hey everyone i'm aliena welcome back to my channel today's video is all about being
productive and how to do time management some of you folks have been asking me how do i manage time
i have a full-time ui ux design job and i also manage this youtube channel* all by myself and i
try to learn something every day but before i say anything about being productive i have a question
for you please tell me in the comment section what do you think being productive means to you
and for me i don't really think i'm a productive person i think i'm more as an efficient person
so i can get things done and that's only because when i start working i spend a
very short amount of time to do very efficient work and i spend most of my time doing nothing
but since i'm efficient i like to first tell you how i stay efficient
and that is the 20/80 rule i think this rule is about how eighty percent of the impact or result
is really coming from twenty percent of the effort or input usually when i start working
no matter how difficult or how large the project is i try to convince myself to spend 30 minutes
on doing a sketchy version of it and then later on i will keep iterating on the work and this
is also something i learned as a ux designer there's no perfect design in the first trial
great design or great work always comes with feedback and iterations and taking a step backward
in the beginning of the video i asked you what do you think productivity means to you
and i came up with this tool that kind of helps me to define what does being productive means at any
given moment or any given week all you need to do is to draw a huge circle and then divide it
into eight pieces once you divide it to eight pieces try to brainstorm what matters to you
because growing up i thought being productive just means you're either doing work or studying
with this mindset you will become a working machine and that's not okay for me what i wrote
down last week is health having a side gig money relationship work my career design career my brand
which is probably my youtube my home i care about how my home looks it's my furniture in the same
color tone does it feels like home yeah and then have fun yeah i care about having fun too and
then i draw a dotted line in the middle and this dotted circle represents expectation this will
be what i expected at this moment of the rating of this criteria and then what i do is i give
a very subjective rating to each criteria by just filling the color in comparison to my expectation
so for example have fun i feel like i wasn't having a lot of fun that's why i drew some pink
here but didn't like really reach this dotted line and with this visualization it quickly
tells you where you can improve and looking at this i realized last week that what i really
need to work on is my health my relationship and having fun and that's why i booked a ticket to
my friend's city i'm currently in san jose and then i went to two physical therapy sessions
because my hand hurts my arm hurts that's my health problem and then i call my family every
single day for the three things i just said none of them are related to work or studying anything
but it actually makes me feel being productive simply because i'm improving something that feels
meaningful to me it's just great to have this tool that i invented here and seeing that yeah
i actually did something last week and speaking of tools i'd like to introduce you to today's sponsor
sunsama sunsama is a tool that helps you to do work consistently without burning out
here i will show you the user flow of planning a day on sunsama and getting works done by sunsama
this tool is available both on website and mobile app first sunsama encourages you to
reflect on the work that you completed yesterday and evaluate the amount of time you spend on them
you can also use channel to color code the works to realize how you allocate time then sunsama will
ask you the tasks you need to do today it also works well with calendar apps and slack and notion
here i laid out the work that i need to do today and i assigned time and channels to each work
then i dragged the tasks to my calendar to plan out my day sunsama asked me whether there's
anything i can move to tomorrow so i move grocery shopping to tomorrow because today will be a busy
day sunsama also encourages you to identify the obstacles in your way and that helps me
to intentionally think about how to work around these obstacles finally as you start your day you
can click the start button to use the focus mode for each task here the page looks super minimal
you can take notes while doing your task you can also take a break and you can tell sunsama
when you completed this task there are more features and fun things to explore on sunsama
please use my link below and try it for yourself now back to the video i think a lot of time when
we talk about productivity we also talk about how to stop procrastination i used to procrastinate
a lot when i was a student because when i was a student everything had a deadline and there were
so many deadlines but recently i learned that it's not like we only procrastinate because
we're just lazy people we procrastinate mainly because it's a way of stress relief in order to
stop procrastination we have to first stop feeling so guilty that we procrastinate and then we need
to understand that the hard part is not about the task the hard part is how to get started so
i use this trick i try to tell my brain that i'm just going to work on this project for 10 seconds
10 seconds and surprisingly 10 seconds can actually get you start doing work
15 minutes ago i wanted to sleep i wanted to watch youtube it's right there and then
i told my brain that this video is getting late and how about i just start working on it for 10
seconds that's how i get started another thing that just really distracted me from working
is my mobile phone i think mobile phone our phones are the worst productivity killer
monster because there's so many information on our phone and i feel like these days we all have
our mobile routine at any moment if we pick up our phone I'll go check notification i'll go to
instagram and then i'll go to facebook and then i will go to twitter and then we'll go to gmail
after gmail i checked everything i will go back to instagram and then to facebook and then to twitter
and then gmail and then going back to instagram again i just got stuck to this infinite loop and
it's just taking all my time away so recently i've been starting to try this trick that
whenever i'm trying to do productive work i try to put my phone outside my visibility zone so
if i'm working on my laptop i will try to hide my phone inside a cabinet and i will also make sure
that i don't hide my phone at a place where i can comfortably sit there and check it so i will never
put my phone on the sofa because whenever i go out there and check it i will just be stuck on the
sofa forever so far it's been pretty helpful when i'm just so addicted to my phone i sometimes will
just change my phone into totally black and white screen because that helps my brain to release less
dopamine so less addictive so if you if you're really addicted to your phone you can try that
too and finally i want to point out that there's a huge difference between working for other people
versus working for yourself so whenever there's a deadline let's say if we're in a school or
if we're working at a company there are other stakeholders that will push you to finish
the work but when it comes to personal projects when it comes to projects that you just really
want to do for yourself that you value that has no deadline and no stakeholder to push you to do it
it becomes even more difficult because we can always tell ourselves that i'll just do it when
i have time and guess what and whenever we think like that we're already placing our work in a
very very low ranking and that's why i think most people didn't even start trying to do what they
want to do for example this channel is something i created on my own and manage on my own and i'm
pretty proud of how far i've came i started making videos when i was 13 years old and i started doing
youtube four years ago but for a while i was just making videos when i have time when i feel like
it i don't even know what language to use i don't know who my audience was so i don't know if you've
seen this video yet but i read the book atomic habit and this book talked about one thing that
you have to understand when it comes to how to be more motivated and start doing personal projects
is that you need to believe you're that type of person so there needs to be an identity shift
in the beginning i thought being a youtuber just means people who make videos for the money
but now i realize that being a youtuber simply means sharing valuable content to the audience
even in the risk of sometimes exposing my personal information and that's something
i'm willing to do i mean the first part not the exposing my personal information part for sure
i started to tell other people that i'm a youtuber and that just changes everything when i started to
tell other people that i'm a youtuber i started to see this entire side project more seriously
and want to make this a thing so once you have this kind of mindset and you know who you are
i think it will make it way easier for you to be more productive or for your actions to just
automatically relates to your work and relates to your identity okay i talked a lot today
i hope you guys like this video there's going to be more videos coming up so stay tuned and
if you have any more tips of how to be more productive or more thoughts on what does it
mean to be more productive please please please share in the comment section below i would love
to hear your thoughts and thank you so much more video coming up soon and i will see you next time