so this is something that i've been a bit obsessed with over the last few weeks so i'm in lockdown
right now the whole city is because of kobe the number of cases here just keep going up it's not
looking good but in this lockdown i've had a lot of time to really reflect on productivity i've
been working from home the last couple of weeks but i've been really working on kind of maximizing
my productivity by not necessarily working more hours but rather working fewer hours but getting
more done in those hours so basically working smarter rather than harder right and speaking
of working smarter rather than harder i've just launched my first skillshare course it's called
study smarter not how to decrease your study time by 50 and it basically goes through step by step
how you can simultaneously decrease the number of hours that you study while achieving higher grades
you don't need to be studying 10 11 12 hours a day there are far easier and more effective
strategies than that the course explains it all and best of all for the next couple of weeks is
absolutely free i'm gonna give you it away for free so there's a link in the description so check
it out i think it's gonna provide massive value but enough of that i'm gonna go through seven
of maybe the most effective things that i do to really maximize my productivity throughout the day
parkinson's law so parkinson's law states that work expands so as to fill the available time
for its completion so let's say you give yourself an entire week to write a 5 000 word assignment
it would probably take you that full week to write it right but if you gave yourself just
one day you'd probably be ultra productive and efficient with your studying and you'd get it done
within that day so it's often why i know a lot of students leave their exam revision until the night
before the exam or they'll leave their assignment until the day before the deadline because
then they have the pressure of a deadline keeping them motivated and that's parkinson's law in
action so if you give yourself an artificial deadline to finish your work by you'll be more
productive and get your work done faster and you can even sweeten the deal by giving yourself some
kind of reward if you reach the deadline and one mistake that i made at university is that
i would study eight hours a day which is great but i wouldn't necessarily be studying as efficiently
as i could but i knew i had eight hours to study so i wouldn't necessarily have deadlines for each
task so i would kind of like take my time with my work so right now when i'm working i've learned
from that and now i make sure that i have deadlines throughout the day so i have like three
or four main tasks that i need to complete before the end of the day so not just working x number of
hours and that way it kind of puts more pressure on me to keep working with a sense of urgency
take a nap taking a nap is often something that is a bit stigmatized i think many of us think of
taking a nap as something i don't know lazy people do but i don't think that's necessarily true
so we all know the feeling that we have when our energy drops right and we're feeling tight and for
me it's usually in the early afternoon usually just after lunch so instead of having to fight
it because that really can be quite difficult just fighting through that feeling of being extremely
lethargic instead of just fighting it i take a nap for 20 or 30 minutes so for a maximum of an hour
then after i wake up i'm feeling so much more energized and i'm feeling so much more productive
and i really like this idea of swimming with the tide rather than against it so instead of having
to kind of push yourself and force yourself to be productive instead if you're feeling tired
just kind of go with the flow take a break take a nap wake up you'll feel a lot better and that
way you kind of you're kind of swimming with the tide rather than against it and i like that
minimum viable action if you're really struggling with procrastination and your productivity is
taking a massive hit then that's when the concept of minimal viable action can help you out so if
we know that we need to study but just the kind of idea of it is intimidating that obviously can lead
to procrastination so the idea here is that you just do the absolute minimum so you tell yourself
okay i'm just going to study for five minutes and then you go and study for five minutes and it's
very likely that after that five minutes you'll be in the mood and you'll be able to continue
studying and often just the idea of studying we can kind of blow it up in our mind and convince
ourselves that it's going to be like this horrible experience and it's going to sap all our energy
and it's just going to be awful but that's almost always not the case often the idea of studying
can be far worse than actually studying right anyway i won't talk too much about
the minimum viable action because i made a video just last week i think on it and i
talked about it quite a lot there the video is called how i beat procrastination the easy way
you can click on the pop-up banner right here to watch it imagine you're in a movie so this
is a bit of an unconventional method to help maximize productivity and i'll be honest with
you i personally haven't tried it before but i've not mentioned it before on this channel
and it's quite interesting so i'm going to talk about it anyway so everyone loves movies right
and a lot of people wish their lives was just like one but really you are the main character
in your own movie you're filming your story right now and with the right mindset you can use that
philosophy to tackle whatever scene comes your way the main characters in movies usually have
extraordinarily interesting lives they encounter odds that are completely stacked against them yet
they always somehow manage to emerge victorious but you'll have your own struggles maybe it's
with procrastination or maybe it's with money or maybe it's with relationships or something else
and you've probably encountered your fair share of plot twists too a good movie is unpredictable just
like your life so tell yourself that your story is important and that no matter how bad things get
your life will at least be interesting and just like the hero in a movie you fight against the
