How do I find enough time to do everything!

One of the most common challenges we hear from sales people is lack of time do fit everything in. Whether in front line sales, sales support or sales leadership, demands on our time from our customers, colleagues and our own organisation constantly challenge our ability to think and to plan. 

In this episode of The Luxury Choice podcast, host Steve Vaughan, along with colleagues Jayne Green and Pru Layton, delve into the complexities of time management in today's fast-paced business environment. They discuss the challenges posed by technology, the impact of email as both a tool and a distraction, and share effective strategies for managing time and priorities. The conversation emphasizes the importance of being effective rather than just busy, the necessity of saying no, and the value of planning one's day to enhance productivity.

Steve Vaughan, Jonathan Cooper, Pru Layton, Christian Walter, Pascal le Floche and Jayne Green are Sales Trainers from george james ltd. You can email the show at: Podcast@georgejames-training.com

The trainers on LinkedIn:

Steve Vaughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-vaughan-salestrainer/
Jonathan Cooper https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cooper-18716b1/
Pru Layton https://www.linkedin.com/in/pru-layton-b46a3528/
Christian Walter https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-walter-a1857b1/
Jayne Green https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-green-salestrainer/
Pascal Le Floch-Riche https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-le-floch-220ba46/


george james training website https://georgejames-training.com/

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:01)
Hello again and welcome to The Luxury Choice, a B2B sales and business podcast brought to you by the training team of George James Limited. My name is Steve Vaughan. I'm a sales trainer at George James and I'm also the host and producer of this podcast. And today I have my two colleagues, Jayne Green and Pru Layton with me. So Jayne, Pru, how are you both? How are things?

Pru (00:21)
Go first Jayne.

Jayne Green (00:22)
we've all been very polite. Yeah, very well. Thanks, Steve. Thank you. Yeah. I can see a little bit of a nice sunshine out of my window today. So that's always very, very welcome.

Steve Vaughan (00:23)
One of you.

Good.

Yeah, same here.

Yeah, and you prove you

Pru (00:37)
Yeah, I'm really good actually. I'm planning a holiday. It's nothing better than planning a holiday. yeah, so I'm going to go to Hungary. I've never been before. So yeah, planning a couple of weeks on Lake Balaton. I'll let you know later in the year how it was.

Steve Vaughan (00:43)
it's great.

wow.

You'll love it in Hungary, I think. Yeah,

Jayne Green (00:55)
beautiful.

Steve Vaughan (00:56)
I've been to Budapest a few times. And one of my best memories is if you like red wine, it's a nice place to go. but we won't go any further on that. Let's just part that thought. You got a holiday coming up, Jayne, anytime soon?

Jayne Green (01:09)
Well, so I'm also planning, shock and horror maybe, to go inter-railing, but via hotels, not in hostels, because I'm not that age anymore. So yeah, with a hope to go around about five cities and sort of hop around a couple of nights each city or so and explore. So yeah, can't wait, later in the year.

Steve Vaughan (01:14)
Wow. Amazing.

You

That'd be amazing.

That'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, great stuff. Yeah, we've just booked a week in Croatia in June. So the best you're right proof planning a holiday and all that stuff is fantastic. But it does take time to plan a holiday. And that's a very, very, very corny segue into what we're going to talk about today. So today's topic is how do I find enough time to do all the stuff I'm supposed to do? And it's the thing that we hear.

Jayne Green (01:39)
Please feel.

Pru (01:49)
no.

Jayne Green (01:54)
You

Steve Vaughan (02:02)
over and over and over again when we're running training courses. And of course we do have training material on this. I think in today's world, know, we have all this technology that we provided to make things easier for us faster. You know, we've got AI now, we've got smartphones, and yet I think it's never been harder to find time to do stuff in my personal experience. And I'm sure we're to look at that between us today. So we're going to knock around. How do we find

time, how do we manage the time constraints set upon all of us, regardless of our roles in business. So where do we start with this one? It's a big topic. First of all, do you agree with the point I've just made, Pru Do think it's never been more difficult to manage time or to organise ourselves?

Pru (02:52)
Well, I think you're absolutely right. think we all want instant responses to everything. The patience has gone. I recall my first, whenever I do training courses, I try to make people, often make people abused because when I first was in sales, I used to have customers wrote to me, wrote to me, put envelopes and stuck stamps on letters to

Steve Vaughan (02:58)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (03:15)
Letters!

