So today we're gonna be talking about time management.

Now time management is remarkably simple, but we tend to overcomplicate it.

And there are a handful of simple habits that you can incorporate into your life that will just save you absolutely gallons of time.

And if you can consistently do these simple habits, you'll be amazed as to how quickly they can stack up.

And it almost feels as if you're playing a video game, but with the cheat codes turned on.

And this is important, right?

Because time is literally our single most valuable non-renewable resource.

We can always make more money, but we can never make more time.

Okay, let's start with the calendar.

Now, back when I first started medical school, I didn't really use a calendar for anything.

I would just sort of look at my timetable on the PDF or on my phone or whatever.

And I'd know exactly what lectures I have or what supervisions I have.

Now this was a real problem because I wasn't using a calendar.

So I was just forgetting all of this stuff and I'd forget to look at the thing.

I wouldn't have any notifications turned on.

And that's basically like level zero where you don't use a calendar for anything.

And then you graduate to level one where you start scheduling stuff into a calendar.

If there is an appointment that requires you to be somewhere, you then put it in a calendar and you look at the calendar regularly to know what you've got scheduled.

Now, immediately this level one of using a calendar immediately adds a lot of time management skills to your life because now you're not forgetting these things and you don't have to use your brain as a storage medium for these random events.

You can just delegate the remembering of these events to the calendar on your phone, for example.

And so that's very good.

But then level two is really where a lot of the gains are had.

And level two is where you intentionally schedule things into your calendar, even if they're appointments with yourself.

So for example, right now I've scheduled into my calendar that I've got a block for filming this video.

That's an appointment with myself.

And this is helpful because what it does is that it separates the planning of how we're gonna spend our time with the doing of how we spend our time.

And I sometimes like to think of this as the pilot and the plane.

The pilot is deciding kind of where the plane is going and then the plane is just executing and doing the stuff.

And so usually at the start of the day or at the end of the week, I will time block my following week to figure out, okay, cool, in this upcoming week, where are the blocks that I wanna go to the gym?

Where are the blocks I wanna film videos?

Anytime an event comes in, like dinner with some friends on a Tuesday night, it goes straight into the calendar because as long as I'm blocking the calendar in this level two mode effectively, it means I'm not gonna forget what's going on.

And it means I'm also gonna be a little bit more intentional with how I use my time.

And then the really fun aspect of the calendar habit comes at level three, where you start blocking out what does your ideal day or your ideal week look like.

Now, you might've seen me talk about this ideal week strategy before, but chances are you're still probably not doing it.

And I get loads of emails almost every day from people being like, oh my God, I discovered your ideal week method.

And then I tried it and it was actually really helpful.

So if you're not yet doing the ideal week method, would 100% recommend it.

Oh, and by the way, if you wanna get your own template for this ideal week thing, it's sick.

I've got my free one link down below in the video description.

You just click the link and I'll send it to you for free.

So check it out.

But essentially the idea is you create a new Google calendar called your ideal week and you block out what does an ideal ordinary week in your life look like?

And so where are the filming blocks in my case, like blocks for work?

When do you wanna have lunch?

When do you wanna wake up?

When do you wanna go to the gym?

When do you wanna do date night?

When do you wanna see your friends?

When do you wanna see your family?

And then where are the empty blocks?

Like if you wanna take guitar lessons or piano lessons or learn to code, where is that gonna fit in?

And the way I think of this is that you can look at someone's ideal week to see what are their intentions.

And then you can look at their actual calendar to see what's their reality.

And managing our time effectively is bridging this gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do.

And so whatever level you're at with your time blocking and with your calendar, I would suggest see what you can do to level up just a little bit.

And if you can get to the point where you have your ideal week and broadly it matches your actual week, oh, now you've really supercharged your time management and unlocked a whole new level of meaningful productivity.

All right, habit number two, I'm gonna call it the feel good productivity habit because that is the title of my new book, Feel Good Productivity, How To Do More Of What Matters To You.

That'll be linked down below if you wanna check it out.

But really the core thesis of the book, and this is really the habit that this whole book is about, is how do I find a way to make my work generate energy rather than drain my energy?

Because often when we think we have a time management problem, we don't actually have a time management problem, we have an energy management problem.

Like if you think about your life, you probably do have some time that you're maybe not using intentionally, scrolling TikTok or Instagram or watching random YouTube videos, for example.

And you're probably doing those things because there's something better you want to be doing while you're scrolling TikTok, but you feel like you don't have the energy.

But a lot of us have to do things that we don't necessarily want to do.

You might have a job, you might have studies, you might have kids that you have to look after, and maybe in some moments you don't wanna do those things, but you have to do those things.

And so the real challenge is how do we find a way to make everything that we do a little bit more energizing rather than draining?

And there's a bunch of strategies I talk about in the book, but the top level broad one and why this book is called Feel Good Productivity is because there is so much evidence that feeling good, i.e. generating positive emotions, is the thing that generates energy.

And so the way I think of time management is like time management and like calendar blocking is like creating the container in my day, but then the energy is me filling that container with the stuff that I actually want to do.

And if I have more energy because I've generated positive emotions in whatever I'm doing, then it means that I actually have the energy to be able to use my time in the most intentional way possible.

