Are You Busy With Things You No Longer Care About?
What if the routines you have today are not the routines that will get you to where you want to be?
This is something that’s popped up from quite a few of you who have recently taken my new How To Get Back On Track Course. Let’s look at what’s happening and what you can do to alter your routines to move towards the life you want to live.
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Script | 437
Hello, and welcome to episode 437 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, I launched a brand new course focused on teaching you how to get back on track when you feel overwhelmed, stuck, and have no idea how you will get all those important tasks done and attend the meetings you’re scheduled to attend.
This raised a number of questions, but one I was rather surprised by came up, although I did anticipate it when I was building the course. I just didn’t expect anyone to pick up on it.
That is when, in the process of getting things back under control, you realise that the way you are running your week is not the way you want your week to run.
Sometimes, when you stop for a moment to look at what you are working on and how you are managing your time, you begin to feel that this is not what you want and that, in some cases, the way you are running your week is leaving you feeling miserable and exhausted.
Not a great place to be. You may have invested a lot of time and effort in your career, but now feel the career path you have been on was wrong, or, as in many cases, you allowed yourself to take on too many evening commitments, things like helping out at the church choir practice, or have become heavily involved in the local community’s events, so your weekends are no longer yours.
What can you do to rebuild your routines and calendar so that you have enough space for the things you now want to spend time on? Well, that’s what we’ll be looking at this week.
But before we get started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Charlie. Charlie asks, Hi Carl, I recently completed your excellent Get Back on Track Course, and as I was going through the rebuilding section, it occurred to me that almost everything I am committed to no longer inspires me. What would you suggest someone do when they realise that they need to rebuild everything from the ground up?
Hi Charlie,
Thank you for your question.
This is something that occurred to me eight years ago.
In 2018, I was teaching executives in Seoul. I would have to wake up early in the morning (around 5:30 am) and head out into Seoul’s rush hour to arrive at the executive’s office by 7:30 am to sit with them and help them prepare for a presentation or meeting.
Then there was a gap of around three hours before I repeated the teaching to another executive in a different part of Seoul.
I spent most of my days on the brilliant Seoul public transport system and in coffee shops.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved working with these people, and many of them are friends today. But when I looked at my daily routine, it was incredibly inefficient, and it was leaving me exhausted.
I was teaching right up to 8:00 pm most evenings, and that meant when I got home, all I was fit for was to drop.
That was the year I created the Annual Planning Template. It was inspired by a pharmaceutical company I was working with at the time. They always described August as their planning season. The goal was to come up with a plan for the following year by the end of October, when they would report their plan to the leadership team or as they were called: the KLT (The Korean Leadership Team)
I thought that was a great idea. Give yourself a month or two to think about what you would like to accomplish and achieve the following year.
Well, it was in 2018 that I realised that the way I was structuring my days and weeks was not moving me towards where I wanted to be.
The key to the change is to step back and ask yourself: if what you are doing today is not what you want to be doing, what is it that you do want to be doing?
“Well, not this”, I hear many of you saying.
Now, before we get carried away, it’s not likely that you will be able to stop everything you are doing today and completely change your life in just a few months. But one thing you can do is to give some thought to what you do want.
This gives you a destination to work towards.
The changes I began making in 2019 took until around the middle of 2021 to complete. And there was a lot of experimentation, failures and frustration.
However, I can say it was definitely worth it, and the journey towards that destination has been thrilling.
So, start by looking at what you are doing today and ask yourself what you don’t like about the way your weeks are structured. Then, ask the opposite question: what do you like?
I have a few clients who love waking up at 6:00 am and heading out for a run or to the gym, but they hate having to tidy up that buried chair in the corner of their bedroom. Great! That gives you a starting point
Now, what would be your “perfect” close to the day?
You may need to experiment here.
I used to write until around 11:00 pm and get ready for bed. I love writing, and it seemed the logical thing to do late at night.
