Transcript & Summary: Stop Wasting Time - 5 Time Management Skills to Master

[00:00] hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm the author of Feelgood productivity which is a book about how to be productive in a way that actually feels good and this is the third video in a three-pot video series about how to manage your time outside of your 9 to5 in video number one we talked about the five mindsets that it's useful to have when it comes to managing your time and in video number two we talked about the five time [00:21] drains things that if you can eliminate from your life you're going to free up gallons and gallons of more time and in this final video in the series we're going to be talking about the five key skills that it's really useful to develop or to work on developing that will massively improve your time management abilities and therefore just free up your time and your energy and your attention to focus on what's truly important in your life skill number one is the skill of prioritization now one of the most common things I hear from [00:43] people who have N9 to- FS whether they're jobs or whether they students is I don't have time to do x and x might be take care of my health spend time with my family start a YouTube channel start my business it might be any of those things but there's this common Narrative of I don't have the time and one of the key breakthroughs in my own ability to manage my time came when I I stopped using the phrase I don't have time in fact I think no one should ever use the phrase I don't have time because it's [01:04] never that we don't have the time it's always that the thing that we are trying to do is not enough of a priority like you might right now feel like oh you know I really want to learn Japanese but I don't have the time okay but if someone put a gun to your head and your family's head and said you had to make the time to study Japanese for an hour a day you'd find the time right you know it's it's just a matter of priorities it's not that we don't have the time it's just that it's not yet a priority [01:24] and that is actually totally okay I'm not saying in fact the whole point of the series is not so you can squeeze more stuff into your time is that you can do more of the things that are truly important to you so it's really all about prioritization what are the things that are actually meaningful for you to do outside of your 9 to5 and even within your 9 to5 and therefore how do you make the time to do those things all right so let's talk about some practical ways for getting better at the skill of [01:42] prioritization firstly it's really really helpful to have some goals when you have goals then you kind of have a sense of where you want to go in your work and also outside of your work and therefore your priorities and the things that you're spending your time on are sort of reverse engineered based on what the goals are if for example like me your goal is to be financially free and to have I don't know a few thousand a month passive income that's a clear goal and it leads to a very different set of [02:03] priorities compared to if your goal is to I don't know learn Japanese and become fluent within 2 years that leads to a very different set of activities so knowing what you actually want to do and turning it into goals is ridiculously important for this and we actually have a whole three-part video series on the channel it'll be linked down below that's all about how to figure out what you actually want and turn it into tangible goals but once you've got the goals how do you then prioritize the actions that are going to help you get [02:24] to those goals and that is where a few different methods come in the first one and I think the easiest one to implement is something that I call the daily Adventure at the start of every day I will ask myself what is today's adventure going to be now basically what I'm asking myself here is today what is the single most important thing that I want to get done and sometimes this is work related but often it's life related but I phrase it as an adventure because the whole philosophy of field good productivity is that we're more [02:45] productive and more effective and more creative and less stressed when we can find a way to make our work feel good and just framing it as an adventure encourages us to find the fun in the thing that we're trying to do so for example back when I had a real 9 to-5 job my daily Adventure in those contexts would have been cool I'm going to go to work during the day but then I'm going to spend 2 hours editing my YouTube video in the evening and then once I figured out what the adventure is the next step is to just put a Time block [03:06] for that Adventure in the calendar again I'm always amazed you know when I do talks and stuff and people asking me about time management how few people consistently put time blocks for stuff that's important to them in their calendar the other tool I find really helpful for prioritization is in the morning when I ask myself what's my daily Adventure I also ask myself what side quests am I going to work on today and usually I like to have like one or two usually in health or relationships cuz my adventure is usually work related [03:28] and so a side quest might be for example to call my grandma or to go to the gym or to get my 10,000 steps in and again I will do my best wherever possible to time block that in the calendar because if it's not in the calendar it's not going to get done and then the third thing that you can really do to boost your skill of prioritization is to conduct a weekly review now basically this involves just spending 20 minutes every week reflecting on how your previous week went and then creating a set of priorities for the next week now [03:50] if you're interested I actually run completely free weekly review workshops every single week it's on Sundays at like 400 p.m. UK time these days I'll put a link down below if you want to join we usually have a few hundred people there and I take you through a facilitated weekly review it's good for me because then I actually do my weekly review and people who attend the sessions love it as well because it makes them do their weekly reviews but that'll be linked down below if you want to check it out now when it comes to the [04:09] skill of time management and productivity there is so much more I could say I've literally written a whole book about it that is sort of outside the scope of this video but if you're interested in finding out more you should definitely check out my classes over on skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives with thousands of classes led by industry professionals across film and media and editing and productivity and freelance and Design and so much [04:30] more and I've personally been teaching on skillshare since 2019 and I've got 10 classes that are currently on skillshare three of which are themed around the idea of productivity one of them is about the pilot plane and the engineer one of them is about the tools of productivity and one of them is about productivity specifically for creators so if you've got an 95 for example but you also want to start a creative side hustle on the side and you should definitely check out those classes but with all these different classes and so [04:50] much Choice over in skillshare it can sometimes be difficult knowing where to start which is why there are these various learning paths so when it comes to productivity I've got my own productivity learning path which you can just of ort of take the classes in order and they will teach you the principles of productivity in an order that makes sense and they've also got a really good learning path all about growing a creative business which has six classes and over 7 hours of content in it it focuses on brainstorming your business [05:11] building a strategy defining your brand and audience and marketing yourself online it's super comprehensive and I wish I'd had something like this when I first gotten started with my own creative Journey cuz I was just making up a lot of stuff as I went along and making so many mistakes along the way if you're interested in checking out any of my classes on productivity or anything else that skillshare has to offer then do please check out the link in the video description and the first 500 people use that link will get a [05:30] completely free one- month trial to skillshare and during that time you can watch any or all of these classes to your heart's content so thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it all right skill number two to get way better at if you want to maximize your ability to manage your time is time blocking we alluded to this in skill number one basically just being able to put blocks of time in your calendar for everything that's important to you this is a ridiculously valuable skill people who [05:51] work jobs that rely on a calendar often will develop the skill in their day job but even then we often tend to use calendar blocking just within our work and not within our life but actually the skill of just creating blocks of time in our calendar for what's important to us is a ridiculously valuable skill for anything we do whether it's in our health or our relationships or even in our relaxation time now there's three different levels when it comes to time blocking level one is when you have a [06:10] calendar and you just put blocks of time for like doctor's appointments or remember to file the taxes you know little things like that hopefully everyone watching this video is at least at level one cuz if you're trying to remember that stuff in your head again like your brain is not a place to store information like that it's a place to have creative insights and thoughts and feelings and all of that fun stuff not a place to store having to remember remember when your doctor's appointment is but then level two of calendar [06:31] blocking is when you graduate from just blocking specific appointments in your calendar to now blocking everything in your calendar on a day-to-day basis so for example when I had a 9 to5 and still to this day because calendar blocking is a ridiculously useful skill I would block out all of the times I had to go to work I would block out the commute to work because then I know what time I need to wake up I would block out the commute back from work because then I know what time I'm going to get home I [06:51] would block out the time where I intend to be editing a video I'd block out the time where I was intending to go to the gym either before or after work and anytime I'd get an invitation for anything even V social related it would go in the calendar if I was planning to visit my mom in the weekend it would be in the calendar because now when I look at my calendar I have a map of what my time looks like and then I can make sure that the stuff I'm actually doing with that time is intentional now whenever I [07:11] mention time blocking there are always people that think well this sounds like a terrible way to live life because where's the freedom where's the joy and I would say that it actually increases freedom and increases Joy because firstly when you time block everything it helps you know with certainty that okay at least I've made time for the most important things like my health my work and my relationships and it also means you then see where are the free blocks of time that you can actually intentionally relax and use for joy and [07:33] use for other Hobbies or things that you're interested in and if we don't do the time blocking stuff it becomes very easy to just default to scrolling Tik Tok or scrolling Instagram and most people wouldn't say that that's a recipe for a relaxing life or a life well lived so I'm massively bullish on this again you know anything in my videos this is not life advice like I'm not trying to tell you what to do I'm just saying what's worked for me and what other people have found useful so think of it [07:53] as an experiment experiment with time blocking for a week or two or three and see how it feels for you see how it feels to block out a time in your calendar to read or to play the guitar or to learn Japanese or to call your grandma or whatever the thing might be and see if it doesn't improve your abilities of time management it massively works for me it works for most people who I coached through the process and I think it can work for you as well there is in fact a third level of time blocking and that is something called [08:12] the ideal week that's also a really cool time management tactic we're not going to talk about it in this video because that I've explained in detail in my Trident Method video for managing my time that'll be linked up there and down there if you want to check it out all righty skill number three that's really important to develop if we want to get better at time management is the skill of focus now when I pull my audience in surveys and in talks I give in real life one of the most common things that [08:31] people struggle with is focus just actually sitting down and doing the thing and not getting distracted from the phone or the notifications or social media or anything else and like with almost everything in life focus is a skill that can be honed and learned and developed and sometimes I'll do q&as and stuff and when people will be asking me like have you got any tips for focusing I feel like I really struggle to focus I will often ask them okay you feel like you're struggling with the skill of focus what have you tried to improve [08:54] your focus and they're like um I don't know I just sort of really struggle with it okay have you read any books about it have you read deep work by Cal Newport or the book flow by Mii chmi who was a psychologist who discovered the concept of flow or the art of focus which is a new book by Dan Co have you tried reading anything about the topic have you tried listening to podcasts about it and like most people who struggle with Focus which is basically everyone haven't actively tried to develop the [09:14] ability to focus so firstly if you want to develop the ability of focus firstly I'd recommend reading those books about it secondly you should totally sign up to my completely free Focus crash course just go to focus crash course.com this is a 7-Day email course where every day I'll email you a bunch of principles and strategies and tools that you can use to improve your focus but really all of this stuff basically comes down to the core principle of single tasking it is not about trying to do multiple things [09:35] at once we all Focus best when we're just doing one thing at a time and once we've done that thing then we do something else and there's data apparently from McKenzie and company that workers in the US lose 25 to 27% of their work days to multitasking and to distractions and if you imagine that's like in a career which it might be 40 years long you losing a Whole Decade to distractions and the ability to just not focus and the solution to a lot of this stuff is single tasking but you can read a lot more about it in these books cuz [10:00] it's kind of outside the scope of this video but if you guys are interested leave a comment down below and we can absolutely do a three- part video series on the Art and Science of actually how to focus and get things done okay so what does Focus have to do with managing your time well Focus has everything to do with managing your time because it's focus at work during your 9to 5 and also Focus outside of work so if you can focus during your 9 to 5 you'll end up getting a lot more done in that time and [10:19] hopefully then your work will not bleed into the evenings and the weekends I found this when I was working as a doctor and also when I was a medical student when I gained the ability to focus and actually get through my studies during the workday it meant I didn't have to study so hard in the evenings because I was able to focus and do the work during the workday it meant that I wasn't spending weekends and evenings having to update my portfolio or having to worry about publications CU a lot of that stuff was stuff I could [10:40] get done during the workday thanks to my ability to focus the other thing as well is that outside of the workday the ability to focus means that when you intend to do something when you set a block of time in your calendar to for example play the guitar or to for example go to the gym when you're doing the thing you're actually just doing the thing you're focusing on that one task that you have intended to do whereas the default for most people is is like you know you might start I don't know maybe [11:01] you've intended to watch a show on Netflix or something but you like start watching the show and you're like then your brain disengages and you go to Tik Tok then you go to Instagram then you go to Twitter then you check the phrase and you continue watching the show and it doesn't end up being a particularly relaxing or energizing experience even though it might have been had we actually just been able to sit there and focus on the thing that we were trying to do and that brings us on nicely to skill number four which is follow [11:20] through follow through is the skill of actually doing what you say you're going to do oh my goodness this is such a rare skill to find people it's a surprisingly rare skill in the workplace from the various managers and leaders I've spoken to now what's the relevance of this to let's say you've got a 9 to5 and you're struggling to manage your time outside of that well the skill is that if for example you have time blocked certain things let's say you've decided you want to hit the gym three times a week [11:42] because that's really important for you to hit your health goals to live a life that you love and you've time blocked it you know after work before work after work now it's this case of like you have said you're going to go to the gym between let's say 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. on a Monday Wednesday and Friday and now 5:00 p.m. rolls around on a Monday and you're just wrapping up work and now you could go to the gym but dot dot dott dot dot dot you start to procrastinate you start to say oh no it's kind of cold [12:03] outside oh I don't really want to do that I know it's in the calendar I know I've said I would do it I know I've told myself I would do it I know it's important for me to do the thing but something happens and you get derailed and you start scrolling Tik Tok or Instagram instead because you don't really want to do the thing that you said you would do this is terrible when it comes to time management because the whole philosophy of time management is kind of based around this idea of intentionality and then time blocking be [12:23] intentional about what you want to do and then put time for it in the calendar and then when it comes round to the thing actually do the thing and I've got a whole method for combating procrastination that's in the middle three chapters of my book it's called the unblock method it's about getting Clarity getting courage and then getting started Clarity is to overcome the Blocker of uncertainty we don't quite know exactly what we're doing courage is to overcome the Blocker of fear because usually fear holds us back from actually [12:43] doing stuff especially if involves discomfort in some way and then the Blocker of inertia which is where you know it just takes a little bit of a push a little bit of a dose of discipline dare I say to just get started with the task again this is a whole thing how to be procrastination as sort of somewhat outside the scope of this video but I'll link a video up there and down here of a previous video I've done about procrastination and if you haven't yet read my book or listened to the Audi book you may want to check [13:04] it out but the other really good strategy when it comes to actually developing the skill of follow-through is finding accountability if for example you have an accountability buddy if you've got a friend that you go to the gym with if you maybe get a personal trainer if you maybe have a group of friends that you know you make this packed with each other that you're all going to do this specific thing you're all going to I don't know publish a video a week on your YouTube channel or you're all going to study for an hour a [13:24] day for your exam if you can create those sorts of structures in your life that give you accountability it means you're a lot less reliant on your own willpower motivation discipline whatever you want to use you're a lot less reliant on that coming purely from within and you're tapping into the power of the people around you this also works for public commitments for example like for me you know for the last six plus years 6 years I've been writing a weekly email newsletter it's called Sunday Snippets you can check it out al.com [13:46] Sunday where every email I write a newsletter and I send it to my fans subscribers followers whatever word you want to use but I've made that Weekly commitment and therefore I do it every week and I've done it pretty much every Sunday for the last 6 years and that's pretty cool I've intended to do a thing and then I've done the thing and there were certainly times when I had a 9: to 5 you know I'd be finished up with a shift on a Sunday night I'd get home at 11:00 p.m. I'd start falling asleep and [14:04] then I'd remember oh crap it's Sunday I haven't written my email yet and I'd get up I'd get myself out of bed I'd grab the iPad and in bed I'd sort of bang it out and be like oh guys really sorry and it would take me 20 minutes to write it and then I would send it and I would send it because I made that public commitment I had the accountability of like these s of email subscribers and even though no one really cares no one would have cared if I skipped a week I cared and it would have been so easy for [14:26] me to skip a week and then another one and then another one and then another one but I managed to stay broadly consistent with writing my Sunday Snippets email every single week every Sunday for 6 years for three of them I had a full-time job four of them actually and I was able to do that because of the accountability so my question for you would be with that thing that you're struggling with whatever it is what is an accountability mechanism you can add to it to make it much easier for yourself to follow [14:46] through and to do the thing that you say you were going to do all right the final skill to develop to get really good at time management is actually the skill of energizing your work what I mean by this is that as you get good at time management you'll realize that often time is not not actually the bottleneck the bottleneck is energy like when I had a 9 to5 job it wasn't really 9 to5 it was more like 7 till 8 or 7 till 6 um but when I had a real job for the first few months of the job I was actually [15:07] pretty miserable because I'd get home from work and I would feel completely drained I would feel as if I don't have the energy to do the things I actually want to do sure I can be as intentional as I like about all this stuff and time block you I was good at time management but I just didn't have the energy and it took me a little while it was a Christmas day where I kind of it all came to a head but I realized over time that I could choose to approach my work in a way that made it much more energizing there are three strategies [15:30] for that the three PS play power and people now this is the entire philosophy of my book field of productivity I've written literally a whole book about how to make your work into a source of energy and if you're interested in hearing more about this you should check out this video over here which kind of talks about my struggle when I had a 9 to5 when I had a real job with this whole energy stuff and the solution that I found to the problem and how I Incorporated these 3ps play power in people to make my work feel good and to [15:53] turn it into a source of energy so that is a video that's going to be right here thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed the series and I'll see you in the next video you bye-bye