How To Optimise Your Productivity System

Is your time management and productivity system optimised so you are always focused on doing the right things? That’s what we’ll be looking at today. 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 237 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 237 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. If you are like me, you will be reading, watching and listening to anything on time management and productivity. And there’s a lot of content out there.  Now, I must confess, I’ve been consuming this content since I was in middle school and I’ve tried a lot of ideas, systems and structures over the years. In the end you realise there are a few fundamentals that work and many that don’t. Most of the ones that do not work are the things that look great in a blog post or YouTube video, but when put into daily practice involve so much maintenance, doing the work becomes secondary to keeping the work organised—a sure bet that the new idea is not going to work.  And so, this week, we’ll be looking at how to optimise our systems so that we are pointed towards the right things every day. It’s also a good time to be doing this because we’ve recently crossed the year’s half-way point and this a great time to be a half-year review.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks, Hi Carl, I want to make my system better but I don’t know where to start. I took your Beginners Guide To Productivity years ago and I love how everything comes together, but sometimes I feel my system has become boated and slow. What do you do to keep things fresh and fast? Thank you, Scott for your question. Good question and it got me thinking. I know it’s very easy to keep adding to our systems once we feel it is working. What we do is add something new, and while that might be a small change when you add, the problems start when those small changes add up.  This often begins in adding more and more project folders to our task managers. This is often where things start to go wrong because the more project folders you have in your task manager, the more folders you need to review when you do your weekly planning.  This can also happen in our notes app where we add more and more categories and sub-categories. Eventually, it becomes a mess and we do not enjoy going in there to find what we need.  Generally, I look at my system as a whole every three months or so. However, there is a key question I use here: what can I eliminate?  It’s easy to accumulate plugins, extensions and apps. I do it all the time. I become curious about a new app everyone is talking about and install it on my computer and ‘take it for a test drive’. In 99% of cases I don’t see how it would improve my overall system, but the app sits there on my phone or computer. This three monthly clean out keeps these out of my system and out of temptation’s way.  If you are relatively new to this world of productivity and time management, it’s going to be hard to stop looking at these tools. The best advise I can give is by all means go looking and playing, but after three months do a clean out. Remove apps, plugins and extensions you’ve accumulated and no longer use.  But let’s start at the beginning. How are you collecting your tasks, ideas and notes? How fast is it? Do you find yourself sometimes resisting to add something because of the effort it takes to g