Transcript & Summary: 8 Simple Habits That Save Me 20+ Hours a Week

[00:00] hey friends welcome back to the channel So today we're going to be talking about time management now time management is remarkably simple but we tend to over complicate it and there are a handful of simple habits that you can incorporate into your life that will just save you absolutely gallons of time and if you can consistently do these simple habits you'll be amazed as to how quickly they can stack up and it almost feels as if you're playing a video game but with the cheat codes turned on and this is [00:22] important right because time is literally our single most valuable non-renewable resource we can always make more money but we can never make more time okay let's start with the calendar now back when I first started medical school I didn't really use a calendar for anything I would just sort of look at my timetable on the PDF or on my phone or whatever and I'd know exactly what lectures I have or what supervisions I have now this was a real problem because I wasn't using a calendar so I was just forgetting all of [00:45] this stuff and I'd forget to look at the thing I wouldn't have any notifications turned on and that's basically like level zero when you don't use a calendar for anything and then you graduate to level one where you start scheduling stuff into a calendar if there is an appointment that requires you to be somewhere you then put it in a calendar and you the calendar regularly to know what you've got scheduled now immediately this level one of using a calendar immediately adds a lot of time management skills to your life because [01:07] now you're not forgetting these things and you don't have to use your brain as a storage medium for these random events you can just delegate the remembering of these events to the calendar on your phone for example and so that's very good but then level two is really where a lot of the gains are had and level two is where you intentionally schedule things into your calendar even if they're appointments with yourself so for example right now I've scheduled into my calendar that I've got a block for filming this video that's an [01:29] appointment with myself and this is helpful because what it does is that it separates the planning of how we're going to spend our time with the doing of how we spend our time and I sometimes like to think of this as the pilot and the plane the pilot is deciding kind of where the plane is going and then the plane is just executing and doing the stuff and so usually at the start of the day or at the end of the week I will time block my following week to figure out okay cool in this upcoming week where are the blocks that I want to go [01:53] to the gym where are the blocks I want to film videos anytime an event comes in like dinner with some friends on a Tuesday night it goes straight into the calendar because there's as long as I'm blocking the calendar in this level 2 mode effectively it means I'm not going to forget what's going on and it means I'm also going to be a little bit more intentional with how I use my time and then the really fun aspect of the calendar habit comes at level three where you start blocking out what does your ideal day or your ideal week look [02:15] like now you might have seen me talk about this ideal week strategy before but chances are you're still probably not doing it and I get loads of emails almost every day from people being like Oh my God I discovered your ideal week method and then I tried it and it was actually really helpful so if you're not yet doing the audio week method would 100 recommend it oh and by the way if you want to get your own template for this audio week thing it's sick I've got my free one linked Down Below in the [02:35] video description you just click the link and I'll send it to you for free so check it out but essentially the idea is you create a new Google Calendar called your ideal week and you block out what does an ideal ordinary week in your life look like and so where are the filming blocks in my case like blocks for work when do you want to have lunch when do you want to wake up when you want to go to the gym when do you want to do date night when do you want to see your friends when you want to see your family [02:54] and then where are the empty blocks like if you want to take guitar lessons or piano lessons or learn to code where is that going to fit in and the way I think of this is that you can look at someone's ideal week to see what are their intentions and then you can look at their actual calendar to see what's their reality and managing our time effectively is bridging this gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do and so whatever level you're at with your time blocking and with your calendar I would suggest see what you [03:15] can do to level up just a little bit and if you can get to the point where you have your ideal week and broadly it matches your actual week oh now you've really supercharged your time management and unlocked a whole new level of meaningful productivity all right habit number two I'm going to call it the feel good productivity habit because that is the title of my new book feel good productivity how to do more of what matters to you that'll be linked down below if you want to check it out but really the core thesis of the book and [03:37] this is really the Habit that this whole book is about is how do I find a way to make my work generate energy rather than drain my energy because often when we think we have a time management problem we don't actually have a time management problem we have an energy management problem like if you think about your life you probably do have some time that you're maybe not using intentionally scrolling Tick Tock or Instagram or watching random Youtube videos for example and you're probably doing those [03:58] things because there's something better you want to be doing while you're scrolling Tick Tock but you feel like you don't have the energy but a lot of us have to do things that we don't necessarily want to do you might have a job you might have studies you might have kids that you have to look after and maybe in some moments you don't want to do those things but you have to do those things and so the real challenge is how do we find a way to make everything that we do a little bit more energizing rather than draining and [04:18] there's a bunch of strategies I talk about in the book but the top level broad one and why this book is called feel good productivity is because there is so much evidence that feeling good are you generating positive emotions is the thing that generates energy and so the way I think of time management is like time management and like calendar blocking is like creating the container in my day but then the energy is me filling that container with the stuff that I actually want to do and if I have more energy because I've generated [04:42] positive emotions and whatever I'm doing then it means that I actually have the energy to be able to use my time in the most intentional way possible whereas I can time block the absolute Living Daylights out of my calendar but if I don't have the energy I'm not going to do the thing it's going to be in the calendar but I'm not actually going to do it which sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise so if you're not asking yourself this question already I would start asking it right now what [04:59] other ways that you can make your work feel more energizing ask yourself what is it that separates an energizing piece of work from a draining piece of work and can you incorporate the energizers into the work itself and this is exactly you know the strategies we talk about in the book so you can check the book out if you like as well by the way if you're looking for another really effective strategy for managing your time you might like to sign up to morning Brew who are very kindly sponsoring this [05:21] video and morning Brew is essentially a completely free daily email newsletter that updates you on all of the interesting news in the world of business and finance and Tech and so if like me you're interested in those topics you might as well sign up to morning Brew it's free it's really entertaining and it gives you this news in an engaging and non-boring way for example morning Brew is how I'm personally keeping up to date with all the stuff going on with threads and figuring out like is that a platform [05:41] that we want to get on it's time keeping up to date with the world of AI and seeing is there any interesting AI stuff that I can incorporate into my own business in my life to make me more productive to help me use my time better there's over 4 million professionals that read morning Brew every single day it is 100 free it takes less than 10 seconds to sign up and if you do sign up it also helps support the channel so there's no reason not try it head over to the link in the video description or go to morningbrewdaily.com forward slash [06:04] Ali and you can sign up completely for free and you can check it out it's an absolutely sick newsletter so thank you so much morning Brew for sponsoring this video but I want to tell you now about my personal favorite way of doing this and that is habit number three which I call the adventure habit basically the idea is at the start of every day you want to ask yourself what is the most important task that I need to get done today if you can focus your time and energy towards just that one important [06:25] thing it means that if you can do that 365 days of the year you'll be absolutely Sailing by the end of the year and the key thing is to limit this thing to one that those only ever one important thing that you need to get done and sort of the question in my mind is always like okay if I only accomplished one thing today what is the thing that would make the biggest difference to my life now sometimes this might be a work thing it might be finishing a chapter of my book or it might be filming a video but often it's [06:48] not even a work thing it's a life thing like calling my grandma or whatever the thing might be but now I want to tweak this slightly because that's sort of like old school somewhat corporate terminology the most important task I don't really like thinking in terms of tasks because tasks make me feel as if I'm a slave to someone actually I have control over my life and even if I don't have control in my life I prefer to think that I do have control over my life and so instead the way I phrase this is what is today's adventure going [07:10] to be and in my mind this phrasing of Adventure is like the ah you know this is the quest I'm embarking on this is like the cool the cool thing I'm gonna do what's today's adventure and the first chapter of this book is called play and it's all about how you know framing our work in the language of play actually brings out this whole positive emotion this whole feel good vibe to our work even if crucially even if the work is really really boring you can convince yourself and you can sort of hack your [07:34] mindset into believing that you're you're playing rather than you're sort of grinding away and working so that's level one of doing this ask yourself what's today's adventure gonna be but then level two is where you give yourself a few optional side quests but the idea is that like you can Define your daily adventure and then up to three ideally we're going to limit it to the three side quests that we want to do that day as well and so today for example my main Adventure is filming this particular video but then the side [07:57] quests I usually like to split up into work health and relation chips just to make sure I've got a little bit of balance in my life so my work side quest is I need to write an issue with my email newsletter my health side quest is that I want to go to the gym and my relationship side quest is I've got date night with my girlfriend where we're going to see Hamilton it's going to Good Vibes and that's it just doing those things a defining what's the most important task which I like to frame as a daily Adventure but then be defining [08:18] three side quests in work health and relationships but you can you know your mileage may vary and on the days where I do that I find like my time management is absolutely supercharged and I feel way more intentional with how I spent my time but on days where it's like I wake up in the morning I rush into something and I don't have that 10 minutes to think to have a coffee and think what do I actually want to do with my time today I find myself squandering all of my time next up we have the focus habit now that [08:39] was a really interesting study that I came across in Harvard to Harvard Business review and it was basically a study where they looked at employees throughout their work day and they found that employees on average waste around 22 to 28 of their work day on distractions and they found that the main reason they do that is through task switching so for example if you're working and you're trying to do a thing but then you get a slack notification or you get like a WhatsApp notification or someone interrupts you for a thing it [09:04] like takes ages to get back into the flow of what you were doing and in an average workday for the average office worker those interruptions make up like 22 to 20 percent of the actual actual workday and that is significant that means over the course of a year we are wasting three months an entire quarter three months of our life on Interruption and over the course of 40 years which is like a career we are wasting a Whole Decade wasting a whole 10 years of our life through interruptions if you take [09:28] the single study in extrapolate out obviously with all the caveats associated with that being able to focus without interruptions is an absolute superpower and is another massive lever that we can use to save tons and tons of time and to be way better at intentionally using our time and our energy now there are some interruptions that are obviously good I call these welcome distractions again I talk about them in a book if you would like to check it out I'm going to stop plugging the book now um I call these welcome [09:48] distractions this is like you know if like you know when I was at University I would always leave my door open because if a friend comes along and wants to interrupt me while I'm doing my work honestly I would rather they did like the point of university is to you know the friends you meet and the social experiences that you have and work is sort of a side effect and so even if I was a little bit inefficient with my work and writing an essay for example it was a welcome distraction because I would rather my friend interrupt me [10:11] similar I've had emails from parents who say that like you know when they're focusing on their work if the kid interrupts you and wants to play you play with the kid because at some point they're going to stop wanting to play with you and you're going to regret the time where you know they wanted to play but you were like no I need to work and so there are some distractions that are welcome but the question I like to ask myself is okay how do I tune out the unwelcome distractions while filming this video for example my phone is in my [10:31] pocket it's on a focus mode I've turned off all the notifications on my computer so that I don't get derailed from filming this video buy something that's popped up on slack for example similarly back when I was writing my book I would often go to a coffee shop because being in a coffee shop would ensure that my team is not interrupting me with stuff it's nice it's social Vibes we've got the team in the house right now but it's hard to get any writing down when people are like around and then I feel like oh [10:51] Tintin's over there let me just throw an idea at him again there's a bunch of stuff around how changing our environment actually makes it feel more playful to do our work so it's nice going to different coffee shops but it means I'm not being interrupted by the team which means I can actually focus and get my deep work done alright habit number five is the rapid action habit now there's a really nice quote from Alex formosi which is to the effect of intelligence is how quickly you can change your behavior given new [11:14] information and so one habit that we can use to save a lot of time is how quickly do we respond to new information and make changes in our life obviously this can go too far you don't want to be a sort of constantly going from one thing to the next to the next to the next just because you get a new piece of information but generally more often than not most people spend too much time being stuck in the actions that they've always done and even if they do get a new piece of information they will take [11:35] ages to act on that new piece of information I noticed this like I read a lot of books and listen to a lot of podcasts and often I'll come across something that's interesting and sometimes I'll act on that thing immediately I feel the inspiration to I don't know start journaling for example if I've listened to an episode with writer Carroll who's the inventor of the bullet Journal method I interviewed him for example on my podcast and I felt super inspired to do bullet journaling in a more intentional way and so I acted [11:56] on that immediately and that was great that saved me so much time and then that made a big difference to my life in terms of time management as well but I've had so many other moments where I've listened to something in a podcast I thought oh I want to do that thing or I've read something in a book and I thought oh that's kind of interesting and then I've waited I've Delayed Action and it's like the thing the forgetting curve I've talked about this in my videos about how to study for exams we tend to forget everything over a sort of [12:17] exponential Half-Life Decay and so you might have an idea you might have listened to something in a podcast but if you don't act on it there and then or as soon as possible or have a way to capture it into a to-do list or something that you actually follow then that learning that knowledge ends up being completely wasted because you will completely forget that you've learned the thing and so the habit here and you know in a way this video is just notes to myself stuff that I want to try and incorporate more of into my own life to [12:40] have more of a bias to action when I hear something or when I learn something or read something to apply it to my life rapidly rather than really slowly and that brings us on to Habit number six which is the experimental habit now when you learn all these things one of the great ways that you can use to be more intentional again with how you spend your time is to treat these different things that you're doing as experiments in your life and so for me for example I'm constantly looking for ways to [13:01] experiment on myself to find more ways of being more productive in a way that's meaningful and enjoyable and sustainable to find better ways of organizing my life and managing my time and generating more energy and every time I come across one of the things I will think of it in my mind as okay I'm doing an experiment on myself and I'm going to experiment with this productivity strategy like the ideal week and I'm going to experiment with it for a week or two and I'm going to see how it feels and the feeling bit [13:23] is important here because like I think in this world of productivity Bros we can we can often ignore our emotions quite a lot and this is something that I I still struggle with I'm actually seeing a therapist about this we're trying to work out how to connect more to my feelings no generally you know the stuff that makes us productive is the stuff that feels good it is about feelings it's not just about living in the mind it's about being in the body and being the heart as well and so if you find a strategy you can a assess [13:45] what difference did it cognitively make to how you're managing your time or how productive you are but also how did it feel and this is why I don't really like The Narrative of discipline particularly or The Narrative of grit or like determination or like persistence all that kind of stuff because yes I get intellectually why it makes sense but it doesn't feel particularly good like if I tell myself I'm gonna go to the gym even when I don't feel like it because I'm disciplined it doesn't feel good I get [14:06] to the gym I'm a bit miserable and I'm like you know what am I doing like what's what the hell is the point whereas if I can find a way to do the gym thing in a way that feels good and run experiments on myself to be like okay how can I experiment with my workout at the gym can I experiment with low rep High weight and see how that feels can I experiment with Crossfit which is something I'm trying can I join yoga classes and seeing if that feels good as a way of staying fit like what are the experiments I can run in my life [14:28] so that I can see how I can be more intentional with how I use my time but also so that I can make sure that it actually feels good while I'm doing the thing because generally over the long term the stuff that we do consistently is the stuff that feels good the stuff that we do inconsistently is the stuff that feels bad and people ask me all the time you know with growing a YouTube channel or growing a business Ali how do you stay consistent with this stuff and my answer is honestly just like find a [14:49] way to make it feel good if making videos or running your business or like learning to code or learning a language feels terrible and you're having to force yourself you're having to use discipline every single time unless you're David Goggins and you're freaking superhuman it never gets any easier you gotta get harder it's just it's it's not gonna work like I don't know maybe it works for you but I suspect probably not so I'm all about this whole feel of good stuff running experiment on yourself [15:12] trying to find a way to make stuff feel good and if you can do that then you'll be way better at managing your time because you'll be way more consistent with stuff because the thing actually feels good okay apologies for the right there I feel I feel very passionate about this this feel of good stuff some people would say I'm soft but oh well next up we have habit number seven which is the alignment habit you know if you imagine a car and you want to get to I don't know let's say I'm in London right [15:31] now and I want to get to Cambridge which is sort of like North ish of London if I start off in London and I'm like five percent deviated I'm not gonna end up in Cambridge I'm gonna end up in Oxford which would be a really Grim place to end up and now that's a total waste of time it's like I've driven and I might be driving really fast but I'm in a Direction that's misaligned with where I actually want to get to and so the alignment habit is a fantastic way of being more intentional with how we use [15:54] our time and it essentially involves fairly regularly reflecting on what do you actually want what goals do you have what direction are you going in what is the destination that you're aiming for the way I personally do this is that every year I set some goals for the end of the year I'm not fully wedded to the goals I don't have to be wedded to being anything but the point of setting a goal is that it creates a direction that you can start to move in and then every quarter every three months I'll review those [16:18] goals with my CEO coach you can do this with a friend if you don't have a CEO coach for example but I review those goals every three months and then I decide hey is this still a goal that I want to have and if so B what are the things I'm going to do over the next three months to work towards that goal on top of that I also try my best to do a weekly review this is my weekly review so number one review the previous week's accomplishments and challenges which is nice look ahead to the next two weeks [16:39] and see what's coming up three revisit your goals to ensure they're still aligned with your priorities this is the important one this is the alignment one so basically in my quarterly goals I do it in just a single Google doc which I have bookmarked on Chrome the web browser and when I'm doing my weekly review I will just look at that Google doc and remind myself oh yeah these are the goals that I set are these goals still aligned with my priorities and how I'm choosing to spend my time and energy [17:00] I have review and update my to-do list Insurance track this is fun I choose my top three outcomes for the upcoming week if the week ahead was going to be a great week what would be the top three things I'd accomplish and then I schedule time in my calendar to work towards those outcomes and again this speaks to Habit number the idea that like blocks of time in the calendar are containers and we can fill those containers with our energy but we have to have those containers in the first place to do the things that we want to [17:20] do but it's really item number three and item number five here that are like the alignment ones item three in particular because it's all very easy to set goals at the start of the year or even at the start of the quarter and then completely forget that we've set those goals now again you don't have to have this all figured out you don't have to know what your 50-year plan is to be able to align your actions with your priorities all you need to do is ask yourself within health and work in relationships what [17:41] are the three things one to three things that I want to do in the next three months like what are they let me just make a list I mean oh you know what let me start working towards those things and as I'm working towards them I'm assessing how do I feel about the thing and finally we come to Habit number eight which is the delegation habit now this is another big one um it it wouldn't necessarily apply to everyone but I think everyone can benefit from learning about delegation essentially what are the things that you're doing [18:04] that a you just don't need to do and therefore should just stop doing or B what are the things that you're doing that could be delegated to someone else now in my case I I have a team and an assistant and so I can in fact delegate things to people in my life but even in your personal life there are some things you can think about like the way I think of Delegation is what is my personal time worth in terms of like an hourly rate and B is there anything that I absolutely hate doing that I could Delegate for less than that hourly rate [18:30] so back when I was working at the doctor my hourly rate was about like I think like 14 pounds an hour so if I bought something for three pound fifty on Amazon but it would take me an hour out of my way to return the thing if I didn't want to keep the thing is it worth me spending an hour to go to the Post Office to return this thing that cost me five pounds probably not because I value my time at 14 pounds an hour these days I value my time at way more than 14 pounds an hour and so there's a huge amount of things that I can [18:54] delegate and actually my business ends up benefiting way more when the only things I'm doing are the things that a I love to do B that give me energy and see that I'm really good at here's another big one cleaning the house like again depending I'm gonna caveat all of this depends on how much disposable income you have but assuming you have some amount of disposable income and you work a reasonably middle to high paying job you can probably afford to hire a cleaner and so for example we have a cleaner who comes in [19:19] for two hours every week and it's amazing and she cleans the whole house and it's so good because it means that I don't have to do it and my brother and his wife don't have to do it and we've just unlocked an extra two hours of our life for the sake of I think it's like 17 pounds an hour in her case and people have weird thoughts about delegation people are always like you know there's a lot of like you know oh no delegation is evil but every time you go to a restaurant you're delegating the cooking [19:38] and the preparation of the meal to the chef in the restaurant when you go to the doctor you are delegating the managing of your health and the giving advice to the doctor what I am saying is that you can in fact trade time for money and the more money you have the more you realize oh crap time is the most valuable non-renewable resource and you can deploy your money towards saving your time through stuff like delegation and if you're interested in learning more there's a bunch of books I'd recommend uh one is buy back your time [20:00] by Dan Martell and another one is the email Revisited by Michael gobert these are two really good books around delegation in personal life but also and work anyway that brings us to the end of this video if you're interested in learning more about the specific mechanics of how I incorporate some of these things into my life check out this video over here which is about the Trident method that I used to manage my calendar and that'll have way more information about the ideal week thing but also on my daily priorities thing [20:21] and you can see along with a template exactly how this works in my own life if you want to incorporate it into yours so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye