- Have you ever wished
that you could understand native speakers better
so that you can watch all of those fabulous professional
and personal development videos on the internet?
But have you also felt that you don't have a lot of time
and that's really difficult?
Well, then today's lesson is for you
because we're gonna watch together a video
on time management that is meant
for native speakers and I'll help you understand it better.
You ready?
Let's go.
Hi, I'm your English coach, Christina.
And welcome to business English with Christina
where you become better at English, better at business
and better at lots of other things too
like time management.
Today, We're gonna watch a Ted talk together
and it's called 'How to gain control
of your free time' by Laura Vanderkam.
And do you ever wish that you could gain control
or take control of your free time
or just your time so that you have free time
and maybe spend time doing more of the things
that you really enjoy.
It's something that I find is like a constant challenge also
because with running a business, having a personal life
and all of that.
Yeah, like the struggle is real, as we say in English.
So, I enjoyed making this lesson for you
because I learned a lot as well.
In this video, I'll help you understand
a lot of expressions from this Ted talk here.
But if you also wanna be able to actually remember
the expressions and then maybe use them in your real life,
I've got a worksheet to help you to do all of that.
It's free.
So, you may as well go and get it.
And it's over at christinarebuffet.com/worksheets.
And you can watch this video, use the worksheet,
follow along, and that's just going to make you learn
a lot more efficiently, a lot faster
and help you really get the most out of these video lessons.
Do you think that somebody who writes a book
about time management is always on time?
- When people find out I write about time management,
they assume two things.
One is that I'm always on time.
I was once late to my own speech on time management.
- One thing that I love about this video
is that they don't focus on like weird hacks
on how to find tiny moments of time in your day
like cooking your food a few minutes less.
"Mm...
Mm..."
Or recording your favorite show on the television
so that you can skip through all of the commercials.
- Another way to find 32 minutes to exercise?
Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?
- So, is spending two minutes less time to cook your food
or watching five minutes less of commercials.
Like, is that really gonna help?
Can we save time by being faster and more efficient?
Well, not according to Vanderkam.
- We don't build the lives we want by saving time,
we build the lives we want and then time saves itself.
- And if you think about it, we can find time
for the really important things for our priorities.
For example, in the Ted talk,
there was this one woman, her water heater broke.
And so she changed her entire schedule
to find the time to solve that problem.
- And so the key to time management
is treating our priorities as the equivalent
of that broken water heater.
So, how do we do that?
How do we treat our priorities
as the equivalent of that broken water heater?
Well, first we need to figure out what they are.
- In other words, you have to treat things
like their emergencies so that you find the time
to act on them now.
And maybe that means, first of all, figuring out
or thinking about and deciding
what your priorities really are.
And now, can you imagine doing a performance review
for yourself?
When you look back at the year and everything that you did
and you decide what you did well
and what you need to improve.
Okay.
Classic exercise in pretty much any company.
But what if you imagined a performance review today
for next year?
Think about that.
- So, I want you to pretend it's the end of next year.
You're giving yourself a performance review
and it has been an absolutely amazing year
for you professionally.
What three to five thing did you do
that made it so amazing?
So, you can write next year's performance review now.
- What does your amazing year look like next year?
Can you come up with a few goals that you wanna accomplish?
- And now we need to break these down into doable steps.
- And maybe now make your goals smaller
and easy to do today.
- And then this is key.
We treat our priorities as the equivalent
of that broken water heater
by putting them into our schedules first.
And we do this by thinking through our weeks
before we are in them.
- And what if you tried
like really tried the advice from this Ted talk?
Like, can you find 15 minutes
in your schedule maybe this week
or maybe next week to really take the time to do something
that's gonna help you move closer to your goal?
For example, if your goal
is to better understand native speakers,
what can you do 15 minutes a day?
Very soon, you can put it in your calendar
and you can do it.
I'll give you a hint.
There's a lot of things on business English
with Christina that you can use for that.
And you think that 15 minutes is it's too small
to actually make any difference?
Well...
- But small moments can have great power.
You can use your bits of time for bits of joy.
Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful
on the bus on the way to work.
It's about looking at the whole of one's time
and seeing where the good stuff can go.
I truly believe this.
There is time.
Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters.
And when we focus on what matters,
we can build the lives we want in the time we've got.
- Do you agree with that?
Do you think that small moments
have the big power to change your life?
You know?
Yeah.
I definitely believe that.
Now, maybe you wanna take a few minutes
to figure out your priorities.
What matters to you right now?
And can you find just 15 minutes
in your schedule to just put it in there?
Even if it's just 15 minutes to start,
you gotta start somewhere, but,
whatever you're gonna do, put it in the comments below,
let me know what you're gonna do, because as we say,
if you write your goals down,
if you tell someone about them, so tell me about them.
You're more likely to accomplish them
and that's what we all want.
Isn't it?
Now, if you enjoyed this lesson, I would love to know.
And there are three ways that you can tell me.
First, is give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube
and subscribe to my channel
so we can continue learning together.
Go over to christinarebuffet.com
and get the worksheet that goes with this lesson,
so I can help you even more.
And go ahead and watch this next video
which is another breakdown video.
That's a video made for native speakers
that I help you to understand.
And it's all about habits and motivation.
So very useful for improving your English in lots of ways.
All right, that's it for today.
Thank you so much for learning with me
and I'll see you next time.