How To Stop Overthinking and Overcomplicating.

This week, we’re looking at how to stop overthinking and over-complicating our lives. 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 252 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 252 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 of the biggest drains on our productivity is over-thinking things. It’s this overthinking that usually leads to overcomplicating our task managers, notes apps and work in general.  However, there are a few things we can do that will eliminate the need to think too much about things. One of those, I’ve written and spoken about a lot, and that is in the way we write our tasks. If you write tasks in a haphazard way, you will end with tasks such as a website address with no idea what you need to do, or a single name with no indication what you need to do with that name.  Whenever you write a task, you need to have an actionable verb telling you precisely what needs to be done. For instance: “look at this website for design ideas” or “call Jenny about next week’s meeting”. It’s a simple trick that adds, perhaps, a few seconds to writing out the task, but it will save to a lot more than a few seconds when it comes to deciding when you will do the task.  It’s surprising how much time we lose when we need to think about what to do and how to do it. It’s when we do that that we discover multiple different ways to do something, and if we are not motivated enough to get whatever needs doing done, we use the excuse to “think about it” as a way to delay doing the task.  So, before we get into the depth of this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Leon. Leon asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I understand how to set up my system. The problem I have is I feel I waste so much time trying to decide what to do and how to do it. I collect everything in my inbox but then never do most of the things I put there. How do you manage all your tasks?  Hi Leon, thank you for your question. When you say, “I waste so much time trying to decide what do and how to do it” I presume that this will be a symptom of how your write your tasks and not being clear on where your priorities are. If we leave writing your tasks out for the moment and look at the decision part, this should be almost automatic. When you know where your priorities are, there will always be a natural hierarchy for the tasks that you do.  For instance, if you were a salesperson when at work, your priorities would always be those tasks that risk you gaining a sale. Everything else, no matter how loud the task is—colleagues or bosses screaming at you for an activity report, for example—are not priorities.  I know it’s hard to ignore your boss. But if you needed to call your boss about your activity report or a customer asking for further information, your customer is the priority and there shouldn’t even be a debate about it. Remember, you’re a salesperson. Your job is to sell. So, of the two calls; calling your boss or calling the customer, which one is likely to result in a sale?  A doctor would never leave a seriously ill patient to answer a question from a manager. Doctors are trained to identify where their priorities are. You need to train yourself to know instinctively where your priorities are.  And therein lies the secret to simplifying your work.  When you know what your objective is, al