All Clear - A Firefighter Health & Wellness Podcast
All Clear is a podcast that looks at the perils of modern firefighters, especially the physical and mental strains we face. Our goal is to help firefighters ignite The Fire Within and to build the best version of themselves as firefighters. Our conversations are real, sometimes raw but always honest. All Clear is presented by the NC Firefighter Cancer Alliance & First Responders Peer-Support Network.
All Clear - A Firefighter Health & Wellness Podcast
Saving Lives & Saving Time - Time Management for The Fire Service With Carl Pullein
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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This is All Clear Firefighter Health and Wellness, where we help you light your fire within Travis. It's good to have you here with us today. We have another very special guest. 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? 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?
Speaker 2:Just to give you a brief background. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 2: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. Then I started a YouTube channel and then then I started my podcast and everything just grew from there. 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. So I've been living in Korea, south Korea, for, yeah, 22 years this year, and it does feel very much like home now.
Speaker 1:That's good. 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. So I've got to learn about something leadership related. 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. And I came across you on YouTube and I've watched many of your episodes that you've done.
Speaker 1: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. Also doing brain dumps. 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. What's your expertise for using our mind to get our work done? I don't think it matters if we're firefighters, if we're lawyers or bankers, it doesn't matter. We all have to have our mind clear. So what are some strategies you can recommend for that?
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. 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. But let's just take an administrative role. There are two things that are inevitably going to happen. First, you're going to have a load of email to deal with and secondly, you're going to have like admin. Now, admin doesn't mean the actual job. It means things like doing expenses, dealing with requests from human resources departments and that sort of thing. But they're inevitable. They just come up every day.
Speaker 2:So you need to set aside time for this. 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. A few weeks months ago she had 60,000 emails in her inbox. 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. And I said are you willing to do that? And she said I can't do that because I've got to do my job. I said, yeah, exactly. So what we need to do is we've got to declare bankruptcy at some point. 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.
Speaker 2: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. We get stuff that we don't need to read, stuff we might need to keep and stuff we need to respond to. You need to really set aside an hour or so for just dealing with that actionable email. So that's one hour of your day. But if you can protect that time as in time, block that. Now, in my case, I'm flexible on this. 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. 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. So that's one example of time blocking.
Speaker 2:But then I mentioned earlier about this thing called core work. Now, core work is the work that you actually employed to do, so everyone's going to be different here. 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. So to do that I need time. Now, time isn't going to miraculously appear. 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?
Speaker 2:I actually calculate it takes me about 12 hours a week to do my content. 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. 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. 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. That needs to be externalized written down.
Speaker 1:That is a good point. 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. We use Microsoft Outlook at our organization and I learned how to do filters. So when email comes in, if it's from certain people, like my chief, it gets pushed to a certain folder. That means if I see the little read number there, I need to jump on that right now. But there are some things that are like newsletters. I don't need to read that right now and it'll automatically go to a different folder. 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.
Speaker 1:What things do I need to do right now and which things do I not need to do? But the other key factor that you mentioned, too, is blocking out time for your job. Now a lot of the guys are listening here. 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. But at the end of the day, we all have the same things to do. 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. 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.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I like what you talk about actionable items the interesting thing there is all jobs are different and firefighting is. I don't know if you still have the bell or the alarm that goes off in the fire station?
Speaker 1:Yes, we do, but when that?
Speaker 2:happens. That's your trigger. That's okay. Whatever I'm doing in front of this computer is no longer important.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2: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. Whatever goes off at the station. Do you still have the poles as well?
Speaker 1:One of our stations does, but yeah, that's more of a US thing that some of the older departments have it. 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.
Speaker 2:So the beauty of that, though, is that you've got it. 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. There's no negotiating. You can't say oh finish this email, just take me another five minutes. There's none of that. 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.
Speaker 1:The other things, if it's not an emergency. It's time for meals very serious. 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. So there are a few things that will bring halt to your day. But yeah, for the most part I agree with what you say. We have triggers that let us know when it's time to shift gears.
