hello wonderful humans and welcome back to the bliss bean
something you've probably heard a lot is when people say they don't have enough time for something or they wish they could
do something but at last there's not enough time to do it and I definitely say it myself as well I'm not gonna pretend
what i need to often remind myself of and what we all need to remind ourselves of is that you don't really find time,
you have to make time because by saying that you don't have time for something you're really just saying that it's not a
a priority in your life because if it were really important if it was a life or death situation you would definitely be able to find
something that you could cut out in order to make time for this new thing so in this video I want to talk about some practical
strategies to help you get clear about what you're priorities are and schedule out your week so that yes you do have time for
all of those things that you want to do there's a worksheet that goes with this video so just go to the description to download that
and we'll move on to the next step so the first thing to think about is
what is this everything that you have to make time for what activities does your life actually
consist of and what would you include if you had more time so I have this little note card where I've written out
all of the aspects of my life so this is what I use when I'm doing weekly planning I go through this list
i look at each item and then I think about what in each category do I have to get done this week
so write your own list and then with that list look at each category and think about
which categories you would like to spend more or less time on maybe more time
exercising more time with family less time responding to emails less time editing videos
this is by no means a clear actionable plan yet but it will give you some idea of
what buckets of your life you're gonna pull from to create more time and what
specific changes you'll have to make so then
you have to think about what goals and habits you're striving for so a goal is a result
or an outcome it's a finished line that you reach a habit is something you do regularly and a lot of
times yorur habits are what what build-up to you reaching your goals so for example if your goal
is to become fluent in a language a habit that you might implement would be to practice everyday
it's super important to keep it simple in the beginning so if there are multiple habits that you want to
implement just pick one start with one get that one really consistent add another one
and then just keep building on top of it similarly for goals don't set yourself 10 goals at the same
time just pick whichever ones are most important to you right now so that you don't spread yourself to thin
if you don't currently have any goals that's ok you're gonna start right now so I think
a macro to micro approach is really helpful here start by looking at the large scale a big period of
time and then you zoom in more and more to bring that goal down into small actionable steps so when you start
goal setting start with your big goals maybe three months what do you want to have accomplished in three months how can you
break that into monthly goals how can you break that into weekly goals and then at the start of each week what
actions can you take to help you get closer to those weekly checkpoints at the start of each day what are the most
important things on your to-do list that are bringing you towards those goals so examples
time let's say your goal is that you want to start a cooking youtube channel so you say
okay, in three months i want to have a hundred subscribers and 8 recipe videos uploaded to my channel
month 1 you're gonna start posting your food on an Instagram account, you're gonna design all of your branding
for your new channel and you're gonna go through some editing tutorials to learn how to edit videos then you break down
down your targets within each week of that month week one you're gonna set up your Instagram account and create
a content calendar so that you have something to post every single day week two you're gonna make a list
of all of the new graphics that you need to design for your channel and get all of that done week three
you'll take an editing course and then week 4 you'll film and edit your first video for practice
so then zooming in even further maybe in week one you'll take a look at your schedule and you block out
three hours after your classes to get those tasks done and each day of that week you prioritize
whatever is gonna bring you closer to that goal even if you have a lot of homework even if you have
a lot of club meetings because at the end of the day cooking it your passion and you want to become
a youtube cooking star so one of the things I mentioned in that example
was this idea of blocking out time so I want to talk a little bit more about that
so recently i took Mickael Karnjanaprakorn course on skillshare titled Real Productivity:
Create Your Ideal Week and in his class he talks all about systems and rules that he follows
in his own life and he's actually the CEO of skillshare so I was pretty interested to hear
what advice he had and one of the things that resonated with me the most in this class is something
that i have started doing in the past couple of months is the practice of time blocking time blocking
is where you actually schedule all your tasks into your calendar rather than just having like a long list of things that you want
