Your Time, Your Way

Podcast 414

"Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'."

That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week. 

Let’s go, 

 

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Script | 414

Hello, and welcome to episode 414 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. 

How do you organise your work? 

There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc. 

Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them. 

Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk. 

All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off. 

Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work.

Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage. 

Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, 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 Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method?

Hi Ken,

Thank you for your question. 

I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail. 

They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised.

You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy. 

The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on. 

This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week. 

Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens)

To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning. 

Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer. 

But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed. 

This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing. 

Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”. 

Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list. 

The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious.

And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list. 

So where do you put it? 

So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there. 

That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work. 

Soon, that project list is out of control. 

Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours. 

And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects? 

For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do. 

In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist. 

Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken. 

On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic? 

And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks. 

Hmmm, but does it work?

Well, no. 

For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards. 

The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day. 

Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel. 

Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food. 

Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food. 

This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go. 

While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence. 

This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do. 

Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap. 

And so your low-energy list will keep growing. 

Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean? 

It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them. 

The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done. 

Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June. 

Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner. 

If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next. 

As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June. 

Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them. 

The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists. 

Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list. 

The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions:

What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note?

What do I need to do to complete it? 

And, when will I do it? 

In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists. 

Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large.

The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do. 

To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world. 

I will put links to both in the show notes for you. 

So there you go, Ken.

There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks. 

Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list. 

Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu. 

What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks. 

My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something. 

I hope that has helped Ken. Thank you 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.

“I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.”

I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself.

In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors.

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Script | 413

Hello, and welcome to episode 413 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. 

1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving. 

The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends. 

And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life. 

It could be asked, what went wrong?

I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey. 

Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”. 

What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination. 

You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well.

The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times.

Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break. 

Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together. 

Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people. 

But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”. 

It was down your tools and go out. 

This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available”

If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour.

What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect. 

If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write. 

This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate. 

What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump.

Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know. 

Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic). 

This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner. 

After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the smoking room for brandy, coffee and cigars. There, the day’s business was often discussed. 

This was the aristocracy, not the middle or working classes. Although even the lower classes treated dinner more formally than we do today. It was the family meal of the day, and everyone was expected to be there. 

After that, people often wrote letters, read books, or, in the case of people like Winston Churchill, went back to their studies and did some more work. 

And that was something I have noticed. Because there were no fixed working hours for the upper classes, work occurred at all hours of the day. A lot of work happened after dinner, rarely in the early hours of the day. 

This gave a lot more flexibility for things like admin and communications. Most letter writing was done late in the day.

The founder of the British Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir Mansfield Cumming, would retire to his study after dinner to read through all the papers he’d received that day and send out letters to his agents around the world, often until 2 in the morning. 

Yet Cumming was famous for two to three-hour lunches and late starts to the day. 

The problems we have today are caused by on-demand entertainment. There’s always something to watch on YouTube or Netflix. And our sofas are very tempting after a nice dinner. 

Once there, it’s a real challenge to get up. Take those temptations away, and what else will you do? 

If you think about that for a moment. If a family had dinner together at 7:00 pm, discussed the day, and afterwards joined in an activity, they would be spending quality time together every day. 

Then at 9:00 pm, you could go back and clean up your messages, clear any admin tasks for an hour or so and still have time for reading or a hobby. 

It’s often our fixation with work-life balance that puts unnecessary barriers in our day. No personal stuff during office hours and no work stuff in our personal time. 

And yet, what do we do in our personal time? Spend hours in front of a screen, not talking with our family or friends, instead sending WhatsApp messages and commenting on social media posts. 

Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss write their books late in the evening. In Cal Newport’s case, he spends time with his young family until they go to bed, and then goes to his home office and writes for two or three hours. 

Cal Newport is a good example because he’s completely rejected social media, so he has time to write after his kids have gone to bed. 

Rest was taken very seriously in the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it was social. Parties and weekend getaways. 

I’ve spoken about Ian Fleming’s work habits before, particularly when he was in Jamaica writing the next James Bond book. But when he was back in London, he still worked in very much the same way. 