Speaker 2:So the difficulty there is the unpredictability. 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. 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. You've got to stop. 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.
Speaker 2:I block an hour out every single day and I'm going to do my email. The thing is life isn't quite a straight line and you've got to build in flexibility. 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. 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. What you're doing is you're creating a cycle. So some days you may only do 20 minutes, 35 minutes, maybe 40. Other days you think actually I've got 90 minutes. I'm just going to sit down and just get on with it. As long as you're doing a little bit every day, you're never going to build a backlog. You might have a few extra one day, but then you'll catch up the next day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that is something that that is very true and particularly for guys, that may be their own shift. They work for a full 24 hours. Then they won't be back to the firehouse for two days, for a full 48 hours. They may not touch their email from work and when they get back it could be a little heavier. Sometimes it's not, but that is a very good point. 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. A lot of times we'll have like checklists we have to go through. We'll have to check the truck out when we get on duty different things like that. That those require focus to do those things and they become like habit.
Speaker 2: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? And they just look to me and says, are you serious? There's no way. They would never, ever take. They would rather delay the flight than skip any any of those safety checks. On a checklist it says that's how we stay alive, that's how we keep the passengers alive.
Speaker 1: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. 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. 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. 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. Is that a skill that's important for us to be able to master, regardless of what our careers are?
Speaker 2:It is, and it's one of the best things that you can do each week as well. 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. A pen that you like to write with always helps.
Speaker 1:Actually.
Speaker 2:I did this in a video recently. 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. So we've got core work, projects, issues, personal and radar, and I divide the piece of paper into four. Now this is a great way to just start. I suppose we'd call it a brainstorming session. Now the core work, as I mentioned before, that's the work you actually employ to do. It's the non-negotiable part of your contract of employment, if you like. That goes down first. 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. 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. And then the top right corner, which is projects and issues. That's where you're brainstorming your professional life. 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. Just get it all written down. This is a project, I'm working on a new payroll system or something. These are the projects. Just get it on the sheet of paper. It doesn't mean you have to do them next week, but it's just getting it all out of your head.
Speaker 2:And then, as I said, bottom left is going to be your personal life. So is there anything going on in the personal life that you need to attend to? Do you need to doctor's appointment, or do you need to do something else, take the car in for service or something? 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. So you're only looking ahead a week. You're not looking beyond that because things change too fast. 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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:All it'll do if you don't get it out is spin around in your head, and it does exhaust you. The brain is an amazing thing and it uses up an incredible amount of energy. I heard somewhere that if you just stayed in bed and didn't move, you'd still burn 1,800 calories a day. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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. If I've got something that's on my mind that's bothering me. Maybe it's a professional situation at work. How do I deal with this situation? How do I resolve this problem?
Speaker 1:When I find myself writing stuff down, if I hang on to it for more than just a day, I can look back. It's like, oh, that's been on three of my sheets. 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. Or maybe personnel things. Maybe there's a code question about how should we apply the FHIR code in a certain situation. 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. Is that something? That's also a benefit of doing these writing sessions and putting everything down?
Speaker 2: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. I don't tear them out or throw them away, I just keep it all in a ring because I can always go back. 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. And then I can decide next week.
Speaker 1: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. We hear on our podcast talk about is to build the best firefighter possible. Improve your life on all levels, whether it be your physical fitness, your mental fitness, your financial fitness, whatever it is. 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. 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. How can goal setting be accomplished?
Speaker 2:by being productive with our use of time. 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.
Speaker 2:Now we all have eight areas of focus, and they relate to finances, health and fitness, family and relationships, professional career, lifestyle, life experiences. There's a lot of stuff in there. 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. So let's just take the career and professional development, and you want to become a fire chief. If you're in your first year as a firefighter, you've probably got a long road to go.
