May 3, 2024
Saving Lives & Saving Time - Time Management for The Fire Service With Carl Pullein
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Unlock the secrets to a decluttered mind and soar in efficiency with the insights from productivity master Carl Pullein. In a world of ceaseless demands, Carl's journey from a diverse career to time management mastery offers a treasure trove of strategies for navigating professional and personal complexities. We embrace a philosophy where identifying daily non-negotiables and embracing strategic time blocks isn't just smart—it's essential. With Carl, we learn how to combat email overload, adopt a practice of 'email bankruptcy', and keep our heads clear to ensure we're operating at peak productivity, no matter what life throws our way.
Have you ever wondered how firefighters remain poised in the chaos of an emergency? They, like many professionals, wield time management as a lifesaving skill. This conversation ventures through the landscape of different occupations, from those defined by alarms to careers commanding meticulous routines, like pilots with their pre-flight checklists. We share stories and tips on how small daily efforts can stave off backlogs and why a flexible yet disciplined approach to time blocking can be your ally in the relentless quest for productivity.
But it's not all about to-do lists and schedules; it's about growth and achieving a harmonious life balance. We delve into the power of journaling, goal setting, and recognizing the eight life areas that shape our existence. By sharing personal anecdotes and embracing mentorship, we discover the slow productivity path to success, finding that preparation and digital minimalism pave the way for a more fulfilling life. So join us, with Carl Pullein by our side, as we transform our understanding of time management—for a life that's as efficient as it is enriching.
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Transcript
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This is All Clear Firefighter Health and Wellness, where we help you light your fire within Travis.
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It's good to have you here with us today.
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We have another very special guest.
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We have Carl Pullein, who I have been following for a long time and it's an honor to have you here, carl, why don't you tell us about yourself and tell us about the world we're living in now?
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I know you're a productivity specialist and a time management specialist there's all kinds of words put in there but why don't you tell us about yourself and tell us how those things are relevant to what we're doing?
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Just to give you a brief background.
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I think in my 20s I was doing all sorts of kinds of different jobs, so I started in hotel management, I then did car sales and then I finally decided I wanted to go into law, and after six years of studying law and then I got a job in a law firm, and suddenly I'm working in an office and I went oh dear, this is not for me.
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I felt like a prisoner and, unfortunately, after six years of, obviously, of studying and the cost investment as well, the financial investment I was uh oh, I've made a mistake here.
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So I took some time out and came to Korea, which is to teach English for a year, and 22 years later, I'm still living in Korea, although I don't really teach English anymore.
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Back in 2015, I decided to pursue my I suppose you can really only describe it as a passion for time management and productivity methods and that kind of thing and I started writing about it.
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Then I started a YouTube channel and then then I started my podcast and everything just grew from there.
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So over the last seven or eight years, my whole business has changed from teaching English to now basically specializing in productivity and time management globally, and so that's been my journey.
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So I've been living in Korea, south Korea, for, yeah, 22 years this year, and it does feel very much like home now.
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That's good.
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And to fill our listeners in on how I found out about you, I was tasked with some professional development and the caveat was we need to find professional development that's not from the fire service.
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So I've got to learn about something leadership related.
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Particularly after I got promoted, things became a little bit more managerial for lack of a better term and I realized I had a million emails coming in, a million things I needed to do and I needed to figure out how to do it.
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And I came across you on YouTube and I've watched many of your episodes that you've done.
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But one of the things that really caught my attention that has helped me more than anything has been time blocking or setting out blocks of time to do things.
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Also doing brain dumps.
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I think that's something you talk about clearing your mind because it it's not so much about for me, for the productivity I've got to get as much done as I can in eight hours, but it's more along the lines of being efficient at what I'm doing and making sure my mind stays in the game while I'm doing it, not becoming overloaded.
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What's your expertise for using our mind to get our work done?
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I don't think it matters if we're firefighters, if we're lawyers or bankers, it doesn't matter.
