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- A great man once said that time is an illusion,
lunchtime, doubly so,
but despite the apparently elusory
nature of these two things,
time can certainly seem like something that's tangible
and like something that is constantly
slipping through our fingers,
not least of which because of the fact
that we tend to waste so much of it.
Yes, it seems that most of us are
perpetually rocked by at least a little bit of guilt
over the amount of time we spend scrolling through Netflix,
or browsing the dankest of memes,
or just refreshing Instagram to see
how many likes we got on that latest post
in the last 30 seconds.
Though, it also bears mentioning the
amount of time we tend to waste on
things that don't seem to produce as much guilt,
things seem justified like taking on too many commitments,
and having an overly busy schedule
where we're stretched thin, stressed out,
and producing low quality work as a result.
As Francis Crick once said,
a busy life is a waste of life.
What I wanna do with this video is
take a broad view of time management
and give you five useful tips for
managing your time more effectively
whether you already know you're wasting it
because you're a couch potato,
or whether you, like me to be honest,
have simply diluted yourself into thinking
you're already managing it pretty well
because of how busy you are.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat electronic music)
The first tip that I've got for your guys today
is to try using a time tracking tool.
I recently did a video on apps that force you to work,
which listed several different options in this category
so I'm not gonna restate them all,
but what I do wanna do here is
give you a little bit of a deeper look
at one that I'm gonna recommend you
at least give a try and that is Toggle.
Unlike automatic time trackers like Rescue Time
that just log the time you spend in each app
or program on your computer and then
give you a report at the end of the week,
Toggle is a manual time tracker which means
you actually go into their dashboard
and record the time you spend on each task
throughout the day.
The reason that I recommend at least
giving this tool a try is that
tracking your time manually makes you think harder about it
and you start to realize more accurately
how you spend your time on a daily basis
and that let's you make changes going forward.
Within Toggle's dashboard,
you're gonna find two different modes,
manual mode and timer mode.
With manual mode,
you can record the amount of time
you spent on each task after the fact,
but what I'm gonna recommend you use instead is timer mode.
This is a real-time method where you
hit a start and stop button so you
can be timing your work as you actually do it.
This has a couple of key benefits.
First, it's more accurate since you are
tracking time in real-time.
You don't have to go back after the fact
and try to remember how many hours
and minutes you put into each task, and secondly,
and more importantly,
you'll be less likely to waste time or switch tasks
because you'll subconsciously want your
time log to accurately reflect what you actually did.
Long-term manual time tracking like
eating a bowl of nails in the morning is not for everyone.
You might find that after you do it for a week or two,
you kinda wanna move on and just
not worry about it anymore and that's fine,
but I do think that doing it for a week or two
as an experiment is very useful because
it gives you a more accurate picture
of how you're using your time and
it'll make you think a little bit more
deliberately about how you're gonna use it in the future.
(upbeat electronic music)
Tip number two is to get clear on your priorities
and to do this very deliberately,
maybe even sit down and do it on a piece of paper
or write it in your journal because
when you aren't clear on your priorities
and what they represent on your schedule,
it can be very easy to take on too many commitments
and to become that overly busy person.
I think prioritizing can be a topic for a video all its own,
but I do wanna give you a couple of questions
that I ask myself whenever I'm trying to
nail down what my personal priorities are
and whether a new commitment is worth it.
Number one, to ask a very in the details type of question.
What does my schedule look like without this on it?
Answering this means taking a hard look
at my current list of commitments,
my schedule, how much free time I have,
and whether or not I'd be willing
to give something up to take on this new commitment or not.
In addition to that question,
I also like to ask a more birds eye view question which is,
when I'm on my death bed, will I regret not doing this?
This is the question that actually
got me to finally start taking singing lessons.
This could be a question that would
also be useful for getting over your
fear to start doing things,
but as a time management question,
it can also be very useful because
it helps you to prioritize things
from a bird's eye view, from a life values perspective.
If you wanna be really clear on your
priorities and on your values and on what you're doing,
it may also be useful to have a
written record of what you're doing at the moment
and to update it quite frequently.
I actually do this.
If you go over to my website, collegeinfogeek.com/now,
you can see what I'm doing and
what my priorities at least should be ideally.
(upbeat electronic music)
Tip number three is to learn how to
batch your tasks effectively,
and batching basically just means
taking a bunch of your tasks, bundling them together,
and knocking them all out in one session.
When you do this, you free up lots of time
for more intense projects later on,
or if you're me, probably playing more Beat Saber,
but more importantly,
batching lets you take advantage of economies of scale.
When you decide to do a bunch of tasks in one big batch,
you eliminate a lot of the setup costs
that you would have to deal with
if you did them all individually.
In terms of tasks that make good candidates for batching,
I'm gonna go ahead and suggest number one,
any and all errands.
If it's a low energy task and you
have to leave the house to do it,
go ahead and take care of all those in
one big batch in one afternoon.
Number two, tasks that require a low mental energy
and that are done at home so cleaning things up,
organizing papers, fighting that ninja
that's hiding in your closet,
clearing out your email box, all that kind of stuff.
Number three, any kind of small tasks
that surround your main work.
For an example here,
every single time that I have to make a video,
I need to create a project over in Notion
with a sponsor tag and a publishing date,
and I also have to create a research document in Evernote.
These are little tasks that could be
done individually when I start the project,
or I could come up with 10 video topics in a row
and do all of these things in one big batch.
