how I balance college, work, & everything else | time management guide

So I'm a student, maybe just like you, studying in college, and my life is really busy with working full-time, a full college load, and then just a social life and writing and YouTube and all these things that I want to dedicate my time to. And that's a really hard problem, right? You may have a test coming up, but you also want to go spend time with some people, or maybe you're working and you have a work deadline and a test, and there's a lot of people that get this really, really wrong. And I see most people that are probably around the age of you and I getting this really, really wrong. So I want to cut through all of that and tell you exactly how you can manage all these parts of your life. And even if you're really on top of all of that already, the little things, right? The big things, the hacks, the new platforms, et cetera, that really will help you in managing everything and not just surviving, but thriving. I also want to share the lazy way of really just, again, thriving across all these different domains of your life. So that'll be at the end of the video and now let's get into this first frame. We're also coming up on half a million subscribers here, so thank you all for the recent growth and I hope you continue to enjoy these kinds of videos. And just for context, if you haven't seen any of my videos before, I'm a economics student at Boston University, but I also work full-time in construction and in sales. And then on top of that, I have YouTube, I have writing, I've written about five books now. And then I have family and friends and a social life that I want to put time into. So that's where I'm coming from, from my experience in maintaining this kind of schedule. And I think doing so in a moderately successful manner, not that any of us are perfect, but doing that also not just once, not for one semester, one test, but for many, many years now and that I did work full-time throughout high school as well. So the first frame I want to get into before we touch on those lazy kind of hacks and also just the platforms and the approaches you should be using is that there is a measure of sacrifice in everything you're going to be doing. And with one caveat that I'm going to touch on in just a few minutes, I think people approach productivity and time management in a very positive some way. And I think you ultimately do have to recognize that it is a trade-off. And if you are spending your time doing one thing, for example, studying on a test, you cannot be working, you cannot be socializing. Time is binary in that way. Now what that means is ultimately the output is going to reflect the input. If something's binary, the more hours you put in means you're not putting hours into other things. So the more hours you put into that thing means you're going to get more results there. So for example, let's say you're not doing well at your internship and you're also studying and you're also, you know, you have a healthy social life and you're saying, hey, well, why is my, why am I not doing well at my internship? If you just aren't putting hours into it, there is no hack to that. There is no system. It's really just, hey, you have to make some kind of sacrifice and actually put more hours into this bucket. There are ways of making that time more efficient. There are ways of prioritizing and tracking, right, how you spend those hours, but there still is an intrinsic core sacrifice there that has to be made. And this ties into another like three hour video I made about just college and also working and entrepreneurship, where I don't mean to make any claim for the validity of any approach. For example, choosing to work full time while in college, going all in on studying, or just socializing and enjoying your time. I'm merely making the claim that you have to make that decision and you have to recognize that there are sacrifices there. And if you do really actually want to see different and radically divergent in a positive sense results, well, you have to actually increase the input. Okay, now the second frame is somewhat controversial. It's worked really well for me. I think a lot of people are going to disagree with that and a lot of science disagrees with that. So I'm going to get into the specifics there of what I really mean by this. But just to put it out there, I think you should multitask if you have your hands in a lot of different buckets. And by that, I mean you should do different things at the same time. And if you can combine things, well, that's really, really good as opposed to being a negative. Now again, science is going to say, well, if I'm studying while I'm listening to music, if I'm trying to do multiple things at the same time, I'm going to be worse at any one of those things. And I agree with that. That is empirically backed. That is true. However, I would argue, well, how much does what you're taking away from something or how much does the output actually matter? And if it does matter, you should multitask. But there are a lot of areas in life where it doesn't really matter. And so that, if you're really busy and you have to make a sacrifice, those are the things that you multitask. For example, there are some classes, some general education classes that I have to take to graduate that are of zero relevance to my degree that I already have a background in. I really just don't need to produce amazing work or really study that material. I don't need to. Now, again, this is just one case. If you need to learn your subject matter of your degree, you need to, but let's just consider a few examples here. So in that case, let's say I have an