It seems to me, the older I get, the less free time I have. That's why it's important and
vital that I maximize my usage of what little free time I do have. Using my general time management strategy, which I'm gonna go over in this video, I've started a YouTube channel, a website, all while in medical school full time. And more importantly, I
haven't sacrificed my sleep, I haven't sacrificed my grades, and I haven't sacrificed my
fitness for any of these things. In this video, I'm
gonna show you nine ways to manage time better,
nine things that I use pretty much every single week, when I'm figuring out how
I'm gonna manage my time. If you guys don't know me, my name is Zach and I'm a third year medical
student here in Philadelphia. The general blocks are
prioritize, plan and perform. But before we get to that, the sponsor of this video is NordVPN. NordVPN is a service that I
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videos are sponsored now? Anyway I just think that's cool. But back to the action. So the first thing is prioritize. Time, just like money is
something that's created by us. It really has no bearing past the credit we as a society give it and
just like money as well, time can be spent wisely
or it can be spent poorly. We need to figure out what we actually wanna spend our time doing. We need to prioritize. (bright music) My first tip is shift your mindset. One quote that I like is
time is a created thing. To say I don't have time
is to say, I don't want to. For example, I wanna read
more, but usually at night, like after I'm done filming this video, I'll go watch some TV, maybe I'll play a video game
and then I'll go to bed. But I could choose to
spend that time reading. So realize that time is in your control. Once you realize this, a
whole new world we'll open up. (bright music) Time management tip number
two is decide priorities. I like to break it down into things that I absolutely have to do, things that I absolutely want to do and things that kind of wanna do. There are some things that I absolutely have to do right now. I have to go all my clinical
rotations, I have to eat and I have to sleep. Things I absolutely want
to do is I wanna cook and eat healthy food, I wanna exercise, I wanna study for medical
school 'cause I wanna do well in medical school, and I wanna meditate. And here are things that are
just the category below it, things I want to do. I wanna work on my YouTube
channel and website, I wanna hang out with
my friends and family and I wanna read books. Notice how my priority list
is pretty small, right? There's maybe nine or
10 things total here. That's because if I
started throwing things on, like I wanna paint the wall
or something like that, it becomes more of a to-do list instead of a guiding kind of light. I'm gonna use these things
that I just established, these priorities that I've picked in those three categories
to guide my time management for my life. Maybe you wanna think about, okay what are things that
I absolutely have to do? Like, that's go to work
or pick up your kids from soccer practice
or something like that. What are things that I
absolutely want to do? Maybe that's exercise, maybe
that's eat healthy food, maybe that's sleep nine hours. And what are the things
that you want to do? This could be reading
books like I wanna do more. This could be starting a project
that you haven't done yet. Or maybe this is just spending more time with friends and family. Now, this is nice, right? Because I have these categories. I have these priorities
of the things that I need, want to and kind of wanna do. Now, if something doesn't fall
into one of these categories, I'm probably not gonna do it. Or if it is one of these categories, I'm gonna know, okay, this
is my priority up here, so I'm gonna do this thing first. I'm gonna make time for
the things that matter. (bright music) Tip number three is be
ruthless with your time. This means cutting out
things that don't matter. But how do you know what to cut out? How do you know how you spend your days? Well this is where we're gonna
get a little bit nitty gritty but this is something that I did one week. It was painful to do for a week, but it really showed me what
I'm spending my time doing. What I did is I analyzed
every single thing I did during the week. So I had a little notebook
and in that notebook, I would write literally everything I did. So maybe I would wake up and
then I would look at my phone for a little bit when I
woke up and then I would go to the bathroom and then
I would brush my teeth. And then I went to have
breakfast number one and then I would watch an episode of TV and then I would have
coffee and read my email, and then I would do Anki flashcards, and then I would have breakfast number two and so on and so forth. But it's important if
you're doing this at home or if you wanna do this, that when you create your
list, you include everything. And here's where the
important part comes in. Here's where we see this
book, this list of things that we've done and put it to good use. You wanna go through every
single item in this list, this is what I did, and see
which things are essential, which things you need to do
and give those a check mark. So for me, that was probably
studying, exercising, all the things I talked
about earlier, my priorities. And what you can do is you can actually go to your priorities list
that you've just made just before this, and you can go through this
list of everything you've done during the week and say, okay, exercising, that's one of my top priorities, that's gonna get a check mark, that's gonna stay in there. Watching TV before bed, that's not even one of my priorities, so that's a nonessential thing, I'm gonna give that an X. And now you have this list, this list of things that
you do during the week. This list of things that you
do that you can say, okay, this doesn't match up with my priority. This does match up with my priority. And then using this, we
can go to the next step, which is plan. (bright music) So tip number four is schedule
time for a daily goal. Now this tip is stolen from Ali Abdaal and I saw this in one
of his videos previously and I really liked it just
because it gives you a block of time during the day,
a set block of time during the day to do kind of what you want to accomplish to do these
things that are essential, that are not kind of your work or school or these kinds of things. And during this daily goal, you're only gonna try and do one thing. So for example, my daily goal for today is film this YouTube video. Usually it'll be something around YouTube. So it could be writing
scripts, editing scripts, recording videos, stuff like that. So I'm gonna show you how
this daily goal integrates in a bit. But now we're gonna get
into the meat and potatoes and this is probably the
longest and hardest part. This is how you're gonna
plan out your entire week. (bright music) And now we have our
lists of what's essential and not as essential, right? So we're gonna use this
list to plan out our life. Just plan the essential things. Is starting at your
YouTube channel essential? Is going to the gym essential? Is cooking a certain food essential? And the reason I'm being so nitpicky about this essential
and non-essential thing, because if you haven't made
this distinction in your mind, it's very easy to fall off the wagon on kind of your time management strategy. Whatever you are trying to accomplish, needs to become part of your life. Making my YouTube videos is essential because I'm a YouTuber, this is what I do. And I have a deadline, a personally set deadline to
post a new video every week at 12:00 PM Eastern on Friday. I am a YouTuber, making
YouTube videos is essential. I plan out my weeks
and I plan out my days. There are things that you
know that are essential that you just have to do that they've been scheduled for a while. So if you work from 9:00
to 5:00 for example, you're gonna put in your calendar work from 9:00 to 5:00. Lectures you need to schedule, a birthday dinner you've
planned for a while you need to schedule, things like that. Okay, so we have those main
things in our calendar. The other thing I like to do before I start inserting
things into my calendar is plan out my meals and plan out my exercise. So at this point, again
I'm not putting anything into the calendar yet. I'm just planning out
what meals I'm gonna make when I do my meal prep on the weekends. So when you look at my week, you can see I filled in those
things that are essential. I filled in my rotations, I filled in a hike that I'm
gonna do with my brother, I filled in a soccer game that I have, a birthday party I need to go to. I mean there's a lot of
empty white space, right? This is where the work comes in. So with this empty white space, I'm gonna put in the
things that I wanna do. This is where I'm gonna put
in basically the entire point of this video is just putting these things into these time slots. So if we go all the way
back to the beginning and we look at the priorities we made, if I look at the priorities
I made, what do I wanna do? So I said, I wanna cook
nice and healthy food, I wanna exercise, I want
to study for med school and I wanna meditate. Okay, so those are the
four things I'm gonna put into my calendar. Okay, so now,
if we looked at my calendar, you can see things are
filling up a little bit. So I've thrown in kind of my breakfast. I've thrown in my meditation,
thrown in my eating. I've thrown in studying pediatrics, 'cause that's what the
rotation I'm on right now. I've thrown in exercising and eating, meditation, running, showering, dinner, all these kinds of things. So the calendar is pretty
full at this point, and you might be like, wait, Zachtin, aren't we doing this so
we can do other cool, really cool things? Well, yeah but the essential things are essential for a reason. These are the things that kind of I find personally to make me the happiest and run my life, they make my life better. So I'm gonna put those things in first. Exercising is the thing
I wanna put in first, eating healthy is the
thing I wanna put in first. Sleeping well is the thing
I want to put in first. And I also want to do
well in medical school. So these are kind of the
things that I put in first. These are the essential things, they should take up most of your calendar. The next thing we're gonna
do is we're gonna throw in the daily goal into kind of every day, and I'd like to do the daily goal from like one to four hours usually. I can usually find an hour
