sunday monday happy days first let's talk about what exactly time management actually means because i feel like it's tossed around a lot as like this is a skill you've got to have but like what the heck even is time management right according to the oxford dictionary time management is the ability to use one's time effectively or productively it's kind of like packing your clothes into a suitcase if you organize them in particular ways more things will fit into the same suitcase than if you kind of just throw them in at random and the same can be said for your time if you organize your tasks and events and even just doing nothing in the correct way it'll seem like you have more time in each day or week or month and that's really what time management is all about optimizing and taking advantage of our most limited finite resource here on earth time itself let's stop talking about the concept of time before i have a full-blown existential crisis live on camera let me break it down into what i see as the four basic skills involved within time management and those the things that hopefully you'll be able to do by the end of this video are reduce prioritize plan and execute reducing the first and most important step because in order to do what's most important to you you have to avoid wasting your time on what's not important here are two tips on how to do that first of all and don't take this specific tip as like gospel just the overarching concept of this one right um is don't do all of your reading now maybe you do actually need to do all the reading but that's not the point of this my point is that you don't actually have to do a hundred percent of all available tasks at 100 perfection in order to reach the goal that you desire like sure if your goal is to be a researcher in your field of interest yeah you probably want to do as much reading as possible so you have as much knowledge as possible but if your goal is just to pass a class or to get a certain grade and then graduate with a degree then you only have to do enough reading to write your papers finish your assignments get the grade and be done and for recovering perfectionists like myself this can be something really hard to accept a lot of us who are both perfectionists and procrastinators tend to have this all or nothing mindset an example of a thought process that might be familiar to this type is oh no i forgot to do a chapter of reading i am going to fail my test in this class even though realistically the only thing that's going to happen is maybe you'll lose a few percentage points on one exam so first and foremost you want to let go of this mindset because you know you don't have to pick these two there is a huge range of variation you can pick good or great or fantastic it doesn't have to be perfect i know it's hard to let go of wanting a 100 perfect everything it's taking me like the better half of the year i'm still not there yet so trust me i understand it's not that easy but as you work on it i want to introduce you to another concept that might guide what you decide you want to spend your time on which comes from economics which is the principle of diminishing returns the basic idea is that you can keep investing more and more time and energy and other resources into a project but that doesn't necessarily mean that your output will continue increasing in proportion with the amount of resources you pour in most of your life endeavors will have a maxing out point that your results will approach but never quite reach for instance with grades it might be that perfect 100 and of course you can keep striving and striving towards it but at a certain point you might decide that your resources especially time might be better spent elsewhere because the time spent on your first task might not offer the same kind of return on investment as the time you spend on another task one example might be say i have 95 in my english class and i spend three hours working on a paper for that class just to increase my grade to a 96 which might be a smart idea if i didn't have like an 80 in my physics class and i really needed to study for that and i should have spent three hours you know studying for physics to increase that grade to a 92 instead of just spending the same amount of time increasing my other grade by just one percent my next piece of advice is that constant growth is neither realistic nor required welcome to modern hustle culture where we're all constantly pushed to be adding the next best thing to our resume or reaching exponential growth or growing up it feels like the outside world is always pushing for growth and for it to be as rapid as possible but this completely ignores the time and labor it takes to just maintain to just keep homeostasis staying where you are is viewed as stagnating or resting on your laurels but this doesn't have to be the case maybe where you are just it's good enough you've worked hard to reach it you've reached your personal goals and maybe you don't necessarily want to reach the constant growth goals that others are pushing onto you for example with my youtube channel it does take a lot of time and effort for me to just keep going with what i'm currently doing which is like posting a video a week maybe more during the summer but usually it's just like about one video per week but then there's this constant like message being pushed on me almost with like what are you gonna do next i'm gonna make more videos you're gonna start a podcast make a merch business like add something new all the time but realistically i don't have time to be adding these extra things to what is already a very busy workload as a full-time student and part-time youtuber and it's especially true that i don't need to add these