Getting Back To Productivity Basics

This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course 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 236 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 236 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. Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use.  However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity.  How do we organise all this stuff?  Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time?  What do I do with all my bank statements?  And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep.  What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics.  And that is what I will be looking at in this episode.  So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects?  Hi Eric, Thank you for your question. You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work.  Let’s start with the task manager.  All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today.  On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you.  Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and a