The great American writer Mark Twain once said,
"Never put off till tomorrow
what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well."
Of course when we live by that advice,
sometimes we find ourselves chugging concentrated coffee
at two AM in a valiant attempt to stay up
and finish a project that's due in six hours.
I've been there.
As productive as I'd like to think I am,
I have been there.
And if you've been there as well,
or maybe if you're there right now,
this video is for you.
Now we're gonna look at some specific concepts
related to planning and willpower in a minute,
namely the Impact/Effort Matrix,
and Ego Depletion,
but first I wanna talk about the foundation here,
Location Selection.
I think your location is incredibly important
when you're working under pressure,
and personally I like to pick my locations
for studying based on vibe,
that is, what's going on around me.
I tend to favor coffeeshops and libraries,
in fact I still go to my university library at times
even though I've graduated,
because I like to be in an environment
where the people around me are also working,
it motivates me.
Also close proximity to caffeine does help.
The most important part of location selection, though,
is avoiding the call of the pillow.
When you're working under a time crunch,
it's likely you're gonna be working late into the night,
so you wanna pick a location
that's as far away from your bed as possible.
Call up James Cameron,
go study at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
or go to the summit of Mt. Everest,
don't worry about the lack of oxygen, that's not a big deal.
Seriously though, the later it gets,
the more you're gonna start rationalizing
how good a nap might be,
and the more you're gonna start deciding
that certain aspects of your project
maybe aren't all that important.
So, just make sure you pick a study location
where it would be more effort to go to bed
than it would be to just finish your project.
Now with that piece of business taken care of,
it's time to plan your efforts.
Before you start working,
it's a good idea to look at your workload
and break it down into individual components,
and then to assess those components
to figure out which ones deserve the bulk of your attention.
Dwight Eisenhower often remarked that
"What is important is seldom urgent,
and what is urgent is seldom important."
In the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
Stephen Covey popularized the Eisenhower Decision Matrix,
which is based in this principle.
Within that matrix, tasks are categorized
based on their importance and their urgency,
and that matrix is used in a lot of time management systems,
but when you're studying under a time crunch,
everything can seem urgent.
Because of that, the main factor you should be focusing on
is importance, and to that end we're gonna use
a similar but more fitting tool,
which is called the Impact/Effort matrix.
Here, tasks are given scores
based on their impact to the overall success of the project,
and the effort that it's gonna take to implement them.
To give an example of this,
when I was a senior in college,
one of my final projects was to build a web app,
and my idea was to build something I called AMpanic,
it was an app where you'd have to log in
before a certain time each morning
and tell the app you were awake,
otherwise it would send an embarrassing email
to someone like your mom.
This app idea was actually the precursor
to the early wake-up system I use now,
which I detailed in this video,
but when I was working on it,
I found myself in a time crunch.
So, to help me finish it on time,
I broke the project down
into the individual sections I needed to code,
and then prioritized them
based on this Impact/Effort Matrix.
The core functions,
the code that ran the scheduling and email delivery systems,
and the code that let the user
tell the system they were awake,
those things took a lot of effort to build,
but they were also
the most high-impact parts of the project.
On the other hand, some parts of the site,
like the about page, the F.A.Q. page,
the contact page,
those things were lower impact,
but they were also really easy to implement.
They didn't take much time.
And because of that I made sure to include them
to make the project seem more complete.
The main element of the site I chose not to focus on as much
was the registration and log-in system.
A good one should have functionality to reset passwords,
but I felt that I didn't have time to do everything,
so I focused more of my time on the alarm functions,
because that was rather the point of the project,
and I just grabbed old code from a previous project
for registration and log-in.
And this decision did pay off.
The code that ran the alarm portion of the system
was more advanced
than most of the other projects in the class,
so I ended up getting an A.
Taking this back to you,
to assign impact and effort scores
to each component of your project,
or to each assignment if you're juggling multiple,
consider the following factors:
What the core deliverables are,
the grading criteria for the project,
which components count for the most points,
what percentage of your grade
each assignment counts for overall,
and how much each component
will contribute to the knowledge you need to have for tests,
which usually impact your grade the most.
Once you've assigned a score
to each component of the project,
I think it's a good idea
to tackle the ones that are the highest impact,
but also the highest effort first.
This is due to something called Ego Depletion,
a phenomenon described in Daniel Kahneman's book
Thinking Fast and Slow.
Citing research from the psychologist Roy Baumeister,
he reveals that an effort of will or self-control is tiring.
If you have to force yourself to do something,
you're less willing or less able to exert self-control
when the next challenge comes around.
So use the bulk of your willpower
to deal with those high impact/high effort tasks first.
That way later on you only have the high impact/low effort
tasks to tackle when you're feeling drained.
And that is where we're gonna wrap this video.
If you select your location wisely,
plan based on impact and effort,
and tackle your tasks
in an order that utilizes your willpower effectively,
you're gonna get through this time crunch in one piece.
If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful,
then give it a like to support this channel,
and I would love to hear any additional tips you have
down in the comments, and of course
we will cover additional strategies in the future,
especially regarding how to deal with procrastination.
Well that's all I got for you guys,
so as always thanks for watching,
and I will see you next week.
Hey guys, thanks so much for watching this video.
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