Steve Vaughan (03:15)
wrote to you.

Gosh.

Pru (03:21)
request

quotations. And now it's like, you know, we have this instant world and we're part of it. So we can't point the finger. And anyone who's been in any one of my programs knows that I often introduce it by saying the interesting things about being in a commercial role in this industry is that you will never ever get to the end of any working day, close your computer and go, I've done everything I need to do today.

It is never going to happen to you again in your working career. Even if you work 16 hours a day on weekends, there's always something else you could do. So it's not about doing more. It's about, it's about really being careful about the things you choose to do. There's that very kind of commonly used phrase. It's not about being busy. It's about being effective. And I think if we, and if you think about

Steve Vaughan (03:51)
is true.

Absolutely, yeah.

But it's never been truer, I think, really.

Pru (04:20)
managing time and finding enough time. It's not enough time to be busy, it's enough time to be effective.

Steve Vaughan (04:27)
Your thoughts on this, Jayne?

Jayne Green (04:29)
Yeah, very true. I think that instant world that we live in now, you know, we expect to reply immediately to anything that we ask for. But also I think we're in a world of, in a business world of many distractions because there are so many tools. There's so many things that we're having to think about, you know, so it becomes a bit distracting. you know, our focus and our minds can be more distracted in terms of the way we approach things.

Steve Vaughan (04:58)
you

Jayne Green (04:58)
So that

ability to ever, you we'll never complete our to-do list like we get to the end of the day, like Pris says. There's always things left on the to-do list and I quite like that, but I do like the satisfaction of ticking things off my to-do list. So if it's a bad day, particularly, I add some things on that I've already done just so that I've got some ticks on that. It's a mindset. It's about keeping a positive mindset when it feels...

Steve Vaughan (05:11)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

It is yes.

Jayne Green (05:27)
maybe too busy and that often can lead to feeling a little bit overwhelmed.

Steve Vaughan (05:32)
Yeah, great thoughts, great thoughts. So we're not a large company, George James, we're not a big corporate organization, although like any company we have our systems and processes, but we've all worked for businesses that are very large corporations with lots of systems and processes and workflows and things.

And one of the things I hear over and over and over again is I've got all this stuff to do for the company and I haven't got enough time to do any selling. know, HR need me to do this and finance need me to do this and legal need me to do this. And has that got worse, do think, in recent times or has it always been there? Am I perhaps overplaying that one at all?

Pru (06:11)
think it's always been there this century. Maybe not last century, but I think it's always been there this century. think that in large organisations, they create their own work and it's not unnecessary because depending on your viewpoint, that's really essential for you to complete what you have to do. But yeah, the bigger the corporation, the tougher it becomes.

Steve Vaughan (06:13)
All right.

No, no, of course.

Pru (06:40)
I don't think it's got worse actually. think it is what it is. I think there are some tools that have made us be able to interact more simply, which has helped a bit, but rather than it helping, it just means that we interact more. But that's up to us, you know. If you want to have lots of stuff in your inbox, number one, reply instantly.

Steve Vaughan (07:01)
Okay.

Pru (07:09)
Number two, reply to all. you get an email in and you reply instantly, then you will get lots of other instant responses. And that reply to all button or default is awful because other people join in. And I think it proliferates communication and partly that's our dis- we should have that discipline ourselves. I hate that button reply to all.

Steve Vaughan (07:37)
No, me too. I deleted

from Outlook if I could. Yeah. Yeah. And the danger and why we say that by the way, dear listeners, if you hit reply to all, then, you know, if you've got seven people, on the email and hit reply to all, you're going to get seven replies potentially. So the whole thing becomes viral and sort of proliferates, doesn't it really? So I'm of an age, but like you're pretty aware, I do remember the world before email, cause you referenced, you know, getting letters from customers. and

Jayne Green (07:53)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (08:04)
Email is a great enabler, but it's also a great time distractor, Jayne, in my experience. And I used to have colleagues, all they seemed to do was write emails all day. That was their job, it seemed. But how do we work with email? How do we make email an enabler rather than a distractor? That's a big question to ask you, but what are your thoughts on that?