of time to do something during the day, pretty much always. Usually I'm gonna be able to find one hour during the day to do stuff. That might be before
I go into my rotation. That might be late at night, but I usually will be
able to find this out. The next thing is a junk hour. Now during the week, I usually accumulate a
bunch of little tasks. Like for example, I may need
to fill out a form online, change things on my website or transfer things from my to-do list. They usually accumulate
kind of as the week goes on. Now, I'm gonna give you a
special bonus, super bonus tip, it's not even one of
the nine, super bonus. That's what you expect when
you watch Zach Highley video? Just, you know, extra,
extra bit of (blows kiss) That's probably gonna get cut out. Anyway, so the extra bonus tip is bulking. So not bulking, but bulking,
putting everything together so you can do it all at once. Like if you went to the laundry room and washed every single piece of clothing every time it got dirty, that's a ridiculous waste of
time and resources, right? But if you wait the entire week to build up like kind of
all your dirty clothes or stuff like that, and then wash it all at once, you're saving yourself time,
you're saving resources, right? Water, electricity and it's a better way to do a lot of things. So that's it. If you
looked at my calendar now, my calendar is completely full up with all the kind of stuff
that I'm doing this week. Okay, so we have our time blocked out and now we're gonna get into planning every single day 'cause we just planned our week
kind of in these time locks, and now we plan the days. And this is much more simple, much easier because we've planned
out our next day already on this calendar. So what I'll usually do the night before, is I'll look at my calendar and I'll see, okay, it says, I should
study Peds tomorrow and then I'm going to go do some exercise and then I'm gonna meditate and then I'm gonna do my daily goal and then I'm gonna have dinner. But that's kind of a little
bit of general stuff, right? And one of the best kind of goals are specific and actionable goals. We wanna know what we're
doing and when we're doing it. So for Study Peds, for example. Okay, I see that starts
and I'm gonna write down I wanna do all my Anki flashcards. The other thing I wanna do is I wanna do a couple practice questions. The other thing I wanna
do is I'm gonna read this section in a book. So I'm going to put these
all specific things listed. And the next thing I'm
gonna do is exercise. But what exercise am I gonna do? So I'm gonna write down, go
to the gym and lift weights. And what food am I gonna eat? I actually like to write
down what food I eat. It's just easier instead
of thinking about it, you already have it planned out. And also when you do
the thinking about it, you kind of lose time. You know, Steve jobs, for example, would wear the same
clothes kind of everywhere. This is because it eliminates
that decision-making process. It eliminates that decision, okay, what am I gonna wear today? And daily goal, then I'm
gonna set my daily goals. So for the next day, it
might be something like, okay, I wanna edit this
video during that time and that's what I'll do
during that daily goal. And then I'll write dinner. What am I going to cook for dinner? And these are all just
little bullet points that I put on a post-it. And then I go through
the day and I see, okay, I need to do this, this,
this, this and this next. (bright music) Tip number six of this planning phase and the last time of the planning
phase is use to-do lists. My mind can't hold much. So when I think of something,
I like to write it down, otherwise I'll forget it or I won't do it. And usually what I'll do with these to-do is 'cause usually they're not
super urgent to-dos, right? It might be a YouTube idea or something like that,
but that'll build up. And what I'll do kind
of during my junk hour and planning time on Sunday, which is the two hours
we talked about before, is I'll go through this to-do list and I'll knock out things
that I can knock out right now or I'll transfer it to notion, kind of be stuff to do later. For example, YouTube ideas
are gonna go into notion. (bright music) And the final big category is perform. Now this really is the hardest part. Planning is kind of the fun part and honestly the easier part. The harder part is to perform,
it's to do those things. This might be writing, this is often for me studying, this could be going to the gym. This is where the work and
effort comes into play. You've built your essential life, your planned out life, right? But now you have to actually do the things the past person told you to do, the past person being the past you. So in this kind of chunk of the video, I'm going to give you some tips on how to perform the most
important part, how to perform. (bright music) So tip number seven is live in task-tight compartments. Sir William Osler said live
in day-tight compartments and this is amazing advice. What he's saying is that you
shouldn't think about tomorrow, you shouldn't think about yesterday, just think about what