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We all have to have our mind clear.
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So what are some strategies you can recommend for that?
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Well, that's absolutely true, and I think a lot of people tend to forget that they have a personal life as well, and you don't just have a professional life, you have a personal life and both actually need managing the life and both actually need managing the time side of that needs managing.
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So one of the principles that I have and particularly I work when I'm working with my coaching clients, for example is we have to establish what are your non-negotiables each day, both personally and professionally.
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Now I can take a really simple example for most people, particularly working in an administrative role maybe not so much a firefighter who's at the front end of everything, going out to deal with fires.
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That might be a little bit different, although they will still have core work to deal with, which we'll come to in a moment.
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But let's just take an administrative role.
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There are two things that are inevitably going to happen.
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First, you're going to have a load of email to deal with and secondly, you're going to have like admin.
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Now, admin doesn't mean the actual job.
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It means things like doing expenses, dealing with requests from human resources departments and that sort of thing.
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But they're inevitable.
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They just come up every day.
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So you need to set aside time for this.
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If you don't set aside time, for instance, for dealing with that email, it's just going to back up and back up and back up until eventually you've got no choice but to declare what I call email bankruptcy, because I think I have one at one client.
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A few weeks months ago she had 60,000 emails in her inbox.
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So I did a kind of a quick calculation on this and said if you're willing to spend the next I think it was five and a half months doing nothing but email, you might catch up.
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And I said are you willing to do that?
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And she said I can't do that because I've got to do my job.
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I said, yeah, exactly.
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So what we need to do is we've got to declare bankruptcy at some point.
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So it's a matter of taking the time we're going to keep the last month or the last week or the last 10 days, you get to choose.
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But now the strategy to avoid that in the future is to say, ok, I need 45 minutes or an hour each day to deal with my actionable email, because we get a load of different types of email.
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We get stuff that we don't need to read, stuff we might need to keep and stuff we need to respond to.
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You need to really set aside an hour or so for just dealing with that actionable email.
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So that's one hour of your day.
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But if you can protect that time as in time, block that.
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Now, in my case, I'm flexible on this.
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Sometimes I'll do it at 4pm and sometimes I'm thinking I'm not in the mood, like today the sun's shining, I might think I'm not going to go and do that, I'll do it after dinner.
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I don't mind when I do my email whether it's before or after dinner, but I do actually quite enjoy now just sitting down saying, right, for the next hour it's just deal with my actionable email.
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So that's one example of time blocking.
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But then I mentioned earlier about this thing called core work.
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Now, core work is the work that you actually employed to do, so everyone's going to be different here.
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I consider myself more these days as probably being a content creator, so it just helps me to understand what I need to do each week, and so each week I have six pieces of content to create.
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So to do that I need time.
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Now, time isn't going to miraculously appear.
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I've got to find that time on my calendar, and so that's what I generally start the week at doing is saying where am I going to do this content?
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I actually calculate it takes me about 12 hours a week to do my content.
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So I've got, if we do a five-day week, I've got five hours of communication, 12 hours of creating content, but that's only 17 hours and most people are employed 40 hours a week.
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So that's only half your week, half your working week, so the other time you can be available for meetings and for other people and that's essentially the basics of it.
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I mean, we need flexibility and there's probably sometimes you've got project work to do and stuff like that, but essentially it's really understanding what is that core work that you are actually employed to do each day.
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That needs to be externalized written down.
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That is a good point.
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And, to back up, one of the things you talked about that hit a chord with me when I first started down my journey of a more of an admin role was that about actionable things actionable emails, actionable phone calls, things like that and one of the things I did I'm not going to get into the technical end of it because I know you've got a ton of videos on setting up Mac workflows and things like that but I know that one of the things I did.
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We use Microsoft Outlook at our organization and I learned how to do filters.
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So when email comes in, if it's from certain people, like my chief, it gets pushed to a certain folder.
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That means if I see the little read number there, I need to jump on that right now.