Jayne Green (08:25)
Well, email can be great. You know, it's identifying what we want to use emails for because it's brilliant for facts, getting information out, you know, quite quickly. But it doesn't necessarily always get tasks done, you know, but we can use it in a very specific way. If we want to get some instant answers, think we demand that in the way that we work. But of course, an email doesn't necessarily do that.

Steve Vaughan (08:41)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (08:53)
But one of the challenges, of course, with email is that the notification that can come up in the corner of your right hand corner of your computer and you can get very distracted by what happens on emails. And I remember going through a time years ago where that probably was a very recent, more recent thing, actually. And just every email kept popping up in the corner. was trying to get on with a task.

And I was being very specific with the task list and priorities of things to do. And that was great. You know, so had I been being challenged by, you working on your priorities? I could have said, yes, I am. But I'm now being distracted by all of the emails that are coming in because I can now see them, you know, really quickly, even though I've got something else open. so it's, email is great because it gets information out very quickly, know, globally, instantly.

But of course what we tend to then get back is we get all of the disruption that affects our day from it. So use it wisely. Turn off those notifications please. It was the best thing that I ever did with my email just to turn notifications off. And I need to take your advice, not reply to all.

Steve Vaughan (10:02)
Great advice. Do you remember that thing

that would have been Windows 98 or even some of kind of thing, that Clipit thing, the paper clip that used to pop up? I wanted to punch that when it came up on my screen. If you don't know what to talk about, list it, go and look it up on Google. But Pru, you are...

Pru (10:19)
Cool. That was annoying.

Jayne Green (10:19)
yes, yes.

Pru (10:23)
The advice thing.

Jayne Green (10:27)
Bye.

Steve Vaughan (10:29)
the best person I know from being able to manage email and being in control of your email. So would you want to share a little bit about how you do that? Because I think you do brilliantly.

Pru (10:40)
I'm ruthless, Steve. So yeah, I don't have my notifications turned on. So today when I sat at my work desk, opened up my email, of course. But the first thing that opens on my email is my schedule, my calendar, because it told me that I was recording a podcast at nine o'clock this morning so I could get prepared, brush my hair, make sure there was no laundry behind me, all those things you have to do.

Steve Vaughan (10:41)
You are.

You

Pru (11:10)
Because it opened on my calendar, if I'd opened it on the default, which is my inbox, I promise you I would have been drawn into things that had come in overnight. And suddenly I'd probably get a message from you, Steve, saying, Hey, Pru, I think we're doing a podcast this morning. And I'd be like, yeah, sorry, Steve. And hop on, not in the right frame. So, so I'm ruthless about opening on my schedule and letting that define my priority.

Jayne Green (11:20)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (11:27)
Hahaha.

Pru (11:38)
because it's what I've said I'd do today. I only interact with my inbox at fixed times in the day. I'm not, if I'm like today, I'm working from home. I'm not saying I only do it at 10 o'clock, but I'll only have two sessions on my email today that fit in with the other priorities I have. And it means that I don't, I can actually like bulk process emails and often.

Steve Vaughan (11:56)
Amazing.

Yeah.

Pru (12:05)
When I hop into an email chain, by the time I've addressed it, it's all sorted. I have to do nothing. But if I'd immediately responded to it, I would have been, had to do more work and lots of people trying to resolve things. So I'm really don't interact with my email that often. I put my out of office on and I stick to it. How many people say, well, I put my out of office on, but then reply. So what are you telling your, what are you telling your colleagues?

Steve Vaughan (12:27)
You do.

Great point. And your customers for that matter, yeah.

Jayne Green (12:34)
Mm-hmm.

Pru (12:35)
You're saying actually, and your customers, yeah, I'm

out of office, I can't reply. And so the next time that you really are out of office and we were talking about holidays, they feel let down because, they normally reply though, because I'm special. So yeah, stick to your rules. So that's probably the things that I do, but I definitely never reply to all.

Steve Vaughan (13:00)
And when I've covered this in training courses myself, and as you say, Jayne, I totally agree about switching off the notifications. What I'll get sometimes is that, but I don't want people to think I'm not around. I want people to be really responsive. I want to help my customers. So if we do what Prou says, and I think we should, how do we deal with that sort of built in desire to be as flexible and responsible as we can to our customers, which is an admirable thing to have. How do we manage that, without, you know,

Jayne Green (13:25)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Vaughan (13:29)
disconnecting ourselves from that sort of alert that comes up on our computers. How do we manage that so we feel we are still responsible and responsive, shall I say, to our customers?

