- Hey guys, welcome back to the channel.
In this video I'm going to be sharing
some tips for time management.
Now this is a question that people have been asking me about
for the last several years.
They see that I'm a full time doctor, if you didn't know,
I've got this YouTube channel, I run my own business,
I like to sing songs and play guitar,
and I like to give the impression
that I've got a vibrant social life as well.
And people often email me or Instagram DM me or whatever
asking, "How do you manage your time, how are you able
"to do so much stuff, how are you so cool?"
So in this video I'm going to be attempting
to address these queries by talking
about some principals, some tactics, and some tools
that I've personally found helpful to allow me
to do all this extra stuff with my time.
And speaking of time, this video is kindly sponsored
by ExpressVPN, the fastest virtual private network provider
in the world, and I'll talk a little bit more
about them at the end of the video.
So the most important thing that really changed the game
for me in terms of time management was recognising
that my time was fully and 100% in my control.
Like back in the day, I used to be tempted
to use the phrase "I don't have time,"
when, you know, talking about going to the gym.
I kind of realised over time that actually
I am fully in control of my own time,
and at any given moment, I am doing
what I most want to be doing.
It's never the case the I don't have time to go to the gym,
it's always the case that going to the gym
is currently not a priority in my life.
So yeah, subtle mindset shift,
and that's principle number one for time management
that I've personally found really helpful in my life.
Principle number two is something called
the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule
you might have come across.
The general idea is that for most things in life actually,
about 80% of the results come from
about 20% of the input.
So think Marie Kondo, the whole minimalist, tidy living,
minimalist home, all that stuff, has this thing
that only 20% of your possessions are bringing you 80%
of value, and actually this applies to so many other things.
Especially when it comes to effective studying,
often when it comes to exams that we take
at school and university, 80% of the marks
are going to be coming from 20% of the content.
Like if you really understand that 20% of content,
you can figure out how to get the 80% of marks.
And sort of by extension, I realised that this applies
to learning new skills as well.
I taught myself how to play the guitar and the piano
a few years ago, by following YouTube tutorials
and using Justin Guitar and all that stuff.
At the start, I thought that learning piano and guitar
would be hard, but it's really not.
If you want to get to a reasonable standard on guitar,
if you wanna be able to play the guitar while singing along,
all you have to do basically learn four chords,
and those four chords let you play the vast majority
of pop songs in the world, and you can just
move the capo up and down to change the key.
And that kind of changes the game because anyone
can learn four chords on the guitar,
you just need to buy a guitar for about 30 pounds
from a secondhand shop like I did one day,
teach yourself the chords using Justin Guitar,
practise for about two weeks or month,
and suddenly you are at the level
where you could literally stand on stage, play these chords,
and sing whatever song you want.
Prior to learning guitar, I kind of had it in my head
that you know, this is like a really hard thing,
but when I started to learn it,
I kept this 80/20 principle in mind,
I kept saying to myself, okay no, this is actually easier
than it seems, I'm going to focus on the 20% of things,
of chords, that's actually gonna result in 80%
of the songs that I can play.
So I think this applies all the way across the board
with things like piano, digital artistry, graphic design,
coding, photography, video editing, YouTube.
All of the things that I've taught myself over the years,
from the outside looking in it seems like,
oh my God, how do you do all this stuff?
But actually when you really get down to it,
and try to teach yourself this stuff,
you realise that it's not as hard as it initially appears,
and you can focus on the 20% to get the 80%.
But yeah, that's principle number two.
And principle number three is something called
Parkinson's Law, and Parkinson's Law states
that work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it.
And we've all probably had this feeling
where when we've got a deadline coming up the next day
or the day after, we get so much more work done,
whereas if we've got an assignment that's in
for two months from now, we're just gonna procrastinate
and put it off until like the week before
or the night before.
I think Parkinson's Law applies to almost everything in life
as well, you can always be a bit more efficient
by giving yourself less time to do something
and more time almost never, in my experience,
leads to a better result.
So this is kind of the case of getting over the idea
of perfectionism and just churning stuff out
and recognising that if you give yourself a short amount
of time to do it, then things just work out.
Okay so those were three broad, overarching principles
of time management, let's now talk about some tactics
for time management, and tactics are kind of drilling
down a bit more into rules that we can follow,
stuff like that.
