Digital Overwhelm? How Getting the Basics Right Changes Everything

How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That’s the question I’m answering today.

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Script | 370

Hello, and welcome to episode 370 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.

Two of the challenges we face today are the increasing complexity in our work life. Yet, that has been around forever. New technology requires us to learn new techniques for doing things and, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all is dealing with the speed at which things come at us. 

Interestingly, the number of emails we get today is comparable to the number of letters people in the 1970s and 80s received. Yet the number of phone calls we get have dramatically dropped. That’s largely due to the move towards instant messages—which were not around in the 70s and 80s. 

The difference is the speed at which we are expected to respond. With a letter, there was some doubt about when the letter would arrive. It might arrive the next day, but there was always a chance it would take two or three days. 

And when it did arrive, we had at least twenty four hours to respond. Today, there are some people who expect you to respond to an email immediately—no thought that you may be working on something else or in a meeting with an important customer. 

So the question we should explore is how we can navigate the way we work today without letting people down, but at the same time work at a comfortable speed which minimises mistakes and leaves us feeling fulfilled at the end of the day. 

So, with that stated, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, Hi Carl, over the years, my productivity system has changed with technology. I began, like you, with a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, then I moved to Getting Things Done and managed everything digitally. These days, I am struggling to keep up, and it just seems so complicated. Do you have any thoughts on how to keep things simple?

Hi Tom, thank you for your question. 

One way to look at this is to remember that the basic principles of good time management and productivity will never change. Those principles are incorporated in COD—Collect, Organise and Do. 

No matter how complicated or fast things get, we still need a way to collect stuff and trust that what we collect will be where we want it to be when we process it. 

We need an organisation system that works for us. And that means, we can find what we need when we need it. 

And finally, we want to be maximising the time we spend doing the work, so we avoid backlogs building. 

It’s within this framework we can evolve our systems. 

Thirty years ago, we would have been collecting with pen and paper. Today, it’s likely we will collect using our phones or computer.

Thirty years ago we would have had stacks of file folders and a filing cabinet or two to store those folders. Today, those files will likely be held in the cloud—Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive, for instance. 

So while the tools have changed, the principles have not. 

I’m a big rugby fan. I’ve been following Leeds Rhinos since my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five years old. 

The teams that win the championships and cup games are the ones who get the basics right. In rugby, that is playing the majority of the game in the oppositions half. Being aggressive in defence and ensuring their players are disciplined—giving away silly penalties is one sure way to lose games. 

The teams that lose are the ones who don’t get these basics right. They try to be clever, get frustrated, and drop the ball (quite literally) and give away unnecessary penalties, which results in them giving away territory and playing the majority of the game in their own half. 

The message is always the same. Get the basics right and the results will come. 

This is the same for you, too, Tom. Get the basics right and that’s following the principles of COD. 

The problems will start when we begin trying to do multiple things at the same time. Multi-tasking is not a strategy. Sure there are some things you can do at the same time. Walking and thinking about solving a problem, listening to a podcast while doing the dishes or cleaning up the house. 

But you are not going to be able to write a report, prepare a presentation and reply to your emails at the same time. These are very different types of work requiring different skills. 

A report is well thought out words and conclusions. A presentation is a visual representation of your main points and writing emails is about communicating clearly in words. All requiring different parts of your brain. 

This is why categorising the work you do works so well. With categorising, or chunking or batch processing—they all mean the same thing—you are grouping similar tasks together and doing them at the same time. For example, you can collect your actionable emails together and set aside thirty to sixty minutes each day for responding to them. 

If you were consistent with that, you would always be on top of your mails and no one would be waiting much longer that 24 hours for a reply. 

Similarly if you were responsible for sending out proposals to prospective customers, if you were to spend an hour or so on those each day, you would rarely have any backlogs and your proposals would be going out quickly without errors. 

It’s when we stop following these principles we become like the losing rugby teams. We’ve stopped following the game plan and become frustrated, which leads to mistakes which in turn means we lose the game. 