Jayne Green (13:39)
we take control of it. I think it's the only thing we can do with that is to try and own that, but not by being super responsive to everything that comes in. I've been in a training session and seen people replying to their computers are down, but if the computer is up, which is the of the horror moment, and somebody's replying to that email that's come in.

Steve Vaughan (13:41)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (14:05)
You know, what it's it distracts us. So how do we take, let's take control over that moment, you know, not by having to respond straight away. know, typically nobody's going to die and the world isn't going to end if we don't reply to an email straight away when it's come in, you know, and often if people and people overuse it, there's sometimes on an email, it's at high importance.

Steve Vaughan (14:20)
No.

Jayne Green (14:30)
Yeah, that might, I kind of don't like that. I sometimes want to avoid those a bit more, if I'm honest. But if they were used truly, then that would be really helpful. If it's that high important, then maybe pick up the phone to me, you know, and have a conversation. But I think it's taking ownership, isn't it, of that. But for somebody that is very driven to respond very quickly, I think when we're sometimes new in a role, we want to respond quickly. We want to show that we're keen, that we're listening, that we're available.

Steve Vaughan (14:47)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (15:00)
But actually we may not have, if we start to train ourselves and our mindset is that we've got to respond super quickly, we're not really giving ourselves thought process to be able to deal with what needs to come up and how we need to handle that response. If we are responding to the notification, it often means we'll have probably sent that email and want to withdraw that email because we've, gosh, I've actually not thought about that properly. So there's a real danger.

Steve Vaughan (15:11)
That's a great point.

Jayne Green (15:28)
in being really responsive too quickly. Give yourself some thinking time, give yourself some processing time and then work out when an email comes in. When is the appropriate time with your priorities of the day to deal with that?

Steve Vaughan (15:30)
There is.

That's a super point. And I think, you know, we all carry around these super high tech computers in our pocket called mobile phones. And if it is really, really, really, really business critically urgent, you know, I know you prove I'll give you a call. And, you know, why not say the same thing to our customers? You know, if it absolutely is, you know, if you really need to get on me quickly, give me a call, you know, leave me a voice, my message doesn't necessarily I can, I'll pick it up.

But if we do just get into that mindset, I've got to respond to every email that comes in immediately, then recognize the impact it's going to have really on your planning, your prioritization. It's going to be impossible really, because you're always dealing with things that aren't your control really. And I want to pick up on that point now, if I can just move on to something slightly different really, and that is things that we can control versus things that we are affected by and things that we can influence as well really.

I find particularly with new people in the commercial world, they find that very difficult to understand the difference between those things. what are your thoughts on things that we can control versus things that we are impacted by and how that affects our ability to manage time?

Pru (16:50)
Well, if you think about, if you think about the sphere of influence, you know, in terms of what am I in control, what can I influence and what is out of my control, a very classic model in relationship to time, the things that you can control, you can control the time that those things take. You can control how much time you do it. You can define the importance of it, how much time you should spend on it.

Steve Vaughan (17:11)
Yeah.

Pru (17:18)
and how to do it. you're normally it's within your, as well as in your control, it's within your competency. The further away we move from that, the more time energy we can use up with having less and less impact. It's further and further away from us. So if we have something in our business that's driving us mad, and I know all the listeners will be making a mental list now of all the things within their own business that drive them mad.

Steve Vaughan (17:24)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Precephalists, yeah.

Pru (17:50)
And turning over the page and writing again. You know, those are things that we can waste so much time on, but we have no impact on them. You know, we waste time stressing about it. We waste time talking to our colleagues, dare I say complaining about it, using up all that useful time. And it's actually something that we really cannot influence. Would be much better working at Hada.

deal with it rather than complain about it and say if only they did their job correctly or if only we got this product or if only we had that and that they're just fruitless frustrating wastes of our time. Focus on what you can do. Focus on what you can have an impact on. It's so much more satisfying and efficient.

Steve Vaughan (18:19)
you

your thoughts on this Jayne.