to get done but not really any idea of when you'll get done so the reason I started doing this was now that i've
graduated highschool and now that we're in quarantine I just had so much unstructured time and I really wanted
to make the most of it so I had to literally take my calendar and block out that structure for myself
if you're life doesn't look like that right now you can probably still make use of time blocking so I realized that I was kind of
doing time blocking during senior year cause I actually had three open hours in my schedule
so every day on my to-do list I would organize my to-do list and be like here's what I'm gonna get done during
my fourth-hour study hall here's what I'm gonna get done during my fifth hour study hall and that gave me those time limits
to work with and that's exactly what time blocking does for you it pushed you to work faster because you have a time
limit it ensures that you have time for your most important tasks because you're literally putting that time on your
calendar and it empowers you because you look at your schedule for the day and you see that yes I actually do have time
to get all of this stuff done so this is important for everyone but it's specially helpful if you're a student or you
work from home because a lot of the responsibility of designing your daily schedule falls
on you so you have to take your time blocks in very seriously
treat them like important meetings that you have to show up for
another big one of my takeaways for this class was this rate per hour exercise where you estimate an hourly
rate for each of the tasks that you do now I'm no CEO like Mickael I guess I'm the CEO of
the bliss bean and he does say that numbers are arbitrary so like you could just call these
low medium and high priority tasks but I do think it's kind of fun to say that an hour
of my time is worth 10.000$ so here's an example of how I fill this out in the 10$ category I have things like
responding to comments and messages, emails, and checking analytics in the 100$ category
shooting and editing photos and videos and promoting some of my other content a 1000$
is working on sponsored videos, planning videos, planning my content calendar and finally
10.000$ creating products creating sales funnels creating worksheets so I realized there's a lot that I do
for my blog that doesn't really increase my revenue or my audience sometimes it just feels like I'm a machine turning out
weekly content now that definitely doesn't mean that it is not important to have creative time like I'll have
photo-taking sessions where i take a bunch of photos for Instagram or thumbnails and I really just get to enjoy
being creative for an hour or two but what I don't do is I just don't like take and edit one Instagram photo
per day instead what i do is I batch all of those tasks so that I have plenty of time left over
for the higher valued tasks another framework that might help you to figure out which of your tasks should prioritize
is The Eisenhower Matrix i talk about this more in my productivity course
21 days to productive flow and i have a link to that in my description if you're interested but basically what you do is you draw
a 2:2 table and you categorize your tasks based on whether or now they are important and
whether or not they are urgent so yes you have to get all of this quadrant one things done because they are important
and urgent so they'll probably be consequences if you don't do them quadrant 3 is really where a lot
of the magic happens, this is where you learn news skills nurture relationships start that cooking channel
these things are important but because they're not urgent they can very easily get pushed to the back burner
if you don't schedule them so basically once you have all your goals and habits that you're striving for in place
what you can do is you can create a braindump this is where you look at the list of categories in your life
and you just write down anything that you can think of that you might need to do in that category based on your
rate per hour table and your eisenhower matrix figure out what of those tasks are more important so that you'll have to schedule them first
and then you can start putitng this stuff in your calendar so
if you're doing the worksheet you can follow along with me just pause the video whenever you need some more time
so for filling this out i'm going to pretend that I'm still in highschool because my life was a lot busier back then
so this exercise will apply a lot more so let's say at this point my goals were to study for AP exams
reach a thousand subscribers on the bliss bean and study korean so after taking all of those goals and
breaking them down into monthly and weekly checkpoints for the week ahead of me I would sit down
and I would write down a brain dump and write everything that I need to do to get close but also everythin that I need
to do in all of the other categories of my life first on my calendar I would block out
any events and appointments so being at school clubs after school exercise classes
i block out my morning routine because that's very important to me and it happens at the same time each and every
day so then maybe my weekly target for starting studying for AP exams
was to take a practice test for AP macro and read through half of the AP lit content in my prep book
and so i would block out time in my week to get than done to reach 1000 subscribers
i need to make weekly videos so I'm gonna film and edit over the weekend I also need to be active