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But there are some things that are like newsletters.
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I don't need to read that right now and it'll automatically go to a different folder.
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So I've actually got my workflow that comes into my inbox and that does a lot of sorting for me, because my brain isn't sharp enough to do all that at one time, but that has helped me tremendously so I don't get overloaded when it's coming in.
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What things do I need to do right now and which things do I not need to do?
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But the other key factor that you mentioned, too, is blocking out time for your job.
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Now a lot of the guys are listening here.
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If you have a house fire, come up, if you have a car accident, whatever the case is, you might have to stop checking your email for about an hour to go deal with whatever is emergent.
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But at the end of the day, we all have the same things to do.
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Even if you're a firefighter that's on the line, you still need to read the emails and the bulletins that come from the chief and things like that.
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So it is important for us to get things square, because email is in everybody's life now and getting that communication tamed, I think, is a huge factor.
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But yeah, I like what you talk about actionable items the interesting thing there is all jobs are different and firefighting is.
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I don't know if you still have the bell or the alarm that goes off in the fire station?
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Yes, we do, but when that?
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happens.
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That's your trigger.
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That's okay.
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Whatever I'm doing in front of this computer is no longer important.
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Right.
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Something else is way more important and that, in a way, to me is fantastic, because a lot of people's problems is they're struggling to prioritize, and in firefighting you've got number one priority and there's a trigger which is the bell or the alarm.
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Whatever goes off at the station.
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Do you still have the poles as well?
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One of our stations does, but yeah, that's more of a US thing that some of the older departments have it.
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But yeah, when the bell goes off and the tones go off, it's time to go do your main job, and that's the thing.
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So the beauty of that, though, is that you've got it.
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When you start your shift, when you start your working day, you've actually there is a trigger that's going to trigger you to say this is the priority.
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There's no negotiating.
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You can't say oh finish this email, just take me another five minutes.
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There's none of that.
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It's great, because you've got that trigger that says okay, now we go and do our job, and a lot of office workers, unfortunately, don't have that, and they don't have anything that's going to trigger them to say this is the priority, and then they get themselves into all sorts of mess at the end of the day because they've run out of time around the firehouse.
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The other things, if it's not an emergency.
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It's time for meals very serious.
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And when the favorite tv show comes on whether it's judge, judy or whatever, the soap opera is, you got to stop for that too.
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So there are a few things that will bring halt to your day.
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But yeah, for the most part I agree with what you say.
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We have triggers that let us know when it's time to shift gears.
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So the difficulty there is the unpredictability.
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So one of the beauties of time blocking is that what I try to do, and try to get people to do, is to fix the blocks in the week, because that's less decision making.
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Obviously, with firefighting you're not going to have that luxury, you're not going to be able to say between 8am and 9am I deal with my actionable email, because maybe four days out of five can do it, but at 8 30 one day that bell's gonna go off and that's it.
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You've got to stop.
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But that then actually leads to an interesting one, because one of the problems I think sometimes is we'll take advice from somebody, say all right, that's it, that's great.
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I block an hour out every single day and I'm going to do my email.
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The thing is life isn't quite a straight line and you've got to build in flexibility.
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So I like an hour to do my actionable email, but some days I've only got 30 minutes and I work tend to say to people work on the principle of one is greater than zero.
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So just because you can't find an hour in a day, maybe you can find 20 minutes and just say, okay, for the next 20 minutes I'm going to deal with this email.
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What you're doing is you're creating a cycle.
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So some days you may only do 20 minutes, 35 minutes, maybe 40.
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Other days you think actually I've got 90 minutes.
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I'm just going to sit down and just get on with it.
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As long as you're doing a little bit every day, you're never going to build a backlog.
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You might have a few extra one day, but then you'll catch up the next day.
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Yeah, and that is something that that is very true and particularly for guys, that may be their own shift.
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They work for a full 24 hours.
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Then they won't be back to the firehouse for two days, for a full 48 hours.
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They may not touch their email from work and when they get back it could be a little heavier.
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Sometimes it's not, but that is a very good point.
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Learn to prioritize your time and block it out as much as you can and focus on what you need to do, like in our jobs.
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A lot of times we'll have like checklists we have to go through.
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We'll have to check the truck out when we get on duty different things like that.
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That those require focus to do those things and they become like habit.
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Like you're talking about blocking your time that reminds me of the pilots I've spoken to and I said would you have, if you're running a little bit late, would you ever skip the walk around the plane?
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And they just look to me and says, are you serious?
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There's no way.
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They would never, ever take.
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They would rather delay the flight than skip any any of those safety checks.
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On a checklist it says that's how we stay alive, that's how we keep the passengers alive.
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We do those checks exactly, but one of the challenges that I know I face still face is when you have so much going on, your head gets I call it mental static.
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You get okay, I've got to do this, I need to call this department, I need to talk to this chief, I need to do payroll, and you start going through all these things and if you start on Monday worrying about it, by Friday your brain is so full of stuff that maybe you haven't got around to.
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I know, writing it down seems simple, but sometimes, when I am really stressed out and my head is so full of static, I will literally sit down, I'll get out my notebook that I carry with me and I will just start making notes.
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Okay, I need to do this and it won't be in any coherent order, but that gives me a way to pour out what's in my mind.
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Is that a skill that's important for us to be able to master, regardless of what our careers are?
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It is, and it's one of the best things that you can do each week as well.
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I tend to advise people is to me, a nice big A4 piece of paper is probably the best productivity tool you'll ever have, because I want a nice pen.
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A pen that you like to write with always helps.
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Actually.
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I did this in a video recently.
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I've got to try and get this balanced, so I divide my piece of paper you can probably just about see that into four sections.
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So we've got core work, projects, issues, personal and radar, and I divide the piece of paper into four.
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Now this is a great way to just start.
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I suppose we'd call it a brainstorming session.
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Now the core work, as I mentioned before, that's the work you actually employ to do.
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It's the non-negotiable part of your contract of employment, if you like.
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That goes down first.
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Now the thing is, if you're doing this every week, that's just going to be the same every week, but it's always a good idea to still write it out.
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It takes me maybe 90 seconds, two minutes, to write that out each week, but it's a reminder that whatever happens, that has to be done.
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And then the top right corner, which is projects and issues.
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That's where you're brainstorming your professional life.
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It's thinking I've got to do this for the captain, I've got to do this for this, I've got to do that for that.
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Just get it all written down.
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This is a project, I'm working on a new payroll system or something.
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These are the projects.
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Just get it on the sheet of paper.
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It doesn't mean you have to do them next week, but it's just getting it all out of your head.
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And then, as I said, bottom left is going to be your personal life.
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So is there anything going on in the personal life that you need to attend to?
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Do you need to doctor's appointment, or do you need to do something else, take the car in for service or something?
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Or perhaps you fall behind on your personal exercise program, which I find I'm writing every week, yep, and then the, which is what I like is the most interesting thing, which is the things that you need to know about but don't necessarily need to do anything with next week.
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So you're only looking ahead a week.
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You're not looking beyond that because things change too fast.
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So you only want to be concerning yourself over the next seven days, and it's a good idea to either do this at the beginning of the week or the end of the week.
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It doesn't really matter when you do it, but just that physical action of putting a pen in your hand and a piece of paper and just writing out all the things that you think oh, I must remember to do this, oh, I must do that, it.
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All it'll do if you don't get it out is spin around in your head, and it does exhaust you.
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The brain is an amazing thing and it uses up an incredible amount of energy.
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I heard somewhere that if you just stayed in bed and didn't move, you'd still burn 1,800 calories a day.
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And I'm thinking and a lot of that is going from the it's life supporting energy, but it's also a lot going on in your head.
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So getting it out of that head will just slow things down nicely and then you can start deciding okay, I'm going to do that on Wednesday, I'll do that on Thursday, I can do that on Monday.
