How to Stop Wasting Time - 5 Useful Time Management Tips

A great man once said that time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. But despite the apparently illusory nature of these two things, time can certainly seem like something that's tangible and like something that is constantly slipping through our fingers, not least of which because of the fact that we tend to waste so much of it. Yes, it seems that most of us are perpetually rocked by at least a little bit of guilt over the amount of time we spend scrolling through Netflix or browsing the dankest of memes or just refreshing Instagram to see how many likes we got on that latest post in the last 30 seconds. Though it also bears mentioning the amount of time we tend to waste on things that don't seem to produce as much guilt, things that seem justified like taking on too many commitments and having an overly busy schedule where we're stretched thin, stressed out and producing low quality work as a result. And as Francis Crick once said, a busy life is a wasted life. So what I wanna do with this video is take a broad view of time management and give you five useful tips for managing your time more effectively. Whether you already know you're wasting it because you're a couch potato or whether you, like me, to be honest, have simply deluded yourself into thinking you're already managing it pretty well because of how busy you are. Let's get into it. The first tip that I've got for you guys today is to try using a time tracking tool. Now I recently did a video on apps that force you to work which listed several different options in this category. So I'm not gonna restate them all. But what I do wanna do here is give you a little bit of a deeper look at one that I'm gonna recommend you at least give a try and that is Toggle. So unlike automatic time trackers like RescueTime that just log the time you spend in each app or program on your computer and then give you a report at the end of the week, Toggle is a manual time tracker which means you actually go into their dashboard and record the time you spend on each task throughout the day. And the reason that I recommend at least giving this tool a try is that tracking your time manually makes you think harder about it and you start to realize more accurately how you spend your time on a daily basis and that lets you make changes going forward. Now within Toggle's dashboard, you're gonna find two different modes, manual mode and timer mode. With manual mode, you can record the amount of time you spent on each task after the fact. But what I'm gonna recommend you use instead is timer mode. This is a real-time method where you hit a start and stop button so you can be timing your work as you actually do it. And this has a couple of key benefits. First, it's more accurate since you are tracking time in real time. You don't have to go back after the fact and try to remember how many hours and minutes you put into each task. And secondly, and more importantly, you'll be less likely to waste time or switch tasks because you'll subconsciously want your time log to accurately reflect what you actually did. Now, long-term manual time tracking like eating a bowl of nails in the morning is not for everyone. You might find that after you do it for a week or two, you kinda wanna move on and just not worry about it anymore and that's fine. But I do think that doing it for a week or two as an experiment is very useful because it gives you a more accurate picture of how you're using your time and it'll make you think a little bit more deliberately about how you're gonna use it in the future. Tip number two is to get clear on your priorities and to do this very deliberately. Maybe even sit down and do it on a piece of paper or write it in your journal because when you aren't clear on your priorities and what they represent on your schedule, it can be very easy to take on too many commitments and to become that overly busy person. Now, I think prioritizing could be a topic for a video all its own, but I do wanna give you a couple of questions that I ask myself whenever I'm trying to nail down what my personal priorities are and whether a new commitment is worth it. Number one, to ask a very in-the-details type of question, what does my schedule look like without this on it? Answering this means taking a hard look at my current list of commitments, my schedule, how much free time I have, and whether or not I'd be willing to give something up to take on this new commitment or not. And in addition to that question, I also like to ask a more bird's eye view question, which is when I'm on my deathbed, will I regret not doing this? And this is the question that actually got me to finally start taking singing lessons. And this could be a question that would also be useful for getting over your fear to start doing things, but as a time management question, it can also be very useful because it helps you to prioritize things from a bird's eye view, from a life values perspective. And if you wanna be really clear on your priorities and on your values and on what you're doing, it may also be useful to have a written record of what you're doing at the moment and to update it quite frequently. And I actually do this. If you go over to my website, collegeinfogeek.com slash now, you can see what I'm doing and what my priorities at least should be ideally. All right, tip number three is to learn how to batch your tasks effectively. And batching basically just means taking a bunch of your tasks, bundling them together, and