“A journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step”, and one of the most common questions I receive from you and new coaching clients is, “Where do I start to get back on track?
Well, this week, I’ll share some ways you can begin your journey from an intense, overwhelming way of working to a calmer, more focused way.
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Script | 439
Hello, and welcome to episode 439 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.
In many ways, the first step to getting organised and back in control of your own agenda is to acknowledge that there is a problem. Without recognising that first, you’ll likely find yourself fiddling with the little bits at the edges that rarely do anything to help in the long term.
Moving all the tasks you’re ignoring from one task manager to another might feel like you’ve done something productive, but the tasks you’ve been ignoring are still being ignored. All that’s happened is you’ve moved them from one pile to another pile. But they are still there.
Quite often, when I am working with a client, the hardest thing for them to do is to accept that to add something new, something old will need to be removed.
It’s rarely about reorganising calendar appointments; it’s more about knowing what the trade-offs need to be in order to rebuild a sustainable week where the things that are important to you take priority over the things that may not be priorities. And that can be very hard to do.
So, with that said, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Karen. Karen asks, “ Hi Carl, I recently found you on Substack, and it felt like you were writing to me personally. I’ve recently found myself overwhelmed and having to work late into the evening just to stay on top of my work. I want to start using your Time Sector System, but where do I start when everything is all over the place?
Hi Karen, thank you for your question.
If you’re starting out and moving your current way of managing your work to the Time Sector System, then the place to begin would be to create the folders in the task manager you are currently using.
You don’t need a new task manager right now. You will find the transition easier if you use the tools you are familiar with.
Now, if you’re listening and are not familiar with the Time Sector System, the way it works is that, rather than trying to organise your work by what you need to do, you move towards managing your work by when you will do the tasks.
The premise is that no matter what you want to or need to do, it will require time. And time is a limited resource. Yet the things we believe we have to do are not limited. And if you want an example of this, just look at your email inbox or Slack feed. It’s likely to look something like an aggressive game of Tetris.
The Time Sector System’s folders are:
This Week
Next Week
This Month
Next Month
Long Term and On Hold
You then have two additional folders. One for your critical recurring tasks; these are the non-negotiable tasks you need to do every day, week or month. They can be both personal and work tasks.
And a routines folder for all the little admin or chore tasks that may not be critical but you need to be reminded of on the day they are due to be done. A favourite example of one of these is watering my office plant. Technically, it needs to be watered every 4 days, which is not the easiest watering schedule to remember, so I have a task that pops up in my to-do list every four days, reminding me.
Now, if I don’t water it on the 4th, the plant doesn’t die; I can water it on the 5th day, no problem.
Once you have your folders set up, you can go through your existing tasks and ask yourself one question: When will I do this task?
Now, this is a better question than “When do I need to do this task?”, which can feel like you’re removing yourself from the equation and allowing someone else to decide when you do something, particularly if that task is for someone else.
The temptation when you begin this exercise is to put most of your tasks into your “this Week” folder. That’s quite natural because as you go through your tasks, there’s likely to be a sense of urgency on many of them; after all, I guess you have quite a lot of tasks there that have been sitting around for a while.
Don’t worry too much about this bias on your first pass. You can sort that out once you’ve got your tasks out of your old folders and into your Time Sectors.
My advice is to default to adding tasks to your next Next Week folder, unless you are quite sure that they must be done this week. A report that needs finishing and submitting on Friday will inevitably need to be in your This Week folder, but perhaps reading through a grant application form for a grant you may be applying for in January could be placed in your next week folder, even though you’ve been wanting to do that task for a few weeks already.
Once you’ve moved everything into your Time Sectors or routines and Critical Recurring Tasks, go back to your This week folder, open it up and ask yourself if, realistically, you can complete all those tasks in the days you have left this week.
Now, our optimistic human nature will likely tell you yes, but if you were to open up your calendar and look at how many meetings and other commitments you have this week, does your task list still look realistic?
Perhaps not, and if you realise that you’re asking too much of yourself, go through your this Week list and move more of those tasks to your next week folder.
Now, this is where what I mentioned at the beginning comes into play. It’s the trade-off time.
What can you move off to next week to give you space this week?
And that is the important question.