00:17:53.102 --> 00:18:03.748
You can start looking at it and deciding when you're going to do it, and there you can use digital tools, or you may use your calendar, or you can just use a different color pen and just put the day next to it.
00:18:05.934 --> 00:18:15.083
Those are all very good strategies and I've employed a lot of those myself, and getting things down out of your head is spectacularly helpful.
00:18:15.083 --> 00:18:30.262
It helps with your mental fitness, it helps you visualize what you have going on and one in two ways that I've found that doing those types of things almost like journaling that has come in handy for me is number one.
00:18:30.262 --> 00:18:34.135
If I've got something that's on my mind that's bothering me.
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Maybe it's a professional situation at work.
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How do I deal with this situation?
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How do I resolve this problem?
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When I find myself writing stuff down, if I hang on to it for more than just a day, I can look back.
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It's like, oh, that's been on three of my sheets.
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Maybe that is something and you'll start to see patterns and that's been very helpful to me in resolving conundrums that I get into.
00:18:58.362 --> 00:18:59.986
Or maybe personnel things.
00:18:59.986 --> 00:19:04.246
Maybe there's a code question about how should we apply the FHIR code in a certain situation.
00:19:04.246 --> 00:19:14.468
If I go back and look at how I've been thinking about stuff, it's oh wait, this has been a common thought that I've had throughout the last month and that's been very helpful to me.
00:19:14.468 --> 00:19:15.430
Is that something?
00:19:15.430 --> 00:19:19.467
That's also a benefit of doing these writing sessions and putting everything down?
00:19:20.249 --> 00:19:29.736
it is because you'll find that in the projects issues and in the radar you keep writing down the same things week after week, which is actually why I keep all my plans in one book.
00:19:29.736 --> 00:19:34.169
I don't tear them out or throw them away, I just keep it all in a ring because I can always go back.
00:19:34.169 --> 00:19:45.008
You know it's only three or four sheets back and I can see what I was writing last week and say wait a minute, this is coming around for the last three or four weeks and I still haven't acted on it.
00:19:45.008 --> 00:19:47.766
And then I can decide next week.
00:19:47.826 --> 00:20:00.795
I must do the very first thing, whatever that very first thing may be, and going along with that, one of the things that we here on our podcast talk about is to build the best firefighter possible.
00:20:00.795 --> 00:20:04.607
We hear on our podcast talk about is to build the best firefighter possible.
00:20:04.607 --> 00:20:08.281
Improve your life on all levels, whether it be your physical fitness, your mental fitness, your financial fitness, whatever it is.
00:20:08.281 --> 00:20:20.885
Be the best you can be, and a lot of that involves setting goals, and goal setting is something that I think every, every career, every trade has some version of it.
00:20:20.885 --> 00:20:35.217
But in the fire service promotion, trying to figure out projects that will help you to develop professionally are huge, and a lot of times we don't always know which direction to go or we don't know how to start down that road.
00:20:35.217 --> 00:20:44.262
How can goal setting be accomplished?
00:20:44.282 --> 00:20:45.305
by being productive with our use of time.
00:20:45.305 --> 00:20:57.817
I don't know if that question makes sense or not it does, and actually with goal setting there's always a missing piece that I noticed that people tend to go straight to the goal but they don't really know what the underlying, what I call the areas of focus are.
00:20:58.378 --> 00:21:08.207
Now we all have eight areas of focus, and they relate to finances, health and fitness, family and relationships, professional career, lifestyle, life experiences.
00:21:08.207 --> 00:21:09.625
There's a lot of stuff in there.
00:21:09.625 --> 00:21:19.867
There's only eight, but now, if you can define what those eight areas of focus are first, that then gives you clarity on what you need to do for your goals.
00:21:19.867 --> 00:21:25.450
So let's just take the career and professional development, and you want to become a fire chief.
