How I Make Myself Study When I’m Lazy (it's not discipline)

4pm may 2014 you refresh the school page again the essay results are due any second now you hold your breath in panic you sent that essay in last minute you wrote the whole thing in two hours refresh your friend is sitting next to you just as anxious and god knows why you're a bit annoyed by it actually because he worked on my essay for six weeks he'll be fine refresh why are you like this when are you ever going to be able to work like a normal person and stick to the schedules refresh they're out you got an a what you got an a your friend got a c oh this this is awkward your your frustration is replaced by relief but also discomfort and insecurity damn they've worked so much harder and longer than you this is not at all a rare scenario if you're also a chaotically passionate person like me you might recognize that super focused super speedy work that you can do last minute and still get amazingly good results and then only get told off by the whole world and yourself for not being able to be consistent in the first place if you're kind of chaotic you probably recognize that super intelligent super focused version of yourself that shows up to do work last minute and yet you and me probably for a very long time have completely ignored that person or hated that person and tried to turn ourselves instead into someone who can stick to habits and be consistent and i've just found that this is a terrible idea because i fully believe that habits and consistency are absolutely not essential to long-term success and also we do not need to have the panic of a last-minute deadline in order to turn into very focused and very passionate people but what if i found something that is not anxiety that then helps me to turn into this super focused and passionate version of myself for every task that i need to do wouldn't i be much more happier and effective never having to create habits at all because i have gone from time to be consistent to embracing my complete inner chaos and crucially never doing work that i don't want to do and genuinely in the long term this has led to so much better results and i believe is the only reason that i'm able to maintain this youtube channel by myself while also being a medical student and having to do a bunch of other things so let me try to explain fully why we should never work when we don't want to and how to organize things in kind of the way that i see the world so hopefully if you're like me this might help let's get straight into it the first issue that i find with the way people approach work is that they see all work as being one and the same and this is generally not the case for me i divide work into two different types real work and arbitrary work real work is something that has to be done on a deadline that is set by someone else and that i can't influence for example i have an exam at a particular date or i need to send in a project at a particular date or i have a team meeting at a particular time these are things that cannot be done according to my feelings i can't finally decide at 2am that i want to have a meeting and invite people to a zoom call and in the same way if you have a baby that's crying and they need food you need to address that right then and there so these are real deadlines and i think the advice of just get things done and ignore your motivation works perfectly for this you have no choice so you have to do the thing that is absolutely fine however i think there's a whole other side of work that is bundled up with this and just doesn't belong there and this is what i call arbitrary work arbitrary work are things that i schedule in my calendar but that i need to do in my own time so for example if i have an exam in may between now and may i have a whole bunch of studying that i need to do by myself and that can be done essentially almost at any time or i have three or four projects i need to hand in a year for university the work to do them is done in my own time and because i have a very project based job a lot of the work that i need to do is also done in my own time so this is called arbitrary work these are things that i know i need to do have no strict external deadline have to absolutely get done but it depends on me when these things are done and in what state they are done now depending on the stage of our life we might have less or more real or arbitrary deadlines for example when you have a baby the amount of real deadlines you have is extreme because you can't depend on your mood when to feed the baby or wash them or change them etc you need to deal with them when they want to and for example when i was a waitress all my deadlines were real deadlines i couldn't depend on my feelings or just give people food later when i wanted to because it doesn't work for me right now however at this stage of my life because i'm in university and because my work is very project-based i have a huge amount of arbitrary deadlines and very few real deadlines so if you also fall into this category this video might be useful for you if you have only real deadlines i don't think this is going to work i'm afraid accepting that real work i do whenever i need to do and that's fine i've just accepted it focusing on arbitrary work all of the things that i'm scheduling by myself every single time that i need to do something here if i don't feel like doing it i will not do it at the time and i'm going to explain why the reason for this is that i have accepted that there is a huge difference between the performance that i get from a task and the output that i get on the task depending on the mood that i am in and my levels of motivation so let's say that i have some studying to do tonight and i'm really really not in the mood to do this but i've put it in my calendar i've promised myself it's a good time to do it i'll just do it anyways i'll sit down and as i read i feel like a complete idiot because i'm completely unfocused i have to read the same sentence five times i don't understand what's happening i'm very distracted i put my fear on and do not disturb and i try to change my environment and focus it just doesn't happen i spend three hours studying but i barely get anything done overall this is almost a waste of time but imagine for a second that i really really wanted to read this chapter if i had the motivation to do this i'm a completely different person i am breezing through it i'm going through it so fast i'm doing exercises i'm excited i'm asking myself questions i feel like i'm the most smart person in the world and i'm getting 10 times as much work done almost for the same amount of time that i would be doing in my unfocused state so if for a second we could guarantee that even though i don't feel like doing this thing right now i don't need to do this thing right now and i am guaranteed to want to do this thing in the future it would make absolutely no sense to do it now right it would just make sense to leave it and do it when i feel like doing it because i can get the same amount of work done in much less time and actually enjoy it if we are in the situation to accept that there is some work in our life that is arbitrary which we don't need to do life or death at that time and if we can also accept that there is a difference in our experience and in our performance when we are motivated and unmotivated and if we can also then accept that our motivation for something will come in the future then it makes absolutely no sense to do work at this time if you don't feel like doing it and instead save it for a time that you feel like doing it later and although this sounds really really simple i think the biggest issue here is well i'm never going to want to do this thing and i just think this isn't true i truly believe that i have to a huge extent an ability to control my motivation and i've spent a lot of time trying to understand break down control and direct my motivation for different things and the results from the ability to do this have been absolutely life-changing for me here's the example in the beginning of this video even if you've never intentionally been able to change your motivation you probably recognize that when you have a strict deadline and you have a lot of anxiety around the task somehow you have a lot of motivation to do things the night before and you also realize that you are so much faster and more effective at doing a task when you're riding that huge level of motivation than you were five days ago when you technically had time and you still didn't feel like doing it and even though anxiety is a very effective way to increase your motivation i don't think it's the singular thing and i'm not arguing for leaving everything last minute i think there's a whole host of other things that we can do to change our motivation levels and this is why as cringe as it is to admit this the only reason that i can run this youtube channel and business by myself is not because i am super intelligent or super fast but i'm only working with my super elizabeth intelligence and super elizabeth speed at that task at a specific time i'm not the smartest and the most motivated person in the world and sometimes i am the stupidest and the least motivated person in the world i just never work in that state i make sure that every time that i'm doing something i am showing up as the most motivated and the most excited and fast person that i can be and this is how things work for me take a picture here and the way that i imagine things is not that i have this schedule and i am going to put things in when they need to be done and just stick to them because it's guaranteed that a lot of these things at minimum 60 or realistically 90 of these things i would be doing just because i have to in a completely slow and unm motivated and bad way the way that i see things is that i have a schedule and i have times where i can do things i also have a bunch of projects on the side and what i do is i match the project with the state of mind that i am in so if i'm feeling hyper passionate about something that's when i'm going to do it rather than doing it when i've scheduled it in if that makes sense because as i do this every day and then every week every month what this means is almost all parts of the work that i do for a specific project are always done when i am the smartest the fastest the most motivated and the most passionate version of myself for that task and what that means is that i am getting so much more output for the same amount of time that i am putting in while enjoying myself a lot more and this is why putting in the exact same amount of hours and the amount of work my output now is insanely different than it used to be in the past because i'm not arbitrarily sticking to things i'm doing things when i am the best version of myself to do those things and obviously this is not a 100 perfect system there are many many times where i am just tired and lazy there are times where i still rely on my last minute anxiety to get things done and there are times where i just have to do things in that board state because it just has a super immediate deadline or i'm not passionate enough for something but there is still a huge change to the consistent version of myself that i used to have before and just applying these principles in general has caused the biggest change for my life now if we somehow accept this way of working here's how i'm going to explain how i increase my motivation in order to get things done now the first core and most essential thing is the realization that it is work and it is valuable and it is effective to spend your time increasing your motivation so i love the phrase that says give me five hours to chop down a tree and i will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe why do we not do this with work it's absolutely ridiculous to me increasing your motivation is sharpening the axe making yourself angle work in a way that makes it interesting for you making sure that you actually want to do this thing that it's the right thing to do this thing and increasing your desire to do something is sharpening that ax and if we're just being consistent for the sake of it we're just working all the time with a blunt axe for no reason and feeling absolutely miserable i accept that some people like habits this is not for them but if we hate habits there is no point in just showing up with a blunt axe every single time and i genuinely do this because i know if i have five hours to do something if i spend the first four hours trying to make myself want to do that thing and one hour actually doing that thing the results from this will be much more effective than spending five hours doing boring work because if i'm unmotivated there's no chance that i'm being effective and there's absolutely no way i'm going to get creative but if i'm motivated in a short amount of time i can get so much more work done so even though increase your motivation can look like procrastination on the outside i generally don't care if it looks like i'm not working i couldn't care less i know this makes sense for me and this is the way that i function so this is what i do but i'm going to give you four tools that sharpen the axe or kind of sharpen my mind and make me more motivated in order to do something so let's get straight into it the first tool is focusing on skills versus results and i have a full video on this here so i'm not going to waste your time if you've seen it already but just in brief what the basis of this tool means is that results are not enough to fuel our motivation because either one we don't care about the results so therefore there's no motivation or two we care about the results but the process is too boring so we think nah don't want it anyway or is there another way to do this and we just never end up getting things done so what i do is i completely ignore results and i focus on skills instead and this means i will break up the task into its component parts so writing an essay might sound boring because i couldn't care less that my professor will be proud or that i'm gonna have a great number i couldn't care but what i do care about is structuring my arguments better i do care more about being better at verbal communication and what that means is then i can be a better partner a better friend a better mom a better youtuber a better person so i can focus on the skills within the task and that can fuel my motivation i have very little motivation for random results that people tell me to care about i have a lot of motivation for increasing my skills and making myself a better person so i hang my motivation on these things and this leads me to my second point which is making tasks work for me this needs to be a two-way street in order for it to make sense i feel like a lot of tasks or projects that i'm given are just things for me to do and i naturally very often don't focus on what is the task doing for me so before i start a task i will make a task do the work i will in a way of course this is a two-way conversation within my own mind so it might sound a bit crazy but i will kind of ask myself what are you doing in return like what are you giving me fine i'm giving you my time my energy my focus what are you giving me and this is where i can lean into these skills a bit further i can lean into how this task can improve things that i value in my life and things for me rather than just another thing that i need to do for seemingly no reason so this sort of focus really really helps the third task is focusing on the bare minimum and what this involves is that very often if i have a lot to learn in order to start doing something i will just get very bored with that thing and this can be a lesson in medicine where it's a whole chapter on a whole condition and i don't know anything about it yet and it just feels really boring or learning something completely new like how to edit videos and what i will do in this case is i will learn very very basic principles like i'll give myself five minutes to learn for example three basic rules of editing like how to open and how to get started on a project or i'll learn the very very basics of the anatomy or the physiology of this part of the body and then i will go into the deep end i will spend time looking at crazy things that people have done with this for example what patients have people helped how can knowing this information on this clinical condition actually change someone's life or then i'll look at what crazy edits have people done in their videos and then i'm going to immediately get started i'm going to use just these very basics in order to try to do these crazy complicated things and pick up the lessons that i'm supposed to do along the way by using only the bare minimum one you can get a lot farther than you think you can because people focus on the sexy moves and the crazy little details and like little things in medicine nobody cares if you just know the very very basics you can get a lot farther than you think you can with a lot more general understanding and it gets a lot more creative as you're using first principles every time to do crazy complicated things and you get jump straight on the task immediately when i have to do something that's a lot of work to get started my motivation for it is very very low but if i know that with very very few basic things i can actually get started right now my motivation for doing that task increases a lot so exposing myself to crazy interesting results while using only the basics to get there tends to be a huge factor in fueling my motivation and lastly not to be looked are getting over mental barriers because realistically if you have something to do if you know now is a good time to do it if you know you have to do it and no one's going to do it for you and you're still not doing it you have an emotional problem this is not a logical problem the logic is there it's an emotional barrier so i think i always do some exploration within myself questions that i ask myself are what do i want to do instead why do i not feel like doing this task when do i think i would want to do this task what would make me more likely to do this task am i somehow insecure what would happen if i completely failed at this task how would that make me feel am i certain that i can do it am i certain that i can do some version of it am i certain i can improve at this thing genuinely what am i worried about if i fail at this task what part of myself will feel insecure what skills in myself do i think i am worse at and if i do this task better what skills of myself do i think i'm improving and i'm quite familiar with things that i'm insecure about in my performance i'm very familiar with things that i'm secure about and i'm kind of very in touch with my fears and anxieties which might sound like a bad thing but it really helps me recognize when they are being triggered in a task and therefore kind of calm myself down rationally and then start doing the task so getting in touch with your emotional self treating yourself like an adult understanding exactly why you don't want to do something is very very effective so overall what i end up with is this line of reasoning if there is a task that i want to do today but i don't necessarily and absolutely have to do today i will ask myself do i feel like doing this if the answer is yes i'll do it that's fine if the answer is no or hmm not so sure i won't do it i will spend time instead motivating myself to want to do this task using one of these four tools i know they sound really organized i've only organized them to kind of give that information to other people in my mind they're very natural and intrinsic and i kind of like use them little bits here and there i wouldn't use all four or use them all the time so i'm going to motivate myself to want to do this task and motivation works in weird ways depending on the level of the task and how i'm feeling so sometimes it might take me five minutes and i want to do it sometimes it might take me five weeks and then i'll want to do it that's absolutely fine so i'll invest time and motivating myself to do that task in the process i might end up wanting to do something else which is also fine i'll do that instead or i'll end up wanting to do that task later but this is not wasting time this is sharpening the axe and it's so so so essential and then there always come a point where i'll feel that i will want to do this task eventually and i'll do it then worst case scenario i want to do it because of my anxiety which happens a lot rarer for me now but mostly i can lean into these positive emotions for wanting to drive myself to do something now one thing that tends to happen when i motivate myself and feel that i need to start something immediately is that i often don't learn the complicated things and because i just use the basics and i teach myself how to do things the results tend to be a bit weird the way that i edit videos the way that i write the way that i use maths equations the way that i paint is quite weird because i never learned the advanced method and finally after a year and a half on youtube i've decided to kind of see what the professionals are actually doing with editing and to do that i've checked a class on quick video editing on nebula classes which has been absolutely great there's one lesson in this class in particular that talks about some quick methods to make your editing a bit faster and i'm actually quite excited to use them on this video in particular so i'm probably going to be checking that out if you also want to see nebula classes there's a whole bunch of things over there i might have my own course there at some point maybe i don't know but in the meantime this cast on editing is absolutely fab would really recommend it there'll be a link in my description for a discount for it but otherwise if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day behind yourself and others and leave everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 759,457

Keywords: how to study, study, how to create a calendar, scheduling tips, schedule, how to schedule, productive, how to be productive, how to study for exams, how to study effectively, how to stop wastsing time, how to stop wasting time, how to stop wasting time and study, how to organise your day, how to organize your time, how to organize your life, learn english

Id: SqOTG3n5sbI

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022