But I realised that writing until late in the evening was affecting my sleep; there were often nights when I got up again to rewrite a paragraph. So, I gave myself a hard stop of 9:00 pm, after which I would either watch TV or read a book to wind down.
Reading a book or watching TV was something to look forward to, so it never felt forced, and in many ways it was a reward for writing or completing the things I wanted to get done that day.
From the messages I have received about the Get Back on Track course, the rebuilding section has become one of the highlights because it gets you to ask yourself what you want to keep in your life and what it’s time to let go of.
That can be an uncomfortable question for some of you and one you may have been avoiding.
But is what you are keeping around helping or hindering you on your journey to where you want to be?
An excellent way to start answering this question is to do a commitments audit. I would start in your personal life, as many of the things you have committed to may be easier to let go of, as it’s simply a choice you can make without involving other people.
For instance, you’re maintaining a 400-day language-learning streak not because you actually plan to visit the country or speak the language, but because you’re terrified of what the green owl icon will do to you if you skip a day.
Or you do the night-time steps of shame in your pyjamas as you stare at your smartwatch, waiting for the step count to reach 10,000 steps.
Are these really that important to you? If not, take the risk and see what the green owl icon will do to you. Just step back before you look.
Then look at your professional life.
This is more challenging, as there’s often a boss involved or colleagues you like, and you enjoy the meetings they hold every Wednesday afternoon, where your only contribution is to nod along like one of those toy nodding dashboard dogs.
I wonder how many of you feel like that in some of the meetings you are required to attend.
You’re not trying to eliminate everything, and if you tried, you likely wouldn’t be able to. What you are attempting to do is to remove the things that no longer serve a purpose in your life.
If you were able to get back five to ten hours a week by removing some of these things, you could then decide what you will do with the time you get back.
And don’t be fooled. Time does not like a vacuum. You will fill any available time with something, even if that’s just lying on the sofa scrolling through social media or the news.
The important thing is to be intentional with the time you get back. What will you use that time for?
Or another way to do this is to list out your daily non-negotiables.
For example, my daily non-negotiables are:
45 minutes to start the day where I do some light stretching, make a pot of tea, write in my journal and clear my email inbox.
30 minutes for exercise every day
1 hour to take Louis out for his walk
And 2 hours of creative work.
That’s just over 4 hours of committed time before my day begins. Yet it covers everything I enjoy doing. And yes, I love dealing with email and messages; I know, I am a bit strange like that.
Everything else is negotiable.
Yet the question I ask is, if all I do is my daily non-negotiables, would I be happy with the day? And yes, absolutely!
What about you? What are your non-negotiables, and if all you do are those tasks, would you feel content and happy at the end of the day?
If the answer is yes, then you’ve got the balance right. If the answer’s no, you may need to make some adjustments.
The truth is, most of us have filled our weeks with a lot of things that no longer serve us or our longer-term vision of where we want to be.
Doing an audit of sorts to make our weeks more in tune with the way we want to live our lives is a superb first step to recalculating the route we want to take to get there.
My mother recently stayed with us here in Korea, and we were talking about my school days and the daily school run.
My mother said she loved those days because we used to listen to the Radio (David Hamilton and Jimmy Young on BBC Radio 2 for those of you in the UK), and sometimes we’d sing along to the songs. It was also where my mother felt she bonded most with my sister and me.
The rest of the time, apparently, we just got under her feet while she was trying to clean up the house or cook dinner
And, funnily enough, I also look back on those school runs fondly. It’s also where I think my love of music began. I still listen to Radio 2 while I am doing chores or driving.
What are the things in your life today that you really enjoy doing? Keep those. And what are things that no longer give you enjoyment? Let them go.
If you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed or simply have no room left in your week to do any of the things you want to do, you can join the Get Back on Track course today and save $30. The early-bird discount offer ends on Friday 16th October. I will leave the link to where you can learn more in the show notes.
Thank you, Charlie, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.