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If you're in your first year as a firefighter, you've probably got a long road to go.
00:21:32.343 --> 00:21:35.359
Now the thing is you've got to go step by step.
00:21:35.359 --> 00:21:36.662
You don't go from one year.
00:21:36.662 --> 00:21:39.944
You know, after one year of fire service, suddenly you're the chief, it's not going to happen.
00:21:39.944 --> 00:21:41.487
You know, suddenly you're the chief, it's not going to happen.
00:21:41.487 --> 00:21:42.448
That's not the way it works.
00:21:42.448 --> 00:21:47.575
But finding out how the promotion track is.
00:21:47.575 --> 00:22:00.248
But more importantly and this is something that I actually learned from Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn which is find somebody who's already doing what you want to do and then track back how they did it.
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Find a mentor You're not going to copy them.
00:22:03.165 --> 00:22:14.907
But you're going to see, ah, this guy did two years or three years in a fire station and then he or she went off into this area and then they did this development.
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Now that's going to give you a blueprint.
00:22:18.028 --> 00:22:24.833
And I remember a quote from Jim Rohn which sort of said success leaves clues.
00:22:24.833 --> 00:22:41.147
And so I've always I've loved that If I want to make a multi-million dollar business, I need to look at somebody who's in a similar kind of business to mine, who's already doing it, and then track back what have they done?
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How have they developed?
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What have they learned?
00:22:43.904 --> 00:22:44.847
What are they reading?
00:22:45.127 --> 00:22:53.321
These days we're so lucky because of the internet we can find all this out pretty much on linkedin, you know, it's not difficult to get this information anymore.
00:22:53.321 --> 00:22:56.971
One of my other fascinations is going back leonardo da vinci.
00:22:56.971 --> 00:23:02.893
I've just been reading his autobiography and you know, we know we say oh, wow.
00:23:02.893 --> 00:23:11.333
But the Mona Lisa, for example, which is the most famous painting he was drawing lips 20 years before he made that painting.
00:23:11.333 --> 00:23:19.470
He was learning how to put that they call it the enigmatic smile into paint 20 years before he painted that painting.
00:23:19.470 --> 00:23:27.369
And so all this like knowledge he was gaining led him to eventually being able to paint the Mona Lisa.
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If he tried it 20 years earlier, he wouldn't have been able to do it.
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He wouldn't have had that experience.
00:23:31.861 --> 00:23:55.627
Small steps lead to a big payoff, oh absolutely yeah, and organic growth is better than trying to force it, because if you try and force it and get there I want to be the fastest to becoming fire chief that's probably a good goal, but you might be missing something important, and I find that organic growth is usually the one that's most fulfilling, and you're also going at your own pace.
00:23:55.627 --> 00:23:56.932
You're not going to burn yourself out.
00:23:58.099 --> 00:24:26.484
Yeah, and that's very true, and one of the things that is somewhat common to our industry is that you'll have someone who maybe is doing their job as a volunteer at a department where you know they might get paid a little bit or a little bit of reimbursement, but it's not true professional development all the time and they have to really scramble to try to put pieces together themselves and, like you said, finding a mentor.
00:24:26.484 --> 00:24:32.666
Okay, this guy did what I want to do and they have to put in extra time and extra effort to do it.
00:24:32.666 --> 00:24:35.532
While they're maybe being a mechanic or whatever other job.
00:24:35.532 --> 00:24:44.564
There is Time management, goal management and all that is very important, important, and that's one thing I hope our listeners do understand.
00:24:44.564 --> 00:24:46.307
It doesn't matter what you do.
00:24:46.648 --> 00:25:16.134
If you don't manage your time, you don't manage your career path, you'll be unhappy ultimately one of the one of the areas of focus is self-development, but the self-development area of focus is probably also linked to the professional development in career, because, first of all, that career development or the career path you want this is what I want to eventually do and then the personal development to personal improvement area is what you need to do on a daily or weekly basis in order to get to where you want to be.
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