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Your Time, Your Way

Your Time, Your Way

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 Personal Development Personal Success
Episodes
  • How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity

    How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity
    Apr 19 2026
    “I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.” I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself. In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith 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 | 413 Hello, and welcome to episode 413 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. 1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving. The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends. And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life. It could be asked, what went wrong? I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”. What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination. You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well. The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times. Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break. Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together. Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people. But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”. It was down your tools and go out. This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available” If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour. What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect. If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write. This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate. What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump. Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know. Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic). This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner. After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the ...
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    15 mins
  • How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement

    How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement
    Apr 12 2026
    Podcast 412 Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme 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 | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 412 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. Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve. When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes. The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers. It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”. I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English. Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live. Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching. It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching. In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb? Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control. I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption. Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court. The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession. However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject. Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are: The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli. The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow. When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough) I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose. All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle. That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week). Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning. This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn. A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using ...
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    14 mins
  • Lessons in Purpose and Productivity When Planning Your Retirement

    Lessons in Purpose and Productivity When Planning Your Retirement
    Apr 5 2026
    Podcast 411 Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do. It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith 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 | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 411 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. I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives. It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely? This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose. But what do you want to do? As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”. So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do? And this is important. My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day. He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done. At the age of 60, he retired. His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy. That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist. And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation. I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person. It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair. That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith. Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did. In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year. I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the horse racing calendar. But not only that, Harvey’s written at least four books, and he still doesn’t spend much time in his armchair. If you want to hear Harvey’s words of wisdom, there is a superb YouTube video in which he and Sue are interviewed. I’ll put that video link in the show notes. Harvey is a true Yorkshireman with the wonderful Yorkshire wit. Retirement is not the end. It’s the start of a new chapter in your life. You have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience and likely collected quite a few interests along the way. Retirement is your time to use that knowledge and work on the things that interest you. So what interests you? I’ve had a love of bonsai trees since I was in my twenties. I was probably inspired by the film The Karate Kid. While I have a couple of trees now, I don’t have the time to properly learn to nurture and grow them. However, when the time comes for me to slow down and retire,...
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    15 mins
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