Why You’re Still Overwhelmed After Trying Every Productivity System
Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you.
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Script |427
Hello, and welcome to episode 427 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.
Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity.
In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier.
This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated.
AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not.
When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist.
For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut.
I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year.
I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it.
Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do.
No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin.
No need for AI to get involved.
AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change.
There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time.
Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep.
The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time.
And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot.
Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives.
Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive.
As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning.
They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course.
Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system.
This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised.
Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed.
A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor.
YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity.
Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it.
It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming.
I also saw something similar 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 with an LL.B Honours degree.
I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people.
And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit!
It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work.
It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years.
Being good at time management and consistently productive 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.
Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects.
You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice.
The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally.
The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will 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.
This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain.
Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change.
They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges.
My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me!
I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.” the same is true about your time management and productivity: 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, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it.
So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you.
I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations.
Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher.
Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally.
The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you.
It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving.
All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself.
And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work.
It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them.
My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing.
But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work.
If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn.
The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice.
If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member.
I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.
I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.