So over the last decade,

I have experimented with dozens and dozens of strategies for managing my time.

And I've been doing that because time management is I think one of the most important skills that we can develop and build in the world today.

And it's because fundamentally, time is our single most valuable non-renewable resource.

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

And so really the skill of time management is in being able to make the best use of that time, not necessarily for only doing productive things, but instead to use that time intentionally and effectively.

So in this video,

I'm gonna talk you through my Trident method, which is a sort of three-pronged method for time management.

And I'll show you exactly how I use these different methods in my life to manage my own time.

And in the video description,

I've also linked completely for free the templates that you can use to incorporate this into your life if you would like as well.

So this aspect of the strategy was a total game changer when I actually tried bullet journaling last year.

Now bullet journaling is a somewhat fancy pen and paper method of productivity, but it's sort of been co-opted over the years by artists and people making ridiculously fancy and beautiful looking bullet journal spreads.

And I was super enamored by this and thought, you know what, I'm gonna try the bullet journal method.

And so for the final four months of 2022,

I painstakingly bullet journaled basically every day, and I sunk so many hours into my bullet journal method.

And it was really good, but there was one aspect of the bullet journal method that completely changed the game for my time management.

And that was this view, the year at a glance.

Now the point of this view is that you split up the entire year into these different columns.

And so you end up having 12 columns that show the different months, and then one to 31 down the side that show you the different dates.

And so what you end up with is these 366 blocks.

Now, when I did this, when I did the bullet journal technique, this immediately gave me incredible insight and clarity into what the rest of my year was gonna look like, because this is not really a view that we see particularly often.

If for example, you use Google Calendar or something, you tend to be stuck in the weekly view or in the monthly view.

And even if you have like a physical annual calendar, you tend to flip the pages.

And so you never really see your entire year just laid out on a single page or two pages.

So in January of this year,

I decided I wanted to have a more digital way of having this kind of view in my life.

And so I decided to just make a Google Sheet out of it.

I think these days it's too easy to default to fancy apps and like, oh, what's the latest thing here?

But I thought, you know what?

A spreadsheet just does the job totally fine.

And so I literally just went through on Google Sheets and I created one of these year at a glance templates.

And this is what the blank version of this looks like.

So as you can see, we've got the months down the top.

We have color coded the months in like pretty colors, and we've got the weekends color coded as well.

And this is the template that you can download.

Just hit the link in the video description.

It's completely free and you can duplicate this into your own Google Sheet account if you would really like to.

And this is what my version of this actually looks like.

And I use this in two specific ways to manage my time.

Firstly, it's really helpful for zooming out and getting a bird's eye view of my entire year so I can use it to plan my life.

I'm filming this video, for example, in April, but I already know that this is the stuff that's kind of going on in May.

And in June, I'm going to Austin for a bit.

And then I've got this block of time to go on an adventure with some friends.

And then I'm going on a retreat to LA later in June.

And this is so helpful to get an idea of A, where things are and B, it then allows me to plan things like weekend group trips with friends or being able to plan holidays in advance so I can block out the time.

I then reflect those changes in my actual Google calendar so the team knows exactly what's going on in my life.

And I found this to be a ridiculously effective way of managing my time on a macro scale.

And to make this easier to deal with, what you can do is when the months are gone, you can just right click, you can hide those columns.

And now it's just way easier to see exactly what's going on in a given month and then what's going on for the rest of the year.

So that's how I manage my time on the level of the whole year.

Let's now move on to the level of a single week.

But I've got to go somewhere right now, be right back.

Good morning.

It's a new day and we are talking about component number two which is all about ideal week planning.

Now here's the context behind this.

So essentially we all have these goals and plans and stuff that we want to get done.

Now, please don't cancel me for saying this but there are literally just 24 hours in a day and we all have to decide how we're gonna make the most use of that time.

If for example, you have three personal assistants and five private chefs and stuff, then obviously you will have more of those 24 hours that are free to do things that you want to do rather than do things like laundry and cooking and cleaning and stuff.

But fundamentally those 24 hours or 168 hours a week are basically the same for everyone.

And assuming you're sleeping for eight hours every night, we all basically have 112 hours in a given week that we can play with.

And the point of component number two is that we wanna define the ideal week, i.e. our absolute ideal allocation of those 112 hours per week.

And this is a method I've been using for the last eight months or so ever since I started working with my CEO coach,

Eric Pateko.

And Eric has worked with a couple of hundred CEOs of really high growth companies and this is one of the methods that he asks all of his clients to do.

And apparently it's a method that always gets some results and it's certainly gotten me a lot of results over the last eight months.

And so instead of you having to pay several thousand dollars an hour for Eric's time,

I'm just gonna teach you the method straight up.

And it's actually fairly straightforward to do.

All it involves is going on Google Calendar and it involves creating a new calendar so that you've got a completely fresh slate where you can do your ideal week planning.

Cool, so I've now created Ali's ideal week and now you can see it's shown up in my Google Calendar right here and this is completely free.

Everyone can use Google Calendar.

You don't have to pay a penny ever at all.

Now at the moment, my life is a little bit of a mess because of the YouTuber Academy happening and because of all the book stuff going on and all the meetings with the editors and agents and all of that fun stuff.

And so what can often happen is that

I actually don't have that ideal lunch hour in which I'd like to cook a healthy lunch.

And so instead, a product that I've been finding a lot of use of is in fact Huel who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

Now I've actually been a paying customer of Huel since 2017 and since my penultimate year of medical school and actually when I first started this YouTube channel six years ago, I've been taking Huel fairly regularly.

