How Does It All Fit Together?

Podcast 207 This week, I have a question about how everything should be working together and why when you do bring everything together, your daily life will seem so much more focused and, more importantly, relaxed.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Download the Annual Planning Template Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template More about 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 207 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 207 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. I’ve been writing and producing videos for a few years now and over the years I have introduced a number of concepts that are designed to help you better manage your time and become more productive in what you do.  It can be quite confusing if you picked things up a little ad hoc. This week’s question is about how to bring it all together so it is seamless and logical.  Now before I get to the question, the 2022 edition of my Create Your own Apple productivity course is now available, If you are enrolled in the course, this is a FREE update for you and if you are not, but would like to enrol in the course you can do so this week for an early bird discount price of $49.99 (it’s normally $59.99)  This course will show you how to build your own productivity system using only Apple’s Productivity tools: Reminders, Notes, Calendar and iCloud. It’s a great course and one, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, that will give you so much benefit. And the course includes how to set up the Time Sector System as well as my new GAPRA notes organisation system.  All the details are in the show notes. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your podcast for a while now and I know a lot of the things you teach. I was wondering if there is a particular way you apply would use each of those ideas? I get a little confused sometimes about the differences between some of them. Hi Beth, thanks for the question.  There is a logical sequence for many of the principles I teach and when I saw your question I thought this would be a great way to explain how they all fit together.  So. Let’s begin with COD, that's Collect, Organise and Do. This is the foundation of all great productivity systems. If you are not collecting stuff—things like your tasks, your events and ideas, you are going to keep them in your head and that is when you will find yourself swamped and stressed out by the number of things you are trying to remember. Our brains are not very good at remembering things like that.  You will then need some time, preferably each day, to organise what you collected. Asking some straightforward questions such as what is it? What do I need to do about it? And when will I do it? Are all parts of this process. When I describe organising in this way it seems like it will take a long time, but you soon become very quick at processing tasks using these questions. Just to give you a benchmark, I will collect around ten to fifteen things each day, and to process those at the end of the day takes me about five minutes. If a task, for example, doesn’t need doing this week, all I need do is drag it to my Next Week or Next Month folder.  My focus each day is then on doing the work I have assigned myself for that day.  So where does the 2+8 Prioritisation fit? This is the daily planning process. The average person will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks per day inc