in those days), and complete and total focus on his art. No elaborate tools. Just bits of paper strewn all over his studio with ideas and sketches.

It’s glaringly obvious that you have to commit to total and uninterrupted focus if you want to succeed at something. Without that focus, you spread yourself too thin and fail to accomplish anything.

And it’s never about the tools. New tools will do nothing to make you better. New tools will distract you and take your focus away.

I’ve heard all the stories and excuses about how these successful people are different and lucky, and that all a person needs is this new app, and they’ll miraculously become more productive, yet those new apps never do make you more productive. They prevent great work from being produced.

Why is that?

Well, if you go back to the way Sylvester Stallone and Woody Allen do their work, it’s the process of doing their work. When Sly wrote Rocky in the early 1970s, computers were colossal machines that just about fit in a room. The personal computer wasn’t even a tickle in Steve Jobs’ mind. So, the only way to write a script was to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write it or type it. Woody Allen began his illustrious writing career by typing out his scripts, which he still does today.

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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.

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Links:

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