The first one is the two minute rule,
and I came across this in a really good book called
"Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity"
by a chap called David Allen.
This is like the world's most famous book about productivity
and in it he introduces the two minute rule,
which is the idea that if you have a task
that is gonna take you less than two minutes,
you should just do it now rather than put it off.
Everyday I come across tasks that I know
will take me less than two minutes,
and for the most part I try and get them done
there and then so that they're not kind of,
in my mind or on my to-do list or languishing,
like there's a mug behind the camera over there,
it will take me less than two minutes
just to pick it up after I film this video,
and stick it in the sink, and that will just
make my workspace a little bit more neater.
So yeah, two minute rule applies to everything.
If something's gonna take less than two minutes,
just do it now.
The second tactic is called batching,
and I first came across this in Tim Ferriss' amazing book
"The 4-Hour Workweek," which is the single book
that's most changed my life,
and that is a book all about, kind of, productivity
and efficiency and maximising time management and stuff.
So if you are interested in this sort of topic,
you should definitely read "The 4-Hour Workweek"
if you haven't already.
But in the book he talks about this idea of batching.
It's pretty intuitive, it's like, let's say,
throughout the week you get lots of emails
that you have to reply to, it makes sense
to do that all at the same time
rather than taking five minutes out sort of here and there,
every hour of the day to reply to emails.
And I find that batching all these similar tasks together
really helps because I'm not then context switching,
it's not like I'm working on a video
and suddenly I'm replying to an email,
it's like I'm working on a video
and when I make the time, I'm gonna reply
to these 16 emails that I have to reply to.
Equally the same thing applies to filming videos.
Part of the reason why I'm able to put out
at least one video a week is because I sit down
and batch film them, so today I'm going to be filming
like six videos and then I'll edit them over the course
of the week or send them off to my editor,
'cause I now have an editor now which is very exciting.
And finally the third tactic is my personal rule
for watching TV, which is that I'm not allowed to watch TV
if I'm watching TV on my own, and actually
in the last two years I think the only TV I've watched
on my own, like sitting on my own,
is one episode of "Game of Thrones,"
'cause no one came around to watch it with me that day,
one episode of "Chernobyl" 'cause I was interested
'cause everyone was talking about it,
and I watched a season of "You" on Netflix
when I was on a flight, I think that's allowed
when you're on an aeroplane.
But for the last three or four years of my life
while I was at university, I made the rule for myself
that I'm just not allowed to watch TV if I'm on my own.
TV is fine, in my opinion, as a social activity,
but I've found that if I was just sitting there
watching TV on my own, I'd just end up wasting
so much time, and thinking back
for the last four or five years,
I'm really glad that I spent that time
doing other things instead, like making my websites,
I was falling in love with making my business,
or just hanging out with friends
or making this YouTube channel.
I don't feel that I've missed out
by not having seen "The Office,"
or by not having watched "Breaking Bad" for a second time,
or by not having watched "Friends" for a third time.
You know, I don't lose anything by not watching TV
on my own, but I gain a lot of spare time.
And there's all these stats like the average American
spends three hours a day watching TV,
all this sort of stuff, and I find that
with a lot of my friends, and you know,
this is no judgement to them, if this is what they wanna do,
that's absolutely fine, but I find that
with a lot of people, the default activity
when you get home from school or when you get home from work
is to put on Netflix and watch something.
And if that's intentionally what you want to be doing
and what you're aiming for and what makes you happy,
then by all means that's absolutely fine,
what I'm saying is that for me, I don't lose anything
in my life by not watching Netflix
I don't even have a Netflix account,
but I gain a hell of a lot of time,
and I think personally my life is much more fulfilled
and interesting because I've used that time
to do other things rather than watch TV.
So yeah, that's my rule for watching TV.
Let me know what you think in the comments,
usually it is quite controversial
when I mention it to friends, people are always like,
"Oh what's wrong with relaxing and stuff?"
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with relaxing,
I'm not saying you have to hustle all the time,
I'm saying is that if you're gonna ask me
what my tips are for time management
and how I'm able to do so much stuff,
I think a big part of that reason is
I just don't spend any time watching TV.
And so having talked about three principles
and three tactics, and I want to talk about three tools
that I find helpful in term of time management.
The first and most important one is an app for the Mac
called Alfred, and I think there are equivalent apps
for Windows if you're one of those people
that sadly uses Windows.