essay due. And then also for my job, maybe I have to make some cold calls. Well, for cold calling, you're really sitting there most of the time, right? And people are only going to pick up once every few minutes. And then you go to your script, you have a conversation and so on. So I can write my essay while cold calling and then just switch back and forth and effectively multitask. And I'm not going to be worse off doing the cold calling. I've done a lot of cold calls. I know what I'm doing there. And the same applies to the essay. Like I don't need to pay 100% attention to this essay on a subject that it doesn't really matter if I get 100% versus a 90%. And as long as I just write a decent essay, that's going to get an A, I'll get an A in the class and I will go on to the actual classes that matter. And I also have to do a lot of menial kind of data entry spreadsheet type work for sales and marketing and my work there. Now that's really brainless work. And that means I can do other things intellectually while I'm physically going and doing this, you know, maybe copy paste work, for example. Now that is not to say again, that if you really need to learn something or if the output really, really matters, that you should multitask. But given the premise that we just covered of there being sacrifice inherent to just time management and productivity, well, the things that you can multitask that aren't really important in terms of the output, those you should multitask because there is an opportunity cost, a very real opportunity cost to spending your time doing that thing versus another thing. And so sure, maybe your work will be marginally worse or it might take a little bit longer, but that's the cost, right? That decrease, the spread in the efficacy of the work. And then the gain is, hey, this opportunity cost wasn't realized and that I was able to do two things at the same time. So again, I know a lot of people disagree with that. That's just what works for me. And I think it can work for you if you go about it in the correct way. Okay, now the third big thing here is actually about studying. And this is for school, sure, but also just generally if you have to learn something for your job, for school, whatever that may be. And this ties back to pretty much the two big concepts that we touched on, the first being sacrifice and kind of the zero sum gain that is how you spend your time. And then the second being multitasking. And so what I want to say about studying is that, or at least my approach and what's worked best in a productive sense is speed run busy work and focus on actually learning and deep learning of core concepts. So what that means is if I judge in an academic sense that something doesn't actually contribute to my learning or that it's not important, I'm going to try and get through it as quickly as possible given like, okay, I need to get an A, right? Like I need to get an A in the class or at least say a B, whatever that metric may be for you, that kind of lower bound performance wise. But then beyond that, I don't really care. So I'm going to do the minimum that I need to get through that, what I call busy work to get through those assignments. And then for the actual concepts that matter, for the actual assignments that matter, I really want to do whatever I need to do to actually learn the concepts. Because ultimately if, especially in an academic sense, if you don't learn the base or you don't actually know the concept and you're just memorizing things, it won't hurt you now, but in the next class, right? In the next two years of classes, that's when not knowing the base really screws you up. So I think you have to have this kind of radar for what matters and what doesn't, and then just get through as quickly as possible what doesn't matter, and then really focus on the actual concepts and learning in whatever way is best for you, those core concepts. And this ties into something at the end of the video as well about studying that's critically important. That is the most important thing. So we'll get to that in a second as well. Now speaking of busy work, you're going to see a lot of that obviously in school and in work. And like I've said, balancing a whole load of your social life, your work, your school isn't easy. So I want to mention Aether, which is an AI powered assistant that helps you create unique academic and creative works as a student and more generally just as a learner. So you can go to their homepage and for example, because I'm an econ major, search how inflation affects economic growth. I can then choose the length, how it should sound, the citation style, and then review and outline. And then I get a essay back that has this auto disguise tool applied, though again, I generally recommend using Aether to enhance your own learning and also in that whole category of busy work. I also personally love the literature review tool that summarizes research to identify trends and gaps. And that has really materially helped me in crafting really good essays that do actually matter. And that's especially when those essays are on very niche, for example, economic subjects. But then this also helps me a lot when I'm researching trends for YouTube, for my work, for starting a new business, or just for personal learning as a whole. So just go to Aether.com to get started with an entirely free account. Again, that's A-I-T-H-O-R.com and the link is in the description for that. You can also further enhance your own writing and use some of their more advanced features using the code John10, that is J-O-N-10 for 10% off. So again, go to Aether.com via the link in the description. And with that said, let's get back to