Balancing Digital & Paper Planning with Carl Pullein

In this episode of the Franklin Planner Podcast, hosts John and George welcome time management expert and productivity coach Carl Pullein. Carl shares his journey from a middle school student fascinated with time management to becoming a globally recognized specialist in the field. He introduces his groundbreaking programs, including the the COD Task Management System, and discusses the benefits of integrating digital tools with traditional paper planning. Carl’s experiment with returning to the Franklin Planner reveals significant improvements in focus, productivity, and fulfillment. The conversation delves into the principles of effective time management, the importance of slowing down, and how to balance digital and analog tools to lead a more intentional and productive life.

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Episode Timeline

00:39 – Meet Carl Pullein: Time Management Innovator

02:18 – Carl’s Journey into Time Management

05:12 – The Digital Age and Rediscovering Franklin Planner

06:19 – From Teaching to Time Management Coaching

11:36 – Challenges in Modern Time Management

14:47 – Introducing the COD Task Management System

28:29 – The Importance of Writing Things Down

29:00 – The Power of Pen and Paper

31:37 – Balancing Digital and Paper Planning

32:23 – The Focus and Fulfillment of Paper Planning

38:38 – Combining Digital and Paper Systems

53:19 – The Benefits of Slowing Down

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Episode Transcript

George Wright III: Okay, welcome back to the Franklin Planner Podcast. We are so excited to have a special guest here today. John, are you excited as much as I am?

John Harding: I think we’re lucky to be together, so—

George: Definitely.

John: Let’s get into it.

George: We’re joined by a time management innovator and productivity coach, someone that’s got some amazing skills. His name is Carl Pullein. How are you doing, Carl?

Carl Pullein: I’m very good. Thank you for having me.

George: Yeah, we are, you know, we’ve been connecting a couple of different ways. We’ve got some really cool stories to kind of talk about, but let me just give everybody a little bit of a [00:01:00] background on you and at least set them up so they kinda understand, you know, who you are if they haven’t already seen you online.

Introducing Carl Pullein

Carl’s not just another time management expert. He’s a visionary behind the groundbreaking program Time Sector System and one of the programs we’re gonna talk about today, the COD task management system. But he helps individuals worldwide to master time management and boost productivity. He’s been voted a world’s top time management professional. He’s got a major following online, and he’s a longtime advocate of the Franklin Planner system, so it’s obviously very serendipitous that we are here together. So, there again, Carl, we’re so happy to have you here, and you’re in what part of the world, so everybody knows?

Carl: I’m in South Korea. I’ve been here for, like, the last twenty-three years.

George: Isn’t it amazing, the digital tech we’ve got nowadays, so we can just kind of be talking and riffing at all hours of the day? John just comes back from Hawaii. We’re, you know—I’m in Utah, you’re out in South Korea. That’s [00:02:00] great. [Laughter] So, um, happy to have you here, but let’s get right into it, John.

John: Let’s do it. Carl, more than anything, I think, people would love to hear—people that haven’t met you that we might share this with, and also of your great following—just if you might wouldn’t mind, tell us a little bit about your journey and maybe what your mission and your vision is for— You know, you’re helping a lot of people, you’ve done some innovative work. Can you just share with us a little bit about your journey, um, and your background from your perspective?

A lifelong interest in time management

Carl: Yeah. Now, my—well, my journey with time management is kind of funny because I actually started that when I was in middle school. Now, when I was in middle school, we didn’t have the computer systems we have today. So it was basically a pen, ruler, pencil, and paper, and I used to schedule out my exam revision timetable, and it was brilliant. I mean, I had different colored pens and— [00:03:00] oh, that timetable was fantastic. My only little problem there was I wasn’t actually very good at revision, [Laughter] but I was really good at planning my revision; that one, I was really good at.

So, I realized even as a teenager, I had this kind of fascination with time and time management, but then I joined the workforce and, you know, you get caught up in that exciting world. I think I started in hotel management where time management itself isn’t really much of a thing because you’re reacting, ‘cause that’s how hotels worked; back then it was “customers were the king,” and—or “guests are king”—and you just reacted. Then I went into sales and that’s where time management started impacting my life.

Now, the first four years of my working life, I didn’t have to worry about time management. You just reacted. Somebody wanted a bottle of wine, somebody wanted an extra pillow … You know, you couldn’t plan for any of that. You didn’t know any— So it was very reactive. But sales are totally [00:04:00] different, you know, you had to do your prospecting, then you had to set up appointments with customers. I mean, I wasn’t familiar with anything like this. And I remember my sales manager telling me, he says, “You are probably the most disorganized person I’ve ever met.” And I think that really hit me. And that’s when I thought, “I need to read about this. I need to read a book.”

The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management

And at that time, Hyrum Smith’s 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management—I think it may have only just come out, but it was only maybe two or three years old at most. And that was the book that I picked up, and it completely transformed my life. I mean, things I didn’t even think about, like governing values—it never occurred to me that that would be important, but after reading the book, I went, “Of course you need a foundation to build your life on.” You can’t just go from day to day to day reacting; you need to be more proactive about your life.

Digital Planning Takes Over

And that’s where it kind of started, and I started using the Franklin Planner. I guess it must have been late ‘90—what, [00:05:00] ‘92? Um, and then in 2009 I got my first iPhone, and obviously the excitement of all this digital stuff and [Laughter] I joined that bandwagon for, yeah, a good ten, twelve years. But you know what I noticed? There was something missing; there was—I don’t know what it was about the digital technology, it just felt there was a gap, there was something missing.

“There’s no soul to it”

And I remember two years ago, it hit me, and that was: digital technology has no soul. There’s no soul to it. It’s just, like, “here’s a list of stuff you’ve got to do, here’s your appointments,” and it’s— the text on a screen is always the same. It never changes. So it is just another list of stuff to do, “here’s your current calendar appointments, here’s all your digital notes and documents.”

