How To Stop Overthinking and Over Planning.

Podcast 157 This week, what can you do to stop overthinking and over planning.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet   Time And life Mastery Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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   Script Episode 157 Hello and welcome to episode 157 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. One issue I find that causes the biggest problems is overthinking and over planning. Now I suspect there are many reasons for this, partly because of the many books and articles written about the benefits of planning—and there are a lot of benefits. But we should always remember that planning and thinking never get the job done. So, this week, I will attempt to answer this excellent question.  Now, don’t forget we are in the middle of planning season—which seems a little ironic given this week’s question—and that means you should be thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.  To help you, over on my downloads page you can get my FREE annual planning sheet and if you are an Evernote user, I have a template you can get that will put the planning sheet into your Evernote.  All the links and details are in the show notes. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice. This week’s question comes from Maria. Maria asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you produce. I want to ask about planning. I find myself spending so much time planning and organising each week I find I have no time to finish my work. Do you have any ideas about finding time to plan and do the work?  Hi Maria, Thank you for your question.  One of the reasons I came up with the COD system several years ago was because I too found myself spending too much time planning. When I sat back and thought about the process, I realised all I needed was a simple and quick way to collect new inputs into a trusted place. I needed some time each day to organise those collected inputs and the rest of the time I needed to be doing the work. And that, in essence, is what COD is. Collect, Organise and Do. Now, breaking it down, Collecting is something you should be doing automatically. A new input comes your way, you collect it. Job done. Once it is collected it is in your system.  The area I found most difficult to sort out was the organising and doing. I realised I was spending far too much time organising each day. It was a joy to be reorganising my lists and changing typefaces and creating new perspectives and views. But all that organising and fine-tuning was not doing the work. That is why eventually I came up with the ratio of spending 90% of my time doing and 10% planning and organising. That meant in a typical eight hour day you spend forty minutes or so planning and organising. As time has gone by, I have made my own processing more efficient and now aim to spend 95% doing and only 5% planning and doing. That’s what eventually led to the development of the Time Sector System.  So, in any given day, if I spend more than thirty minutes planning and organising, I know I need to readjust.  But to get to that stage takes time and practice. It’s not something you can do overnight. You need to learn how to process inboxes quickly—without overthinking things. For instance, with the Time Sector System, the only decision you need make is “when am I going to do this task?” As there are no projects, labels, tags or contexts in the Time Sector System, you do not have to waste time trying to d