Jayne Green (18:38)
Yeah, absolutely. It's part of, you know, we get very consumed by things that I do personally and still, and probably will continue to be concerned about things or things that irritate me or things that I would love to see done in a different way. I can get quite consumed by that. I have to work out actually all of my brain matter time, my thinking time, am I spending it all?

on things that don't really have, I've got any influence or control on. You know, when I start to then bring that back in, I used to often draw myself. I had a manager years ago that would draw the big circle of concern. He'd say, right, what are you thinking? And he'd plot all of this. And it was scary when I think back now. And he would go, right, all of these things are in your circle of concern, this kind of very traditional way of looking at it. And then he'd say, right, none of that is in your influence, Jayne.

let's get down to the things that you can influence. And it was very releasing to do that. And I take myself back to that every now and then to say, actually, where am I thinking? What am I actually in work, in life? You know, it's a really good practice. Where am I really? What am I actually thinking about? What's consuming my time, my processing time, my energy? And just bring it down to actually what can I influence? And out of that influence, what can I really focus on?

Steve Vaughan (19:41)
Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Jayne Green (20:04)
What can, what, what, I love the, what three things am I going

to accomplish today that are within my influence? You know, and that starts to really have an effect on how we use our time wisely.

Steve Vaughan (20:18)
Absolutely. Yeah. Great thoughts. when we, you know, we have a, we have a training module on planning and time management and effectiveness. are the things do we hear from the people we're training that they find challenging in this area? What are the things come up? Any other thoughts on that?

Pru (20:39)
think that they... I was thinking of our five golden rules without saying our five golden rules. think email is always number one. People find email the biggest... they feel it's the biggest waste of their time, but when you challenge them, they're contributing to the waste of time. I think the other thing is that comes up is the idea of using one calendar...

Steve Vaughan (20:49)
Yeah.

Correct.

Pru (21:07)
diary schedule, whichever word you would like to use. So whenever I work with someone who says I'm too busy and I don't have enough time, enough hours and days to do everything. The first thing I say is can I have a look at your calendar? And I will guarantee you as they open their calendar schedule, whatever it is, go, oh yeah, not everything I do is on there. And I go, okay, now you don't know.

Steve Vaughan (21:11)
Yeah.

Why?

Pru (21:34)
Now you don't know and

other people don't know what your priorities and how your time is planned. No wonder you're feeling completely like you're not getting everything done. If you don't put it down and look at it and say, is that achievable or is that not achievable? You don't have a hope of lassoing your time. Last year I was at a training program with a big company.

Steve Vaughan (21:40)
Hmm.

Mm.

Pru (22:02)
over a drink, one of the delegates said to me, I just don't have enough time, Puri. I'm like, this is just too much. So I said, let's have a look at your time. And it was the one time when she had everything in her calendar. But I had a look at her calendar and for every day of the week, she had 12 back-to-back Teams calls every day. she was technical support covering a global, she had a global remit.

Steve Vaughan (22:24)
12.

Pru (22:30)
So she was working across multiple time zones and she was technical support and she literally had back to back teams calls. And I said, well, I've only got one piece of advice for you. They said, what's that? I said, learn to use that two letter word, no. You know, if you, if you are in high demand and losing control of your time, you have to learn to say no. You just have to do that because you can't, you're not going to get less to do.

Jayne Green (22:44)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Vaughan (22:53)
Great point.

Pru (22:58)
If you're good, you're always going to be asked to do more. So learning to say no is really important.

Steve Vaughan (23:04)
I think that's a really important point and it's better to say no rather than take on something you take on too much and then let people down in their eyes, you know, by being realistic about this. The one diary one is something that I was very guilty of myself before I joined this company because, you know, my wife runs a wedding photography business, which I help her with. So we had the wedding photography, I had the work diary, I had the personal diary. And what we ended up doing was whenever we had an appointment, we used to email about five different accounts.

the right diaries and it was just nonsense so we got rid of that and you know the beauty of Outlook is of course you can put personal and private events in there mark them as personal and private and yeah it's a real enabler really so what else do you find that Jayne that people say to you when they say they're too busy what other things tend to come up?