I thought, “Aha. That human side, that soul of planning your day, is important.” And that was when I kind of had those [Laughter] flashbacks to my Franklin Planner days, thinking, “Yeah, let’s do an experiment.” And last year, I think it was October, I went, “Okay, let’s [00:06:00] go out, get a brand-new Franklin planner, get it set up, and run it for three months.” And, well, that was six months ago.

Discovering a Passion for Teaching

George: That’s actually how we kind of connected. And I definitely want— I think our listeners are gonna want to hear that story. I’m curious though, before we get into maybe even your system, was there a pivoting point? You’ve obviously always had a love for time management, productivity, things like that, but on your journey, like, was there a point you decided to go into, you know, teaching and training and coaching and talking with people and helping them with time, productivity, as kind of a full-time deal? What was the, what was the point that you—

Carl: Well, that one, yeah— I mean, I recently was watching an interview with Brian Tracy, and he was talking about, uh, turning points in your life, and there’s been a few of those, but the big one for me was coming to Korea. I trained to be a lawyer before I came to Korea and actually went to work in an office—for the first time.

George: Oh, wow.

Carl: Now if you think about it, I was in hotel management—that’s running around a big building, you know, up and down [00:07:00] stairs—then I went into car sales—so that was walking, running around a showroom all day, and you didn’t have a set desk—and suddenly I went to university, did my law degree, went to work for a law firm, and suddenly I’m in an office eight and a half, nine hours a day, tied to a desk, and I went, “This is not for me.” And you know, having spent six years training to be a lawyer, I’m thinking, “This is a mistake.” [Laughter]

John: [Laughter]

Carl: So I went, “Okay, time out. Time out.” And I thought, “What can I do? I’ve got a degree now.” I thought, “Oh, let’s go to Korea to teach English.” Now, back when I came here—what, was 2002?—the reason I chose Korea is because beer. Uh, being English, you know, we like our beers. [Laughter] Um, beer was, what, uh—it worked out to something like one pound a pint. And, like, in England, we were paying four pound a pint, so I said, “Okay, Korea’s good enough for me.” [Laughter]

George: [Laughter] That’s random.

Carl: No, I was very lucky because almost within the moment I landed in Korea, I just fell in love with the place. It is just an amazing, dynamic country, it’s [00:08:00] just brilliant. But my reason for coming to Korea was nothing more than just, “Well, beer’s cheap, so everything else must be quite cheap.”

George: Well, you’re a pretty random soul, but you were driven—you know, you just had the ability to do what you felt like doing—

Carl: Yes.

George: —which is ironic that it’s time management you went into. So keep going. What were you—did you pivot into that?

Carl: And that was— I think it was within the first three months of being in a classroom teaching people that suddenly I was coming home buzzing every night. I mean, that never happened to me before. Every night I was coming— We finished at 9:30. It took me like three hours to calm down when I was buzzing. And we were starting classes at 6:30 the next morning, so I wasn’t getting much sleep, and so—and yet that buzz, and it was because I was in a room helping people, and I could see I was helping people, I could feel it. And you were getting people saying, “Oh, thank you so much, you’ve just made this so much easier for me. I’ve struggled all my life with English, and you’ve made it fun, and you’ve made it—” And I remember my boss saying, you know, [00:09:00] “You are very much into ‘edutainment,’” like educating and entertaining at the same time. And I thought, “Oh, I like that.”

Embracing principles of time management and planning

And so I just fell in love with teaching, and it became pretty obvious, I would say about 2012, that, you know, my passion for that time management was still there; I was still reading all the books that came out, reading all the articles, watching YouTube videos, and I thought, “Well, maybe I need to start writing about this.” So 2015, I started my blog and wrote every week for—well, I still write every week on my blog. Um, then I started— 2016 was the YouTube channel. In 2017, I started my podcast. So I kind of staggered it. And now I’ve got these three things, ‘cause I needed to put in place the processes. You know, the first time you do a YouTube video, it’s gonna take you two weeks to do it. Now I can, you know, roll off a YouTube video, and two or three hours later I’m handing it over to my video editor, [00:10:00] but when I’m doing it on my own, it’s two days solid.

George: It’s interesting ‘cause—John, I’m curious what your thoughts on this—so it’s interesting because, you know, Carl, you’ve always had this fascination and love for the principles, and you caught the vision of Hyrum’s book and some things, but—you love to teach, and yet you are living example of someone who is pretty directional with what they love to do, purpose-driven, and in time management. It’s literally what we try to talk about on this podcast, and so you have been driving your purpose through principles that are also tied to time management. But, John, that’s crazy that he is actually like a case study example of putting both in play, right? Your principles and your time management.

The 8th Habit: Finding Your Voice

John: It is. I was thinking as Carl was talking of kind of The 8th Habit; one of our other key partners/founders, Stephen R. Covey—[00:11:00] Carl, I know, you’ve done some work with his work—when he wrote that 8th Habit—and that was, really, finding your voice—uh, I feel like, as you were teaching, helping people, you were finding your voice. And I’m curious to know as it relates to, as you kind of leaned into this, and you were helping people and you got focused on, it sounds like, helping people succeed, create, you know, their best life—and we, we talk about that a lot on this podcast—I’m interested to know, as you’ve been working with people through these different mediums, what are some of the main obstacles—I guess you could say either goals that people are trying to achieve, or you could say problems or obstacles that they are encountering, relating to their goals, relating to time management, relating to just this area—I’m curious to know what continued to give you inspiration that you were helping [00:12:00] people solve? What problems were they coming after?

Why people struggle to identify their goals today

Carl: I think today, the problem is probably a little bit more different from what it was in the 1990s, but today, it’s like people—probably this is gonna sound a bit harsh, but people want too much. And this is one of the reasons why I went—when I established my areas of focus, or governing values, if you like—was like, “Okay, what’s really important to you?” And I think what’s happened is— And last year, I was also reading every single time management book from the twentieth century; I know, I think I got back as far as the 1950s. Uh, I can’t remember the title of the book, but I was trying to read them all to see if there was any common denominators.

And if you read those books from, like, particularly the sixties, seventies, and eighties—so when we were moving into the office and out of the factory, if you like—what was happening was, is that people were pretty clear about what they wanted to do. I want to be the CEO, I want to be the director, I want to— It wasn’t so [00:13:00] much entrepreneurship. It was a word, apparently, but it wasn’t as common as it is today.

