How I Schedule With Neuroscience: Trick Your Brain to Work

you've seen this a thousand times before everyone has from building pyramids to stepping on the moon painting chapels Santa delivering Christmas presents all of these are just an execution of some sort of to-do list and as simple as they've seen on the upside to-do lists have hidden ways that they affect our brain they can make us love or hate work anxious or calm productive or lazy all depending on how and when we set them up if you also have known at some point exactly what you need to do but still didn't do it you might have fallen into one of these planning traps as a medical student through reading books studies and my own personal experience I've discovered that these simple to-do list can affect not just our procrastination but also our intelligence memory flow and actual work performance if you want to see how I scientifically schedule all of the tasks of a full-time job University and life or Jump Street in the way that I schedule at the moment is a six plus one day week let me explain this is based on the concept by Paul Graham of the maker versus manager schedule which is absolutely incredible so the manager plans to stay in one hour slots where he can have a meeting here sign something off there travel somewhere else so all he needs to do in order to organize something or List something is just find an empty slot and put it there things can move around easily they're absolutely fine the maker is the person who actually does the task and the way that they ideally would schedule things is in half day or in one day increments now we are both managers and makers for different tasks when it comes to life admin answering someone paying something doing laundry going to the shops these are manager tasks in the sense that they are very discreet they have a start and a finish and they can very often be shuffled around the way that we need them to but we are also makers when we are studying or when we are working or when we are completing a project we are working in this broader times scales and the issue with mixing these with one another is that they destroy your bark if you have a maker day where you are studying or working and you suddenly put a manager task in the middle of that day you are really really damaging your chances of getting into flow and doing good work the way that I get around this is that six days a week I try to almost do none of my to-do list tasks and I only work on my projects and one day a week I have a manager day where i'm happy to be interrupted I can do callbacks I can answer messages and emails I can pay stuff I can organize my life admin because these are those discrete things that can move around as shown by studying by kanaman in 2012 we are really bad at estimating how long things will take and even when told to think of the worst case scenario academics always consistently underestimated how long things would eventually take so even though I think answering one email will just take me two minutes sometimes it doesn't sometimes it spirals into something takes over my whole day and I end up in this Loop of just being consistently unhappy the anxiety of kind of having done something but also having technically procrastinated because it wasn't the right thing is something that I used to be so familiar with so now I try to be as strict as possible with this because I know in the worst case scenario it would have to be a six day rate for me to get back to someone or to do something which doesn't tend to be a complete disaster of course this is sometimes unavoidable I would just recommend doing those admin tasks as your last think in the day so hopefully it doesn't ruin your flow otherwise and this to-do list that I have everywhere I just add and add and add to it and I don't touch it until it's my to-do list day where I can get through things the other benefit of this is that in the six days a week most of the time I have no to-do list because I have one or two projects to do that day only and I can just focus on those and work very intuitively which is the best way things work for me with this peace of mind that I'll get to things next week or in a few days and I can just write them and delete them there next thing I want to tackle is how using a to-do list effectively at the right time can actually improve our intelligence and make us better at doing tasks the reason this works is because of our working memory so we have three types of memory working this is our intelligence what we use to process things our long-term memory this is our experiences history Pythagoras Theorem and also we have external memory these are photographs to-do lists anything that we write or that we leave in someone else's mind to remember our brain works in a bit of a strange way if we externalize something for example taking a photo of it or if we write it down somewhere we are less likely to remember this because and this is rooted in transactional memory Theory we are sending a signal to our brain that this is an external memory now this is bad because we're more likely to forget things but it's also great because it frees up a lot of our memory space Miller in 1956 found that our working memory or our intelligence can hold 7 plus minus two items at any given time so it can be very easily overwhelmed and therefore reducing the amount of items here or the cognitive load in our working memory means that we will just perform better a task we will appear and feel a lot smarter the impact of this distraction is huge imagine you are trying to study something and you suddenly remember that you forgot to pay rent yesterday and that also you have to take out the laundry in the washing machine these two things alone can potentially take up 30 of your current focus and attention and therefore you're left with a lot less to work with if you're someone like me there's a million intrusive bolts I have all day about things that I've forgotten and these can significantly impact my work so the best thing to do in this case is to externalize it immediately and to have a very low friction very easy access to-do list where you can dump every single intrusive thought and task that comes to your mind immediately I personally use the notes app on my phone and also I have a really big A3 paper Notepad under my keyboard and whenever something comes to mind when I'm working I'll just write it down and keep working on my task uninterrupted leaving these things to linger in our mind is really bad for our work performance and anxiety and as Cal Newport said your mind in other words is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment by the way if you want all the resources and the journaling prompts in this video I will have a completely free notion template that summarizes it below in the description so if you want to get the information without having to re-watch me all over again you can download it because I'm going to tackle procrastination head on because even though it can have a very specific plan of what I need to do it very often happens that I don't end up following through with it and I believe one of the biggest barriers towards effective work and that leads to procrastination is bad prioritizing it's completely understandable that on any given day as an adult we probably have 200 things we need to do and it's really really hard to try to process what's actually the best thing that you should do which