Whereas I can time block the absolute living daylights out of my calendar, but if I don't have the energy, I'm not gonna do the thing.

It's gonna be in the calendar, but I'm not actually gonna do it, which sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

So if you're not asking yourself this question already, I would start asking it right now.

What are the ways that you can make your work feel more energizing?

Ask yourself, what is it that separates an energizing piece of work from a draining piece of work?

And can you incorporate the energizers into the work itself?

And this is exactly the strategies we talk about in the book so you can check the book out if you like as well.

By the way, if you're looking for another really effective strategy for managing your time, you might like to sign up to Morning Brew, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

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It's how I'm keeping up to date with the world of AI and seeing is there any interesting AI stuff that I can incorporate into my own business and my life to make me more productive, to help me use my time better.

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But I wanna tell you now about my personal favourite way of doing this.

And that is habit number three, which I call the adventure habit.

Basically the idea is at the start of every day, you wanna ask yourself, what is the most important task that I need to get done today?

If you can focus your time and energy towards just that one important thing, it means that if you can do that 365 days of the year, you'll be absolutely sailing by the end of the year.

And the key thing is to limit this thing to one, that there's only ever one important thing that you need to get done.

And sort of the question in my mind is always like, okay, if I only accomplished one thing today, what is the thing that would make the biggest difference to my life?

Now, sometimes this might be a work thing.

It might be finishing a chapter of my book or it might be filming a video, but often it's not even a work thing.

It's a life thing, like calling my grandma or whatever the thing might be.

But now I wanna tweak this slightly because that's sort of like old school, somewhat corporate terminology, the most important task.

I don't really like thinking in terms of tasks because tasks make me feel as if I'm a slave to someone whereas actually I have control over my life.

And even if I don't have control of my life, I prefer to think that I do have control over my life.

And so instead of the way I phrase this is, what is today's adventure going to be?

And in my mind, this phrasing of adventure is like the, oh, this is the quest I'm embarking on.

This is like the cool thing I'm gonna do.

What's today's adventure?

And the first chapter of this book is called play.

And it's all about how framing our work in the language of play actually brings out this whole positive emotion, this whole feel good vibe to our work.

Even if, crucially, even if the work is really, really boring, you can convince yourself and you can sort of hack your mindset into believing that you're playing rather than you're sort of grinding away and working.

So that's level one of doing this.

Ask yourself, what's today's adventure gonna be?

But then level two is where you give yourself a few optional side quests.

But the idea is that you can define your daily adventure and then up to three, ideally we wanna limit it to three, side quests that we wanna do that day as well.

And so today, for example, my main adventure is filming this particular video.

But then the side quests, I usually like to split up into work, health, and relationships, just to make sure I've got a little bit of balance in my life.

So my work side quest is I need to write an issue of my email newsletter.

My health side quest is that I wanna go to the gym.

And my relationship side quest is I've got date night with my girlfriend where we're gonna see Hamilton.

It's gonna be good vibes.

And that's it, just doing those things.

A, defining what's the most important task which I like to frame as a daily adventure, but then B, defining three side quests in work, health, and relationships.

But you can, you know, your mileage may vary.

And on the days where I do that, I find like my time management is absolutely supercharged and I feel way more intentional with how I spend my time.

But on days where it's like I wake up in the morning, I rush into something and I don't have that 10 minutes to think, to have a coffee and to think, what do I actually want to do with my time today?

I find myself squandering all of my time.

Next up, we have the focus habit.

Now there was a really interesting study that I came across it in Harvard Business Review.

And it was basically a study where they looked at employees throughout their workday.

And they found that employees on average waste around 22 to 28% of their workday on distractions.

And they found that the main reason they do that is through task switching.

So for example, if you're working and you're trying to do a thing, but then you get a Slack notification or you get like a WhatsApp notification or someone interrupts you for a thing, it like takes ages to get back into the flow of what you were doing.

And in an average workday for the average office worker, those interruptions make up like 22 to 28% of the actual workday.

And that is significant.

That means over the course of a year, we are wasting three months, an entire quarter, three months of our life on interruption.

And over the course of 40 years, which is like a career, we are wasting a whole decade, wasting a whole 10 years of our life through interruptions.

If you take the single study and extrapolate that, obviously with all the caveats associated with that, being able to focus without interruptions is an absolute superpower and is another massive lever that we can use to save tonnes and tonnes of time and to be way better at intentionally using our time and our energy.

Now, there are some interruptions that are obviously good.

I call these welcome distractions.

Again, I talk about them in the book if you would like to check it out.

I'm gonna stop plugging the book now.

I call these welcome distractions.

This is like, you know, when I was at university, I would always leave my door open because if a friend comes along and wants to interrupt me while I'm doing my work, honestly, I would rather they did.

Like the point of university is to, you know, the friends you meet and the social experiences that you have and work is sort of a side effect.

And so even if I was a little bit inefficient with my work and writing an essay, for example, it was a welcome distraction because I would rather my friend interrupted me.

Similarly, I've had emails from parents who say that, like, you know, when they're focusing on their work, if the kid interrupts you and wants to play, you play with the kid because at some point, they're gonna stop wanting to play with you and you're gonna regret the time where, you know, they wanted to play, but you were like, no, I need to work.