Too many distractions, not enough focus

But now we’re living in a world where it’s like, “Well, I want this.” “I want to start my own business, but I want to start multiple different businesses, and I want to have a happy family, and I want to have this house in the, in the Bahamas, and I want,” and it’s like, “I want, I want, I want, I want,” but nobody’s sort of saying, “Okay, you can have all those things, but you gotta step back first and figure out, well, how are you gonna get from where you are today to where you want to be?” You know, how do you close the gap?

And that’s the bit I think today that I’ve noticed that people are missing. They’ve got these dreams and aspirations, which is fantastic, I think probably quite natural for human beings to have that forward thinking about what we want. But then they’re missing that key part of saying, “Well, here I am today. This is where I want to be. What do I need to do to close the gap?” And you know, it’s—and then you’ve got all the distractions that go on in the world today that wasn’t around. I mean, I find it fascinating that, you know, people were reading the [00:14:00] newspaper in the morning, and that was it. That’s all they did for—and they’d watch the evening news at night on TV—but it was like two touch points for the daily news. But today it’s, you watch people on the train or on the bus, and it’s like constant.

Productivity Is Not Time Management

George: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because, to John’s point and what you just said, people are so pushed and caught up in what’s going on in the digital age that they’re just worried about being—and I’m curious to ask you this question, and then we can talk a little bit about your system—they’re so caught up in just productivity and management and time that they don’t step back to actually, like we talk about here, lead your life. Direct your life. You’re trying to be productive for what purpose? And so, um, I’m curious— I wanna talk about your system ‘cause you have this amazing, uh, you found some timeless ways to create systems for people to manage their time and productivity, but—and maybe we could talk about your COD system—but I also want you to maybe— Maybe you [00:15:00] have a thought on differentiating between task and time management and productivity? Or does that work into your system? Do you notice that there’s people that struggle with different parts there, right, like managing their time versus productivity? And maybe that’s also a segue if you’d like to talk a little bit about one of the systems you put together, this COD task management system.

“Stuff coming in is never gonna stop”

Carl: Well, you know, time management and productivity these days are just words that get bandied around online, and I think that the true definitions of them—I mean, there are definitions, and there’s probably clear definitions—but the big thing that I would say to people, which in a way that anyone can understand it is, stuff coming in is never gonna stop. And there’s a great story of, uh, when Queen Elizabeth passed away—she passed away in the afternoon, but that morning, she still had to sign her papers, do the government boxes, you know. Her civil servants made sure she—‘cause in the UK, all government ministers, prime ministers, and the Monarch get this red leather [00:16:00] box full of papers that they’ve gotta sign or read or review—she still had to do that on her last day. Now, she died, I believe, of something like a blood cancer—it was something similar to that—so she must have known, like, her days were numbered, so to speak, but yet she still had to do her boxes. Now she was very diligent; I’m pretty sure she could have said, “No, not today,” but she didn’t. She still did them.

George: Wow.

Carl: Now, the thing is, that reminded me of something that I realized is, stuff coming in is never gonna stop. Emails coming in: never gonna stop. Slack messages, team messages: never, ever gonna stop. So you can’t control it. It’s out of your control. The one thing, though, that is a constraint—and I love constraints because they force you to be creative—is time. You only get twenty-four hours a day. And there’s certain principles there that as human beings, we need. We need to sleep. I know it’s inconvenient, but we do need to sleep. We need to eat.

Fitting life into a busy schedule

So, we need to get those in, and realistically, you’ve probably only [00:17:00] got about fourteen hours at most to actually do work—if you wish. I wouldn’t necessarily advise people to be working fourteen-hour days every day, but, you know, that’s really all you are playing with. You can’t change the fact that stuff will come in ‘cause that’s not within your control. But you can control what you do with your time. You can make decisions about, “Okay, I’m gonna get eight hours sleep every night.” “I’m gonna spend three hours with my family.” “I’m gonna take my kids to the park every day.” “I’m gonna walk my dog every day.” You can make those decisions.

And equally, I mean, if you get a little bit more down into the weeds, I always say, look: just in the past, in the twentieth century, we didn’t have email, but we were writing letters. And they wrote letters almost every day. Charles Darwin, for example—I think his time was between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.?—he’d sit down in these … I think they called it a parlor. I can’t remember what a parlor is, but anyway, he sat down in the parlor, which had a table and a chair, and he would [00:18:00] write his letters every day, respond to letters. It was just something we did, and it was a joy. But today you’re talking about, you know, replying to email and it’s “Ugh, replying to email.” You think: we never used to be like that!

George: [Laughter] Right?

Carl: People were responding, but they eked out time for it every day, ‘cause they knew if they didn’t, it’s just gonna pile up and just become an overwhelming mess.

Clarity is Key

George: Well, I wanna add something, ‘cause I like your point there. It’s kind of back to what John said. You’re right: it’s never gonna stop. I think—and John had kind of asked the question—where do you see most people struggling? And I think I have seen as well, if you don’t have purpose behind how you’re living your life, if you don’t have a reason, a direction, then it’s much more difficult to handle all that stuff coming in than if you actually have clarity on what you’re doing in your life. Is that maybe safe to say with the clients you’ve been seeing that have direction, they have a better, [00:19:00] you know, strength in handling all that time and stuff? Or, is that one of those key ingredients that you find people have helped them?

“What do you want?”

Carl: Yeah, that’s the bit I generally have to untangle, is to try and get people to stop trying to manage tasks, because you can’t—it’s, you can’t control that—and start managing what they’re doing with their time. And with that, I always say, “Start with you first. Don’t start with your work.” It’s very easy to start with work because that’s where we normally identify where the overwhelm is, but if you don’t sort yourself out first, you’re just gonna feel very unfulfilled, very dissatisfied, and that’s when you get that low levels of anxiety, which is deadly. You know, long-term stress and the illness that will come from that. You first got to say, “What do you want that?” I mean, I’ve listened to many of your podcasts already, and I know that John talks about, you know, “What do you want?” That is the key question first. And some people will tell you, “I don’t have time to think about that.” And you say, “Well, you’ll never have [00:20:00] time if you don’t figure that bit out first.”