Mornings were intensely focused work, followed by a long lunch, then letters, and then home for dinner, or out with a friend. Afterwards, he would go to his study and edit a manuscript or read through the papers he’d received from his foreign correspondents around the world. (He was the foreign news editor at The Sunday Times Newspaper)

The most noticeable thing I learned from this era has been to structure your days around meal times. I now do intense creative work in the mornings, followed by more leisurely afternoons, and then, after dinner, go back to doing some work for an hour or two. 

I still work for around eight to ten hours a day, but I find that my energy levels remain strong whenever I am working. There are plenty of breaks throughout the day where I can socialise, spend time with my family and still get a lot of work done. 

And then there was movement. A lot of movement. 

The 1920s and 30s were a lot less convenient than they are today. This meant we had to walk a lot more than we do now. 

Weirdly, people have become obsessed with their step count today. They struggle to get even 8,000 steps in. And gyms are everywhere.

There were no gyms, and nobody was counting steps back then. They didn’t have to. It was natural to walk 10,000+ steps every day. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it; there was no app to order it. 

Although the upper classes did have servants who could produce it for them when necessary. But given that refrigerators and microwaves were not a thing then, a sudden order of food would have resulted in a cold meat salad and not much else.

As an aside, just do a search for 1950s New York or London and look at the images. There’s a significant difference between the size of people then and people today. Yet, no gyms, no smartwatches calculating steps, sleep cycles, or anything else. 

It was purely natural. Real food, not processed rubbish, plenty of natural movement, and no gyms. 

If you want to be more productive every day, move more. This is really what balance is all about. The so-called work-life balance is a modern concept, but what really matters at life level is the movement-rest balance. 

With the right movement-rest balance, your productivity will naturally increase. You will be a lot less mentally tired, and when you do move, you can map out what you will do next. 

I find that the biggest benefit of working from home has been that I can get up between work sessions to do the laundry or take Louis out for his walk. It gives me a natural mental break, and I do something physical. That refreshes my brain, and I can come back and do some more mental work feeling energised. 

I know it will be impossible to turn back the clock and go back to living the way people did in the 1920s. Technology and cultural changes would make that impossible. 

However, there are things we can do, as people did back then, that will naturally increase our productivity. 

First, focus on the rest-movement balance. If you’re mentally tired, do something physical instead of collapsing on the sofa. If you’re physically tired, do something mental. 

And move more than you currently do. We have become alarmingly sedate today. Dance while you’re cooking or making tea or coffee (I do that hahaha)

Eat real food, not processed rubbish, and take proper lunch breaks. Get out, move and socialise if you can. Treat them as a non-negotiable. 

Be relaxed about work-life balance. It’s not natural. There will be times when the best thing you can do is to clear some backlogs in the evening, and equally, there are times when the best thing you can do at 3:00 pm is go out for a walk or hang out the washing. 

Another aside. The worst invention has been the tumble dryer. Before we had them, we had to hang out the washing. This involved bending down to pick up clothes from the washing basket and then reaching up to hang them on the line. Possible one of the best workouts you would ever get. 

I know today’s episode has been different. I hope you’ve found it interesting. It’s well worth reading some of these older novels to learn how people used to live their lives. 

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very active, yet productive week.

Podcast 412

Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose. 

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Script | 411

Hello, and welcome to episode 412 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. 

Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve. 

When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes. 

The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers. 

It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”. 

I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English. 

Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live.

Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching. 

It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching. 

In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb? 

Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control. 

I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption. 

Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court. 

The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession. 

However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject. 

Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are: 

The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli. 

The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something 

And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow. 

When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough)

I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose. 

All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle. 

That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week).

Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning. 

This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn. 

A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out. 

And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others. 

When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week. 

When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success. 

Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress. 

If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear. 

For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely. 

Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed. 

The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on. 

For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. 

He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science.

For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf. 

Which then leads us to the second problem here. 

When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that. 

You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in. 

Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest. 

Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations. 

His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams. 

There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose. 

In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on. 

The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable. 

One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel. 

The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production. 

As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in. 

So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able to help. 

Make sure it is something you are interested in, something you enjoy reading about and something you like talking to other people about. If you wake up excited about doing something related to this, then you’ve found your purpose. 

