I am continuing my little series offering my honest thoughts on different productivity systems that are on offer today. I have previously written about the old Grandaddy of all productivity systems – GTD (Getting Things Done) – here. Today I turn my attention briefly to consider Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System.
What is the Time Sector System
The Time Sector System is billed as a modern productivity system designed for the 21st Century. It is a system developed by Carl Pullein.
Here are a few YouTube Videos that Carl has produced on the system itself. Carl also has a premium course where he runs through and explains the system in full. I should state that I have not done this course. As such, my thoughts are based only on what is available for free through Cark’s public content.
The Time Sector system is a way of managing your work, specifically your tasks, based on when you plan to do them. It is an incredibly stripped down and minimalist organisation system. The idea is that if you adopt this system, you will spend less time organising your work and more time doing your work. This is certainly true and the claim is verifiably valid. The organisation required within this system in practically nothing on a regular basis once it is set up. Here lies the power of the system, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Look at the average person’s task manager, for example ToDoist, Tick Tick or Microsoft ToDo. What you will see is a group of top level folders in your sidebar. If you use an app like ClickUp, these would be your spaces. These top levels would be things like ‘Work’, ‘Personal’, ‘Family’ etc. Underneath each of these you might find some sub folders, ‘Projects’ and ‘Areas’. Underneath each of these you might find another folder or list for every single project and every single area of focus. These lists will be the ones that contain your tasks. Every task is in either a project folder or an area folder. If the person is a GTD purist, instead the sidebar might be a single long list of 50-100 projects each with their relevant tasks in.
Not so in the Time Sector Sytem.
You might also find each and every task having multiple labels or tags added to them. These could be for GTD contexts, people place or things you need. This could be to reflect the time it would take or the amount of energy needed for the task.
Not so in the Time Sector System.
How is the Time Sector System Organised?
In the Time Sector System, at it’s heart, you will have 7 lists in your task manager. These are the Time Sectors. This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month, This Quarter, Long Term & Routines. Every task will be in one of these lists. Here are some key points or USPs of the system if you will. Generally speaking, project tasks will not be in your task manager. All project tasks will be in a list in a project note or notebook in your notes app. Your task manager will have a task ‘Work on Project X’ that will link to your note or notebook. Tasks will not have labels or tags. The Routines folder is for Routine tasks that recur and need to be done, but are not important or part of your core work. Within your this week folder, you will have a section for recurring areas of focus. These are tasks that recur and are significant and provide a key element of your core work.
Only tasks in the this week folder will receive a due date, which is always the date on which you intend to do the task. You may add a date to other tasks, if you know that you have to do something on a specific date in the future that is not this week and you do not want to forget, but you do not do this by default or in an arbitrary way.
How does the Time Sector System Work?
The system is an extension of Carl’s core system which is COD – Collect, Organise and Do. I won’t go into to detail about this here, but it is fairly self explanatory. Basically, when you organise your tasks, you decide roughly when you want to do it and move it to the relevant Time Sector. I say roughly because the only one that needs to be reasonably accurate is This Week. Once each week in your weekly planning session, you need to review your This Week, Next Week and This month Time Sectors and move things up. Once a month, in your monthly planning session, you will look at the other Time Sectors in this process as well. Mostly, what you will be doing is moving everything from Next Week to This Week. Your ‘This Week’ Sector will also contain tasks for working on specific projects on the days you wish to work on them. Every task in this This Week is given a date – which is the Date you actually intend to do the task. This requires checking that you have not allocated more to each day than you can reasonably do.
On top of this, Carl utilises his 2+8 prioritisation system. For each day, you choose 2 Objective Tasks. These are top priority and will be flagged as such. These must get done. Then 8 other focus tasks that are you key tasks for the day of the next level of importance. Carl will flag these priority 2, for the morning and priority 3 for the afternoon, in his To Do list app – ToDoist.
What makes this work, is his weekly planning, where he manages the time sectors and his daily planning where he chooses his priorities for the next day. It would be remiss of me to not mention that Carl uses his Calander as a driver but with a simple rule – what goes on the calendar, gets done. This is not for idle hopes and and plans, but fixed commitments. This might be meetings or appointments or scheduled blocks of focussed work to do core tasks or work on specific projects.
My reflections on the Time Sector System
What I love
As a minimalist system it works really well. As I said, the amount of organisation that you need to do is really minimal allowing you more time to focus on deciding what is important and actually doing the work. This I really like. I also like the way in which it cuts down the review time in my planning sessions. Gone are the days when I would trawl through hundreds of projects and areas of focus to give dates to tasks that I wanted to do this week. Gone are the days when I would be reviewing projects that had sat undone in my task manager for months, if not longer. This is a huge time saver. It also means that my planning time is given over less to keeping up to date with where everything is at and more to considering how best to use my finite time & energy resources.
It really does strip out the unecessary bits as well. Over the years, I have used a lot of labels/tags for different things in my task manager. Some of them, I figured I might use down the line. Sometimes, I would need to look for 5 minute tasks or tasks with low energy but it was rare that I did this. Sometimes, I noted in my planning that a task was high energy or estimated to take a long time, but the truth was, I could always tell just by reading the task that this was going to be the case. The reality was therefore that I was spending a lot of time tagging tasks based on time and energy requirement and not ever using most of these labels. The ones I did, was exceptionally rarely. It was a total waste of time.
The Time Sector System is a way of organising things that cuts out all wasted effort and is therefore incredibly fast to do and easy to maintain. This I love.
What I struggle with
There are two things I struggle with.
The first is that, whilst there are many benefits to having all my project tasks in notes or notebooks in my notes app and then just having a tasks telling me to work on the project, I find an issue with it as well. This works really well most of the time, when a project or tasks within a project require or will be given a big chunk of time. I frequently have projects where there will be several small tasks. I also have times when I do not want to or cannot actually give a project a significant amount of time, but I do need to complete one or two of these small tasks in a given week. I do not feel it is time effective to have a ‘Work on Project X’ task linked to the note for these. I want these tasks in my task manager. This means when I do my planning session I need to check through my active projects, looking for tasks like this and copy them into ToDoist and then remember to tick them off in the project note as well as in ToDoist. This means I lose some of the benefits of the system as I end up having to review everything most weeks anyway to check for these tasks.
The second comes into play when working on a bigger project with a lot of tasks involved. A task manager or similar app is designed for just this, managing tasks. It can sort and order them, filter them, prioritise them, group them. A notes app cannot do this. I accept if you use Notion, then you could do this and Nimbus Notes has a feature that enables you to sort tasks in their task list. But if you are using an app that just has simple check boxes, or even Evernote’s tasks feature, then you cannot organise and manage tasks within the note unless you do it manually yourself. This is not a problem if the project has around 10-15 tasks or less. But long projects, with a lot of steps might require more work. You may sit down on Monday with 2 hours to ‘Work on Project X’ and find yourself staring at a list of 30 – 50 tasks. In order to be most efficient, you then need to group and order these so you know what you are supposed to be working on. This takes time to do manually.
My overall thoughts
This is a truly fantastic system and addresses a lot of the issues with many productivity systems that require to invest so much time, so frequently in organising and managing your work. So, I highly recommend it.
I am however thinking through some different ways to tweak it to deal with the two issues I have highlighted above. They are not deal breakers, but they do need addressing. I will keep you posted on the different things I try. Though be patient. Most of the ideas I have had so far just involve duplication and wasting time in some form, or make the system more complex and harder to manage. This I do not want to do.
