How I Manage My Time – 10 Time Management Tips

Well, over the past 10 years, I’ve read almost every book on productivity and time management, and over that time, there are 10 things that I still use in my life, that I genuinely use to help make my time management more efficient. Let’s talk about them in this video. The first tip is that we have all our time now. This is so important.

When I first realized this, my life completely changed because I used to think I didn’t have time to do anything, and I don’t know where I read it, but I came across this fortune cookie somewhere, which said something like: At any given moment, you are doing what you most want to do. And that was so empowering for me because I was desperate for empowerment, and it helped me realize that my time is completely under my control. Now, I’m making this video because I want to be earlier today.

I spent six… hours playing World of Warcraft because that’s what I wanted to do. I wasn’t going to say I don’t have time to exercise today. I was choosing not to make time to exercise today. So when it comes to time management, the first step is to realize that we are always in control of our time. Yes, you may have a boss, yes, you may have parents telling you what to do, but fundamentally, you are in control of your time, and you can choose to do whatever you want with that time. If you don’t have time to do something, it’s not a priority for you, and that’s fine, but don’t pretend that the reason you’re not doing it is because you don’t have enough time. Number two is the title of this book by Derek Sivers: “Yes or No?”

What’s worth doing right now? The vibe is here. Yes or no, that’s kind of what he’s saying. The whole point of the title is that when we’re young and don’t have many opportunities in our lives, we should say yes to most things that come our way. But once we get to a point where we start attracting more potential clients, and when we have time, we start operating on the “yes or no” principle. The idea is that something is either “yes” or “no.” So if I get an email from someone saying, “Hey, do you want to do this thing?” and I think, “Maybe it sounds kind of cool,” my default position is going to be “no.”

Manage My Time

If I get an email from someone saying, “Hey, do you want to do this thing?” and I say, “Yes,” I’m going to do it. And I’m trying to improve on using this principle in my life, because so far, my schedule is so full of things that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, kind of,” instead of yes, too. And I always regret doing that when the time comes. So yes or no, just like I’ve learned to be okay with saying no to things, which is a very important principle in time management. Third, there’s a tip I learned from the book “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zuratsky, and it’s called “The Daily To-Do,” and it’s very simple. The idea is that every day we decide this is the most important thing in our day, this is the one thing I need to get done today. On the days I have a daily to-do, I try to do it every day, I always get it done, and I’m really happy at the end of the day.

But if I have a day where I don’t have a daily to-do, I get lost in my to-do list, and I get this picture in my mind: Yeah, yeah. I need to do this, this, this, this, and this, and it’s much harder to get things done. Whereas on the days when I have my daily to-do, I only have one thing to focus on. You know, this is the most urgent, most fulfilling, or most fun thing I need to do today. And then it really helps me manage my time. The fourth time management tip is to use a to-do list, and these days I’m using a physical to-do list with this… an analogue of an ugg monk, it’s so beautiful. It’s like note cards, and then you get this wooden thing, and you put the note card in it, and it looks like this.

I mean, every morning, once I figure out what my most important thing is for the day, I make a list of the other things I need to do that day, and I put it on the list, and then I mark it off and cross it off with a pen as I go about my day. No… it doesn’t really matter what system you use for your to-do list, but there’s a general principle of productivity, which is that our brains are designed to conjure up ideas, not to collect them, and a big part of the reason we neglect things when it comes to managing our time and productivity is because we don’t write it down, so every time I need to do something,

I write it in an app these days. I use Room, but when I look at my daily to-do list, it’s all based on OGG Monk’s analog system, which is a great system. It’s great to have a physical to-do list in front of me that I can cross off, and that feels great. Even at work, when I’m a doctor, I use physical to-do lists to manage my patient list and my to-do list. There’s a very satisfying feeling of crossing something off that you don’t realize when you’re using an app. The fifth principle of time management is the concept of time blocking, and that seems to be something Elon Musk does all the time.

Time Management Tips

The basic idea is that anytime we need to do something, we block it out in our calendar. So I don’t like doing that for absolutely everything, because I’m a bit of a wasteful person, and I think the more time I have… the less time I spend managing my productivity system, and the less time I spend getting things done, the more pointless it becomes. But the one thing I always include in my agenda at the beginning of the day is the most important thing in my day. If I decide the most important thing in my day is shooting this video, I will do my best to schedule it for the time I know I will be shooting the video. If the most important thing in my day is calling my grandmother, I will include it in my agenda. If the most important thing in my day is making changes to my website, I will schedule it for a specific time in my agenda.