Or in the world of work, we create backlogs, deadlines are missed and we feel horrible, stressed out and overwhelmed. 

I’ve always found it fascinating to learn how productive people work. I saw recently an interview with Tim Cook, where he mentioned he wakes up at 4:00 am, and the first hour of his day is spent doing email. 

I remember reading that Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and the CEO of Square, who would schedule his days by category of work. Monday and Tuesdays were spend on marketing, Wednesdays were problem solving and Thursdays would be spent at Square and Fridays at Twitter. 

They all have some structure to their days. Incidentally, this was the same for Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin. They both followed a strict structure to their days which ensured they spent time each day on the things that mattered. 

While the way we work and the tools we use to do our work may change, the way we structure our days doesn’t have to. 

Twenty years ago, spending an hour on returning phone messages was the norm. Today, that same hour will likely be spent responding to Slack or Teams messages and email. 

If you want to get control of your time and remain productive, it will be helpful to know what is important. 

What is your core work? The work you are paid to do? What does that look like at a task level? Working in concepts doesn’t work here. You need to go to the next level and determine what your work looks like at a task level. 

An accountant will need to put numbers into a spreadsheet (or something similar) in order to get the information they need to be able to advise their clients. The question therefore becomes how much time do they need to do that each day to ensure they are on top of their work? 

As a former Franklin Planner user, you will know the importance of daily and weekly planning. This is about knowing what is important today and this week. It’s about allocating sufficient time to getting that work done and being strict about what you allow on your calendar. 

Perhaps part of the problem we face today is the increasing demands on our time. It’s easy to ask someone to jump on a Teams or Zoom call for “a few minutes” Ha! How often does five minutes turn into thirty minutes? 

And because of the simplicity of doing these calls, we accept. Perhaps too readily. 

I don’t have Zoom or Teams on my phone. If I am not with my laptop, I cannot do a video call. It’s a rule. And a non-negotiable one too. 

Where are your rules? What will you accept and, more importantly, not accept? 

One way you can manage this is to limit the number of meetings you have each day. If you spend seven hours of your eight hours of your work day in meetings, how will you find the time to do the work you are employed to do? 

That isn’t a task management issue. That’s a time issue. It doesn’t matter how many tasks you have to do today if you do not have the time protected for doing them. It’s on you to protect that time and that doesn’t matter where you are in the hierarchy chain. 

If your boss expects you to be in seven hours of meetings each day and write reports, prepare presentations and respond to your emails and messages, that’s an issue you need to take up with your boss. No tool or productivity system will sort that out for you. 

Even with the help of AI, you will struggle to do your work with that kind of time conflict. 

Now when it comes to managing your files and notes, I would say don’t reinvent the wheel. 

Several years ago, Microsoft and Apple’s engineers released we were terrible at managing our documents. So, they began rolling out self contained folders for their professional tools such as Word and Keynote. 

You no longer need to file these documents in folders you create. Instead you can save them and let your computer organise them for you. For example, if you use Word, all your word documents can be saved to the Word container folder in OneNote. Just like Google Docs. These are all kept together and you can then organise them in a variety of ways.

You can do it alphabetically, the date the document was created or when it was last modified (great for when collaborating with other people). In iCloud and Google Drive, you can also organise by which documents are shared. 

Your computer does the hard work so you don’t have to. There’s certainly no longer a need to create sophisticated file folder structures that take forever to keep organised. You don’t have time for that. Let your computer do the work for you. 

And not only have these companies made organising our work easier, they have been gradually improving search features too. Now as long as you know a date range, a keyword or a title, you’ll be able to find any document in seconds. 

There is no longer any need to manually organise your documents. The only responsibility you have is to ensure the names of the documents you have saved mean something to you. If you’re downloading a document, make sure you rename it. There’s some very strange file naming conventions out there. 

And that’s about it, Tom. 

Stick to the basics of COD—Collect, Organise, Do. Be strict about what you allow on your calendar (even if that means you need to an uncomfortable talk with your boss) and let your computer do the hard work of filing for you. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to with you all a very very productive week.