Reflections After 10 Years of Teaching Time Management and Productivity.

It’s my birthday this week, and as I often do, as my birthday approaches, I begin reflecting.

As I was reflecting, I realised that I’ve been writing newsletters, blog posts, and books, creating courses, coaching professionals from around the world, and publishing YouTube videos for ten years!

And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Looking back, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses. They were the people who kept learning.

For years, we’ve approached productivity as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then we’ll finally be organised.

Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed.

I also saw this when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday.

On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later and receiving their LL.B Honours degree.

And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit!

Productivity is more like fitness.

Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger. Fitness doesn’t work like that.

The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous.

And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different.

The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do.

You already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do).

The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day.

That’s why just consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want.

If you’ve read James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book), you know that Information fades, yet it’s your habits that remain.

The best learners never stop learning.

I recently noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. They don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they come back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers change.

They revisit ideas they learned years earlier and discover new insights because they’re now facing different challenges. My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible results, so much so that they’ve inspired me!

And as my driving instructor told me: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.”  In the same vein, you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned.

All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years.

I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them. Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, because becoming organised isn’t a project; it’s a life-long commitment.

And like every commitment, it works for those who keep showing up.

And so, I want to let you into a little secret today: I’m putting the final touches on some big improvements to my Learning Centre this week and next week, and I’ll share how I plan to help you and your productivity in the future.