Recently, I've been playing a lot of this game
called Overcooked, it's this game where you play as a chef,
as you through this increasingly difficult and crazy
series of kitchens,
basically trying to fill orders for customers.
And of course, in the beginning, it's easy to do.
The orders are pretty simple,
and there aren't too many of them coming your way.
But as time goes on, more and more orders start showing up,
there's lots of little things thrown into the kitchens
to make your work harder
and the orders get more complicated.
And if you get behind on just one order,
then everything starts to pile up
and you have basically no hope
of clawing your way back from the brink.
And if you are a student,
this is probably sounding pretty familiar right now
because it is a good representation
of what basically every semester has looked like
up until this point.
And that leads to the obvious question,
how do you not fall behind?
How do you become one of those people who can stay
on top of things consistently over the long term,
even as the semester wages a war of attrition against
both your organizational systems and your motivation?
Well, in the case of Overcooked,
the answer is pretty simple, get good.
But in terms of your school performance,
it really breaks down to doing three things consistently.
First, you need a well-organized task management system
and calendar, and you need to keep them well-organized
over the entire semester.
Secondly, you need to take your assignments and projects,
even things you need to study for exams,
and break them down into mini-tasks
that can be given milestone deadlines
which are easy to achieve.
And finally, you need to put in work frequently
so you don't get rusty, basically, work every single day
at least some small amount.
So in this video, I wanna help you guys
put these three things into action in your own lives.
I'm gonna dig into each of these,
give you some specific tips,
and show you how I've implemented them into my own life
so you have some context.
The first step to staying on top of things
throughout the entire semester
is to make sure that your task management system,
which is your to-do list and your calendar,
is a perfect representation of everything you need to do.
That way, your brain doesn't have to
worry about those things,
it knows that it's an external system that it can trust.
And building that system really starts
at the beginning of the semester.
When you go to each of your classes
and you get the syllabus for that class,
take some time to transfer what's on the syllabus
into your task management system.
For example, here's the syllabus
for one of my marketing classes for my sophomore year.
And on it, there's a couple of written assignments listed,
with due dates, and there's also some quiz dates.
So over in Todoist, which is my recommendation
for a to-do list app for most students,
I have written all these assignments down.
So that way, they are in the system
that I'm going to be looking at every single day.
Now, that takes care of the initial set-up
at the beginning of the semester.
But that's just the start.
As the semester goes on, you need to be adding
anything that your professor assigns you,
or anything that comes up into that to-do list.
And there are really two different ways to do this.
The first method is the most straightforward one,
and it's the one that I like to use.
It's to simply add new tasks into the to-do list
or into your calendar app the moment you hear about them.
So, if you're sitting in class and your professor
assigns you a math assignment, you open Todoist,
you put in the details, you put in the due date,
and you're good to go.
There is a perfectly valid alternative to doing this,
though, because sometimes you have to rush out of class
and you just don't have time to enter all the details,
and push that due date button, and do all of that
little fiddling around while you're in class.
So the alternative is to use
what I like to call a daily note.
This is just a scrap of paper in your pocket,
or maybe one of those tiny little moleskin notebooks
like my friend Martin has, or maybe just a note
in your favorite note-taking app,
where you write all the assignments
and everything that comes up during the day
in plain English.
You're not messing with due dates or priority levels
or whatever your task management system has you do.
Using a daily note is an easy and simple way
of writing down all the things you need to do
for an assignment without having to fiddle with an app
but it is not a task management system.
It's not organized, you can't prioritize it,
you can't look at what's coming up in the next seven days,
so if you're going to do this,
you need to establish a daily habit
where you go through your daily note
and you transfer whatever's on it
into your more-trusted robust system.
Finally, you need a way to keep your calendar
and especially your to-do list
from getting disorganized and chaotic.
And you're probably familiar with this happening.
Every semester, all these tasks pile up,
and some of them just slip through the cracks,
or you forget to check 'em off, or the details change,
and then you look at your to-do list one day,
and it is a mess.
But if you establish a review day, like Sunday afternoons,
to go through your task management system
and clean these things up, this isn't going to happen.
And I'm actually gonna do this right now.
So the to-do list app that I use these is called Asana,
and it is great for working with teams, which I do,
so that's why I use it over Todoist, but as you can see,
my personal task list here has some red due dates on it.
Now, some of these tasks are things that I actually did do,
but just forgot to check off,
so I'm gonna go ahead and check those off.
And some of them, I didn't do, so I need to figure out
what to do with those particular tasks.
The second main thing
you wanna be doing on a consistent basis
is breaking your work down into manageable chunks
and then setting deadlines for those chunks,
so that way, you're working consistently over the long term
rather than pushing everything off until the last second.
