Your Time, Your Way cover art

Your Time, Your Way

Your Time, Your Way

By: Carl Pullein
Listen for free

About this listen

 Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.Copyright 2024 Carl Pullein International. All rights reserved. Economics Management Management & Leadership Personal Development Personal Success
Episodes
  • Time Blocking for People Who Hate Being Boxed In

    Time Blocking for People Who Hate Being Boxed In
    Feb 1 2026
    Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else” How is your management of time? Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 403 Hello, and welcome to episode 403 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show. Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure? Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility. Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important. If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done. But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take. This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so. The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind. Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar? Hi Alex, thank you for your question. Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day. Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness. The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when. You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much. And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment. I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that. I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that. One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have. That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment. When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do. It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality. If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it. If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour. It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work. The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters. The best salespeople block time every day to prospect and follow up with their customers. That’s why they are the top salespeople.The best CEOs block time every day for working on their top priority task. That’s why they are the best at what they do.Best-selling authors ...
    Show More Show Less
    15 mins
  • Managing "AI-Generated Work Bloat"

    Managing "AI-Generated Work Bloat"
    Jan 25 2026
    You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year? That’s what I’m answering this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Take the Time Sector System Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show. Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today. Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”. All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more. I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself. And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be. Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers. It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from. Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task. Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary. It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question. AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised. It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially. I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious. There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes. Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails. However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today. I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so ...
    Show More Show Less
    17 mins
  • How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents

    How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents
    Jan 18 2026
    Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show. Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files. In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic. The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today. And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes. The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents. The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated. Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find. So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question. A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year. Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know. What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated. So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries) Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year. Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales. All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened) I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates. If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year. You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder. Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015. The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders. For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder. How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them. I would suggest starting at the current year ...
    Show More Show Less
    16 mins
No reviews yet