One little tidbit before we move on,
if you're already using Todoist or a similar task manager,
you may wanna start using their labels feature
as it can be very helpful for batching since
across all of your projects,
you can apply labels that correspond to say
your energy levels like low or medium or high,
or the location at which a task has to be performed
like home or work or an errand,
and then when you have time for a batch,
you can look at the label that's most
relevant to you right now and see what there is to be done.
(upbeat electronic music)
Next up, we have to talk about how to
get better at saying no.
This is an integral skill in time management,
especially for people who are overly busy.
Those of us who are perpetually overcommitted
seem to be the kind of people who
just can't say no to new opportunities,
whether there are people coming to us
because they want something from us, they want our help,
or whether it's something that just
seems really cool that we want to do.
Either way, we have to learn how to say no
if we wanna be able to prioritize
the things that are actually important
and give them the time that they deserve.
How exactly do you get to the point where you can say no?
There are definitely tactics,
there are ways to gracefully let people down,
there are ways to sort of push off things
that you might wanna do for yourself,
but I think the first thing you have to do
is just become mentally okay with saying no
and this can be hard.
A lot of times saying no feels like
letting an opportunity slip through your fingers forever
like you're only gonna get one shot
because this opportunity only comes once in a lifetime
like having the ability to seamlessly
integrate Eminem lyrics into a video script,
which I didn't say no to.
Remember that every time you say yes to an opportunity,
you are incurring an opportunity cost
because the act of saying yes to one thing
means you are implicitly saying no to something else.
You have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention
and you can't devote it to everything.
This can be a useful way to reframe your thinking.
Remember that every single decision you make
incurs an opportunity cost.
That brings us to the question of
how to properly let people down if you have to say no
because there is a graceful way to do it
and then there is an abrasive way to do it.
You could just yell no and why would
you ever ask me to do that in their face,
but you could also do it a little bit more tactfully
and here's an example of how I personally do it.
One type of opportunity that I have
deliberately chosen to say no to
for the most part is public speaking.
This is something that I do like doing.
It definitely can advance my career,
but I've realized that if I travel,
if I speak, if I take time to write talks,
I can't make as many videos and I
can't do the other things that are valuable to me.
Nine times out of 10,
when somebody reaches out to me wanting me
to go speak at their school or their event,
I have to say no.
My priorities dictate it,
but I try to say it in a way that
respects the fact that they even reached out to me
that says that I'm honored that they did so
and that tells them I have other commitments right now.
I'm not saying no because I don't want to do it.
I do, but I have other priorities that I have to respect.
You could also take it one step further
by trying to anticipate their next step
and then trying to help out with that.
If somebody comes to you with an opportunity
and you have to say no,
it's likely that they're gonna have to
go to somebody else or look elsewhere for a solution
since you can't provide it.
If you have anything that you could do quickly,
again, that doesn't interfere with your
priorities or take too much time,
then anticipating that need of theirs and trying to fill it
is going to help them along in their process,
but it's also going to make this interaction a positive one
even though you had to say no.
To go back to my previous example,
if I get a speaking request and I have to say no to it,
I'm going to do so gracefully,
I'm going to inform them as to why,
but I might also follow that up with
a recommendation that they contact my friend
Chris Bailey over to Life Productivity
because I happen to know that he does take speaking gigs,
he's really good at it,
and his area of expertise is pretty similar to mine.
Even though I had to say no,
I might've been able to provide them with a solution.
This practice,
the practice of anticipating the needs
of the other person when you say no
or anticipating the next step in the conversation
is a very, very useful life skill to build
so don't think of it just as a time management tip,
think of it as a life tip in general.
(upbeat electronic music)
We have arrived at what is possibly
my personal favorite time management tip
which is to use the pressure created by deadlines
to your advantage.
A few years ago,
I had to learn the hard way just how useful deadlines are
and how terrible for your productivity
a lack of them can be.
Back in my junior year of college during the first semester,
I was incredibly busy.
I had so many commitments.
I was in RA, I had a second part-time job,
I had classes, I had clubs.
Basically I had very little time
to work on my side project,
which was my site College Info Geek.
The second semester of that year rolls around
and I have the bright idea to quit
basically everything except my classes
and devote the rest of my free time to working on the blog
and I thought that this would give me
so much more time and energy to get articles done
that I would basically triple my productivity overnight,
but instead, I spent most of that semester
playing Marvel vs. Capcom Three,
getting very few articles written,
and generally wasting a bunch of time.
That experience taught me a very valuable lesson
which is that we need structure, we need deadlines,
we need a little bit of a framework to operate within.
Otherwise, we just don't do anything.
We tend to take the path of least resistance.
There may be some rare souls out there
who are so passionate about every single
element of what they do that they need
absolutely no structure, no deadlines, no nothing.
They just get up and work like a mad man every single day,
but I'm not one of those people.
I love the work I do,
but I don't love every single element of it
and I'm prone to procrastination unless I have a deadline.
It's like the ex-Navy Seal
Jocko Willink always likes to say,
discipline equals freedom.
When you have a little bit of discipline,
when you have a little bit of structure,
you're able to operate within that,
there are fewer decisions to make,
and you have a little bit of time pressure
with which to get your work done.
That actually gives you more free time overall.
If you work for yourself or your student
who has a lot of free time,
a lot of kind of flexibility with your homework,
I would encourage you to set some deadlines.
Maybe make some mini goals within
your task management system.
Give yourself a little bit of time pressure.
Speaking of deadlines,
one unspoken deadline that I do wanna remind you about
is the unknown amount of time before
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going to want for yourself.
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I was unfortunately born just a little bit too late
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and show your support for this channel.
Big thanks to Hover for sponsoring this video
and being a big supporter of the work that I do here.
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