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Your Time, Your Way

Your Time, Your Way

Written by: Carl Pullein
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 Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.Copyright 2024 Carl Pullein International. All rights reserved. Economics Management Management & Leadership Self-Help Success
Episodes
  • Managing "AI-Generated Work Bloat"

    Managing "AI-Generated Work Bloat"
    Jan 25 2026
    You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year? That’s what I’m answering this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Take the Time Sector System Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 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. Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today. Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”. All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more. I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself. And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be. Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers. It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from. Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task. Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary. It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question. AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised. It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially. I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious. There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes. Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails. However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today. I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so ...
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    17 mins
  • How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents

    How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents
    Jan 18 2026
    Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 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. Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files. In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic. The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today. And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes. The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents. The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated. Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find. So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question. A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year. Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know. What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated. So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries) Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year. Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales. All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened) I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates. If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year. You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder. Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015. The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders. For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder. How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them. I would suggest starting at the current year ...
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    16 mins
  • Mastering GAPRA: A Simple Structure for Your Digital Life

    Mastering GAPRA: A Simple Structure for Your Digital Life
    Jan 11 2026
    WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey. And now, let us begin. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 400 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. 15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years. This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points. Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure. It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, 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 Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important? Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question. When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation. Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them. Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes. Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists. And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world. It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough. Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection. That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today. Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents. These were all original thoughts and observations. Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books. What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini. This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude. But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes. Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored. When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45. And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. ...
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    15 mins
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