I don't know who said this or where I got it from, but from what I remember, it's just a provocative philosophical thoughts or idea.

And it's not a truth.

But when I first had this quote, it really resonated with me and to me, it really holds the essence of what effective time management can accomplish.

I think I've heard this like, five or six years ago and the reason that it really stuck with me.

It's because as soon as I heard it, I got this vivid image of all the nights I'd spent pushing hard, trying to finish my assignments right before they would do.

Even though I'd had weeks to finish it, I would often end up finishing 80% or more of it in the last hour before the deadline, when I only had one hour to complete a task that should have taken a couple hours, I managed to finish it anyway, seemingly compressing four hours of work into one hour.

Now, of course, one cannot take something that truly takes four hours of work and completed in one hour, at least not without losing quality.

Now, my realization wasn't that I, all of a sudden an hour before the deadline, got some superhuman ability.

Thio complete four hours of effective work in only one hour, but it was that an hour before deadlines, my time management got drastically more efficient, and I think this is the trick to getting eight hours of work done in one hour is too.

Increase your time management effectiveness.

And there's a famous quote by Abraham Lincoln, which is Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the 1st 3 hours sharpening my acts, which relates to effective time management or making sure that you spend your time on the right things.

Today.

I would say that I'm fairly good at this, and it is one of the things that I focus on daily and tried to reflect over and try to think of how I can make sure that I spend my time on the right things.

There's a concept called deliberate practice, and I think it's fairly common in sports and it pretty much stands for what it sounds like it stands for, which is practising things deliberately to give some context of this.

I thought I'd use Olympic weightlifting as an example.

And the way that an Olympic weightlifting would use deliberate practice is by focusing extremely intently on every rep in every part of every rep that they do, constantly thinking about what is happening and what should be happening and what could be improved and how it can be improved.

This is a very exhausting and intense way of practicing, and I think that the recommendation is that an athlete can only handle like 2 to 3 hours before it loses its benefit because of being too exhausting.

And this is the way that I think of my time and I want to employ some sort of deliberate practice toe every task that I do and the way that I do this is by asking a few questions both before and during trying to complete a task.

So there are five questions that I ask, the first being what is most important, the second being what has to get done, the third being how much time should this take and the fourth being?

What am I doing in the fifth being?

What should I be doing by asking these questions?

I'm able to catch myself a soon as I start to focus too much time on something that is not very important and I'm able to re focus on the task that are important.

I thought I'd go through all of them and tell you in more detail what I do for each of them and the 1st 1 being what is most important and this is where I basically take the goals and test that I have and I order them in order of importance.

So basically the things that I think are most important go at the top and the things that are less important go at the bottom and the 2nd 1 What needs to get done is where I basically take that list of tasks and goals in the 1st 1 and I pick one task for one goal and I break it down into what what do I have to do to achieve this goal?

And I tried to be as specific as possible about each and every step.

I look at this as the axe sharpening face where if I get this done properly and pay attention to all the details, then chopping down the tree will be as easy as just ticking off boxes.

And it helps here to also again ask what are the most important things that need to get done?

The 3rd 1 How much time should take before I get started, I usually try to set a deadline.

And when I do this, I tried to cut myself a little bit too short, knowing that even if I don't meet the deadline, I will be very close to finished.

Even if the deadline is ages away, I still try to enforce my own deadline.

And this insures firstly, that I most likely will be done with time to spare before the actual deadline.

And second, it further facilitates the focusing on the most important things in order to meet the deadline.

The fourth question.

What am I doing?

This is something that I usually after having answered the 1st 3 questions, I get started with the task.

And then as soon as I realized that I'm slowing down or getting to a standstill.

I tried to re evaluate and think about what am I actually doing right now?

And this is something that I combined with the fifth question, which is, What should I be doing?

This is where I usually go back to the start and reevaluate and try to look at OK, what have I gotten down?

And what is now most important because generally, what will happiness at the start, you'll have a list of things that you think you need to dio and hierarchy of importance among those things.

But after having completed some of those things, you'll realize you might realize that there are new things that you didn't know.

What the start that you need to do that are not on the list and maybe some of the priorities have shifted.

So you realize that Okay, the third things, actually, the most important thing.

So then you have to go back and try to rearrange these things according to where you're at.

And this is why re evaluation is super important and continuing to question whether you are spending time on the right things and not just going down like a rabbit hole, looking for an answer to a question that might not serve the whole.

So asking these five questions is something that's really helped me increase my efficiency and help decrease the time that I spend on things.

I hope you got something out of this video, and if you did, please share it or like it, subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.