the video. So now let's get into a few more quick tips and things, strategies that I found have worked really well about studying. And the first of those is applied learning, and that means teaching other people or having some other kind of reflexive means of studying as opposed to just, oh, I'm looking at a paper and I'm trying to just absorb it into my brain. So my approach there is writing articles about subjects that I'm learning, especially new economic concepts or models, because again, that's what I'm studying. So you can go and see my blog right now on medium.com, and there's over 150 articles on there, most of which are me just learning a concept, summarizing it, internalizing it, and then having to write about it, just using my brain and what I've learned. So the concept really hits and sticks. Same thing as if you went and tutored or had to explain to other people concepts that you're learning, you're going to learn them much better and kind of internalize the actual core concepts and relationships there. Something else that's really helped me with studying is just highly concentrated studying and repetition as opposed to kind of a distributed approach. Now, I think another core concept to consider here is what are you really good at? What are your strengths in an academic or a career sense? For example, there's two of those things for me, writing, as in I can crank out really good essays, any kind of writing very quickly, and I'm going to get an A on those assignments. Same applies in a career sense with any kind of writing. As I said, I write books in part for a living. I did that for a long time, so I can do that fairly well. The same applies with econ. I have a long background in econ, so my economics courses don't take that much time studying-wise because I have a good base, so to speak, and I can incorporate kind of those models, those new concepts into my learning fairly easily. So the subjects that are in your wheelhouse are another one of these kind of categories of work that you can delineate into to manage your time better. So you have your busy work or menial work or things that don't require your intellectual devotion or attention. Then you have these things you need to learn, and you need to deep learn these concepts from a basic up to an advanced level. And then you also have your wheelhouse, so the things you're really good at that you know, hey, I can do this just before it's due. Also, I just need two hours of really dedicated work instead of 20 hours pouring over this to really learn it. For example, if you're a computer science student and there's one language you love or one type of computer science or programming, double down on that and try and take classes around that, focus on that, because you're just going to advance at a higher rate. And the same applies in career, where it's much more open, right, than something like college. Just double down on what you're good at, and that will be the ultimate time management hack because now you're doing things you probably enjoy more than other things, and you're just more efficient because you have this really good base, it's your wheelhouse, it's your bread and butter, you can just sit down and you can crank those things out. Okay, we have three more core concepts here, and then I'm going to get into the lazy way to maximize your productivity. And then finally, the most important thing of all. So next up is the infrastructure for productivity. And this is where I see a lot of people going really, really south, where there's so many productivity and time management tools that are thrown at you and advertised nowadays. And if you go on YouTube, you'll see videos with people making, let's say, Notion videos or some sort of CRM, ERP type structure, like this very corporate software that's thrown at individuals or freelancers. And I think monday.com is a popular one. There's all these different notes. And there's also a lot of midwit memes, actually, that you may have seen. If you're not familiar with that, it's basically like, it's an IQ distribution, basically, like a standard bell curve, and you have the people in the middle, so just in the middle of this bell curve, and then either extreme, and it's the midwit meme of, well, either end of the spectrum, both ends of the spectrum are doing the same thing, and it's the people in the middle, the midwits, quote unquote, that are doing it this different way. And I think those apply very acutely to time management and productivity, where you don't need 50,000 tools, but you also don't need no tools. You need some basic structure that works, that's not complicated, that you can keep doing for the next few years, if not your whole life. Now, I only use two tools, and this is the structure that works best for me. Maybe it's slightly different for you, but just think about the concepts here as well. Now, one of those is Google Calendar, and that's just everything that needs to get done every meeting for work, right, every test or exam for school, that's going to be put down on that calendar, so I can see a very visceral representation of my day of my week of my month in advance, and I also get constant reminders for those things. And then while the calendar is the macro tool for kind of the holistic, like the bird's eye view kind of of productivity and time management to my life, the micro tool is just Flask, I believe they're called Flask.io. I'm not sponsored, I'm not affiliated with Flask, but it's basically just a to-do list where I can go and check things off, and you can do the same thing in your Notes app, and I do that a lot as well, I just like the Flask interface more, and it's totally free. Again, I'm not