How To Be Motivated Every Day

Podcast 219 This week’s question is about the tyranny of the to-do list. Something I’m confident we’ve all felt at times.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   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 219 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 219 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. Have you ever felt your to-do list is controlling your life and not allowing you the freedom to get on and do the things you want to do? I think we’ve all felt this before and it can be demoralising. The feeling our to-do list is running our lives and we cannot escape. This week, my goal is to change that and to show you that rather than your to-do list controlling your life, it is you who ultimately is in control.  But first, if you want a convenient place to receive all the content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter. It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system.  It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes. Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I started using Todoist about a year ago when I saw one of your YouTube videos and I loved it. But recently, I feel my life is trapped by all the tasks I have to do each day. It’s becoming difficult to motivate myself to look at my list and I am always rescheduling tasks. How do you keep your list from becoming demotivating? Hi Adam, thank you for your question.  I know how you feel. I’ve been through that forest many times and it can be disheartening to feel trapped by becoming better organised. I’ve recently felt it since we moved house and I got a new office and studio. I want to keep my workplace clean and tidy and everything in its place. The trouble is, to maintain that, it feels I am always cleaning and tidying up.  However, I’ve learned strategies to overcome that. The first is to treat cleaning and tidying as a way to step away from my desk. What I do, is between sessions of sit down work—like preparing this podcast script—I will get up and wipe down the kitchen surfaces, or I might pull out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the studio. These tasks don’t take very long to do on their own, so they are a great way to keep me moving through the day and consistently done, they keep my office and studio clean and tidy.  When it comes to your task manager this can be a bit more difficult. Part of the problem most people face is in the enthusiasm for building a productivity system. When we start we enthusiastically put all tasks into our task managers. It does not matter whether they are important or not, we just throw everything in there and we then process these into the system. Now, when you first start, this is an important part. We need to develop the habit of automatically putting our commitments, event and ideas into our system. If we never develop that habit, we fall at the first hurdle. Not getting stuff into our systems, means we never learn to trust the system we create and if you don’t trust your system, it will never work.  However, once you are in the habit of dropping all your tasks, commitments and events into your system, you need to become very protective of what actually gets processed into your system.  I treat my inbox for both notes and tasks as a filter. Nothing moves from