This is nice and reassuring because it means that this thing that I decided was very important will always get done because it is always in the agenda. If I need to postpone it, I will postpone it if something urgent comes up, but at least it is in the agenda virtually. This thing, where combining the most important thing in the day and dividing the time in the calendar is very useful. Everyone always thinks that there is no need to do more than one thing in a day. Yes, we need to do more than that in most of our lives, but imagine if you could do the most important thing every day for the next year, you would make huge progress throughout the year, and that would be a radical change. The sixth principle relates to what’s called Parkinson’s Law, which is that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. If I have to shoot a YouTube video in one day, and I set myself a full day to shoot it, it will inevitably take the entire day. Whereas if I only set myself half an hour or an hour to shoot a YouTube video and fill my day with other things,

I will inevitably finish the video in that short amount of time. So, the practical advice here is to take advantage of artificial deadlines, even when it’s like shooting a new course. You know, I’m working on a YouTube course for beginners, where I film the whole thing and explain everything about the process of producing my YouTube videos. This doesn’t have a deadline; I can do it whenever I want. I don’t have to do it; it’s a purely optional project. But I set myself a goal: Okay, you know, I’m going to film this entire course by the end of next week. And I’ve built time into my schedule to film the course by the end of next week. This is an artificial deadline, which means the course will get done. Whereas if it had been in my mind or on my to-do list without a deadline or timeline, it would have been inevitable that it would never have been completed.

Point seven is that I started applying recently, which means you have protected time when you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed, etc. You basically end up being able to set whatever schedule you want, but if you’re like me, and you’re building relationships and friendships with people all over the internet, there comes a point where your day becomes filled with tons and tons of Zoom calls, and I realized that I need to keep my mornings completely free of any commitments or Zoom calls, and that was a big change, because in the morning, that means I can wake up whenever I want, which is usually 8:30 these days, and that means for at least four hours straight, I have uninterrupted time to do whatever I want. So these days I’m working on my book, so the mornings are my protected writing time. But even on days when I’m not working on the book, it’s really nice to have that… that chunk of time where I can think about work or plan more videos or do things that help me advance in my career. And sometimes, if I don’t feel like it, I just decide I’m going to use that protected time to play World of Warcraft or relax and read a book on the couch.

So, if you’re interested in better ways to manage your time, I recommend that you set aside your protected time, which is time that’s just for you, or time that’s “World of Warcraft” and no one else’s, where no one is allowed to block anything out on your schedule, okay. The eighth principle is delegation, but that’s a little weird. Usually, when you say the word “delegation,” people imagine that I can’t delegate anything, and I don’t have the money to delegate to someone, and maybe that’s true, but the way I thought about it, even when this YouTube channel wasn’t successful, was like: What is the actual value of my time in dollars, and how much is my time actually worth?

When it came to running my business, I decided that my time was worth £20 or $25 an hour, meaning that anything I did… I don’t enjoy the possibility of outsourcing to someone for less than $25 an hour, and that’s absolutely what I should be doing. This principle of delegation has encouraged me to hire a cleaner, which is great because we now have someone come to clean the house every two weeks, meaning I don’t have to do it myself. In the past, when I was building my business from scratch, there was a lot of work that needed to be done, like data entry and the like, that I could have outsourced to freelancers in the Philippines, Bangladesh, or India via Upwork.com or Fiverr.com. Paying them $7 an hour was a great wage for someone working in the Philippines, but for me it was great because it freed up my time to do things that add more value to the business and my life, rather than, say, data entry.

So, whatever your circumstances, I’d recommend it. Think about the value of your time in dollars, and maybe, if you want, could you outsource tasks that are cheaper than that? The ninth time management tip is to try to automate scheduling as much as possible. We’re in a world of Zoom calls and online chats. I would find myself wasting a lot of time every day scheduling appointments back and forth, saying, “I want to talk to you, but are you available this time in Pacific Time, this time in Eastern Time, this time in British Standard Time?” All of this stuff, and we would exchange emails for 10 solid days before we got anything done. Then I discovered an app called Calendly, which is great, and it’s free. I pay for the free version of the pro version these days, and I don’t endorse this video or anything like that.

Unfortunately, this is what’s happening. You’re watching this, tell me. The idea behind the calendar is that you can literally send someone a link with all your available appointments, and they can book a time on your calendar. This can feel a little weird. At first, it feels like a power move, like, “Hey, book a time on my calendar.” But every time I get a calendar link from someone, I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m so grateful that this saved me 20 minutes of my time that I’ll never get back, and I don’t have to worry about scheduling emails back and forth.” Even sometimes these days, when it comes to connecting with friends, I send them a calendar link, and I’m like, “Look, I’m really sorry.” But you know, listen to the sweet link, I know we’ll never talk because schedules will never align, but if there’s a time that works for you, click on that link. We write sometime, we make a call, and that’s great. I’ve met more friends in the past few months, using calendar links, than I have in the past three years, scheduling appointments back and forth, using WhatsApp messages.

And finally, the tenth principle of time management, and this is something I’ve recently come to appreciate: when you’re obsessed with productivity, obsessed with efficiency and getting more done, it’s easy to get to the end of the day feeling chronically dissatisfied with what we’ve accomplished. It’s like, “Okay, I shot one video today, but I could have shot five. What’s wrong with me? I’m a spendthrift, and I beat myself up about it, but one thing I’ve recently started to convince myself of is that I can choose…” I’ll be satisfied at the end of the day. At the end of this day, I’ll have shot this video. I was planning to shoot three more, but I didn’t get around to it, so that’s okay. I’ve photographed one, and I can choose to be satisfied with what I did, and that’s fine, and it doesn’t change how much work I put in, I beat myself up about it, and that makes me feel bad, and so I can choose to feel satisfied with how I managed my time.

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