George: One of the reasons, John, right, why we’re doing the podcast? ‘Cause we’re like, we wanna be up in your face, making sure we remind you there’s a reason you are actually here on Earth, trying to work, trying to create a living. It’s not about being productive, right? So, John, I don’t know if you want to comment on that, ‘cause that is literally why we decided to start this, right?

John: It is. And I think, Carl, you have really touched on something. People know what matters to ‘em, and like you say, we’ve done a lot of research, and I think you have too. And you realize the power of goals are there, the power of a vision and mission, and yet a really small percentage of people— because there’s a whirlwind out there going on in life, if they can just take some time to figure out who matters most, what matters most, and you’ve done that. [00:21:00]

With your system, before— I think we wanna ask you about the whole digital story and your experiment, but Carl, would you just comment about anything you’d like to say about your innovative system, the principles of it, the fundamentals? And I would love to hear you just take a minute on it, and then people that are part of your amazing community know where to get it, but people that we touch, uh, will be able to know where to go for that. Do you want to just—

George: Yeah, I think that’s— I was gonna say, John, that’s a great, that’s a great point. Let’s actually break it down for our listeners, if you would—your COD system, task management system, help us kinda break that down.

The COD System

Carl: So this came about when, again, going back to my researching into, well, what are the fundamental basics of all great productivity systems? It’s one of the reasons why I read all these old books, fascinating books, but they all had these three underlying principles. How they—what they added to them was [00:22:00] different because each person’s coming at it from a different point of view, but there was three things.

Collect

First of all, you gotta collect stuff that’s coming your way. You need to have a way of collecting that stuff that you trust. If you don’t trust your collecting system, you know, you’re— it’s gonna fail, because you’re gonna be worried about what you need to do. And I don’t know if you—I think Franklin Planner still does this, I don’t know if people can see this. [Carl holds up a Franklin Planner Satellite booklet] This is what, um, a little notebook, and it fits nicely in an inside coat pocket and stuff, and you can carry this around with you. This is a great idea for a collecting system. I call it the ubiquitous collection tool. This is one of them, but it can be something as simple as like a pocket notebook with a pen attached to it, or if you like the digital world, it can be your phone.

But you need to have a way of collecting your thoughts, your ideas, the things—“oh yes, I need to do that, I need to do this, I need to do that.” This is that part of, like, externalizing it instead of letting it float around in your [00:23:00] head, waking you up at three o’clock in the morning going, “Oh, I forgot to do that!” You don’t want that sort of stuff. So, collecting is really important. Writing it down is just the best way to externalize all that stuff that’s coming at you.

Organize

But then the next step, which is what a lot of people kind of forget to do, is organize that stuff. That’s the O part of COD: organize. What does it mean to you? What do you need to do? So I have, like, three basic questions. What is it, what do I need to do, and then at the next level would be, when am I going to do it, if at all? So that organizing, going through those questions: What is it? You know, oh, it’s a thought about buying a printer. What do I need to do? Oh, I need to research printers. Um, okay, so when am I going to do that? You know, I’m not gonna do that in the middle of a call. I’m not gonna do that in the middle of working on a project. I just need some time to just figure out what’s the best printer for me. [00:24:00]

So you run these questions. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it? Now, for me, research I’d probably do in the evening sitting on the sofa; then it doesn’t feel like work. [Laughter] But, you know, everyone’s got their own ways of doing that. So, what is it, what do I need to do, when am I going to do it?

Do

And the final bit is do it. The do bit. Now, the bit, kind of like, the encompassing—or, if you like, the bit that sandwiches it all together—is, you want to be looking at— You’re gonna be collecting all day, ‘cause that’s random. But the bit—and this was addressing one of the problems I had with a lot of people particularly around about 2015 to 2017, when the productivity apps were kind of exploding—people were spending, like, 50 to 60 percent of their day just organizing their stuff. Well, now, when you expand that time, there’s only one place that you’re taking it away from. You’re taking it away from doing the work.

So one of the bits that I emphasize in the COD system is to [00:25:00] say, look, you know, you’ve gotta try and get to the point where 95 percent of your time is doing this stuff and just 5 percent of your time organizing it, which—it roughly equates to about fifteen to twenty minutes a day. Now, if your system’s set up correctly, whether it’s paper or digital, it doesn’t matter. It’s actually very easy to organize your stuff in twenty minutes a day.

George: It’s interesting you say that, because I think so many people have lost the idea. Digital is supposed to make us more free, more successful, more productive. All it’s really done is made most people think they could take on more.

Carl: Yes.

The Power of Simplicity

George: And so by having that simplicity—and John, I know you would agree with this—it’s the simple principles that actually make your life better, not adding more and taking more complexity. And so this COD system, the “collect, organize, and do it” system may sound simple, just like many of the timeless principles we talk [00:26:00] about, but there’s a reason that it’s supposed to be simple, right?

Write down your tasks in advance

Carl: Well, there’s a story that Hyrum Smith puts in his book about somebody calling him saying, “Hey”—a big CEO or a big company calling him, saying—“Hey, I’ve heard of your great system. I want you to come and teach my executive team,” he said, “but we’re all busy at the moment, so can you, um, can we talk about it again in six months’ time?” And Hyrum Smith says, “Yes, uh—what time do you want me to call you?” He says, “What do you mean, what time do you want me to—it’s six months from now! Just call me in six months.” “No, I need a time and a day.” And Hyrum’s talking about writing this down in his planner, and he’s explaining about how you use the planning folders and everything. And on that day at 7:00 a.m. in the morning, he calls him, the executive, and he goes, “Oh, ——!” I think he used an expletive word. “You told me to call you at seven a.m. on this day, six months ago.” And he’s going, “Yeah, okay.”

George: Well, I tell you, there’s a simplicity, isn’t there, John, in just putting something down and being able to walk away from [00:27:00] it and knowing it’s in your system.

