How To Find Time For Your Goals

Podcast 132

This week, how do you find time each day to work on your goals?

 

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

The Time Sector Course

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

 

Script

Episode 133

Hello and welcome to episode 133 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 fitting in your goals and the things you really want to do when you already have a full schedule. 

Now, before we get to the answer, if you have been considering joining the Time Sector Course, now is the right time to do so. The early-bird discount will be ending in the next twenty-four hours. You have until midnight, Tuesday 19th to get yourself into the course at the special introductory offer. 

This is a revolutionary new way of managing your tasks and your work. It gives you back your time, by focusing more on doing the work and less on the processing and organising. It’s simple, easily maintained and will give you so much time back.

Full details of the course are in the show notes. 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks: Hi Carl, I want to begin an MBA but I am too afraid to commit totally to it. It’s expensive and I will have to save money to do it, but I am worried if I do save the money and register for the degree I will not do the classes and fail. It will be a waste of money. Are there any tips that might help?

That’s a great question, Stephen! Thank you.

Now I know it’s easy for people like me to tell you to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write out your goals. But that is the first step. If you do not have your goals written down they are only wishes, and wishes are not strong enough to motivate you to get up and take the steps you need to take. So whatever you may think of the advice about sitting down and writing out your goals, start there. You do need that list. 

Next up, how you structure your goal is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to be measurable. Just saying “I want to study for my MBA” is not good enough. You need to be much more specific than that. The goal needs to be written out as “to register for an MBA programme and to complete it by July 2023” 

In that example, there are two parts. The first is to enrol in the programme. Now, I know MBA programmes are expensive so your first objective might be to save up enough money so you can enrol. The second goal will be to do the studying required for you to successfully complete the programme.

In this instance, take step one first. Save the money. While you are doing that you can do any research needed to find the right course for you. The good thing about having to save money first is it will test your resolve. If your “why” is not strong enough you will not progress must further than this initial step. 

And that brings me to your “Why”. 

Here’s the thing about your “why”. It has to be YOUR way. You have to want to do whatever it is you want to do for you. Not for your parents, your spouse or to impress people. When you do that, the “why” is someone else’s why and that will not sustain you. Your reason for doing something must come from within you. 

Losing weight and building muscle so you can impress people at the beach will be short-lived. Losing weight and building muscle so you can live a long, healthy active life will be self-sustaining. 

The same applies to studying for your MBA. If your real “why” is to impress people by having “MBA” after your name, your “why” will be weak. When you plan to spend a weekend studying and your friends suggest you go out for a few beers on a Friday night, you’re going to go for the beers (because you can tell everyone how hard you are going to study over the weekend) The problem will be when you wake up Saturday morning and you feel hungover and tired. The quality of your studies will be diminished. 

So, if you are really serious about this goal, you are going to hand over your hard-earned cash. When you do that you are not going to want to waste your money so you are much more likely to carry through with your goal. Handing over money, or anything else of value to you, is going to give you a real incentive to put in the effort to study.

Okay, so you are enrolled, how do you make sure you consistently do your studies? Use your calendar. 

This is where you are going to have to be completely honest with yourself. It’s easy to add events to a calendar and because it’s easy it’s also easy to ignore what's on your calendar. Never ignore your calendar. 

Ignore your to-do list but never ignore your calendar. If you start ignoring what’s on your calendar your whole structure is going to break down. You need something on which to build your discipline. Treat your calendar as sacred territory. You know the saying - “if it’s on your calendar it gets done”

What this means to me is, if I am not sure I am going to be able to do something it does not go on my calendar. It goes on my to-do list. My to-do list is negotiable. My calendar is not. 

You see you need something that you hold sacred when it comes to your time and your calendar is the best tool you have for that. 

You do not have to micro-manage every minute of the day—you do need the flexibility to manage the unknowns that will inevitably come up in your day—and you need the mindset of what goes on your calendar gets done and only in exceptional situations would you ever consider not doing something on your calendar. 

You can do a simple test here. Add a recurring event to your calendar to go for a 40-minute walk every evening for 30 days. Track it in a habit tracker or on a paper calendar (you can create one using Apple’s Numbers or an Excel sheet) and cross off the days. See if you can commit to 40 minutes every evening to walking. If you can do it, you will improve your self-discipline and the way you treat your calendar will improve. 

So, decide how much time you want to dedicate to your studies each week. What you are looking for is a baseline… A minimum amount of time you will spend studying each week. Your lectures will be fixed. They go in your calendar first. Then you add the study time. Perhaps you decide you will dedicate two sessions of ninety minutes each week as a minimum. Fix those sessions as repeating events in your calendar each week. They are now non-negotiable. You will do whatever it takes to do those study sessions. 

The key is to schedule the same time each week. Let’s say Monday evening between 8 pm and 9:30 pm and Saturday mornings between 10 am and 11:30 am. These are your fixed, non-negotiable core study times. Once you have established them, you tell everyone these times are non-negotiable. 

At first, your friends and family will try and persuade you to make exceptions. Never make exceptions. Once people realise you are serious about this, they will stop trying to persuade you to do something else. 

Of course, you are likely to increase these sessions once exams and written papers come due. But you still need a minimum requirement each week. 

The next part of your planning is to identify the core tasks that will drive you forward with your goal. There is always something. If you listened to last week’s episode where I explained the difference between a core task and an area of focus, you will understand the importance of your core tasks. 

Your core tasks are the tasks that move the goal or project forward. It's the time you spend in the gym, it’s the time you spend writing the blog posts or the book, it’s time you spend reviewing your course notes and studying. Your core, critical tasks are the tasks that get the work done. 

Okay, so you know what your core tasks are, these need to go on your calendar. If you are using your calendar correctly, then your commitments will already be on your calendar. So what you are looking for are the gaps. If there are no gaps, you're overcommitted. You will need to review your commitments and reassess your priorities. 

That can be very hard. Let’s say you always meet up with your friends for a Saturday morning brunch and it’s something you really look forward to. But what happens if Saturday morning is also the best time for you to do some solid studying? 

Now you have the classic choice between something you love doing and doing something you know you should do for your future. This is where your “why” for doing something comes in. If you why for doing something is strong enough you will make that sacrifice. If it is not, you will not be prepared to make the sacrifice.

As I have said many times before, “if it’s important enough you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse” and nothing illustrates this more than when you have a conflict between something you enjoy doing and something you know you should do. This is where the strength of your why will come in. 

If your why is strong enough you will instinctively know that the right thing to do is to spend one or two hours on a Saturday morning studying. It could mean you wake up one or two hours earlier on a Saturday, get your studying in and then reward yourself by having brunch with your friends. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. 

The important thing is that you get your scheduled study time in. That is your primary objective. Once that’s done you are free to do whatever else you want to do.

The difficulty with managing your time is the responsibility is on you. Nobody else. You cannot delegate the management of what you do with your time to someone else and then complain you don’t have enough time. This is your time. You need to protect it. 

It fascinates me when people tell me they cannot manage their time because their boss is always giving them more work to do. Sure, that’s what bosses are supposed to do. But zoom out a little here. When you signed your employment contract you decided to give X amount of time five days a week to a company and in return, they agreed to pay you a certain amount of money. It’s a win for you and it’s a win for your company. 

Within those hours each day, you give to your employer you need to manage the work that comes in. You can learn to become more efficient with the way you do your work, you could ask your boss to reduce your workload. There is a multitude of things you could do. Complaining is not an effective way to manage time. Accepting the problem, reviewing your options and then making a decision to do something positive about it is how you become better at your work and better at managing what you do with the time you are given each day. 

I hope that has helped, Stephen. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.

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