affiliated, I genuinely just use them. And so what I can do with the start of a day or a work session if I'm sitting down in the office or at home or a cafe or whatever it may be, is just, I have my calendar, I know the big things coming up, what I need to prepare for, and then in Flask, I write down the 10 things that I need to do that day, given what's on my calendar. And then I just go through the list, and I check one off when I'm done, and then I just cycle through that. And that way, throughout my day, I'm not thinking about, okay, these are the little things that I need to do, these are, like, what should I work on? I know what's on my calendar, and the derivative of that, the product of that is the list I made in the morning, and then I'm just, okay, I have these 10 things to do, I have six hours in the cafe, let me go and just, again, crank through that to-do list. Super simple, super easy, and I'm sure you missed some marginal efficiency of, like, oh, I should be doing this for an hour and a half and this for two hours, but that lack of a very set structure and more so just in an overarching sense, this is what I need to do, and then in a very micro-condensed sense, okay, this is what I'm going to do today, that, I find, really works very well for me when you combine that with multitasking with, like, your bread and butter, all that kind of work and the other strategies we've discussed thus far. Okay, now, before we get to the lazy way, two more things. The first one is, quote-unquote, demon mode. I just like calling it demon mode, you'll hear a lot of things on the internet, I think Elon Musk calls it a surge, and more in the corporate and the business sense, we call it, like, surging, and that really just means some period of ultra-condensed focus and effort, and I see a lot of people not doing this anywhere in their life, and I think if you just do it intermittently, you can have what a lot of people call a one-month day, where in one day or in one work session, you get a month's work of output complete, and this really applies, this does apply materially, where I can nearly guarantee that there are parts of your life, whether it's work, whether it's even just keeping up with friends, whether it's school, where you can get a month's worth of work done. For example, let's say you have a ton of assignments coming up for the next month, and if you're an engineer, this probably doesn't apply, let's just think about, say, humanities for a second, I can nearly guarantee that if you go sit in a co-working space, or you go sit in a cafe or study spot at your school, whether in high school, college, whatever it is, and you just say, I'm putting my phone away, I'm putting everything away, I have my Google document, and I have six essays to write, I have four homework assignments to do, et cetera, et cetera, and you just lock in, and that's all you do, you think about nothing else for 10 hours, you're gonna get a month's worth of homework and essays and assignments done, and you're gonna learn a lot because it's so condensed, it's so repetitive. So do not be afraid, I think, to do things right before a deadline, do not be afraid to condense a whole massive load of tasks into a very condensed period of a surge or going quote-unquote demon mode, like locking in, so to speak. I see this a lot in my own life in writing and with books, where I may just, I'm writing for 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there, and I can't really find the time, and then I just make a eight-hour block where I wake up, and then I'm like, I'm going to a new spot today that I know is quiet, putting everything else away, I have my Word document in front of me, and on those days, I'll write three, five, eight, even like 10, 15,000 words, I think, 13,000 I think is the maximum I've hit in a full day, and that needs drafting and revision, obviously, but I can get more writing done in one just surge period, in a one-month day, so to speak, than I did in the entire month preceding that, and that 100% applies, it's very powerful, if you're not doing that, do it. Okay, so this final core concept comes down to things that you can automate or delegate or kind of build very, very quickly, a little bit ties into kind of surge or quote-unquote demon mode, but really comes down to a high upfront investment and then very little effort versus distributed effort. This does apply to school, it also applies especially in a work sense, and the example there I'll use is that, let's say there's a process that takes you three hours a week at your job, in addition to school, in addition to your social life, right, it takes you three hours a week to do this thing. The question I would ask is, can you spend 15 hours, two full days, to automate that, to build some alternative system, whatever that looks like, to get that three hours down to zero, or down to 30 minutes a week, and sure, that means you're gonna sacrifice two full days of being productive on other things, but for every week for the next year, for the next three years, you're only gonna spend 30 minutes on that instead of three hours, so the savings add up, and that may sound bad in a immediate sense, because you're now spending full days on very small things, right, but what I want you to think about there is, well, if you can do those two-day blocks, like let's say 15 hours of work to automate something, to make something smaller, more efficient, to delegate it, and you do that for a month, you do it 15 times, right, how many hours on an ongoing basis is that going to cut from your need-to-do list, and so how much more productive is that gonna make you, not today, not tomorrow, but one, three, six, 12 