Integrate COD into your Franklin Planner system

Carl: Yeah, but see, if you think about it, though, the mechanics of that is “collect.” I’ve now committed to calling this guy at 7:00 a.m. in six months’ time. Collect it, put it into your system, and then organizing it. That means, “Oh, okay, I’ve gotta call this guy at 7:00 a.m. in six months’ time. Let’s go forward in my calendar, write it in my calendar. The notes that I made about what this guy wants is in my plan.” You know, it’s perfect. It’s exactly what the COD system— I mean, it can work with the Franklin Planner, it can work with a digital system, it’s— If you don’t collect it, think of all the opportunities you’re gonna miss.

The Principles Behind COD

John: Carl, what have you— You told a story before we got on about connecting with Franklin Quest at the time, early, and how somehow you were, you know—I think you’re working at the hotel then—you had interest there. What have you noticed as you’ve gone along in the cool work you’ve done, and, like, what principles have you [00:28:00] seen that you think are timeless, that you’d say, you know, this COD system, whatever tools you use—what principles would you say are some of those timeless ones that that system is built on, that you’ve just seen time and time again? People benefit, I mean, they succeed, if they keep this principle in mind behind those approaches. What jumps out to you?

Writing is powerful

Carl: The thing that jumps out to me is writing it down. That’s the one that I know.Again, it’s very, very simple. You don’t need to be rocket scientists to do this. I mean, it’s—write it down. One of my kind of interests is, like, Formula 1, and there’s Red Bull CEO, uh, Christian Horner. He’s done two videos on his YouTube channel, like, a day in the life of, you know, a Formula 1 team CEO, and one was from 2012 and one was done, I think, a year ago or two years ago. [00:29:00] One thing I noticed was, when they have him recording him in a meeting with one of his leadership team, Christian Horner doesn’t have an iPad on his desk or a laptop or a phone. He’s got an A4 notebook with a very nice pen—which is one of the other beauties of using pen and paper, by the way, is you get— the pens out there are just fantastic [Laughter] but—and I thought, well, hang on a minute. 2012, 2023, 2024, he hasn’t changed that system.

Use digital tools only where paper falls short

And it suddenly struck me; I thought, yeah, we’re losing sight of what computers are meant for. They’re meant to help us. So I think of like, a lot of my output, I need a computer. I write—you know, I post a blog post, I write a newsletter, I do a podcast, I do a YouTube video. All that needs technology. But the planning side of things, the meeting side of things, actually handwriting these things down.

And I know, John, you mentioned in a previous episode about “it lights up the whole brain.” I mean, that connection between a pen [00:30:00] and your wrist, your fingers—it lights up your whole brain. If you think about what a keyboard does, it’s just tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. That’s not lighting up much in your brain.

Don’t edit, just think

And also, the big thing I notice, it forces you to edit. And when you’re planning, you don’t want to be editing. You just gotta let it flow. You get those red lines or green lines under your grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes. That does not matter when you are planning.

George: Right, right.

Carl: That’s the editing part. And I think those are the big things that I’ve noticed, certainly in recent years, is because we are beginning to think technology can run our lives completely.

Don’t let technology run your life

And I hear about—I’ve tried one of those AI calendars. Now, I like to exercise, but I’m not very good at exercising in the morning. I get a bit lightheaded. So I prefer to exercise in the afternoon. But one of these AI calendars said, “Oh, you are busy today. You must do your exercise at six a.m.” I’m going, “Ha! That’s not gonna happen!” [Laughter] And the other thing is, AI won’t know if I’ve got [00:31:00] flu, it won’t know if I had a fight with my wife this morning, it doesn’t know any of that. Only I know that, and I can then manually adjust my calendar accordingly. So I think we’re losing sight a little bit of— we are thinking technology can run our lives, and actually that’s the last thing you want to run your life. You should be running your life.

George: Yeah, just a tool. And you’re right, and the other thing it’s missing is, you know, the idea that it will never have that vision and clarity and purpose factored into your day-to-day, which is what we’re trying to remind people about.

You know, it’s funny; I think the million-dollar question everyone’s gonna ask—and I think it’s best explained by your experiment—is, they’re gonna say, “Okay guys, we get it, right, but how do we merge digital and planner, or paper and planning? How do we balance those?”

The Franklin Planner Experiment

And one of the main purposes John and I wanted you [00:32:00] on the podcast is you started that experiment a little while back where you’re like, “Hey, I’m gonna go back to my Franklin Planner.” And I love that you said, “I don’t know if it’s gonna work. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.” But you’ve been doing that now. Uh, tell us about your experiment and then what you learned from that, or what your conclusions are becoming, or are, for digital and paper.

Paper planning improves focus

Carl: Well, the— what the biggest change, the biggest difference I noticed was focus. My focus—wow, it just shot up once I went back to the Franklin Planner. Now, you see, I mentioned a moment ago about the digital—it’s just text on a screen, and you just see it the same and same and same all day—and you become a little bit numb to that. It becomes like, “Oh God, there’s all these tasks, all these tasks, all these tasks.” When you sit down with a Franklin Planner, or a planner of any sort paper, and you step away from the screen, and you just allow yourself a few minutes just to think, “Right, what do I need to get done tomorrow?”

Plan out your day for better sleep

Now, I always advise planning the night [00:33:00] before ‘cause you sleep better. You also enjoy the evening more ‘cause you’re not worried about tomorrow; you’ve done your planning. And the other thing is, I have a zipper binder on my planner, by the way, and when I close it after my planning and zip it up, it’s like a ritual to say, “My day is done.” And I love that feeling.

George: I love it. I love it.

Enjoying the peace of paper planning

Carl: But the thing about the planner is, it gets me to step away from that stuff on the screen. The emails are coming in, the text messages coming in. It gets me away from that. I’m on a sofa, my dog sat next to me. Um, my wife is studying ‘cause she’s gone back to university, so she’s studying at the dining table. It’s lovely and quiet, but it feels like there’s a connection between us all somehow. And I’m just there with my planner thinking, “Right, what are my most important things tomorrow? What do I need to get done tomorrow?” And that has really helped me with my focus. And then when I come through into the office in the morning, it’s just like, I open up the planner, it’s just to the right of me, and I can just say, “Right, that’s the first thing that needs to get done today. Let’s get started.”