And you should do this
for your assignments and your projects,
but also for the topics you need to study.
If you have a test coming up
and you know what you wanna study,
you should break down that studying
into several different chunks,
so that way, you're doing it over the long term.
Doing this is gonna help you deal with Parkinson's Law,
which states that work expands
so as to fill the time available for its completion.
And I'm sure you're just as familiar with this as I am.
You get assigned a project, you have three weeks to do it,
but in your head, it exists as one task, and of course,
you wait until two days before the deadline
to even start it.
However, when you break that project down into mini-tasks,
each with their own individual deadline,
now you have a well-defined plan
and you know you're gonna be doing things consistently
across that whole three weeks.
So here's an example of this in action.
When I was a sophomore, I had an assignment
in one of my English classes to create a personal website,
which is a pretty big project.
So I broke it down into individual little milestones,
create a list of pages, make a wireframe mockup
on notebook paper, start coding things,
and each of those had their own individual deadline,
which helped me make consistent progress on the project
without a whole ton of stress.
One other huge benefit to setting these milestones
is that it decreases the initial resistance
to starting a task because this is what
makes us procrastinate, it's the resistance
to starting something that seems really big and scary.
But when you've broken your project down,
that little mini milestone
doesn't seem like it's gonna take that long,
and so you can jump into the work right away.
And speaking of right away, for most projects,
you should make the first milestone due date be
the exact same day as when you get the assignment.
Doing this will push you to put
just a little bit of work into the project
while everything is still fresh in your mind,
and it doesn't have to be big.
It can be a very tiny amount of work.
For example, if you've just been assigned an essay,
you could just spend five minutes brain dumping
what you know or writing down questions, on the other hand,
if you wait a few days to start the project,
now you have to spend a bunch of time
re-familiarizing yourself with the requirements
and getting everything reloaded into your brain,
and that is valuable time
that you could be using to play Zelda instead.
Lastly, do some amount of work every single day,
or at least almost every single day,
because frequency is your friend.
The novelist, Anthony Trollope once said,
a small daily task, if it be really daily,
will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.
This is something that I learned really well
in the process of writing a book.
Ever since 2012, I had wanted to write one,
but I had failed every single time I tried
because I would try to write entire chapters all at once.
Or one time, I actually flew down to Texas
to go to a conference, where I tried to write
the entire thing in one weekend, and I completely failed.
So a couple of years later, I tried a different tactic.
I set a goal in my Habitica to write just 500 words a day.
And it didn't matter what those 500 words were.
They could have been, I hate writing,
over and over and over again,
they could be horrible, horrible words,
but I had to put them in no matter what.
And after just a few months of putting in this daily effort,
I ended up writing an entire book.
In fact, this book that I wrote is about twice as long
as what I originally intended because every single day
I was getting myself into the mode of writing,
and I would end up having more ideas
and coming up with more anecdotes than I initially expected.
The other huge benefit that frequency brings
is that it prevents you from going into slumps,
where you get rusty
and you're not used to doing the work anymore.
And I have a lot of experience with this as well.
I've had times where I do a lot of different podcasts
in like a big batch, and then it'll take weeks
before I do it again, and I feel really rusty.
Here's how Cal Newport puts it in his book,
How To Win At College, student slumps occur
when you take a long break from work
and then find yourself unable to easily
pull yourself back into working rhythm.
In order to deny the opportunity for this to occur,
you should do some amount of school work every single day.
Now, if you're having trouble
establishing this daily work habit,
one thing you can do that will help
is to start removing choices from the equation.
And by that, I mean, pre-planning elements
of your study sessions, both in terms of location and time.
It can be very helpful to establish a specific study spot
that you go to every single day and to have a specific
block of time when you know you're going to be studying.
Now if you have a specific block of time every single day,
that's very good to have, but if your calendar is such that
you've got like, student organizations or night classes
that make every day different,
at least at the beginning of every week,
pre-plan when you're gonna have blocks of study time
so that way you know on a given day,
when you're gonna be putting in that daily amount of work.
Now, I know we have covered a lot in this video,
but remember, it all boils down to
building three consistent habits
that you keep throughout the entire semester.
Number one, making sure your task management system,
both your calendar and your to-do list,
are well-maintained on a weekly basis.
Number two, breaking your assignments and projects
down into manageable chunks and then setting deadline dates
so you're working consistently.
And number three, building the habit of working
every single day so you don't get rusty.
Of course, even if these habits do help you
stay on top of your score this semester,
there are gonna be things
that you just always seem to be falling behind upon.
And for me, one of those things is my reading list.
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