If you were to fill your this week folder with too many tasks, you will reduce the space you have for the unknowns that will inevitably come in.
I find that you may need to run this system for a week or two to find where your optimum limit is.
For example, when I take into account my critical recurring tasks—the ones that generally must be done- I have a natural limit of around 30 tasks per week. If I find I have 35 tasks, I already know something’s not going to get done. Not when I take into account my meetings and the unknowns.
This has me going back into my This Week list to see what I can move off to next week.
Given that your time is fixed, and the only variable you have is what you can get done. You could, theoretically, begin the week with 150 tasks in your This Week folder, but if you have 15 hours of meetings, which will produce their own additional tasks, and on Tuesday and Thursday you will need to finish your work 30 minutes earlier to pick your son up from swimming practice, does it still look realistic?
Now, at this juncture, I would advise that you do not treat each email and Teams or Slack message as individual tasks. Instead, group these together and treat clearing your actionable messages as one task.
Your message and email inbox can be treated as one item. All you would need to do then is allow some time each day to go through your messages and respond to the actionable ones.
I have a task in my routines folder that says “Clear actionable messages”. That is the trigger for me to go to my message inboxes and clear the actionable ones. This helps to reduce the number of daily tasks you have and encourages you to “batch process” messages. Something that should help to keep your messages under control.
The whole philosophy around the Time Sector System is to encourage you to think in terms of what you can realistically do. We all have a capacity. There’s a time capacity, and then there’s a physical and mental energy capacity.
Perhaps if you’re a knowledge worker, your mental energy is the one that depletes more than your physical energy.
It’s relatively easy to identify when we’re physically tired. Our muscles ache, and we may find we need to sit down and rest.
But how do you know when you’re mentally tired? That can creep up on you without any warning.
I find mental fatigue shows up when I feel unable to write or think clearly. It feels like I am “not in the mood”. I love writing, so why would I “not be in the mood”? I know now that it’s because I am mentally tired and need a rest. That would be to go out for a walk or take a nap.
The thing about the Time Sector System is that it helps you to become a little more realistic about what you can do each week. If you’re monitoring your This Week folder, you’ll soon learn where your capacity is.
Now the glue that brings everything together is that each week you stop, open up your This Week folder and see what has not been done. Then, either remove the tasks that are no longer necessary or leave them in your This Week folder.
Now, not completing everything in your This Week folder does not mean you have failed. It’s actually perfectly normal. As I mentioned before, there will inevitably be new tasks coming that, when you planned your week, you were not aware of. This means your priorities will shift as the week goes by.
I look at completing 80% of my This Week tasks as an excellent week; anything less than 60% would suggest I was being over-optimistic, not that I failed.
But it also gives you data. If you’re only completing 40% of your This Week tasks, it would suggest that you need to lower your expectations. And that’s the hard part.
It’s natural to push back at that and tell yourself that you “have to” do these tasks. But if 60% of what you thought you had to do is still there on Friday at 6:00 pm, then perhaps they didn’t need to be done this week after all.
But if you look at your week and see that an important project has moved forward, you’ve dealt with Mr Angry from Purley before he slammed the phone down, and your email and message inboxes are up-to-date, then I’d say that was a pretty good week.
Running a productive week is like a Formula 1 driver racing on the edge. There’s a limit that, if you cross, you will go off the track and into the barriers. The trick is to push when the conditions are right and back off when you feel you are close to the edge.
Pushing too hard when you should be backing off usually leads to mistakes, poor judgment and bad decisions that will need to be rectified later, which will require more time. Time you likely don’t have a great deal of right now.
So, Karen, if you want to transition to the Time Sector System, create the folders, and give yourself some space and time to move what you currently have in your task manager into their appropriate folders. Try not to overthink this, but do avoid moving everything into your This Week folder; that folder has a limit.
Then, when you are processing anything new, ask, “When will I do this?” And move it to the right folder.
There’s a lot more to the Time Sector System; there’s how to manage projects, how to categorise your regular work, how to plan your week and allocate your work using time blocks.
If you want to explore more, I will put a link to a blog post I wrote about how it can help you finally get control of your week and ensure that things that matter most to you are prioritised.
Thank you, Karen, 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.