And Alfred is incredible because it basically
lets you do anything on your Mac, just using the keyboard.
So for example if I want to open Safari,
I never, ever drag my mouse over to the dock,
click on Safari, 'cause that's a waste of three seconds
of my life, instead I press Command + Spacebar,
type in S-A-F, which is right next to each other
on the keyboard, press Enter, and I've got Safari open
in about half a millisecond.
It's all these little actions like this,
like let's say I wanna open a file.
Normally I'd be clicking on Finder, Google Drive,
Third Year, Essays, Section A, Human Memory,
and finding my file that way.
This takes about 10 seconds or 15 or 20 seconds
each time I want to do it, whereas with Alfred
you can just do a file search, so you can do
Command + Spacebar, you can press another space,
and that let's you search for files.
You just type in the file name
and then it immediately opens.
Initially a few years ago I was following some programmers
and watching screencasts and stuff
and they were absolutely raving about Alfred
and how amazing it is, and at the time
I was thinking, "Oh come on man,
"you're just saving ten seconds each time."
But then I started using it and I realised
oh my God, the amount of time I've saved in my life
by shaving off these ten seconds
for pretty much every interaction that I have
with a computer, is absolutely game changing.
So if you are the sort of person
who is still currently using your mouse
to navigate your computer, you are wasting a lot of time,
use something like Alfred or Spotlight search
or I think on Windows you just press
the Windows logo key thing and then you just start typing
and stuff just works.
Keyboard shortcuts are so much quicker
to navigate a computer with than using the mouse.
So that is tool number one.
Tool number two is an app called Forest,
which is a Pomodoro timer.
Now the Pomodoro method, you might have come across it,
is the idea that we should work for 25 minutes,
and then have a five-minute break,
and then work 25 minutes, have a five-minute break.
And I used to use this when I was studying for exams,
to kind of motivate myself to focused work for 25 minutes
and then I'd have a break for five minutes with my friends.
There's a really good app called Forest
that let's you do this.
So it's an iOS app, I'm pretty sure it's on Android as well,
and the idea is that when you want to start your timer,
you press the button and then the timer starts
to count down, and it's as if you are planting a tree.
And in that 25 minutes, at the end of it
you have planted a tree and the tree starts to grow,
but if you go off the app, i.e. if you use your phone
to look at a notification or to answer a message
or something, then the tree dies.
So it's kind of nice in that it's a Pomodoro timer
but it also forces you not to be distracted
by all the crap that's going on on your phone.
So I found that quite helpful.
I don't really use the Pomodoro method anymore these days,
but if I were studying for exams and now
when I'm preparing for my post-graduate medical exams,
I think I'm going to be using it,
'cause it just makes it a bit more of a game to study,
so yeah, Forest is tool number two.
And tool number three is actually a website
called 10FastFingers.
I started kind of, using this website about once a month,
since about the age of 13, I remember we were
in an ICT lesson, or IT or computing, whatever you call it,
we were in one of those lessons
and one of my friends discovered this,
and we started having these typing speed competitions
against one another, and I remember when I was 13,
my typing speed at the time was about 80 words per minute,
8-0, I saw that and I was like in the top 20% or something,
and I was like, "Okay I need to improve my typing speed."
By virtue of the fact that I just spent all my life
in front of a computer, but also
that occasionally I do this typing test
and see where I am, I've managed to increase my typing speed
from 80 words per minute to these days,
I consistently get about 140, 130 words per minute
on this website.
That's almost a doubling of typing speed,
and because a lot of the stuff
that I do involves being on a computer,
like coding or writing or blogging or even planning videos,
having a typing speed that's twice as fast
is actually quite helpful, and it's again
one of those things that shaves seconds off
every interaction that you have with a computer,
but when you do that and apply that over a 10-year period,
you end up saving a lot of time that you can then use
for other things, so I'd recommend giving it a go.
Have a go at 10FastFingers.com,
see what your typing speed is,
and then see if you can work to kind of improve it,
because that's another one of those little tools
that shaves off seconds each time
that I've found useful for time management.
And speaking of tools, I just wanna end
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So thanks ExpressVPN for sponsoring this episode
of time management, and thank you very much for watching.
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But yeah, thank you very much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video, buh-bye!
(soft guitar music)