How to Get Started With COD
“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”
That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive.
And it’s a single word: Consistency.
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Script | 420
Hello, and welcome to episode 420 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.
There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics.
Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency.
Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay.
But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency.
So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days?
Hi Stephan, thank you for your question.
Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently.
Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was:
“If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”
I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control.
The numbers take care of themselves.
This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications.
Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete.
But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox.
Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low.
Your consistency will take care of the numbers.
When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising.
You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox.
However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions:
What is it? A note, an appointment or a task
What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask…
When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term.
If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising.
When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow.
But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic.
And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage.
Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes.
But there are other factors here.
The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools.
I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory.
When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature.
Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future.
So, I don’t use that feature.
So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help.
The first is to start small.
Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself.
Instead, pick one area.
For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager.
This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week.
When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone.
While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot.
However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone.
I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station.
Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning.
Daily planning involves three steps.
The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?)
The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes)
And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes)
When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone.
One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do.
Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself.
I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond).
Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer.
How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency.
Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet.
Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were.
When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top.
Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion.
But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there.
It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one.
Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it.
It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are.
That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time.
Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section.
If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom.
If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you.
Thank you, Stephan, 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.