Paper planning prevents task overwhelm

George: Was it a bit of— I was gonna say, was it a bit of overwhelm that made [00:34:00] you do the experiment in the first place? Or what made you decide to do that?

Carl: It wasn’t so much for me overwhelmed because I’d kind of figured out that long list of stuff just overwhelms you, but it was something that was creeping in with my clients. That’s what I was having to deal with, like, sixty to seventy tasks on a task list for the day. I’m thinking, “Wow, you could never do that with a Franklin Planner,” ‘cause there isn’t sixty, seventy spaces, sixty to seventy spaces there. [Laughter] But you would see it as you were writing all those tasks out in a planner, you would see this is not gonna happen. Whereas digital tools doesn’t do that. You could add a thousand things for today, and it won’t warn you that you’re not gonna be able to do this. But the other beauty of the planner, which I think is the calendar, is your day calendar is right next to your task list.

And like, yesterday I had, like, seven hours of calls. So there’s no point in me putting twenty tasks at the—in the prioritized task list, because I could see all my calls on the calendar saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, there’s not enough time to do all this stuff. So I think I only had two [00:35:00] things. Planning and solitude was at the top, which it has been for thirty-odd years when I’ve been using the planner, uh, and then there was just a couple of other things that just needed to be done in between breaks of—with meetings. And that was— Digital technology does not show you that. I say you can throw a thousand things for your day today, and it’s not gonna warn you that this is an impossible day, but your Franklin Planner is doing that. As you’re writing it down by hand, you’re going, “Hang on a minute. This isn’t— I’m not gonna get all this stuff done.” And it stops you from overwhelming yourself.

The Balancing Act Between Digital and Paper

George: I love that. I actually, um, I’ve been picking up a lot more personal productivity habits from John ‘cause of our conversations, and I’m—John, I’m curious what your thought is on that, because I think what people have done, because they’re so overwhelmed with digital, is they’ve said, “Well, you know”—they’ve rationalized it. They’ve said, “Well, you know what’s cool about digital is, I could throw it all in my calendar and stuff, and then I don’t have to think about it till it pops up.” But what you’re really saying is, “I’m not gonna [00:36:00] think about what I’m doing today,” which is the opposite of what you want if you want to create your life. I don’t— John, what would you think about that?

John: What I was thinking as Carl was talking—and Carl, you could tell us—and George, I agree with what you were saying there;—you know, each individual has this amazing leader in them. There’s nothing that we’ve found, and it seems like nothing you’ve found, that can, you know, disagree with that. And also, we might even use greatness, potential. But they may be so busy and so focused, overwhelmed, or maybe not even aware of the power of planning or goals or things like that.

But it seems like some terminology that we’ve come across is, there are certain jobs to be done, and you told us about some of your early jobs. But the digital technology—Carl, I’m interested to see if you would agree with this—[00:37:00] you know, there’s some really powerful things related to communication, texting, and calls, and also information, that digital technology is powerful at and really does a great job. And then, like you said, technology took you away. We’ve had so many amazing customers, the technology took them away, and then what it didn’t do for them was help ‘em, really, kind of have time to draw out of them—almost self-coaching—their potential, their values, you know, really anchor with weekly goals and vision and mission. And so that all that stuff in your C part coming at you, you have a way to sort through that. And as you go into Organize, then you can prioritize it, which your system does, and then, you know, act on it.

But, I’m curious— [00:38:00] Is— Did your experiment kind of discover, “Look, here are the few things that digital technology just is amazing for, and here are some amazing fundamentals that writing and planning and thought,” also that kind of got left, and it’s come full circle for you, in your experience. Summarize, if you’re willing, like, “Yeah, here’s— This is key and this is key.” And what did you find about the way people can combine those for themselves? Is that too long of a question?

Where digital tools prevail

Carl: No, no, no, it’s absolutely fine. Yeah. So for me, the way I’ve kind of landed now is that thinking, planning? Paper all the way. But actually, um, when it comes to, like, for example, the calendar. The way that the world is working today, I can— my coaching clients use a scheduling service. I’ve pre-, kind of, [00:39:00] blocked out time on my calendar. They can just go in and pick a time and schedule it. You know, I can’t do that with my Franklin Planner ‘cause I can’t just hand them my Franklin Planner and say, “Pick a time!” [Laughter] You know, that’s not gonna happen.

However, what I do do is, in my planner, I do put in, like, key appointments, like if my dog’s got a grooming session or I’m going to the dentist or the doctor or anything like that. I put those in, and what I like about that is I can actually see the month as a whole, and I can see if I’ve kind of overcommitted myself, that I’m not gonna be in the office on too many days or something like that.

Technology’s capacity for communication

But the digital system I find, on a day-to-day basis for meetings particularly, is the calendar’s there for me. It’s like, you know, when I joined this call, the link that George had sent me was in the calendar invite. So, you know, you can’t do that in my planner. You can’t write out the link into my planner. So those areas is where I think digital obviously has a huge advantage. It makes communicating, uh, fantastic. And as, you know, George, you mentioned, I’m in South Korea. You got—you’re in Utah, [00:40:00] uh, I think, John, you are in Hawaii?

George: He’s back in Utah now, yeah.

Carl: Oh, you just—oh, you’re in Utah now. So like—

John: My head’s in Hawaii.

George: Yeah. Let’s be clear.

Carl: Thousands of miles between us.

George: That’s a great point, yeah.

Carl: But technology brings us together.