knocking them all out in one session. And when you do this, you free up lots of time for more intense projects later on, or if you're me, probably playing more Beat Saber. But more importantly, batching lets you take advantage of economies of scale. When you decide to do a bunch of tasks in one big batch, you eliminate a lot of the setup costs that you would have to deal with if you did them all individually. Now, in terms of tasks that make good candidates for batching, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest number one, any and all errands. If it's a low energy task and you have to leave the house to do it, go ahead and take care of all those in one big batch in one afternoon. Number two, tasks that require low mental energy and that are done at home. So cleaning things up, organizing papers, fighting that ninja that's hiding in your closet, clearing out your email inbox, all that kind of stuff. And number three, any kind of small tasks that surround your main work. And for an example here, every single time that I have to make a video, I need to create a project over in Notion with a sponsor tag and a publishing date. And I also have to create a research document in Evernote. These are little tasks that could be done individually when I start the project or I could come up with 10 video topics in a row and do all these things in one big batch. Now, one little tidbit before we move on, if you're already using Todoist or a similar task manager, you may wanna start using their labels feature as it can be very helpful for batching since across all of your projects, you can apply labels that correspond to say your energy levels like low or medium or high or the location at which a task has to be performed like home or work or an errand. And then when you have time for a batch, you can look at the label that's most relevant to you right now and see what there is to be done. Next up, we have to talk about how to get better at saying no. This is an integral skill in time management, especially for people who are overly busy. Those of us who are perpetually overcommitted seem to be the kind of people who just can't say no to new opportunities. Whether they're people coming to us because they want something from us, they want our help, or whether it's something that just seems really cool that we want to do. Either way, we have to learn how to say no if we wanna be able to prioritize the things that are actually important and give them the time that they deserve. So how exactly do you get to the point where you can say no? Well, there are definitely tactics. There are ways to gracefully let people down. There are ways to sort of push off things that you might wanna do for yourself. But I think the first thing you have to do is just become mentally okay with saying no. And this can be hard. A lot of times, saying no feels like letting an opportunity slip through your fingers forever, like you're only gonna get one shot because this opportunity only comes once in a lifetime, like having the ability to seamlessly integrate Eminem lyrics into a video script, which I didn't say no to. But remember that every time you say yes to an opportunity, you are incurring an opportunity cost because the act of saying yes to one thing means you are implicitly saying no to something else. You have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention. You can't devote it to everything. And this can be a useful way to reframe your thinking. Remember that every single decision you make incurs an opportunity cost. Now, that brings us to the question of how to properly let people down if you have to say no, because there is a graceful way to do it, and then there is an abrasive way to do it. You could just yell no, and why would you ever ask me to do that in their face? But you could also do it a little bit more tactfully. And here's an example of how I personally do it. So one type of opportunity that I have deliberately chosen to say no to for the most part is public speaking. This is something that I do like doing. It definitely can advance my career, but I've realized that if I travel, if I speak, if I take time to write talks, I can't make as many videos, and I can't do the other things that are valuable to me. So nine times out of 10, when somebody reaches out to me wanting me to go speak at their school or their event, I have to say no. My priorities dictate it. But I try to say it in a way that respects the fact that they even reached out to me, that says that I'm honored that they did so, and that tells them I have other commitments right now. I'm not saying no because I don't want to do it, I do, but I have other priorities that I have to respect. And you can also take it one step further by trying to anticipate their next step and then trying to help out with that. So if somebody comes to you with an opportunity and you have to say no, it's likely that they're gonna have to go to somebody else or look elsewhere for a solution since you can't provide it. And if you have anything that you can do quickly, again, that doesn't interfere with your priorities or take too much time, then anticipating that need of theirs and trying to fill it is going to help them along in their process, but it's also going to make this interaction a positive one even though you had to say no. So to go back to my previous example, if I get a speaking request and I have to say no to it, I'm going to do so gracefully, I'm going to inform them as to why, but I might also follow that up with a recommendation that they contact my friend