3 Time Management Fundamentals » Tips for Making Time

It often feels like the norm to be overwhelmed with an endless to-do list, countless projects, and not enough time to do it all. After years of feeling overwhelmed I've realized that time management is not about squeezing as much as is physically possible into our schedules. Instead it's about identifying our priorities and creating space for them through simplifying our workload, while also making it enjoyable and sustainable with self-care. In today's video I want to share with you three fundamental steps that I use to design systems and mindsets that help me to make better use of my time, and ultimately create that space for the people that I care about, my hobbies, and also some all-important rest time for self-care as well. If you're new here my name's Izzy, I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University and on this channel we talk about designing lifestyle systems to stay happy, healthy, and efficient. I'd also like to preface this by saying that this is just how I personally like to break it down, as thinking about it in these three buckets really helps me to visualize the process, and I hope it might help you out too. So without further ado let's get right into the video. So I like to break it down into the three P's which stand for prioritize, protect, and process. I'll expand on each of these in turn. So the very first step is to prioritize what are your values, what really matters to you, and what do you want to make time for. If we think about why we even manage our time it's usually to make sure that we have the time to actually get everything that we want to do done. So then obviously the first step is figuring out what that actually is. Recently I've personally been feeling a little bit overwhelmed with everything that I've signed up for, so I was talking to someone recently who introduced me to this idea of hell yeah or no, which is this concept by Derek Sivers where if something isn't a hell yeah then it should be a hell no, because if you don't say no to things that aren't actually a hell yeah that you're not really keen on then you won't have space or time for all the things that would have been a hell yes. I like to apply this by first doing a brain dump of everything that I'm thinking about, all the things that I think I might need to do or want to do, and I just put all of these thoughts down onto the page. This helps me to firstly visualize all the things that I have on my plate at the moment and secondly helps me to clear up mental space so I'm not trying to juggle remembering all of these different things I need to do, I can just get it out all onto the page and see it very clearly in front of me. Then once I've done the brain dump I eliminate all the non-essentials, this means that I will keep only the important or the meaningful items on the list. These essential items tend to go into two main categories, the things that I need to do such as work, study or life admin such as getting my car MOT done, and then the second category is things that we want to do and this is actually equally important as the things that we need to do, or even maybe more important because this is where we have the opportunity to make space for things that we really care about and are really meaningful to us and this could be things such as passion projects, volunteering, learning a new language, learning a new skill or spending time with loved ones or even becoming a champion at Mario Kart, it literally could be anything. After deciding what your values are, doing a brain dump and eliminating the then the next step is to protect your time. Often when feeling overwhelmed I would have this idea that I don't have time to do all the things that I care about or want to do. Life can get very very busy at times but it's so important to remember that ultimately we are in control of our own time and whatever we've chosen to do in a given moment is exactly what we've decided that we most want to do. If we're lucky in most cases no one's actually forcing us to do anything. They might want or expect us to do certain things with our time and attention but at the end of the day it's down to us to choose how we want to spend our time. I love this thought because it's just so empowering and just reminds us that we have the power to choose what we want to be doing in any given moment as long as we are being intentional about it. For me I always aim to protect time for self-care because if I can't take care of myself and my own well-being then I can't really take care of anything else for very long or very sustainably because well-being is the foundation of everything that we want to do. To make time management sustainable we need to be nurturing ourselves as well and filling our own cup before we try to fill other cups. For me personally this means making time to exercise, eat well, sleep well, socialise and also just to have fun. I'm not always great at doing all of these things but it's something I'm working on every single day. The third and final pillar of the three P's is the process of time management which includes all the core techniques that I use to stay on track with the priorities and the protected time that I've committed to. The backbone of this is having a good to-do list so every day I write down my to-do list either on my to-do list app or in my bullet journal and something to just think about is that it can often feel good to just add lots of small but ultimately meaningless tasks to your to-do list to just cross them off because let's be honest it feels pretty great to cross off items from the to-do list but by filling up your to-do list with lots of these ultimately meaningless tasks it's easy to forget about the things that are actually important. So for me I like to include three key tasks for each day that are actually meaningful and they don't have to be big but they have to be either important, meaningful or something that just makes me really happy and this helps me to stay focused on what is genuinely essential in my life. Once I have my daily to-do list I like to use my google calendar to time box each of the items by allocating it to a specific time and duration in the day. It's so important to be realistic about how long each task will take. I like to think of this in terms of a Goldilocks style time planning where you don't want to allocate too little time If you leave too little time then your schedule will immediately become unrealistic and impractical but on the other hand if you leave too much time then it's very likely that the task will drag on to fill up the time that you've allocated to it as per Parkinson's law where work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. By time boxing and imposing an artificial limit on how long we get to do a task for this helps to keep us motivated and moving forwards and progressing and prevent us from just dragging on with a task. The final key part of this process which has become so important to me over the last year or so is to consider the energy management aspect along with the time management aspect. Our energy levels very naturally fluctuate through the day, through each week and with it so does our productivity. We can't expect ourselves to be on a high energy and high productivity vibe every single day, every single hour. That's just unrealistic and that would be putting unfair expectations on ourselves so it's so important to work with your natural ebb and flow of energy rather than fighting against it. Taking this into account is in my opinion the key to staying healthy and sustainable with your working habits. I might film a video about energy management mindsets and techniques that have really helped me and been an absolute game changer for me so keep an eye out for that video and I'll drop a link here once it's up. Overall at its core the very essence of time management is our values and how we want to choose to live our own lives and there's this great quote from the book Make Time, moment by moment and day by day you can make your life your own and I think this just beautifully captures the spirit of time management. If you enjoyed this video then I think you might like this video over here where I talk about working with your natural energies instead of against them. Thank you so much for watching take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination.