- 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 by giving a massive
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sponsoring this episode of time management, and thank
you very much for watching. If you like this video
please give it a thumbs up, if you like this kind of
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next video, buh-bye! (soft guitar music)
