Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day”

When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue.

Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want.

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Script |422

Hello, and welcome to episode 422 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.

One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus.

There are eight areas that we all share. These are:

Family and relationships.
Career or business
Health and fitness
Finances
Lifestyle and life experiences
Self-development
Spirituality
Life’s purpose

The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you.

The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ.

This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up.

Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose.

This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities.

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

This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me?

Hi Annie, thank you for your question.

This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do.

This is where having some structure built into your week can help.

Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week.

From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example.

The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable.

For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days.

Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training.

Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture.

I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university.

University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night.

There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”

And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true.

You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on.

I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him.

As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season.

I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”.

After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him.

Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities.

And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you.

It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away.

This is why time blocking, when done right, works.

Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example.

No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone.

It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours.

But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week.

When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have.

Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it.

Yet there’s a fix for that.

Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm.

Now you have the two most important numbers.

When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need.

That means the question becomes, when will you do it?

If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed.

And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it.

This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team.

The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does.

A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic.

I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.

In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart.

At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way bac...