What To Do When Everything Falls Apart

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This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?

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Script

Episode 137

Hello and welcome to episode 137 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.

This week it’s all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think. 

Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track. 

That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course. 

So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal?

Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening? 

A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up. 

Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all.

My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk. 

Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day’s expenses onto the expenses sheet. 

One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most. 

This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed. 

It was a small daily sacrifice that meant I was never in a position where I had to stop every I was doing just to get everything up to date.

My advice to you all is to develop a closing down routine that you follow every day. It does not have to be long. Ten minutes is fine. In this closing down routine, clear your to-do list inbox—decide when you are going to do the tasks, check your calendar for tomorrow, and clean up anything else that needs clearing up.

Clearing inboxes is how we get back on track. Clearing our inboxes—whether that is email or to-do list—the act of cleaning it up is enough to make us feel better and organised. It’s when we allow this area to slip when things go wrong. 

Set aside some time each day for processing, Sam. It’s the first place to start. The purpose here is to avoid the build-up of overwhelm. That’s what often causes us to throw in the towel. 

Developing the right habits can be very hard though, particularly if you try and do too much at once. And with a closing down routine, there is going to be a lot of trial and error. What you are looking for is efficiency and consistency. Spend a week or two testing out different ways of doing it. Decide what you want to clear at the end of each day and create a checklist. 

Once you are happy with your checklist, set yourself a thirty-day challenge. For the next thirty days follow your closing down routine each day. Make sure you do as per your checklist. 

Of course, if you feel you need to refine your list, by all means, refine it. After all, it is your list. The key is to commit to doing it every day for thirty days without missing a single day. That will begin the habit embedding process. 

I find, having a set time each day to do the closing down routine is the best way. I often advise my coaching clients to set an alarm or a reminder on their phone or computer to come up fifteen minutes before they finish the day to remind them to do the losing down. 

So for example, if you finish work at 6:00 pm set a reminder to come up at 5:45 pm and begin the closing down session. Stop whatever you are doing at 5:45, do the closing down and if needs be, finish what you were doing once you have closed down the day. 

There are a lot of benefits in doing things this way. First of all, you give yourself time to process your inbox and review your calendar. It also gives you time to see what you need to do tomorrow and plan your objectives and tasks for tomorrow. 

Back in the day when I worked in an office, there were many days when I left work, and because I had not looked at my calendar or cleared out my inbox, I had this nagging feeling I had missed something important. It was not the best way to spend the evening, worrying about what I had forgotten. Now When I worked in an office, we did not have smartphones and computers and iPads connected to our work life. Our work-life stayed in the office—a very nice state of affairs. So once I left the office I had no way of knowing what was missing until I arrived back at the office the next day. 

Closing down the day, cleaning your inbox and knowing what’s on your calendar for tomorrow leaves you feeling relaxed and stress-free and that always leaves you free to actually enjoy the evening doing what you enjoy doing. 

And while you may think having to find more time each day to plan and prepare is going to be hard, this is where you will have to make a decision. You see, if you are not prepared to do the backend work—processing your inboxes, keeping on top of your email and planning the next day—then where does that leave you? 

Without the backend work, you will have overflowing inboxes, un-replied to emails and a lot of stress. Not exactly the position you want to be in. Quite the reverse, I’m sure.

The next part of the conundrum, Sam, is to have a system in place. And there are a lot of systems to choose from. There’s my Time Sector System, where you manage your work by when you need to do it. There’s the traditional GTD method (Getting Things Done) where you manage your work by context (people, place and things) and the Kanban method where your work is managed by what stage it is at. 

Without a system, you will be flying by the seat of your pants. You will be in a reactive rather than a proactive state for most of the day. Being reactive means you are reacting to the loudest and latest rather than anticipating the pressures on your time and taking action to mitigate it before it happens. 

Using those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to clean up and process puts you into a proactive state because it’s like stepping back and looking at what you have to do and making decisions about when you are going to do it or would like to do it. 

It’s when you have that level of organisation that you gain the clarity to plan better and faster and because you have turned it into a habit—helped by doing a thirty-day challenge—you are much less likely to fall off the proverbial productivity wagon. 

The final part is the make sure you do a weekly planning session. Like the daily planning session, this does not need to be long. But it will take you around twenty to thirty minutes each week. Here all you need do is review the tasks you want to do next week and compare those against your calendar of events to make sure that what you plan to do is realistic when place alongside your daily commitments. 

It’s no good scheduling fifteen tasks for Wednesday when you are going to be on a training course all day. You are not going to get your tasks done. 

If you are using the Time Sector System, all you need do is move your tasks from your next week’s sector to this week, date your tasks, based on what you days look like for next week, and do a quick review of your project notes in your chosen notes app to make sure your projects are moving forward as you expect them to do so. 

The weekly planning session is also a good time to catch up with anything that needs cleaning up. I usually process my Evernote inbox during this session because the notes I collect in Evernote during the week are not too many and can easily be filed once my weekly planning session is complete. It just feels like a natural step, to plan the week then clean up the previous week and make sure everything is reset for the following week. 

It’s a great feeling knowing that everything is done, all your tasks and emails are clear and up to date and you are ready to begin the new week with a clear mind.

I hope these tips have helped, Sam. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about the Time Sector System, then I have put a link in the show note to my blog post where I explained how it works and what you need to create the system. It’s simple, easy to develop and will do a lot for your time management and productivity. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week. 

PodcastCarl PulleinGTD, Productivity, How to be productive, How to be better at time management