How To Stop Overthinking and Over Planning.

Hello and welcome to episode 157 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.

One issue I find that causes the biggest problems is overthinking and over planning. Now I suspect there are many reasons for this, partly because of the many books and articles written about the benefits of planning—and there are a lot of benefits. But we should always remember that planning and thinking never get the job done.

So, this week, I will attempt to answer this excellent question.

Now, don’t forget we are in the middle of planning season—which seems a little ironic given this week’s question—and that means you should be thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.

To help you, over on my downloads page you can get my FREE annual planning sheet and if you are an Evernote user, I have a template you can get that will put the planning sheet into your Evernote.

All the links and details are in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice.

This week’s question comes from Maria. Maria asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you produce. I want to ask about planning. I find myself spending so much time planning and organising each week I find I have no time to finish my work. Do you have any ideas about finding time to plan and do the work?

Hi Maria, Thank you for your question.

One of the reasons I came up with the COD system several years ago was because I too found myself spending too much time planning. When I sat back and thought about the process, I realised all I needed was a simple and quick way to collect new inputs into a trusted place. I needed some time each day to organise those collected inputs and the rest of the time I needed to be doing the work. And that, in essence, is what COD is. Collect, Organise and Do.

Now, breaking it down, Collecting is something you should be doing automatically. A new input comes your way, you collect it. Job done. Once it is collected it is in your system.

The area I found most difficult to sort out was the organising and doing. I realised I was spending far too much time organising each day. It was a joy to be reorganising my lists and changing typefaces and creating new perspectives and views. But all that organising and fine-tuning was not doing the work. That is why eventually I came up with the ratio of spending 90% of my time doing and 10% planning and organising. That meant in a typical eight hour day you spend forty minutes or so planning and organising. As time has gone by, I have made my own processing more efficient and now aim to spend 95% doing and only 5% planning and doing. That’s what eventually led to the development of the Time Sector System.

So, in any given day, if I spend more than thirty minutes planning and organising, I know I need to readjust.

But to get to that stage takes time and practice. It’s not something you can do overnight. You need to learn how to process inboxes quickly—without overthinking things. For instance, with the Time Sector System, the only decision you need make is “when am I going to do this task?” As there are no projects, labels, tags or contexts in the Time Sector System, you do not have to waste time trying to decide which project it goes to (or if it a project by itself) or whether you need a computer, phone or some other tool. It’s simple and it gets the job done.

But how do you stop overthinking and over planning?

The first thing is to be absolutely clear about what your outcome is. If your outcome is a bit fuzzy, you will be drawn into thinking too much about it. By that, I mean unclear outcomes leads to unclear action steps.

Now one of my favourite sports is the World Rally Championship. I’ve been following it since the days of Juha Kankunnen, Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae in the 1990s and the incredible Lancia, Toyota and Subaru teams of that era.

One thing that has always struck me about motorsport teams is they are completely focused on the outcomes. When a new season begins, the focus is on winning the championship for both the drivers and the manufacturer. These top manufacturers want to win and the whole team from the drivers to the mechanics and design engineers have that one goal in mind. The whole team, all departments, everybody start with a very clear outcome.

For each round of the championship. The goal is the same. You cannot win the championship in one single round, to win a championship you have to be at the top of the leaderboard by the end of the rally. It’s about winning consistently.

Monte Carlo is the first round every year, all teams go there to win the race. If they don’t they go back to their base, analyse why they did not win and make any adjustments that will put them into a stronger position next time.

When your whole team is focused on the same outcome, you never get bogged down in details. The question will always be: what do we have to do to win?

Let’s look at a simple example. If you decide to start a project to lose weight and get healthy, that may seem a great goal particularly if you state it as “I will lose weight and get healthy by the end of the year”.

On the surface that may seem a very clear goal. But, it is not. You see, there are too many unanswered questions. For example, how much weight do you want to lose and what does “get healthy’ mean?

What happens with an unclear outcome like this is you will spend far too much time researching. You give yourself an excuse not to start because there will always be something else to read or watch.