And there's broadly two types of Huel that I really enjoy.

The first one is Huel Black, which is often what I have in the mornings as part of my morning routine.

It's 40 grams of protein, 400 calories.

I just add water, blend it up in the Nutribullet blender thingy and then it turns into a genuinely tasty smoothie that has all of the right macros and all of the micronutrients that I might need for the day.

And the other Huel product that I get a lot of value out of is the Huel Ready to Drink.

And again, I've been getting deliveries of this ever since.

I don't quite think this started in 2017 because this wasn't a thing in 2017.

I think like since 2020, this has been a thing and I've been getting regular deliveries of these.

And it's basically a whole meal that's 100% nutritionally complete in a single bottle.

And if on a given day,

I don't have time to have a proper lunch, then the Huel Ready to Drink is an absolutely fantastic lifesaver.

My favourite flavour is banana.

I think that's the best one, but all of the others are pretty tasty as well.

Now, the best way of trying these,

I'd say is the variety pack because it gives you like three bottles of all of the four different flavours.

If you're interested in trying out any of these Huel products, including Huel Ready to Drink, then do hit the link in the video description.

And if you use that link, then you will get two free products along with your Huel order.

You will get a free t-shirt, which is genuinely good and it's nice and elastic-y and like makes you look hench, which is a fantastic like quality t-shirt.

And you'll also get a shaker so that if you don't wanna use a like Nutribullet blendery type thing, you can just like put the thing, put the powder into the water and the shaker, shake it up.

And now you have a nutritionally complete meal that's basically ready to go.

So thank you so much Huel for sponsoring this video.

And the point here is that basically I wanna define what are the containers of time where in an absolutely ideal week, not necessarily a perfect week, but in an ideal ordinary week, how would I choose to be spending my time?

So for example, I've decided that like in my ideal week,

Monday through to Friday,

I'd like to wake up at seven o'clock and then I'd like to have the first hour of the day for my morning routine.

And this is a thing I'd like to happen every day and so I'm gonna repeat this daily and I'm gonna give it this yellow color because that like signifies the sunrise or something like that.

And you know what?

Why not add an emoji to it just to make this a bit more fun?

So we can see that this has now shown up across my ideal week.

And because I wanna get my eight hours of sleep,

I wanna aim to be asleep by 11 p.m.

And therefore I wanna be starting to get ready for bed around 10, doing my reading, nighttime routine, all that fun stuff.

And I'm gonna repeat this every single day and I'm gonna give this a lavender color to signify nighttime.

Fantastic, so we now have a block for waking up and we have a block for sleeping.

And now I can figure out what I want my ideal ordinary week to look like in the rest of the time.

I've decided that in my dream world from eight till nine every morning,

I'd like to do breakfast and journaling.

And in that block,

I could maybe have a breakfast meeting with someone or maybe go for a walk.

And then I want my actual, quote, workday to start at 9 a.m. every day.

And so based on my own energy levels, how would I like my ideal workday to go?

Now, obviously this is gonna vary a bit depending on how much control you have over your own schedule.

For example, when I worked as a doctor,

I just had my entire block being like nine to five workday or whatever this shift was.

And then I would just have to do whatever just happened on the day.

I couldn't quite decide.

You know what?

These are my four hours of deep work time.

But as an entrepreneur,

I can decide how I spend my time.

And actually increasingly in jobs, especially in knowledge work, you actually do have the ability to talk to your boss or your manager and say, hey, this is how I work best.

I would love it if we can kind of find a way to fit my calendar around this.

And then obviously based on the needs of the business and of the team or whatever, things will have to adjust accordingly.

And so I've added in the blocks for the weekly team meeting, weekly team lunch, weekly contents squad meeting, and my two meetings a week with Angus, who's my general manager.

And I've added in the blocks for when I wanna have lunch roughly and the blocks for when I wanna have dinner on weekdays.

And this is already very helpful because now I can see what is the other time that I have to play with.

And then I can adapt this ideal ordinary week based on how I'd actually wanna spend that time.

And so Tuesdays to Fridays, for example,

I wanna have several hours in the morning as a deep work block for writing.

And in my ideal week, I'd like to do a gym session

Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, and maybe Saturday morning if I happen to be free on the Saturday morning.

Now, the other main thing I need to do in my workday is filming.

And so I'm gonna put in my various filming blocks into the calendar.

And obviously this workday schedule is very specific for me because basically all I have to do in my job is writing and filming.

But if your job is a little bit different than that, then maybe you might have a block for checking Slack or checking emails.

And you might do that once or twice a day so that you're batching those interruptible activities and you're not just spending your entire day being like derailed by all the various emails coming your way.

Alternatively, maybe you have more meetings than I do and therefore you have more meetings in the calendar at all the different blocks.

The point is mold this to whatever works for you.

But the point is we wanna create these containers within our ideal week where in an ideal ordinary week, we would be intentionally using our time in this way.

And what you can base these containers on is firstly, what are the constraints of your job?

But also how are your own energy levels?

Like if you're managing your own energy, do you do your best creative work in the morning or in the evening?

Do you have a slump after lunch?

And therefore maybe you wanna take calls then rather than do particularly deep work.

And the great thing about this and what I do is that I also intentionally schedule in the personal life and relationship stuff that I wanna put into my ideal week.

So for example, in my case, ideally every Thursday evening is date night.

So I know that I have that fully scheduled in the calendar and now the rest of my life can fit around that.