Speaker 2:Now the thing is you've got to go step by step. You don't go from one year. You know, after one year of fire service, suddenly you're the chief, it's not going to happen. You know, suddenly you're the chief, it's not going to happen. That's not the way it works. But finding out how the promotion track is. 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.
Speaker 1:Find a mentor You're not going to copy them.
Speaker 2: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. Now that's going to give you a blueprint. And I remember a quote from Jim Rohn which sort of said success leaves clues. 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? How have they developed? What have they learned? What are they reading?
Speaker 2: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. One of my other fascinations is going back leonardo da vinci. I've just been reading his autobiography and you know, we know we say oh, wow. But the Mona Lisa, for example, which is the most famous painting he was drawing lips 20 years before he made that painting. He was learning how to put that they call it the enigmatic smile into paint 20 years before he painted that painting. And so all this like knowledge he was gaining led him to eventually being able to paint the Mona Lisa. If he tried it 20 years earlier, he wouldn't have been able to do it. He wouldn't have had that experience.
Speaker 2: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. You're not going to burn yourself out.
Speaker 1: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. Okay, this guy did what I want to do and they have to put in extra time and extra effort to do it. While they're maybe being a mechanic or whatever other job. There is Time management, goal management and all that is very important, important, and that's one thing I hope our listeners do understand. It doesn't matter what you do.
Speaker 2: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. And, as I say, today we're very lucky because of the internet, we can actually find the blueprint. It was much harder.
Speaker 2:50, 60 years ago it wasn't impossible, but it was much harder to find those blueprints. But today it is actually very easy to do and you can now start combining other people's blueprints. That's not really me, but that is.
Speaker 1:But it's all moving in the same direction.
Speaker 1:Yes, and when you find, like you mentioned, with the internet, there's so many great professional journals out there that you can learn leadership from not necessarily the practical skills that that maybe help you on the fire ground, but you can learn to develop as a professional and as you start pulling those pieces together, then you can actually make a plan and you will ultimately be more satisfied in your career and with your personal development. But when we look at these things I know that we talked about this a little bit before we started recording COVID changed a lot of people's views about work In our industry, not so much because we're doing the same thing we were doing before that, but I think everybody nowadays is focusing on having a better work-life balance. People are trying to find ways to be happier when they're not at work. They're trying to find ways to maximize their time at home or their time away from employment. How can utilizing these strategies time management, things like that how can that lead to having a better sense of balance in your work life and your personal life?
Speaker 2:I think when it comes to balance, it's again. It always will come back to what is it that you actually want to do?
Speaker 2:You're not going to feel very fulfilled is when you get home from a shift and all you do is turn on Netflix and watch TV and say I'm relaxing Because over time you just won't enjoy it. It just you just feel unfulfilled. The human beings like any life form. It's designed to thrive and to grow and just sitting down and watching Netflix every night when you're not working is not growing. Now it's a little bit different. If you have your favorite tv shows like me, I have my favorite tv shows and I watch them every week but just mindlessly watching just stuff because you've got nothing else to do, you will feel unfulfilled.
Speaker 2:It's interesting you mentioned goals, because it doesn't necessarily have to be a goal, but go back to those areas of focus that kind of gives you that this is what I want to do. Family and relationships. I hear people come oh, it's so difficult. I've got a young family, I've got a young child, I've got a six-year-old and a four-year-old and it's just chaotic in my life and I'm saying just enjoy that time, because when they're teenagers they're not gonna want to have anything to do with you yep and you're gonna get all your time back.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people are tend to be. The mistake they're making is they're looking at things too in too short a period. I think it's important to think of your life as a whole and if you want to have a long and healthy retirement, you can't start exercising on the day you retire because by then your health is irretrievably damaged. You need to start now, and it doesn't mean that you have to be training like an Olympic athlete unless you want to, but you don't have to do that. It's just being mindful of what you're eating and being mindful of your movement and making sure you get enough movement each day A lot of those long-term things that people want to achieve or do in their personal and professional life. It starts now. There's little things. You don't have to do a lot.
