How My Systems Fit Together Into A Daily Workflow.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve received a number of questions about how my whole productivity fits together. From COD to The Time Sector System to PACT. So, this week that’s the question I will answer.
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Script
Episode 148
Hello and welcome to episode 148 of the Working With 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 for this show.
Over the last three or four years, I have introduced a number of concepts, models and systems and the question is, how do all these fit together to make a workable, effective productivity system? That’s a great question because there are a lot of different ways you can manage your work, but for me, ultimately it’s less about the actual system and more about the workflow that you use.
Ultimately, how you manage your work in the time you have available is the key. It does not matter how brilliantly you have all your stuff organised if you don’t know where to start, or even how or when to start, you will not have an effective system. You workflow—the way to start your day, how you manage your work throughout the day and how you end the day is where everything comes together. And the best workflows need little thought or decision making. It’s just what you do. So that’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.
Now, before we get to the question, don’t forget, for those of you already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course, you now have a brand new update waiting for you. All you need do is go to your dashboard on my Learning Centre and you will find everything there.
This year, you get the Time Sector System, and almost all the classes have been updated with better content and better explanations.
PLUS… You also get my Email productivity and goal planning courses absolutely free!
Now would be a great time re-take the course so you can refocus your system and workflows and go into the final quarter of 2020 refreshed and working at your most productive.
And, of course, if you have not joined the Your Digital Life programme, you can do so. For just $74.99, you get a complete course that will give you everything you need to become better organised and more productive. You learn how to build your own digital system as well as how to manage your email and goals and bring everything together in a fantastic workflow. Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Angela. Angela asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following your on YouTube for quite some time now, and I have seen you talk about COD, PACT, the Golden 10 and now the TIme Sector System. Is this just an evolution of your system or do al these things play an important part in the way you do your work each day?
Hi Angela, thank you for your question.
To answer your question, I thought it would be a good idea to explain how everything works and how each part fits together.
So let’s start with COD. COD stands for “Collect, Organise and Do”, it’s the foundation of every great productivity system. You see, you need to collect everything that comes your way that you feel is important or something you need to do something about. You then need to organise all that stuff you collect and of course, you need to do your work.
So, whenever you start building a productivity system you need to start with COD. How are you going to collect your stuff? Will you use your phone, computer or a paper notebook? Or, will you use a combination of all of those?
The key is to develop a collection system that is quick and easy. Having a complex method to collect stuff might look cool, but if it’s complex you will resist. It needs to be fast and you need to think carefully about how you will do that.
I use an app called Drafts to collect around 95% of my stuff. Drafts is an app on my phone, Watch, iPad and computer and when I open it up, it starts off with a blank sheet and I can type or dictate whatever I want to collect. It’s incredibly fast.
Now once I have an item in Drafts, I can then choose where to send it. The two main areas are Todoist for a task I have to do or Evernote for an idea or a note.
I’ve been using Drafts for years now, and it’s just automatic for me to open it and add an item whenever the thought comes to me. There’s no thinking. It’s now intuitive and automatic.
Next comes the organising. Organising means where will you process what you collected? For this, you need a to-do list manager and a notes app. So, tasks go into the folders you have set up in your task manager. You can organise your folders in whatever way you want. The simplest would be a “home” folder and a “work” folder. So anything related to your work goes into your work folder and anything related to your personal life goes to your home folder.
Now, the reason you need folders is to prevent your task manager’s inbox from becoming overwhelming. You need somewhere to put your tasks.
Personally, I use the Time Sector System, this is where I organise my tasks by “when” I will do them. That could be this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term. But you may prefer to organise things differently. The key is to have a place where you can group similar tasks together.
If you are a Getting Things Done person, you will organise by context, that’s by people, place or thing. For example, you would have folders called Home, office, computer, phone, boss, spouse etc.
How you organise your tasks is up to you.
The key to the organising part of your system is you want to spend as little time as you can organising. You see, organising can become a productivity drain if your structure is too complex or you have too many apps. You will spend too much time adding folders, sub-folders, labels, tags and trying to decide where to put something.
The simpler you can make it, the less time you will spend organising and that is a good thing. I would say, that the goal is to spend around 5% of your time organising each day. That works out at around 20 minutes a day cleaning up your inboxes and managing your tasks and notes.
The rest of the time you want to be doing the work. That’s the “D” part of COD. Do. If your organisation structure is simple, then each day you will have a list of things you want or need to do and you just get on and do them.
And that’s where the Golden 10 comes in.
A few years ago, I decided to find out what the optimum number of tasks a person could reasonably expect to be able to complete each day. I discovered that number to be about ten.
When you take into consideration all the unknowns in a day, the unexpected urgencies and emergencies from customers, bosses and co-workers, then realistically you will only be able to complete around ten meaningful tasks a day.
I say meaningful because there are always little routines we have to do—take the dog for a walk, do the grocery shopping, clean the house etc. These just have to be done when they need doing. I don’t include these in the 10 meaningful tasks. These just have to be done when they need doing.
So, before you finish the day, you do your Golden 10. That means you look at your calendar and your task list and see what you have scheduled for tomorrow. You assign the ten most important tasks a flag or something that highlights them for you. This should take you no more than ten minutes.
Now the ten comes from the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you choose two objective tasks—the two tasks you absolutely must do tomorrow whatever happens. No excuses. These could be something important for your work, or they could be goal-related. You get to choose. The eight other tasks are the eight tasks you would like to get done—the should dos if you like—but it would not be the end of the world if you did not manage to complete them.
Finally, where does PACT come into it? Well, PACT is; patience, action, consistency and time. To get good at anything you need to have patience, you need to take action consistently over a period of time.
This works for your goals and for developing your own productivity system. If you want to build a functional, productivity system then you will need to be patient. It does not come together overnight and it takes time to get used to managing your tasks, processing and organising things. But you do need to take action and you do need to consistently do it.
I’ve found if you consistently do your Golden ten at the end of the day, you are 95% of the way there. You see the Golden Ten gives you an opportunity each day to step back and look at what you have on your plate. It allows you a little time each day to prioritise what you need to get done and focuses you on the 20% of tasks that will give you 80% of your results.
When you do not do any planning, you find you pick the low hanging fruit—the 80% that only gives you 20% of your results. When you do that, you will feel busy all the time, but also feel you are making little to no progress on the things you have identified as being important.
So that in a nutshell, is how everything comes together. Start with COD. Look at how you are collecting your stuff. Is it easy, fast and not feel like a burden or too much effort? Make sure you organise everything you collected consistently. I generally do that every 24 to 48 hours and spend at least 90% of your time each day doing the work.
At the end of the day, spend ten minutes planning tomorrow. Decide what your ten most important tasks for the day will be. And don’t worry if you don’t have ten. The less you have to do the better. I often start days with only six or seven tasks for the day.
And most important of all, if you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, be PACT. Be patient, take action consistently over time and soon you will find you intuitively follow a workflow that grows with you and removes a lot of stress, keeps you focused on the work you have identified is important and you start to feel each day you have completed a lot of meaningful work.
Thank you, Angela, for your wonderful question and for all you for listening. I feel so honoured to be able to help you in whatever way I can each week.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.