Instead, if you state the goal as “I will lose 20 pounds in weight and remove sugar and refined carbs from my diet by the end of the year”

Now, in this example, the second part is easy. You do not need to do too much research you just need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. The first part, to lose 20 pounds may need a little research on the best and healthiest way to do it, but, your outcome is very clear and really to lose weight, it’s simply all about reducing your calorie intake.

Another way having clear outcomes works is once you know exactly what it is you want to accomplish, your brain will help you to achieve it. Tony Robbins has a great analogy for this. Having very specific and clear outcomes is like being a modern-day missile. Once the missile is locked onto its target it will overcome any obstacle to make sure it hits its target.

Now let’s look at a more every-day example. Imagine you work in sales and you want to increase your prospecting activities. You decide to do that, you need to make a number of phone calls each day. So, you create a list of names and numbers.

Now, here the problem is you could have a list of over 1,000 people to contact. If you say I will call these people every day until the list is done, you will procrastinate. On day one you will see a list of 1,000 plus people to call and you will try to find a way to break it down. You are not going to be able to call 1,000 people in one day, but your brain is trying to solve the problem and it thinks it must call those people ASAP.

Instead, if you go that one step further and take that list and say. “ I will call ten people from this list every day for 100 days” now you have a very clear outcome. You will not resist. All you have to do is call ten people today. That’s all you need to focus on.

It’s the same with writing a book. Preparing a report or presentation. Be very clear about what you want to accomplish and by when and your brain will help you. If not, your brain will hinder you. It will get in your way and give you plenty of excuses.

I see this a lot with people who want to start their own business consultancy. The key to starting a successful business consultancy is to build credibility in your chosen field. How do you build credibility? Well, unless you are lucky and already have a reputation in that field, you need to start writing blog posts, creating YouTube videos and or podcasts. You will never build a successful consultancy by leaving your current employment on a Friday and opening the doors to your consultancy on Monday expecting people to start calling you. It does not happen that way.

It takes years of putting out content to build credibility. So, start writing about your chosen subject. Start by setting a project to write one blog post and a podcast each week. That’s your project and your outcome. This will stop you from wasting time trying to decide which software you need to write the blog post with, where you will host your podcast and which day you will post. That is incidental stuff. It’s easy to find out where to post a blog post and host a podcast. The hard part is doing the writing and recording. And remember, without content, it does not matter how fantastic your software and hosting services are. No content, no blog or podcast.

Now how does this work for people who do not want to lose weight, get healthy and start their own business consultancy?

The same principles apply. Start the week with a plan and by that, I mean a set of outcomes you want to accomplish. That could be to finish a particular section of a project, it could be to resolve an outstanding issue with an unhappy client or to exercise six times that week.

If you have a set of realistic outcomes for the week, your brain will work with you. If you rely on a to-do list linked to hundreds of projects you’re not going to move very much forward. You have no clear outcomes. And I am sure you have already noticed, the incoming work never stops. It just keeps coming. And that just leaves you feeling overwhelmed and overworked.

When your to-do list is organised by projects, you will spend far too much time inside your projects list looking for work to do and more often than not you choose either the easiest to check off or end up working on tasks that are latest and loudest and find yourself never moving anything significant forward.

This is why I consistently stress the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. Spend around twenty to thirty minutes each week devising a set of outcomes you want to accomplish that week, and give yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to create a daily plan for the next day that will take you towards achieving your weekly outcomes.

This way, you will not need to waste time breaking down projects into tiny steps. If one of your outcomes for the week is to prepare and finish a great presentation for your next business meeting, the only task for that in your daily list would be a recurring task every day for that week that says “work on presentation for next week’s business meeting”. All your notes, resources and presentation file will be somewhere else—your notes app and file folders—and all you need do is open up your presentation file and notes related to that project and get working on the project.

Likewise, if you have an unhappy customer that you need to sort out, then really the only task in your task manager would be “sort out customer A’s problem” and either call the customer and find out what you need to do to make things right or call your colleagues you may have the answer. You do not need ten sub-task to sort that out. The outcome is clear—make customer A happy. Your brain will figure out what to do.

So there you go, Maria. I hope that helps you. Remember, focus on the outcomes, not the steps. Trust your brain. It’s been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years and based on your own life experiences it will find a way to achieve whatever your outcomes are.

Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering all you need do is email me your question at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the sow notes.

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