Let your planning systems work together

George: You know, you do make a great point. Yeah, the digital definitely has its abilities to make you actually be able to be more productive. But, you know, I think, John, your question is so great, and your answer is, well, Carl, because of this: most people have not decided where they’re gonna use digital and where and how they’re gonna use the planning, and your system—like, there’s a couple subtleties I wanted to point out, you know. Thinking and planning: don’t try to—I’ve tried that—force the calendar stuff all in your planner, you know. Adopt a calendar digitally and record your primary things on your planner. You know, maybe collect some things digitally, but put things in writing for thinking and planning. [00:41:00]

And I think when you know you are purposeful in how you’re gonna use digital and writing, you become better at your life and you become more successful. If you’re trying to do both, like I’ve experienced it, I’m like, “Oh my gosh,” like, you know, “I’m using two systems here.” No. You’re actually clearly defining where digital helps you the best and where you are missing from the digital here. And to John’s point in our earlier episodes, there are some things you haven’t thought about between, you know, your brain and your creativity and your thought process and things like that. Because even you as a YouTuber/influencer, you know, productivity coach and international speaker, you still have to break away.

And I noticed you said you had solitude and planning and things on your list. Who even puts that on their list digitally? Nobody.

Carl: Nobody does that anymore. Yeah.

George: Right.

“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast”

Carl: Actually, there’s a great saying, there’s a great saying, which is “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.” I think it’s a Navy SEAL, saying, [00:42:00] “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.”

George: I like that.

Carl: And I think of it in terms of this: if you need time to—if you need to plan, that’s slowing. If you need to think, that’s slow. When you execute, you execute very quickly. And that’s doing.

George: Great point.

Paper Planning Delivers Tangible Results

Carl: Now for me, doing something quickly, that’s where technology comes in. I need to communicate with somebody quickly. I need to text my wife because she needs to know something. You know, that’s speed. That’s all about speed. I’m not gonna sit down with a pen of paper and say, “How am I gonna, you know, put this message to my wife together?” [Laughter] You know, that’s—you know, just get, uh, you need this to see this or something, but when it comes to planning—planning your life, planning your day, planning your week, planning your year—you’ve gotta start on paper.

Don’t necessarily finish on paper, ‘cause maybe the action steps, you want to put in digitally, like your calendar appointments, your, you know, maybe if you like digital to-do lists, yeah, sure, put that digital. But that’s the output of your thinking, and the thinking starts on paper first. And, just to give you a [00:43:00] really good example of how this works, uh, when I— I actually started my paper planning experiment early last year, and I thought, “Right, the best place to do this is, start planning my YouTube videos on paper, not digital.” I’d always done it on digital first. And I did it, and I tripled my views in a month.

George: Wow. Wow.

Creativity flows on paper

Carl: I went from an average of three thousand views a week to ten thousand views a week. I’m going, “It can’t be. It can’t be just paper.” But there was no other change that I’d made, that was the only change I made. And I realized, “Aha. The paper.” You mentioned there, George, about that creativity? That’s what was happening. I was being more creative, I was being more fluid with the story, the narrative that I wanted to share. Whereas digital, it was just bullet points. And that doesn’t come across very well in the video.

George: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Deep work brings inspiration

John: Carl, I think you’ve probably heard of this—you pry read this book Deep Work.

Carl: Yes.

John: Um, and we—another point, we’ll give references to that, but—when you took the time to [00:44:00] do that, at least what a lot of our community says is, you connect, you’re more inspired, your brain actually is working better. And so, you know, you were able to do some deep work about things you were inspired about that you knew others had needs for. And you obviously were able to connect with them. I think that’s fascinating.

I wanted to throw one other thing out—and I know that, George, we might be tight on time, but—as you guys were talking about the calendar, you know, the things you mentioned about digital, there’s really some phenomenal innovation—coordinating schedules and so on—but I wanted to just mention something that we hear a lot from in our community: the power of a day, a week, a month. In other words, the calendar itself really is an amazing core part, being on paper, at least related [00:45:00] to goals, and related— you know, it’s a natural day-and-night way to take what matters to you, who matters to you, and work at that each day so that at the end of the day, and so you’re able to say, “Hey, we didn’t get it all done. But what mattered most, we did get done.”

And so it has both a part of your inspiration and drawing out the brilliance in you, connecting with others and building trust and helping them succeed. That structure that—you know, whoever created us, however we got here, the sun comes up and goes down—is also phenomenally integral, is what many have said in our community to that inspiration, values, and foundation site, in addition to coordination, communication, and digital. So it really is a gift in both these technologies. [00:46:00] Paper is a technology, and Carl, I love how you have the courage and creativity to do that experiment. You’re super credible and, wow, it’s been—

Rediscover Your Focus with the Franklin Planner

Carl: I should just—by the way, John, I should just add something to, uh—you mentioned about the calendar and the—and your goals, and actually projects as well. One of the things—and this is for all the Franklin Planner uses out there—in the calendar—I’m using the Monticello pages—but in the calendar you’ve got a section down the righthand side called Notes.

Always remember your goals

And what I do is, at the top, I write out, “What are my projects I want to complete this month?” And then underneath that, “What are my goals this month?” Now, I’m looking at that—I look at that calendar, not necessarily every day, but I look at it certainly every single week when I’m planning the week. And I look at those things and look at the goals and the projects I want to complete this month, and boy, has that kept me focused.

And again, that digital side—when I’ve tried to do this digitally, it’s never worked ‘cause they’ve been hidden. They’ve kind of disappeared. [00:47:00] But every Saturday morning when I sit down to do my planning, I look at that month page view in my planner. I’m going, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, next week I really must get some work done on that project or else I’m not gonna get it complete.” It’s been phenomenal to get me focused, and I think, “How do people—why have people forgotten this?” You know—

George: That’s a point that I wanna, really wanna highlight for our listeners. Focus. It’s really hard to focus when digital gives you everything. Even if it partials it out, it doesn’t partial out the part that’s the most important. So focus is big. I love that you said that, Carl. I wanna mention one other thing before we pivot to a couple last questions. I think there’s a huge intangible that people might not value, but as they go on in life, they’ll wish they had. And that is, you said things like—you’re gonna get the results. You’ve gotten more results, you’ve gotten more productivity, you’ve gotten more end, you know— you’ve shown and proven through your experiment you can get more out of it. [00:48:00]

Align with your purpose to feel fulfilled

But there’s a— I want to ask you if you got this, but you said things like, “When I zipped up the planner, mentally, I felt like I could set it aside.” And I’m curious if you felt that, yeah, you got more results, but did you feel more satisfaction or fulfillment that you were actually driving your life the direction you want as far as purpose, versus “I’m getting so much”—like, “Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a hundred X done on things,” but I could go back and go, “Ah, but I just—my main stuff, you know, it’s not that.” [Laughter] So when you did this experiment, you got the tangible done, but was it that sense of fulfillment and also, you know, peace of mind? Like, what kind of things there did you experience?