Speaker 2:I like the example of if I wanted to save $10,000, I'm choosing $10,000, no $12,000 this year. I'm going to make it easy for me. If I started in January, that's $1,000 a month. If I start at the end in July, that's $2,000 a month. I'd rather start in January than try and start in July, because now I'm putting myself under ridiculous pressure to get it done, and that's the same with pretty much everything. It's like studying for a promotional exam or something. You could start doing it a couple of weeks before or you could start two months before.
Speaker 2:One is going to be easier than the other in terms of balancing out your life. If you leave it to the last two weeks, it's just that's all you're doing. You're studying for two weeks. Maybe that's how you work and that's okay. My wife works like that. She needs that time pressure of the deadline. But if you want a more balanced life, you really want to be like pushing it out a little bit so you give yourself more time. I read yesterday Cal Newport's new book, which is called Slow Productivity. He mentioned about take a project and your initial feeling on the timeline. So let's say it's going to take two months, double it, make it four months. Now you're going to. Now you've got a realistic chance of actually completing it on time.
Speaker 1:And I like that idea. Hey, it's interesting. You mentioned that there's another podcast that I like to listen to. I don't know if you're familiar with Brett McKay and the Art of Manliness.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, yes, yes, but he was interviewing a gentleman the other day that was talking about digital minimalism basically getting the stuff off your phone and different things like that and he brought up an interesting point.
Speaker 1:He said that he likes to slow down and sometimes when you help people see, hey, I've got these five things that I've got to do right now. This is on my plate. When you slow down, people will actually understand that it's okay to slow down. And he gave the example that he doesn't have email professionally. He said if you want to contact him, you have to actually take time to write a letter, put it in the mailbox and send it out. And there's some truth to that and I think that's exactly what you're driving at. You've got to space things out, give yourself time to do what you need to. We all have the same amount of minutes in a day to work with same amount of hours in a week, but it's how we utilize them and what's most important and I think that kind of goes full circle to where we started this conversation about making the best use of your time, picking what's important to you and being happy in the end, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you just reminded me of something I learned about Dolly Parton the other few months ago. If you want to contact Dolly Parton, you have to fax her, which I think is absolutely brilliant, because, first of all, where on earth am I going to find?
Speaker 1:a fax machine today. That is a good point. I had to find one the other day.
Speaker 2:That was a pain yeah, that's a brilliant way of forcing people to communicate on your terms. Now, maybe, when you're just starting out in a company, you you don't have that choice, but as you go up in an organization, you get more choices about how people contact you.
Speaker 1:And I call you by. Hey Bob, how are you doing? Oh, you must have been different. Yes, If you're on my phone, it's either in there because I really like you or really don't like you and you'll have to figure out which it is yeah, that's my joke, and it is pretty much that same thing. We have to set the boundaries. We have to set what I'm able to do, what I'm comfortable doing, because we can't sacrifice our well-being to for any amount of work. It isn't worth it.
Speaker 2:So I can just give you one example of how you know I do like my tv and I do like to. I always think of youtube as the university of youtube, because I've learned so much from there youtube certified yeah, yeah, I've learned how to clean shoes properly mundane things I've learned on youtube, which is why I love it.
Speaker 2:So what I actually do now is I'll, because I I work late and sometimes I have to start early, but I'm working, sometimes until midnight or 1am because of the time zone difference. But I, when I finish work, I will say okay, I need to work, I do. I like the 10 till midnight time as focus time and I usually do planning. I don't want to look at another screen, so I get pen and paper and do planning for an hour or so, but then at midnight I will say it's an hour, I'm gonna wind down and that's my YouTube time. And the weird thing is, yeah, sometimes I'll be in the, I'm gonna watch a comedy show.