might not be a very straightforward answer so this issue of prioritization can lead us in a complete free state where we procrastinate and do nothing or we pick something that we really well know that we shouldn't be doing and it's not the best use of our time so if we are in this state the best thing that I have ever found for the cases that I am stuck I am overwhelmed I have too many tasks to do and or very specifically I know that there is something that I've been procrastinating on for days or weeks or months that I know I absolutely must do but I can feel in my soul I'm not going to do it today I can tell that I'm ready to procrastinate on it this is the best thing to do grab a pen and paper and I'm a typer not a writer but I write because it's so much more powerful and start to write exactly how you are feeling in regarding to these tasks full on journaling and this is incredible honestly four sentences five sentences sometimes I can completely unblock the pressure of what I'm supposed to do so write what the task that I'm supposed to do is start writing out what is the reason that you don't want to do it what are you afraid of what are you trying to avoid what do you think you need and right until and I swear for me it's happened every single time I have this huge kind of like impulse I know what the to-do list is and I'll start one two three as opposed to my other to-do list where I usually like do circles that I take in this case this writing out and these restructuring and hearing yourself say out loud rather than like passively trying to ignore the feelings in your mind what you are exactly thinking can then lead to a very reasonable organized structure to do this that will prioritize things right for you and try to keep this too few items I usually do three Macs and then I try to tackle them on the spot honestly it is the biggest source of free and quick motivation that I have ever found to just write a few sentences and be like yep I know what I need to do this needs to be done I've convinced myself and I'll start it immediately in the book indestructible near Al addresses this when he explains that it's essential to think of our schedules as an evolving experiment that needs to be addressed rather than something that you just set in stone and need to follow through and especially when you're stuck when this hasn't been working for a while try this tip because it really helps to block things if you're anxious about the tasks or your to-do list it's probably badly prioritized and do some writing please about it if you can next it's a very specific tip on how to literally write things in order to make them more likely for you to do them and less Likens your procrastinate Beyond bad prioritizing being too big with a task can also make you less likely to want to do it I fall into this trap a lot where I'll just write something as shorthand and be like YouTube stuff today and then the day comes and I want to do everything apart from that so the best thing to do here is to really specify what you're supposed to do so instead of saying reply to emails in inbox on your to-do list writing get back to Sam with the time for a call hopefully you can see immediately that the second one is something that you're like yeah I want to do this I want to get this done so I use the same thing for my work for writing essays for doing studying tasks anything I don't say make epiglottitis presentation but I'm like find the differences between bronchitis group and epiglottitis so this is something very specific and much more likely that I want to do it Mata Todd and lip K in 2010 found that a lower perceived complexity of a task makes us much more likely to do it and we're making things more complex for ourselves when we glance at them by keeping them very vague and having to do all this breakdown in our mind by writing something really specifically it increases the likelihood of our follow through and feeling that's actually an easier thing to do for our brain so writing things out as though you're giving the task to someone else so they need a bit more detail versus you're doing it yourself next I would encourage everyone to have some sort of separate to-do list which is like a dream Nest it's for projects not specific admin tasks that are very low pressure things that we don't expect to actually take off and which have no deadline the reason for this existing is simply because the saying which is basically our brains to tend to stay occupied by a task until it is completed so by writing it down on this to-do list we're kind of opening up the task so our subconscious will start working on it really really slowly in the background for weeks days or months it just starts it so we can come up with more Creative Solutions on how to do this when we actually want to bring it on our daily to-do list or weekly to-do list and start tackling it properly it's this really soft way to be kinder to yourself and get used to not taking everything off but also to kind of utilize some of that sleep work and subconscious work in order to be better and enjoy the things that we do more and lastly if you want to add something to your to-do list that is fun and potentially it can make you really decent money I would very much recommend video editing and it's something I feel like I'm going to be talking about forever skillshare very kindly are sponsoring this video and over there is my favorite course of all time on video editing Ali abdall's crash course on Final Cut Pro editing has complete really very changed my life it is such a fun such an easy skill to learn and this is the cast that I used and the only task that I've ever watched on how to do it if you made it to this part of the video and you're kind of like me where you think you might want to be creative but you've never really monetized it before and like me potentially gone for a completely stem career this is a great great thing to try it's really fun to learn the Japan and serotonin hits are built into the structure itself because every time you kind of complete a task and you can do something else it's just like this excitement of being able to do so much more and although you absolutely did not ask me for this recommendation it's a really really good way to make money I know tens and tens of YouTubers and every single one of us struggles with finding good editors or finding editors to work with I currently still do not have an editor for this exact reason this is the cast I use if you can use it to edit like me let me know but also just use it for your favorite Creator whoever they are out there because they're very likely to give you a trial I go I have a personal link from skillshare which will give the first one thousand people to click on it a one month free access as opposed to the other two week I think that you get naturally so that's a good kind of buffer to get you really good on this task and going back to it and seeing what you can change if you do decide to reach out to someone and really really go through it yeah I mean I know you didn't ask for it but that is my piece of advice for today I hope in any shape or form that this video was useful at all um you do have the thing to download below if you'd like to but otherwise you so much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 313,251

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: BcV0rF5T8X0

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023