you have to do that day. 'cause if you start to think about what you're gonna do next
week and so on and so forth, when you're doing things,
you're going to freak out and it's going to stress
you out unnecessarily. I just adapted this to live
in task-tight compartments. So remember, we have our weekly plan and then we have our daily
plan that I've written out. So now in this daily plan
that I've written out, I need to do flashcards
for medical school. So often what will happen
sometimes is I'm going through these flashcards and
I'll think about the rest of the post-it notes. I'll think about the rest of the day. And that makes me less
efficient while I'm working on these flashcards. So the thing that's helped
me the most is listen, live in the moment, even if that means in the moment you're hating yourself 'cause you've looked at this
flashcard for the 19th time and for the sake of your effing life, you do not know what a
lysosomal storage disorder is, and that's okay. You just have to kind of
focus up a little bit, live in that moment and
kind of get it done. (victorious music) I will fight you to the death,
you silly man (indistinct) I am winning, I am winning, he's small, he's a little piece of
card, he is on a paper, he can do nothing. But if you're thinking about other things and this is kind of why I've looked at this flashcard probably 27,000 times, that when I get to this
card that says, okay, Niemann-Pick disorder is
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the blah, blah, blah starts
to connect to my YouTube video and then I'm figuring out, okay, what am I gonna script
on this YouTube video? What funny B-roll am I
gonna do, and I've lost it, and I'm onto the next card, and I've completely forgotten about this thing I'm doing right now. So live in task-tight compartments. What are you doing right
now? Focus on that thing. (bright music) Tip number eight is plan breaks. If I stare at this flashcard
long enough, I will go insane. So what I have to do is
plan a break from staring at this flashcard, which
will most likely kill me if I stare at it long enough. Just as some examples of what I do, every 25 minutes of studying, I take a five minute break. Every two hours of studying,
I take a 30 minute break. Every week of studying,
I take a half day off and every month, this
is something I'm trying to do recently, which I probably
will make a video about it, is I try to take a full
day off of everything. That means no YouTube
stuff, no med school stuff, no screens as well. (bright music) And the final tip, tip
number nine is delegate. Your time is valuable,
delegate as much as you can. I know a lot of people, including myself, we wanna do everything on our own because we feel like
we can do it the best. But can you really do
everything better than everyone? No, why don't people build
their own houses all the time? Why don't people sew their own clothes? Why don't I construct a fridge? Because I'm the most
amazing fridge constructor in the entire world? I don't do those things
because that would be silly. It would waste a lot of time, it would make us a lot of money and all my food would definitely go off. The fridge constructors
or the fridge builder, I don't know, the people
that make the fridge. (babbles softly) The people that make fridges or fridge-I, they know what to do. They've been trained on what to do, they know what parts to put in and they can do it much more
time efficiently than you can. It makes monetary and time sense to have people that are trained in certain things to do it because they will do it more efficiently and better than you. Why then is there some imaginary cutoff between sewing your own clothing and maybe cleaning your apartment? If you delegate, you free
up time to spend things that you can do more
efficiently than other people. And that just makes the
whole world more efficient. Isn't that a wonderful thing? Okay, we made it to the time management cluster action video. And what I'm gonna do now
is I'm gonna summarize this jumble of information for you guys because I know it was a lot. The first thing I do is
I prioritize my life. I'm in control of my time, I am in control of what I do with my life. What is essential, what is nonessential. The second thing is I plan, what, where and how will I be
doing these essential things? Planning, put it in the calendar. And the third thing I do is perform I know why I'm doing these things, I know what I'm doing and
I know how I'm going do it, now I just got to do it. One of the hardest parts of
all of this is discipline. I don't stick to these schedules and all these time
management things strictly. It's a constant journey for
me to kind of get better and improve the way I'm spending my time because if improving the
way I'm spending my time according to the
priorities I made earlier, I'm gonna be improving my life, right? What I've found is that
with these nine strategies with this kind of three
pillars of what I do to organize my time, which
is therefore my life, right? I've started to lead
kind of a more purposeful and a more honestly meaningful life. But if you made it to the
end of this video, thank you. Thank you so much for
using your precious time to watch this video, and I will see you in the next one. No pizza.