Speaker 2:I've done enough you know my brain has absorbed enough. Today I'm just gonna watch something like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or something you know, just comedy. But other times I think actually I'm really curious about this. And you know, I think the other day I learned about, oh, charles de Gaulle, and I think I'd seen a reference to him and I went yeah, I know him, I know who about him? I don't know much about him. So I watched a documentary on Charles de Gaulle and I thought oh, this is interesting. So I leave it really flexible. But my wife calls it my learning hour because she says you're always watching some documentary to learn something. I thought, yeah, maybe I've just got that learning desire. But other nights I say it might just be comedy, because I've just absorbed too much that day and I'm not going to push myself beyond my limits in terms of what my brain can take.
Speaker 1:Anyway, yeah, and if we don't develop all of the aspects of our personality? You mentioned learning a new skill, learning something through YouTube during your hour of learning, that's awesome, but personally, I feel like you need to develop yourself spiritually. You need to develop yourself physically, professionally. You have all these different facets of that diamond that you've got to look at and figure out how to do it. That you've got to look at and figure out how to do it, and that's exactly why I wanted people to get to listen to you a little bit today and to understand that productivity isn't just trying to grind out as much work as you can in the shortest amount of time, but it's about finding that balance in life, exactly.
Speaker 2:It's what you say To me it's about. I mean, I often if I'm doing a workshop, I'll get people to design their perfect week, and that's basically taking a blank calendar google calendar, apple account doesn't really matter and just designing your perfect week. Now you've got to be realistic. It's not like you're going to spend the whole week next to a nice swimming pool and drinking cocktails. It's. It's about your like, your professional life and your personal life. But the one thing I always say begin with your personal life. What do you want to do in your personal life? Because the one thing I always say begin with your personal life, what do you?
Speaker 2:want to do in your personal life, because often that's the one we neglect, because we think when we're of working age, that's when we think our working life is it, but it isn't, and there's. We work eight hours a day, but there's 24 hours in a day, and if we sleep eight hours, which is recommended and still leaves you with eight hours, you don't want to you with eight hours. You don't want to waste those eight hours, but you don't want to be stressing yourself out either. It needs to be something that's mentally nourishing and physically nourishing. Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1:And that's the whole reason we do things with this podcast and we bring so many different voices and points of view to it is so that people understand what it means to be the best firefighter possible. So, carl, if folks want to get to learn more about you, your processes, how can folks learn about you and find you?
Speaker 2:The best place to find me is on my podcast, sorry, on my website, because they uh, that's basically where everything is my youtube channel, my podcast, my blogs, everything is on my website. It's calpulinecom, and that's really the best way.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm on twitter and linkedin and all that stuff, but to get there, start at the website, because it's all there okay, awesome, we'll put those'll put those points in our show notes so that they can be able to find you and all the cool stuff you got going on. And, personally speaking, your programs, time blocking and all those programs that you do offer are worth every minute that you spend doing it. So I've learned a lot from you in the past and even talking to you today. But I do have a question for you, carl. We have a tradition here on our show. I got a question what do you call an illegally parked frog?
Speaker 2:I don't know call it toad.
Speaker 1:Oh okay, see, it's bad, it's real bad.
Speaker 2:But actually you mentioned about the dad jokes. Actually the interesting thing there is I, one of my favorite djs in the uk, a guy called tony blackburn. He does the call this. I think he's called the golden hour on a sunday night on bbc radio too, but it's just full of dad jokes I would love it I know I'm sitting there listening to it, I'm just going, going, oh no.
Speaker 1:Oh, they get bad. The thing I've learned if you've gone this far through the podcast, there's got to be a payoff at the end, and that's the best I got to offer. So anyway, Carl, it's nice to have you with us and, as we always tell our listeners, we'll talk to you soon and we encourage you to light your fire within. You have been listening to All Clear. All Clear is presented by the North Carolina Firefighter Cancer Alliance and the First Responders Peer Support Network. You can find out more about us at allclearpodcastcom. Leave us a message. We'd appreciate hearing from you. If you like what you hear, tell someone. Opinions expressed by guests do not always reflect the opinions of the podcast. Intro and outro music provided by Wayne John Bradley. And, as always, light your fire within. See you soon.