Jayne Green (23:54)
well, there's never enough time for absolutely anything. and sometimes it's the tasks. There's never enough time to do, I know whether I dare mention it, X, Y or Z like prospecting because, I just never haven't got enough time for it. And sometimes the things we don't have enough time for are the things that maybe we don't necessarily want to do, or we don't feel as confident doing, you know, sometimes I think we, we go, haven't got enough time to do that because it's the last thing.

Steve Vaughan (23:58)
Of not, no.

That's always the one that slips, isn't it?

Jayne Green (24:24)
on our to-do list every day. And we just don't want to tackle it. know, it's that great advice, isn't it? You know, where it talks about, you know, put the, I think it's Eat That Frog, a great book that, yes. And I love it. You know, it talks about, you know, put the thing that you are dreading or the thing that you don't really want to do, that big project, handle it first.

Steve Vaughan (24:27)
you

Yeah.

Pru (24:39)
Simon Sinek.

Steve Vaughan (24:51)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (24:52)
you

know, deal with it first, because I think what we tend to do is we avoid some of the things that we don't want to do and they just still sit there and they make us feel even more pressured and even more busy because we haven't actually dealt with them. But actually, you know, get on with that as the first task of the day, you know, and get rid of that one or put all of your good effort and energy into it. You feel a lot better when you've managed to tick off something or complete something.

Steve Vaughan (25:05)
completely.

Yeah. That's so good. So important.

Jayne Green (25:21)
that was really, really important, you know, that's been sat there for a while. I had as well a colleague, not a colleague, well, an ex-colleague, but another company, he always said

one of his biggest sort of time savers was rather than every teams meeting that comes up, he would set them at odd times. So if you are a meeting at nine o'clock, he'd set it at five past nine or 10 past nine was the start of the meeting. And it would still finish at something like five to 10.

because he said, let's be face it, often don't fulfill or we overrun by all sorts of garbage in any meeting, you know, so let's give ourselves five minutes or 10 minutes before that meeting, that my nine o'clock meeting, I've given myself 10 minutes to make sure that I'm fully prepared for every meeting I go into and five minutes at the end where I am sorting out things from that meeting. And I thought, great, I'm having that please.

Steve Vaughan (25:50)
I love that.

of that.

Pru (26:11)
No.

Jayne Green (26:19)
But yeah, I still need to set those times in random ways.

Steve Vaughan (26:20)
Yeah. Brilliant, I love that.

Next time we record a podcast, it's gonna be at 9.23 in 14 seconds or something like that. So you're nodding away to that one. That's one you obviously agree with as well.

Jayne Green (26:28)
Perfect.

Pru (26:34)
Yeah, I was thinking that eat that frog books very good. And what he says is, that if you have lots of frogs that need to be eaten, i.e. lots of tasks to do, eat the ugliest one first. Because after that, everything gets better. And I think in terms of if you have something you've been putting off, we just before this, recorded this podcast, actually, we were talking about something as a team that we are putting off.

Steve Vaughan (26:37)
It is.

Jayne Green (26:47)
Yes.

Steve Vaughan (26:48)
Hahaha!

We

are, yeah.

Pru (27:04)
I'm doing. So where is guilty?

Jayne Green (27:04)
you

Pru (27:08)
You know, it's about doing that in a couple of ways. One, get it done. But secondly, understand when you are in the best frame, you're kind of, you know, some of us are morning people, some of us are afternoon people. If you have a big important task to do, schedule it when you know your energy levels are high. Because a task that is going to be important, but tough to do will

Jayne Green (27:20)
Hmm, true.

Steve Vaughan (27:26)
a great point.

Jayne Green (27:27)
Yeah.

Pru (27:33)
will use up your energy levels. you do it towards the end of the day when you've done lots of other things, you'll probably end up having to do it again. So you may delay it. yeah, manage those important tasks. And we talk a lot about making a to-do list for every day. Some of us have these very long to-do lists, which we've been annotating for a number of months.

Steve Vaughan (27:35)
you

That's a really good point.

Pru (27:59)
And I always say, I'll do you a favor, give me a list and I'll shred it for you. And I'll tell you why. you had something on your to-do list three months ago and you haven't done it yet, I challenge you about how important it is. But all it's doing is every time you get your to-do list out, you're being reminded about how ineffective you are. You know, you're being, it's like all these things you haven't done, haven't done that, haven't done that.

Steve Vaughan (28:05)
You

That's a great point.

Mm.

Hmm.