Carl: Oh, the fulfillment side of it’s gone through the roof, uh, which is one of the, probably the reasons—I should have mentioned this in the actual video that I posted yesterday—is that this is one of the main reasons why I’ve not stopped. I should have stopped in December. I never did. It’s now the, we’re now in—

George: Yeah, it’s a three-month deal, right?

Carl: But it is, it’s that [00:49:00] sense of fulfillment, and as I mentioned, that zipping up of the planner at the end of the day after I’ve done my planning for the next day, it’s like a little ritual to say my day is done. Now I can just relax. It’s no more work. And if I haven’t done something, that’s fine. I’ve got next day planned, and I can pick up tomorrow, but that’s it. So it’s nice, it’s like bookending the day. It starts, I’ll open up the planner when I come into the office, put it down on the desk. I always write a journal in the morning, in my, uh, in a separate book, but it’s a handwritten journal. That’s one of my first—make coffee first, that’s always essential—but then sit down and write in my journal, and it’s like twenty minutes of writing my journal.

But before I do that, I realize I always open up the planner and just have it to the right of me. And so I’m very aware of what my most important thing— I don’t put little routinal stuff in the planner; that’s digital, that’s fine. I can just check that at the end of the day. You know, did I take the garbage out? Did I, you know, did I refuel the car? You know, stuff like that. I mean, I’m not gonna put that in the planner. This is like [00:50:00] the real stuff that’s going to make the day feel fulfilling, or fulfilled.

A separate space for peaceful planning

George: And you do something that most people don’t see, and that’s what I was trying to get at is, because of your phone being one of your biggest, you know, like time management, productivity-type tools, people could even leave their office, close their door, go, but you take your digital stuff with you. You were able to block, go shift, shift to a thought, you know, process of organizing, planning, thinking, but then use that to close it off and create your life. And so I gotta commend you on that. I mean, John, that’s pretty, that’s pretty cool, powerful and tangible stuff, don’t you think?

Community Inspiration

John: I think it’s credibility, and Carl, your story is one, you know, where you’ve been interested in this, you’ve studied it, you become an expert, you have combined all your different experiences. So it’s really amazing. It would be fun if we could do this, if we could gather all of your community into, uh, this big [00:51:00] Franklin campus that’s kind of historical for Franklin Quest and Franklin Planner—we have this auditorium called the Hyrum Smith auditorium. We would need a much bigger auditorium to gather all your community there, but, uh, it’s been cool to hear— I don’t know, I would like to thank you and just say I feel like you’ve inspired me to, you know, just take a little time, a little more time each day, each week, and really, for myself, customize and use the strengths of the digital technology.

And in most cases, people are way overwhelmed there. So we’re not knocking that, we’re just saying, and rediscover if you once, you know, were writing things down, journaling, and really drawing out what’s great in you. But also, if you haven’t done that before—some of maybe [00:52:00] the younger, those that are younger that just started digital—would just invite people to visit your channels and your sites, those that hear it from our community, and discover what, you know, you’ve discovered in your journey. And I’m just really impressed. You’ve inspired me to lead my life a little more deliberately and to really focus, so thank you for sharing a bit about yourself.

George: Yeah, and John, I’ll make sure, I’ll make sure that you guys—I’m sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but let’s make sure—I’ll put all of your links to the ways people can contact you in our show notes, and I’ll make sure that they can go there. But before we go, ‘cause I know we’re out of time—apologize, ‘cause we wanna, we’re gonna have to do this again, because we wanna get into teams, how to lead your team and organization—

Carl: I don’t feel desperate to get outside. [Laughter]

Final Thoughts

George: Yeah, so we’ll go about, is there anything last—any last thought or, you know, comment or direction you wanna give people before we let you go?

Carl: [00:53:00] You know, I think, if we relate it to what I’ve learned with my Franklin Planner experiment—which is probably no longer an experiment because I’m in, I’m back in, I’m in, I’m in, totally.

George: Love it.

Slowing down in a fast world

Carl: Um, but one other thing I would say, and I’m currently thinking about how I can actually communicate this to people out there, but the most important thing is just slow down.

George: Yeah.

Carl: You know, technology’s gonna keep getting faster and faster and faster. Your brain is not gonna get faster and faster and faster. The only way that you’re gonna—we as a human race—is gonna cope in the future is to slow down, figure out what’s important to you—not to, not trying to think what’s important to other people, it’s what’s important to you—and make sure that that’s what you are planning for. ‘Cause as I said at the beginning, stuff is never gonna stop coming in. You know, I’ve got quite a lot of retired clients who said, telling me that they’re now busier than they ever were when they were working in the workforce. Of course they are. It’s just because everything’s getting more faster and faster and faster. [00:54:00] “It has to be done now.” No, it doesn’t. Slow down.

Connect with Carl

George: Great advice. That is great advice for people. Slow down. And, we talked before—uh, as we end up here, I wanna make sure I make a note to all of our listeners—Carl has an amazing COD system. You can get it for free, absolutely free on his site. So go check it out. Go check it out. Connect with Carl. Um, you know, learn a little more about his journey, but also because there’s a lot of lessons to be learned in that.

And we really appreciate, as always, as John mentioned, you know, we wanna help individuals to lead their life, we want them to be more productive, but also more fulfilled and passionate. So we appreciate everybody joining us here tonight. Carl Pullein, you are an amazing person. We appreciate your time. And as always, we look forward to talking with you more on the next episode. Have an amazing day.

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