because i've already fulfilled my goals which are making creative videos that i like to make and watch my goal has never been to make huge amounts of money so these growth-minded whatevers like aren't necessary for me to reach what i want enforcing growth on yourself when your time really cannot stretch that thin anymore can lead to significant burnout this is like about to happen to me with youtube possibly i don't know we'll do like a channel update to see how burnt out i feel at the end of the summer don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with wanting to improve yourself but you don't have to be improving yourself at a huge unsustainable rate at all times make sure you're gentle and kind to yourself as you grow and remember that progress isn't always linear there will be ups and downs along the way and speaking of reducing your workload let's take a quick break for a word from today's sponsor curology curology can definitely help you take one thing out of your workload which is the tedious process of researching skin care products trying everything out to make your skincare routine [Music] let me tell you a bit more about curology while i do my nighttime skincare routine and wash off all of my makeup so you can see my actual skin cleansing balm okay while i do this let me just tell you i've been using curology for like a year and a half and it really has been a game changer for my skin care i look insane i got my first curology bottle back in the early quarantine days when due to suddenly being stuck inside all the time and like a weird weather shift my skin became extremely dry and flaky and this really helped relieve some of that weird flakiness i don't really have a recent before and after to show you because i haven't had any skin problems really since then i mean you can see right now this is how my skin looks with no makeup no filters but enough of me talking about myself let me tell you a bit more about curology if you've never heard of them the way curology works is you take a quiz on their website and that will allow a dermatology provider to create your own custom skin care formula especially suited to your skin type skin goals other environmental factors all the cool random information that apparently has an impact on your skin care that they ask you about during the quiz and then you end up with your own custom serum the great time saving aspect of this is you can save yourself the hassle of putting together an extended skincare routine not only the research and trial and error period but also like the literal physical time required to put like a quadrillion products onto your face every night you don't have to because this just has everything you need all in one like yes this is a sponsored video i am being paid to say this but like y'all know it would lie to you okay i've used three bottles of this stuff because it is actually a good product fun fact you can also use the messaging center to directly contact your dermatology provider to ask them for advice or to slightly adjust your formula back last year when my skin was super flaky especially on my eyelid like area where it's not safe to put active ingredients i contacted my dermatology provider and she gave me some recommendations about how to fix that okay why am i back talking about myself again clearly all youtubers are self-obsessed and i cannot be an exception no matter how hard i try but anyways if you're interested in taking skin care off of your to-do list you can check out curology with the link in my description down below thank you curology for sponsoring this video and now back to your regularly scheduled programming [Music] your next priority shall be prioritizing so i've come up with this revised version of the eisenhower matrix as a method for prioritizing that works the best for me the way the traditional eisenhower matrix model works is probably more for like business people rather than students because it has you delegate or just remove the things that are non-essential but i feel like i never have non-essential things on my to-do list anyways so we're gonna scrap that section and i've supplanted the two dimensions to consider as difficulty and urgency so you want to prioritize doing the harder tasks first before you run out of brain power because the easier things can be done a little more sloppily with your tired brain and the second dimension urgency um should be quite clear like do the things that are more urgent first even if you don't fill out a chart like this every single day just considering these factors will help you decide what you want to get done first another thing i want to add to this though is that you want to make sure to set interim deadlines for any long-term projects this will prevent you from putting off these big projects until like the night before they're due just because they're technically not urgent until then an example of this might be that let's say i have a big paper to write and i have four weeks to do it so by the end of the first week i might want to be done with my outline and research by the second week maybe i'm done with the first half of it third week the second half you know the way you pace it out is really up to you but this will help every single chunk of it show up as urgent in your priority matrix so that you can get things done well ahead of the due date and with good quality work instead of rushing right before it's due so yeah that's my priority matrix method but there are a lot of other methods out there which you can research after this like basic guide video [Music] every single task in this video is like a whole beast in and of itself but planning is like the biggest one that can be tackled in the most possible ways that's why i have a