on my social media channels so I remember this is something I would do during fourth hour study hall
that's when i would get all my Instagram posting done and finally for studying Korean I can schedule time to do that
during my fifth hour study hall after that with the rest of your tasks you can also schedule those
but i also think it's fine to just schedule your priorities and then let the rest of the tasks kind of fall into place
around them, you can also set rules for yourself so for example during the later part of high school I had a rule
for myself that i would not do any homework at home from Friday to Sunday so that can help you make sure that
the rest of those non super high priority tasks we can get them done efficiently and make sure you still have a bit time
to work on your goals so then there's the question of what do you do with
extra pockets of time so tony robbins has this concept called n.e.t
no extra time just means that you are using up all of the little pockets of time that you have in your day like
commuting to work in between classes eating lunch waiting in line you can use that time
in a productive way now productive doesn't necessarily mean you always pull out some work to get done
sometimes it just means taking a mindful break but the important thing is that you are intentionally choosing to
spend your time that way instead of just pulling out your phone and scrolling through Instagram whenever you have
a minute or two so for example
when i eat breakfast i like to eat without my phone without the tv I like to listen to a podcast but a lot of times
i just seat in silence and enjoy my food so you're n.e.t. time can be spend unplugging or taking a break
or you can listen to a podcast do a little task on your to-do list study some flash cards little things like that
striving for no extra time also means that you should try to do things efficiently so that you eliminate
that extra time all together whenever possible so for example how can you arrange the steps
of your morning routine so that you have no extra time in your morning when I go make breakfast I put the pan on the
stove as soon as i head dowstairs while the vegetables are cooking I toast my bread I cut my avocado
so there's never a point in time where I'm just like standing around and waiting for something to finish if you want
more ideas on how to achieve n.e.t. i have a whole blog post on it and I'll link to it in the description now a few
miscellaneous tips on how to make time for everything so my tip number 1 is that in some areas of your life it's ok to
cut corners because if you're trying to be perfect and everything you're not really focusing on what's is most
important so for example being efficient in school not I'm not saying cheat on your test and use spark notes
because cheating is not good and actually reading books can improve your life but teachers often give a lot of busy work
or they give a lot of freedom as to how and when you complete the assignment so it's up to you to use your study time wisely
my second tip is to try time tracking for a week so I have a video where I explain exactly how I do that
i know it seems tedious but it's something you get used to at the very least try it for a week so that
then when you're looking at the categories of your life you're deciding where you want to spend more and less time
you have actual numbers attached to that it's so powerful because often times in things that
you dread doing or that are really difficult for you don't take as much time as you think they do and then the little
time wasters really add up and take up a lot of your week and my final tip is just review your systems
and keep learning, keep trying to get better, schedule some time block out some time
check up on your systems regularly and see how things are going it's an experiment try scheduling things at different times
on different days etc also just keep learning new techniques so when I took mickael's class I felt pretty good about my ability
to plan a productive week but anyone can learn something
from someone who is a CEO and I definitely did learn a couple of new things that made me really reconsider how I'm spending my
time thank yuo skillshare for sponsoring this video they have thousands of classes for creative and curious people
they actually have a full category of classes just all about productivity that's where I spend the most of my time on
skillshare i think anyone on a creative career or a side hustle knows that it's not just about having artistic talent
or the eye for design it's also about having like business aquiment and knowing how to manage your time
so i also took this class called focus to flourish productivity skills for the creative and i really want to take this one called
simple productivity how to accomplish more with less these are all under 60min total
as most of the classes on skillshare so it's definitely something that you can pretty easily block into your schedule they are always
launching new premium classes so you don't need to watch any ads and skillshare premium is less than 10$ a month
with an annual subscription the first 1000 of my subscribers that's you to click the link in my description will get
a 2 month free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity so I hope you enjoy learning on skillshare
i hope you plan the best week ever and have the best week ever please give this video a like and subscribe to my channel
and turn on notifications and I will see you next week bye