Chris Bailey over at A Life of Productivity because I happen to know that he does take speaking gigs, he's really good at it, and his area of expertise is pretty similar to mine. So even though I had to say no, I might've been able to provide them with a solution. And this practice, the practice of anticipating the needs of the other person when you say no or anticipating the next step in the conversation is a very, very useful life skill to build. So don't think of it just as a time management tip, think of it as a life tip in general. All right, we have arrived at what is possibly my personal favorite time management tip, which is to use the pressure created by deadlines to your advantage. A few years ago, I had to learn the hard way just how useful deadlines are and how terrible for your productivity a lack of them can be. So back in my junior year of college during the first semester, I was incredibly busy. I had so many commitments. I was an RA, I had a second part-time job, I had classes, I had clubs. Basically, I had very little time to work on my side project which was my site, College Info Geek. So second semester of that year rolls around and I have the bright idea to quit basically everything except my classes and devote the rest of my free time to working on the blog. And I thought that this would give me so much more time and energy to get articles done that I would basically triple my productivity overnight. But instead, I spent most of that semester playing Marvel vs. Capcom 3, getting very few articles written, and generally wasting a bunch of time. And that experience taught me a very valuable lesson which is that we need structure. We need deadlines. We need a little bit of a framework to operate within. Otherwise, we just don't do anything. We tend to take the path of least resistance. Now, there may be some rare souls out there who are so passionate about every single element of what they do that they need absolutely no structure, no deadlines, no nothing. They just get up and work like a madman every single day. But I'm not one of those people. I love the work I do, but I don't love every single element of it, and I'm prone to procrastination unless I have a deadline. It's like the ex-Navy SEAL Jocko Willink always likes to say, discipline equals freedom. When you have a little bit of discipline, when you have a little bit of structure, you're able to operate within that, there are fewer decisions to make, and you have a little bit of time pressure with which to get your work done. And that actually gives you more free time overall. So if you work for yourself or your student who has a lot of free time, a lot of kind of flexibility with your homework, I would encourage you to set some deadlines. Maybe make some mini goals within your task management system. Give yourself a little bit of time pressure. Now, speaking of deadlines, one unspoken deadline that I do want to remind you about is the unknown amount of time before somebody else out there goes and grabs the domain name that you are eventually going to want for yourself. And that is why, as soon as you possibly can, I would suggest you go over to Hover and get your domain name. Now, if you've been following College Info Geek for a while, especially some of our career content, you'll know that one of the most important things you can do for advancing your career and making connections is building an online presence for yourself. And one of the most integral parts of doing that is securing a professional domain name for yourself. This allows you to create a personal website where you can have a portfolio and also link out to your other social profiles. Now, I was unfortunately born just a little bit too late to get the domain that I really would have wanted, which would have been thomasfrank.com. But I was at least early enough to get thomasjfrank.com, which is just about as good, and which I used to create a portfolio website that I shared with recruiters and freelance clients in college. So, if you don't wanna miss out on your chance to get the best possible professional domain name for your online presence, then head over to Hover and get it today. Hover is the best place on the internet to get yourself a domain name, not least of which because they have over 400 domain extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .me to .ninja and .pizza. And now you probably know which cartoon I spent much of my childhood watching. But beyond that, they also have an incredibly streamlined sales process. It is super easy to buy a domain. There are no annoying upsells, no annoying pop-ups, and if you have an account like I do, you can literally get your hands on a domain in less than 30 seconds, which is pretty cool. And once you've got your domain, Hover also has tools for easily setting up a professional email address, like mine, which is thomasatcollegeofgeek.com. And you can also use their Connect feature to easily hook that domain up to website builders like Squarespace and Shopify. Of course, the best part is that if you go over to hover.com slash thomasfrank, which you will find in the description down below, you can get 10% off your first domain purchase. So head on over there, get your domain, and show your support for this channel. Big thanks to Hover for sponsoring this video and being a big supporter of the work that I do here. And of course, guys, thank you as always for watching. If you enjoyed this video and you found it useful, then definitely hit that like button. 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