whole playlist on my channel about planning an organization which you might find helpful for this section first in today's again basic guide i want to introduce you to my favorite planning method which is scheduling your tasks basically what you want to do is first make a list of everything you want to get done in the day or the week or the month or whatever unit i'm gonna do the day as the example here secondly estimate how long each task is going to take and the third and last step is to schedule each of them in as if they're an appointment with a set start and end time i just really like this method it makes me feel a lot less anxious to know how the day will go and be fairly certain that i will be able to finish everything that i need to get done or if i see that i can't finish it then i know that i have to go back to step one which is reducing my workload and i have two additional tips for making the scheduling thing work a little bit smoother one is to batch together small tasks into one like big block for example if i have just a bunch of random tiny errands and thingamabobs to fix up i'll just put them all together into like a one-hour block called tiny random things secondly if you finish your task early within that block of estimated time just let yourself do nothing because i think you should reward yourself for working way more efficiently than you expected yourself to be able to i feel like this conditions my brain to work more efficiently because i've rewarded myself with break time instead of punishing myself for working well with even more work you might also be wondering what tools can help you do this you can definitely use a physical planner or a bullet journal to schedule your tasks i personally love to use google calendar for this because you can set how long the block is and then just like scoot everything around digitally in my last tip for planning not really related to the whole scheduling thing that i just discussed is be careful of analysis paralysis when it comes to planning some of us especially the perfectionist type a people who relate to me in many unfortunate ways some of us tend to spend all of our time planning things and trying to optimize our schedule perfectly instead of actually doing anything that we're planning to do having an 80 percent good enough method for planning and managing your time and then actually executing tasks is far superior to trying to find a 100 perfect method and then never getting anything done because you're spending all of your time working on planning [Music] and speaking of getting things done our last step is executing yeah i can't really tell you how to do the specific things you're doing because i'm not doing them but here are some general tips on how to get things done more efficiently without sacrificing quality first let's start with my top two favorite methods for avoiding procrastination although i have quite a few videos about this which go into more detail about even more methods so you can try them all out and see what works best for you but my top two the first one is outside accountability some people like myself just respond really well to outside expectations not in like a being forced to do things by other people's way but just that being perceived by other people just makes me want to present myself as more focused and productive without actually taking any effort to make myself more productive sitting in a coffee shop to work just kind of makes me stay focused because i don't want people to see me slacking off and next the two-minute rule because the reason we procrastinate is your brain is anticipating the pain of doing work and so it wants to delay that potential pain as long as possible what you do with the two minute rule is you tell yourself i'm just gonna do this homework assignment or paper or whatever task for only two minutes that significantly reduces the perceived amount of pain your brain thinks you're gonna go through and so it will take you less activation energy to just get started and getting started is the hardest part once you've done like the first two minutes chances are you'll start to get into a flow and want to keep going and finish that thing you're working on and if you don't like no harm no foul just take a break and do two more minutes my next tip is to find ways to create efficient systems and this will really significantly vary based on the specific tasks you're doing i can give you a couple of examples but you'll probably want to do some research within your own communities to figure out what will work best for you for me spending like half an hour one random weekend learning and memorizing a bunch of premiere pro shortcuts has really increased my efficiency with video editing like yeah sure each action technically only makes like a second of difference but when i'm doing the same action like the cut action control k over and over thousands of times in one editing session that saves time and effort really adds up and last but not least make sure you take breaks because even though it might kind of feel like you're wasting time it really does increase your efficiency but basically trying to make yourself push through fatigue is not helpful because when your brain is tired it also becomes sloppy and less efficient and less effective so taking a break can make you more productive during the times you are working which makes up for the amount of time you wasted by taking a break and those are all the tips i had for today's video i hope you found this helpful go out there and kill it manage your time heck yeah um i upload new videos on this channel about student life and you can visit my instagram tick tock and second channel for some more sporadic and random content see you next [Music]