Pru (28:27)
So daily

to-do lists are, I've written my daily to-do list already, of course, for today. And they're just, they said, this is what I'm going to get done today. These are the important things that I achieve and it's a really good way to manage your time.

Steve Vaughan (28:42)
points on this whole topic of things that are difficult to do. used to have a colleague that used to talk about his too hard pile. It's on the too hard pile, Steve. And, uh, and normally cause the things that we find too hard are the things that we probably need to do the most really. conscious of time and managing time, we're coming towards the sort of half hour that we normally do have a podcast. So I'd like to perhaps just get one final thought from both of you in terms of.

Any suggestions or any other thoughts for anybody listening to this thinking I just don't have enough time How can I cope with this? So one from you Jayne anything you'd like to give us a final thought or a gem to pass on?

Jayne Green (29:18)
Yeah,

breathe, take a deep breath sometimes, have a coffee if you are a coffee drinker, but just give yourself a moment when you are planning your day. And I would say just plan your day and either you do that at the end of the day before so that you know what you've got coming the next day or give yourself some time at the beginning of the start of your day, sit down with a coffee, know, a bit of fresh air.

Steve Vaughan (29:21)
Yeah.

Jayne Green (29:48)
and understand the big three things that you need to achieve today and make those your priorities.

Steve Vaughan (29:54)
Great point.

That's a really good point. And I was thinking about that. Only the other night there was a program on the BBC about five years since the pandemic, obviously. And obviously we were all working from home and we do routinely anyway. But what I was finding myself doing then was getting up in the morning, having some breakfast and going straight to my desk and then getting straight into it really.

and I'll stop doing what you suggest, Jayne. what I now do is every morning I'll have 20 minutes where I walk the dog and I mentally run through the things I'm going to do in the day really just make sure I've allocated enough time and also what other priorities are. So I think that's a super point. Whatever it works for you, whether it's going for a run, going for a walk, the gym, whatever works for you as an individual out there, dear listener, just having that sort of 15 minutes to plan the day ahead.

in your mind mentally is a really really good tip. Thank you for that one Jayne. One from you Pru before we wrap up.

Pru (30:47)
Yeah, it just reminds me of somebody I was speaking to during the pandemic, because we did lots of remote training during the pandemic. And she said that she really missed her cycle to work because it started a day. So even though she was working for home, she used to cycle to work. She literally had her breakfast, got on her bike, did a cycle ride, came back home and got on with work. And it made a massive difference to her kind of ability to do it. I think for me,

Steve Vaughan (31:00)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

it.

Pru (31:16)
most of us feel we don't have enough time because we expect too much of ourselves. We think we can get through so much more than we actually can. So if you, when you get, not if, when you get into the discipline of writing your daily to-do list, if you never finish your list ever, you write the things that I am going to get done today and you don't finish it, there's, there's a feedback there. It's telling you, you are

Steve Vaughan (31:23)
point.

Pru (31:44)
underestimating how much time each of these tasks take. So you have to learn to understand your capacity for getting things done. Because there's that phrase, isn't there? If you want something done, ask a busy person. But a busy person is busy doing the things that they know they're capable of doing to the standard they need to be done within the time available. you know,

Don't overestimate how much stuff you can get done. Be realistic and you will be feel so much more in control of your time and learn to say no at the right time.

Steve Vaughan (32:21)
Super point, super point. Thank you both, Jayne, and proof of your thoughts on this today. the whole topic of time management, planning and prioritization is part of our core training material of the training courses that we all run. Just to let you know that if you are looking for training for either for yourself or for your team member, that the dates for all our scheduled training courses are on our website right now. So these are courses that run at a scheduled venue, either in Cambridge or...

Alderley Park in the UK, but we also are now running courses in France and in Switzerland and in Germany 2025 as well. So don't forget to check out those dates on the George James training website. If you have enjoyed today's podcast, then please do leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It does help us in lots of weird and wonderful ways. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to show that way you'll get it coming into your inbox when it comes out every two weeks. I'll be back again with another podcast in two weeks time. In the meantime,

Jayne, Pro, thank you very much. Goodbye to you both. And we'll be back again in two weeks time. Thanks again for your time. I'm going to do that bit again, I think, Anyway.

Stop.

Jayne Green (33:31)
Bleh.