What To Do When Everything Falls Apart

  This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page How to Stay Productive When Everything Gets Thrown Out of Sync   Script Episode 137 Hello and welcome to episode 137 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. This week it’s all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think.  Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track.  That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course.  So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal? Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening?  A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up.  Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all. My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk.  Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day’s expenses onto the expenses sheet.  One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most.  This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed.  It was a