months down the line, and that really does compound, right, it's that logic of, well, if you compound at 1%, or if you get 1% better every day, you're 36 times better in a year, well, if you just do that, if you just make something 10 times more efficient, or 10 times better, but it takes two days, there's a very high upfront cost there, and you do that 10 times, those savings really, really stack, and so in my life, a lot of the things which would take a lot of time now don't have to take a lot of time, and so that just gets me much more leverage on my time, and that I can handle now different aspects of work, different aspects of school, with much less effort, because a long time ago, I put a lot of effort in. A company is a perfect example of that, or just hiring employees. There's more complicated examples, but just for sake of simplicity, like for this YouTube channel, right, if I used to spend two days filming because I couldn't speak in front of a camera, I'd have to do reshoots, right, and then I'd go and edit, and then I'd spend hours editing, and perfect everything, and then I'd go through this whole kind of process to produce it, and finally release it, and get feedback from people. That would take 10, 20, 30 hours per video, right, and then now, thankfully, my process is just, I sit down, I shoot once, sure, there's some mistakes there, but I don't need to reshoot, I just shoot, and I make mistakes, I keep going, and then I hand that, and then that process now, comparatively, is I sit down in front of a camera, I just speak given what I want to speak about, or the subject for the day, and then I hand that footage to my editor, he does everything, great guy, and then it's just, I get the footage back, someone else puts it on YouTube, clicks publish, and boom, we're done. So a task that used to take me 30 hours now takes me maybe two hours. And so most of the things that I've been working on for a long time are like that. It's that same process of, well, it's much easier now, whether it's experience, whether it's just having put a lot of effort in at one point, or hiring, or delegating, or automating, so that I can now just do a lot with my time, not because I'm radically more productive, or focused, or disciplined, so to speak, but just because I put the effort in, it's just, it wasn't evenly distributed. So as a final note there, I think, just think about in your life, what are the places where you can apply this kind of automation, delegating, this high upfront investment approach to build something that saves you time down the line. Okay, now finally, we're getting into the lazy way to get things done that I've used that helps me a lot. And then finally, into that ultra critical, I think the most important part out of anything in this video, really. And so that first note, or the lazy way to get things done, is that of accountability. And by that, I mean, in my case, for example, I have a lot of things going on. I have a lot of things I have to do. I'm not a uniquely disciplined person. I don't wake up, and I grind, and I'm feeling motivated, and I go, and I just, I work all day and think about nothing else. No, that's not me. I'm just as normal as you are in that way. But I think what I have been able to get a lot better at over time is accountability. And accountability can force you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do, and really radically transform your brain and your motivation. And by that, I mean, let's say someone put a gun to your head, and they said, hey, your life will end if you don't run a mile, right? You're gonna go and run that mile. When otherwise, you wouldn't have run the mile. That sounds dumb. But the logic there holds, right, in that someone else forcing you to do something just rewrites the cost-benefit equation there. And now, what would have been hard is now easy. I'll give you two examples from my life. The first there is writing books, in that, especially in high school, I was writing all the time. But there were some phases where writing just didn't flow naturally. I wasn't in that a good headspace where words just kind of came out of me, so to speak. And so what I did, I literally took $10,000 in cash for the last time I did this in high school. I handed it to a friend of mine, and I said, okay, hey, you're gonna keep this money if I don't write this book in 30 days. And so before, it was like, oh, well, if I choose to write, then in a year when it gets published, it'll be good, and I'll be proud of it, and I'll make some money. But I don't really want to now. I'm not feeling good. That was the cost-reward kind of dichotomy there. After the moment, which just took like a minute of like, okay, I'm actually gonna do this. I'm just handing him the money and saying, okay, these are the rules, so to speak. The cost-benefit now becomes, I have 30 days to do this, or I lose a lot of money. And that, in terms of motivation, like, it almost takes motivation out of the equation where it's just, it's so unacceptable to lose that amount of money for just not writing like 20,000 words this month that I'm gonna do it, and I'm just, I'm going to get it done because the alternative is bad enough. I'm not saying do the same. I'm not saying just put a stupid amount of money on the line, but I am saying just think about the things that you have to lose and put them on the line, 100%, put them on the line to get things that matter done, and you will find time. I don't know how I find the time for half of those things. You will just find the time to get those things done at a very reasonable cost. So again, it is a sacrifice, but everything else in your life will hold, and you just will get it done