odds and you overcome the obstacles and you emerge victorious you'd be surprised just how much
productive you can be when you simply just believe that you have a story to tell dynamic studying
so dynamic studying is instead of deep diving into one subject and focusing all your intention
in that one subject for the entire day you instead study multiple subjects that day
so at university in an eight hour study session i could even study eight different subjects in that
eight hours so one hour per subject and it can significantly improve your productivity because
your brain is not going to burn out as fast because you're constantly switching things up by
changing the subject that you study there's also this concept of cognitive load and cognitive load
is when it becomes difficult to manage and learn new material due to the amount of mental effort
that is being used it's the workload that your brain is taking on and you need to be mindful
of this so just learning small bits of subject per day and later integrating that information
into your mind slowly bit by bit each day can be far less mentally taxing so i use dynamic studying
a lot at university and i think for me it was mainly to take advantage of the spacing effects
it's a really time effective way of studying because by spreading out my learning my brain had
more time to process the information so there was no overloading of information going on but instead
i kind of have time to soak it in so if you're having problems with focusing on your studying
after an hour or so or you're having problems forgetting the information that you're learning
then give dynamic studying a go you might be surprised just how effective it can be
one clear goal this is really important as the saying goes if you chase two rabbits you'll end
up catching none right so throughout your education you're going to be pulled in many
different directions you have your studying then maybe you have a part-time job you have
your friends to go out with maybe you have i don't know extra curriculum activities to spend time on
but you need to have just one clear goal to really prioritize that above everything else so
let me give you an example my goal at university was to achieve a 4.0 gpa i prioritized it
above everything almost everything my health always came first and it always should
but just after that was to achieve a 4.0 gpa and i mean i was absolutely laser focused on
achieving it i would study however long it needed to if i needed to study 12 hours a day then so be
it if i needed to start revising for an exam two months ahead of time then so be it you see when
i was at university it was relatively easy to see the students that prioritized their studying and
were getting decent grades and those that didn't prioritize their studying and weren't getting
good grades so for example i had classmates that would go to a party the night before an exam even
though they hadn't prepared for their exam and of course as a result they didn't do very well in the
exam now that's fine if that's what they want to do i'm not judging them but i'm assuming if
you're watching this video then you are striving to achieve relatively good grades so i guess
it really boils down to how much do you really want it how much do you really want to achieve
incredible grades and are you willing to pay the price because honestly a lot of people just aren't
the white flag sometimes if my day just doesn't go as planned for whatever reason i might have
been feeling tired there might be a lot of things come up that distracted me so if i have a really
unproductive day by the time it comes to late afternoon or early evening and i still haven't got
anything done then sometimes i'll just write the whole day off i surrender to the procrastination
and essentially fly my white flag which is kind of a strange concept that i'm talking about
in a video on productivity to just kind of give up if you're having an unproductive day but let me
explain so these we'll call them white flag days they're actually factored into my monthly schedule
so at university i studied seven days a week that was eight hours every day from one day to
saturday and on sunday i would study four hours a day but at the same time i told you that i treated
university like a nine-to-five job but even a nine-to-five job you don't have to work seven days
a week right usually you'd work monday to friday and then have the weekend off and that's the way
society has kind of trained us into living it's how school is structured we go to class
from monday to friday then we don't have to attend classes on the weekend right but i do things a bit
differently and this kind of this works for me in fact it really really works for me so it's because
i don't have a set day off from work so i don't plan to have a day off every saturday and sunday
like a lot of people do but instead i just kind of go with the flow and if i feel like having a day
off during the week because i'm being particularly unproductive that day then i will do at the same
time though it's important that if you live your life this way that you don't take advantage of the
fact that you are able to just write the whole day off when you're feeling tired i mean i write the
entire day off maybe once or twice a month if that maybe even just once a month it's not often at all
and i only do it when i'm having a seriously unproductive day and it's one of those days
where you just can't drag yourself to the desk but you're literally too tired or there are just so
many distractions being thrown at you and it's 3pm in the afternoon and you still haven't got
anything done so don't be scared to write the day off every now and then but do make sure number one
that you don't do it too often and number two you learn what it is that's making you unproductive
and you don't allow it to happen the next day and if you're still struggling with being productive
then i have a video called stop wasting time on youtube i know it's ironic right i'm telling you
to start watching youtube while simultaneously recommending you to watch another youtube video
but trust me it's a really good video it's one of my fastest growing videos and i have another
video on how i stay productive when i'm feeling unmotivated both really good videos that will
help you massively with your productivity and whichever one you choose i'll see you over there