How To Find Time To Create A Productivity System.
This week, it’s all about how to find the time to set up a system when you are already stressed out and overwhelmed.
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Script
Episode 156
Hello and welcome to episode 156 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.
One of the more common objections to taking the time to build a productivity system is a belief that a person is far too busy to get organised. It’s an objection that has always made me smile because I often ask why a person is so busy they don’t have time to organise their work in the first place? It’s because they don’t have any kind of system for managing all the inputs that are coming their way in the first place and leads to a build-up of backlog and trying to remember everything in their heads.
It’s a vicious circle. No system, more inputs, less time and an overwhelming feeling of things spiralling out of control. And that ultimately leads to very dark places such as ill-health caused by stress and depression.
So, how do you manage all these inputs and find the time to get control of all the work you must do? That’s what I am answering this week.
Now, before I do get to this week’s question, October is the best time to begin planning the coming year. And, well 2020 has not turned out exactly as many of us had hoped.
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Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks: Hi Carl, I’ve taken a few of your courses and love them. The problem I have is I just cannot get on top of my work. I have so much to do and feel there is so little time to do it. I end up having to catch up with my work in evenings and at weekends and I am sick and tired of this. I have no time to put into practice all the things I have learned. I get so many messages and emails from my customers, and my bosses don’t help. Is there anything I can do to just get a little control?
Hi Tina, thank you so much for your question.
I know this is common—you are certainly not alone. I’ve come across clients of mine that have thousands of tasks on a backlog list that go back more than 12 months. When you find yourself in this situation it can feel like you are drowning and the temptation to just give up can be strong.
But there is hope.
The first thing to do is just stop. Stop trying to catch up and take a day off. Okay, I know, you are thinking how can a day off solve this problem? Well, the thing to realise is continuing as you are is obviously not working. What will happen if you don’t stop and change the way you are working currently? Something is going to break. Either your health will or your career will. Neither of which are particularly good outcomes.
So, what do you do in this day off?
Well, the first thing to understand is by stopping you put a stop to all inputs for 24 hours. I know, your email inbox will continue to fill up and if you are using Slack, Microsoft Teams or Twist, I am sure those inboxes will continue to fill up too. Let them. You need to put a 24 hour stop in new inputs.
A good tip here is before you take that day off, tell everyone you are away and will not be checking messages and emails—you can set up an auto-reply for this.
Now the reason for taking a day off is to set up a basic system. You need to Implement COD. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and what that means is you need to set up a system to collect all these inputs quickly and efficiently, you then need to organise these inputs somewhere and you need to be spending enough time each day doing.
Now, I am not sure what tools you are using at the moment, but you do need a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Set up your task manager so you can collect tasks both on your mobile phone and your computer as quickly as you can.
Now to get fast at collecting takes a little time and practice, but you must do this. With all the inputs coming at you, you need a simple list of everything coming in so you can stay focused on whatever work you are doing at the moment.
Collecting everything into one place—a place you need to trust—means you are by-passing your head. As David Allen points out, “your head is a terrible office”, it is not going to remember everything. Your brain is designed to solve problems and be alert to threats to your life. Calling back a customer may be important to your work, but your brain will never treat it as urgent. It’s not a threat to your life, so it drops very quickly to the bottom of your brain’s priorities. Never trust you will remember something later. You won’t, not if you begin to feel hungry—your brain will always prioritise that over remembering to reply to your boss’s email.
Write it down. Get it into your inbox.
Now, once you have a collection system set up, you need to have a system for organising your work. Now, here is where things get interesting. I could give you a long, detailed explanation of a system of managing your projects and files, but there is no guarantee it will work for you. The best organisation system is always going to be personal to you.
For example, I manage my tasks by when I will do them—the Time Sector System. My project files are managed in my cloud storage system and my project notes are managed in my notes app. That works for a lot of people, but not everyone. A lot of people prefer the old fashioned way of managing their tasks by projects and tags. If that works for you, that’s great. Find the best way to manage your tasks and projects that works for you.
But the basics still apply. You need a place to keep your project files—that could be your customer files instead of projects if you are in customer support. You need a way to organise your tasks. Not all tasks need doing today or even this week. I have around twenty tasks that can be done next month, so these are in my next month folder. I also have seven tasks in next week already and we are only on Tuesday.
Once you have that structure set up, you can process everything you have collected once or twice a day depending on how busy you are. I process my inbox at the end of the day, you may find you need to do it twice a day. In that case process your inbox just before you go to lunch—decide what needs to be done that afternoon and what can be put off until another day. Do the same before you close down the day.
Now the purpose here is to get you to start prioritising. The reality is we cannot do everything. No matter how much we want to do everything. Somethings are best done by other people or we just have to put our hands up and admit we do not have the time or skills to do whatever we are being asked to do.
I get a lot of students on my courses asking me to show them how to set up the Time Sector System in Things 3 or Notion. The reality is, I do not know enough about these apps and the time it would take for me to learn them and then put together a video would be too long. I just don’t have time for it and I have to politely decline. You have got to understand you cannot do everything and you have to learn how to say no.
Now, when you are processing at the end of the day, you will discover a lot of the things you collected earlier have either been done, resolved themselves or are no longer necessary. Delete these. Deleting tasks is not bad. It is one of the best things you can do.
Processing is simple. You start at the top of the list, decide what something is, whether you need to do anything about it and if so, when will you do it and where will you store it.?
You may have collected a task about a customer who needs to set up a meeting with one of your sales team. Is this something for you to do or should you send the request to your sales team? In most cases this is a sales team task, so send the customer details to your sales team. Now, do you want to follow up on this? Hopefully, you trust your sales team enough to know they will act on it, so you can now remove the task.
You may have a task where you need to send a file to one of your colleagues, if you have the file handy, then do it now. Just get it off your plate and move on to the next task.
Now, the trick is to process frequently so you get faster at it. It takes time to develop these skills. I can process twenty or so tasks in less than five minutes. But then I have been doing this for nearly twelve years, so it has become natural for me to go through an inbox and make decisions about what something is and what needs doing. I can go through 100 emails in less than 20 minutes.
Processing, organising and doing are two entirely different things. When I process my email inbox, for instance, I do not do email. I go through the list and decide what something is, do I have to do anything about it? And if not, is it important or can I delete it? I then put actionable email into a folder called “Action This Day” and give myself thirty or so minutes at the end of the day to clear that folder.
A quick tip here. If you reply to email too fast you end up in email ping pong. That just increases the number of emails you get each day. Instead, reply to email once a day. That way you control the speed and you stop people from using email as a way to contact you urgently. Once they learn you only reply to email once a day if something is urgent they will find a better way to communicate with you.
And here is another thing you need to be aware of. If you make yourself too available, you will always be overwhelmed. Make it difficult to contact or interrupt you. Even if you are low down in the command chain you can still do this by controlling when you reply. Reply instantly and people will soon expect that of you at all times. You need to manage expectations. Slow down your replies.
Taking this day off will do wonders for you, Tina. It will allow you to set up a system, put into place a way of managing your work and to get everything on your mind off it and into your system.
Once you have your system set up, you must commit to it. Always collect the inputs into your inbox. Always process your inbox at the end of the day and always have a plan for the day. I know, that sounds like a lot to do, but if you commit to it, stick with, it soon becomes a habit and then you will find all that stress, overwhelm and overwork starts to disappear. I know It is not easy, but what will the consequences be if you do not do it?
Thank you, Tina, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.