One of the most inspiring stories I heard about was about two Canadian gentlemen who loved skiing. Each year, they would go skiing together with their families. 

When they retired, they both decided to take their ski instructor certification and become ski instructors. And that is what they do today. They are both qualified ski instructors, and each winter they spend their days teaching people to ski. 

This keeps them fit and strong and brings an incredible social experience. 

I hope this has helped. If you have any questions around your retirement or impending retirement, let me know. I’m happy to answer your questions in this podcast. 

And don’t forget, I have recently launched a brand new programme called Designing the Perfect Retirement. This programme sets out a blueprint for you to create a retirement you find fulfilling and inspiring, and that keeps you fit, healthy and active. 

In addition, this programme gives you access to a community where you can share experiences and advice. I will put the details for this programme in the show notes. 

It just remains for me now to wish all a very, very productive week.

Podcast 411

Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do. 

It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today.

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Interview with Harvey Smith

 

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Script | 411

Hello, and welcome to episode 411 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. 

I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives. 

It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely? 

This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose. 

But what do you want to do? 

As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”. 

So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do? 

And this is important. 

My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day. 

He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done. 

At the age of 60, he retired. 

His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy. 

That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist. 

And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead. 

He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation. 

I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person. 

It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair. 

That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith. 

Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did. 

In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year.

I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the horse racing calendar. 

But not only that, Harvey’s written at least four books, and he still doesn’t spend much time in his armchair. 

If you want to hear Harvey’s words of wisdom, there is a superb YouTube video in which he and Sue are interviewed. I’ll put that video link in the show notes. Harvey is a true Yorkshireman with the wonderful Yorkshire wit. 

Retirement is not the end. It’s the start of a new chapter in your life. You have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience and likely collected quite a few interests along the way. Retirement is your time to use that knowledge and work on the things that interest you. 

So what interests you? 

I’ve had a love of bonsai trees since I was in my twenties. I was probably inspired by the film The Karate Kid. 

While I have a couple of trees now, I don’t have the time to properly learn to nurture and grow them. However, when the time comes for me to slow down and retire, one thing I will do is spend a couple of weeks in Japan learning from the masters. 

When I was researching retirement for my father-in-law, I came to see that there are three pillars you need to ensure are built into any plans you may have.

The first is mental. This does not mean mental health as it is discussed today; it is about learning. 

Learning something new. 

That could be a foreign language, art history, or how to train racehorses. It doesn’t matter so much what you learn; it is about learning something challenging. Something to get your brain around. Something that will make you think. 

The dangers today are AI and the loss of critical thinking. In retirement, you do not want to lose the ability to think critically. 

Go out and buy the textbooks, enrol in courses, listen to podcasts and do the hard work of learning. Keep your brain active. 

It’s this that will keep you sharp and cognitive. As the saying goes, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” 

The second pillar is physical. After we reach 30, we start to lose muscle mass. Again, it’s the “if you don’t use it, you lose it” problem. 

Unfortunately, for most of us, around thirty, we get chained to a desk and a computer, and we use our arms to help us get out of a chair. We stop using most of our muscles.

This weakens our strength, and it is gradual. Hardly noticeable. So we don’t see the damage we are doing to ourselves. 

When we reach our mid-fifties, that muscle loss accelerates. We can lose as much as 10% of our muscle mass over five years. It’s scary. 

The consequence of this is that the risk of falling rises, and one of the biggest killers of older Adults is the complications of dealing with the injuries caused by falling. Broken hips, legs and shoulders. Not at all nice. 

By adding in a daily exercise session that focuses on your core strength—stomach, legs and ankles, and doing some cardio such as walking up hills to the point where you become out of breath, is all you need. 

Thirty minutes a day. That’s it. 

If you add in some stretching exercises later in the day, you are building a natural defence against one of the biggest underlying killers among older people. 

Your muscles are your natural defence against many lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and gout! Yes, gout is making a comeback. A disease prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries is making a comeback because of how we live today. 

Build in some exercise every day. 

If you want a simple exercise programme, the one that the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, used every day from his time in the Royal Navy, then look up the 5BX. Look for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube. It’s brilliant and very quaint. 