because there's no alternative. There's no not getting that done. Now social media is a second very powerful example of this in my life where, especially when I started on social media in middle school and high school, when I was doing videos very frequently, especially on YouTube versus now, which is much more relaxed, I was back in the fitness days if you've been following the channel for a while, there were so many people that were paying attention, that were messaging me, that were saying, hey, we're looking forward to these videos that I couldn't just not do it. I'll take a TikTok challenge I did as an example. So the first one that really blew up there was 1,000 squats a day. The really popular one, this was like 30, 40 million views in 30 days, was 1,000 calf races a day for 30 days. Now do I want every day, not on the first day, but on day 22 to wake up and do 1,000 calf races when I'm sore and I'm not feeling like it, when I'm really busy? And then do I want to edit the video the same day, get it out there? Like, no, that takes a lot of work. I'm not uniquely motivated to do that. That's slightly different because I do enjoy that stuff, but again, we'll just consider this as an example here. At that point, if I didn't post day 22 when I had 21 videos stacked before that, when I had thousands of people, really hundreds of thousands of people paying attention and expecting that video, well, I can't just not do it. Like there's no world in which that doesn't get done. And motivation is completely taken out of the equation because the cost of, oh, 5,000 people are going to kill me in the comments if I just post this a day late, right, means that I have to get it done. And accountability is so powerful in that way. So just think about in your life, well, what are the things that you really, really care about or want to get done? And then just put something on the line, like really be willing to put something on the line in order to get that done. There are a lot of ways to do it, whether it's giving your friends things, whether it's socially on social media, or just generally putting yourself out there and saying, I'm going to do this. And if I don't, you'll know that I failed. There's a lot of ways to do it. And it really can make the critical difference and just get you over the line on a lot of those things where otherwise just brute forcing it willpower-wise is really not the way to go. Okay, now for this final, most valuable part of this video that I've been saying thus far, I don't think you'll think this is the most valuable because you've heard it before. But trust me, nothing else here works unless you do this. And people have this strange relationship with this thing where they know they should do it, but they don't actually do it. So I'm just, I want to nail it in if I can. If I can't, you've heard it before, but that's the basics. It is the basics of health and the basics of productivity and the basics of psychology. So good sleep, drinking water, a good diet, not having your phone out while studying or working. Those four things right there are, that's a three to five X spread in what you're going to get done. I can guarantee. And there's so many, especially college students, you see them studying. Their studying is, oh, I have Netflix up on this screen. I'm checking my phone every two minutes on this screen and sending Snapchats. And then I'm kind of studying like in the middle of that. There are so many studies you can read about this, but studying like that is going to take literally five to 10 X longer than if you put the phone away, you put Netflix away and you just, you're studying, you're focused. And the same thing applies to just health, right? I used to have brain fog, like really bad brain fog. And that sounds like not science-y, but like I, my mother had a autoimmune disease that I somewhat inherited. So I had a lot of issues when I was growing up and I had this, this literal brain fog where I couldn't think much. I couldn't think hard, but my processing ability wasn't there. I had no energy. And it was by cleaning up my diet through a lot of work over a lot of years in a lot of different ways where I had the mental clarity and the energy to actually do things. And if you're just shooting yourself in the foot with tons of sugar every day, with not eating well, with, especially for, you know, people our age, like college students, high school kids, people just entering the workforce, if you're partying four days a week, if you're going out, you're not sleeping, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Now, if you want to do that, that's the sacrifice you're making, fine. This goes back to what I said earlier, right? Like it is binary in that sense. And if you want to stay up all night and never sleep, and you, you, you, you make the conscious decision to accept the cost of that in return for the benefit, fine. You like, you do you, that's great. But if you aren't thinking of it in that conscious way, if you weren't thinking, for example, me checking TikTok every 30 seconds is really harming my ability to study or my ability to meet my work deadlines, then you're probably paying a price that you don't know you're paying. And that's a lot easier to do across the board than it is to just say, right, like your friends, your circumstances, your living conditions, all have a lot to do with that. But really just focus on the basics. And before any of this other strategies, platforms, approaches apply, you need to nail those. So there you go. Again, go to aether.com and enter the code JOHN10 for 10% off to enhance your writing and creative abilities. And that's the video. I will see you in the next one.