If you want to know how effective this exercise programme is, look at Prince Philip at his final public engagement. He was 97 years old then, and you can see from the way he walked just how fit he was. 

The final pillar is social. 

When we are at work, there is a natural connection with our coworkers. There’s a camaraderie and a social aspect to working with other people. 

We may not like our coworkers, but there’s still the connection. 

When we retire, that disappears, and it’s important to replace it with new connections. 

However, there’s a danger here. It can be tempting to replace all those meetings on our work calendars with volunteer work in retirement. Don’t do this. 

Go back to asking yourself what you want to do. Hopefully, what you want to do excites you. If you are replacing those work connections with volunteer work you do not find interesting, you will soon find yourself swamped. 

Not what retirement is all about. 

Be very strict about what you will get involved in. Be clear about what you want out of this chapter of your life. 

Perhaps some of the hobbies you try will bring with them exciting connections. Imagine how many new people Harvey Smith has met through horse racing. 

But do not rush into it. Take your time. This period of your life is about you and what you want from it. 

If you are worried about retirement, or are retired and have found yourself overwhelmed by all the activities you have embarked on, I have just launched a brand-new programme to help you. 

Ever since I started writing about time management and productivity ten years ago, I have had many people ask me to put together something for retirees. 

It was my conversation with my father-in-law last year that started my research. And that research uncovered some of the most inspiring stories of people I have come across. 

There was Jack Weber, a retired dentist who wrote a memoir of his life and published it on Amazon at the age of 100. 

And then there was the gentleman who inspired me when I was fifteen years old. 

I was a competitive track and field athlete back then, and this gentleman was in his 80s. He would be one of the first people to turn up to training every Tuesday and Thursday evening.

When he was younger, he was a sprinter. Now, in his 80s, he ran marathons. Although he was in his 80s, he looked about 65. 

I remember saying to myself that when I am 80, I want to be doing that. And that has been and still is a huge motivation for me. I’ve never stopped running and exercising for an extended period. I have tried to keep myself reasonably fit throughout my working life so that when I do finally retire, I will have the strength to run those marathons. 

Watch out, London, New York, Tokyo and Paris. I’m going to be running your streets in twenty-five years’ time! 

If you are interested in this programme, I will put the details in the show notes. This programme will teach you about the three pillars, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to manage your calendar so you are not overwhelming yourself. 

In addition, by joining, you get free access to a community of like-minded people where you can share your experiences and learn from others who are enjoying this fantastic chapter of your life. 

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day.

Let’s begin…

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The 2026 Spring 50 Sale

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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 410

Hello, and welcome to episode 410 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. 

It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up. 

Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools. 

Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long. 

For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week. 

Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four. 

If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today. 

This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family. 

Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar? 

Hi Aaron, thank you for your question.

Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges.

I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done. 

The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff. 

Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night. 

John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did. 

One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute. 

Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute! 

As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents. 

Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader. 

Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning. 

President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am. 

The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet. 

One thing you could do is set aside time somewhere in your day for undisturbed quiet work. Whether that is reading, working on a project or simply replying to your emails and messages. 

Just this one change in your day will relieve some of the pressure you may be feeling. It will give you time to work on the non-urgent things that, if you ignore, will soon become urgent and add to the stress and anxiety that working reactively inevitably causes. 

Now let’s talk about structuring your day. 

This is something that, if you’re not doing, you’ll find yourself getting pulled all over the place with no chance of getting on with anything important. 

Structuring your day means planning out what you will do and when. When will you do your most important tasks of the day? When and where are your meetings? When will you take time to rest and relax with your family? 

If you begin any day not knowing this, your day will run away with you. 

Again, let me give you an example of a US president. 

Jimmy Carter would disappear into the living quarters of the While House at precisely 6:30 pm every evening to have dinner with his family. 

No matter what was going on in the world. Whether it was a Middle Eastern oil crisis, spiralling inflation or some other world crisis (sound familiar?), Carter would never miss his family’s dinner hour. It was sacred. 

During that time, nobody from his office was allowed to interrupt him, no matter what was going on in the world. That could wait an hour. Spending some quality time with his family could not. His daughter was young at that time, and she would go to bed around 8 or 9 pm. 

Could you do that? Could you “disappear between 12 pm and 1 pm, cut off from the outside world; no phone or computer for one hour, so you could stop and enjoy lunch with your family or friends?

It’s easy to believe that we have to be “available” all the time. No, you do not. 

Not even the leader of the Western world needed to be available every hour and minute of the day. 

You’re not dealing with a world crisis where people’s lives are at stake. You’re likely dealing with more mundane issues, like a customer who is frustrated because their ordered electric window motor hasn’t arrived as promised. Or a boss who suddenly becomes agitated because sales dropped 12% last month. 

Gee whizz! What can you do right now? Probably nothing. You’re not going to be able to miraculously produce an electric window motor in a few seconds, nor can you change last month’s sales figures. 

These things can wait an hour or two. They really can! 

This is why, when I get clients to do the “perfect week” exercise, I ask them to do their personal life first. This is the one area most people will sacrifice for their work. 

When will you spend time with your family? When will you exercise? When will you spend time on your hobby? 

These should be your non-negotiables every day. 

President Eisenhower would stop work at 3:30 pm every day to spend an hour or two practising his golf on the White House putting green.

President Johnson would go for his daily swim at 2:00 pm every day. 

And Gerald Ford would start his day with an hour on his custom-built static bicycle and finish off with 50 push-ups. Every day! 

It did not matter what was going on in the world; these presidents knew that exercise was important for them to function, and they made sure they were clear-headed enough to make the right decisions on some of the world’s biggest and most urgent problems. 

Your customer’s missing electric window motor or your boss fretting about a 12% drop in sales is nothing compared to what these presidents had to deal with every day. 

Make sure that what is important to you is prioritised, time protected and non-negotiable. 

Urgent events will pass, and your being unavailable for an hour or two is not going to significantly affect the result one way or the other. 

Another part of all these presidents’ days was taken straight out of Winston Churchill’s daily routine. 

The daily nap. 

When you are tired, stressed, anxious, and worn down by the constant noise and decision-making, you will no longer be able to make good, rational decisions. It’s as if your brain tightens up and can no longer access your creative thinking. 

Winston Churchill discovered this while serving in the army in India in the early 1900s. India is very hot during the day, and it was customary among the officer class to take naps during the warmest part of the day. 

Churchill discovered that by taking a proper nap mid to late afternoon, you could do high-quality work well into the evening. And so, when he returned to the UK, he continued to take naps. 

As Churchill said, "Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter all took daily naps. Ranging from 30 to 60 minutes. It was their way of shutting out the noise of presidential work and giving their brains time to re-energise and refresh. 

I remember when I first came to Korea and discovered that many of the office workers I was teaching were working 18-hour days and surviving on only 3 to 4 hours of sleep. 

I asked them how they managed to do that six days a week, and they replied that they took a nap when they returned from lunch.

Korean office workers are legendary for eating a full lunch in less than fifteen minutes. That left them with forty-five minutes to an hour for a nap. 

Not so common today, working hours in Korea have reduced over the last ten years or so, but back in the early 2000s, work hours here were gruelling.

So there you go, Aaron. There are ways of managing our workloads. It may mean you need to consider redesigning your work hours. The 9-to-5 concept is a relatively recent one. Before the 1980s, people in positions of authority would take longer lunches, and these were often social; and they would do much of their focused work either early in the morning or late at night (Tim Cook still does this) 

But whatever you do, put your life first. Work is fleeting. Yes, it’s a part of your life and an important one, but it is only a part of your life. Your personal life matters too. 

Put your family and friends and health, both physical and mental, first. Then decide how you will structure your days so that the important things get done. 

I hope that has helped. And don’t forget that my Spring sale ends on Tuesday, 31 March (two days left). If you want to pick up my recent Time-Based Productivity course (which includes free access to the Time Sector System course) for just $99.00, you have about 48 hours left to get it. 

Plus, you can save $50 on my 2-session coaching programme. A great way for me to help you personally get control of your system so you are more focused and clear-headed about what needs to be done and when. 

I will put all the details in the show notes.

Thank you, Aaron, 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.