How I Study With a Full-Time Job: My Strategic Scheduling

In 2018 my life started to go crazy. I'd just started medical school and had to work three jobs to be able to afford it. I then discovered medical art so I started studying that too. I signed up for extra courses in philosophy, volunteered as a mental health responder, got some more jobs all while still studying to be a doctor. I loved my life but it was a nightmare. My calendar was so full I would want to cry if a bus was even slightly late and I had to fall behind on things because I couldn't afford to. Absolutely no one had asked me to do any of this but through a combination of need, curiosity and stupidity, my schedule was leading me into a mental breakdown. So I had to change the way that I did things. I've experimented with lots of ways for planning work, some better or worse than others, but what they all have in common is that they end up, one, always boring and I quit them and two, they end up always making me hate work. What I'm going to suggest is a method of planning based on years of mental breakdowns of a chronic workaholic alongside the science and books on human psychology, dopamine, motivation and planning in order to hopefully create a schedule that makes work just as addictive as games, chocolates and allegedly casinos. Hopefully if your brain is anything like mine the principles here will help you understand why your calendar or time blocking hasn't worked in the past, how to approach your schedule and how to sustainably make better use of your time. Let's get straight into it. The first important thing for me to recognise was what exactly falls within a schedule and this might sound completely obvious but it is exactly where I kept going wrong in the past because when I filled in my calendar I used to focus on the work that I needed to do. I would separate it into bits, schedule it in, have some overview and plan and by only focusing on the work I would completely ignore any sort of non-work activities and the big problem with this is that psychology states that both work and non-work actually really affect one another and the way that we combine and permutate these two actually determines if we are more likely or less likely to want to work in the future. Let's go into a bit of psychology here. The actions that we take after a behaviour will act as a reward for that behaviour. For example when you are done reading, writing, working or studying and you proceed to rest, sleep, scroll on your phone, watch YouTube videos, talk to someone, eat, cry, any of these actions will be seen by our brain as a reward for the work that we did. The issue is the type, timing and frequency of these rewards will in the long term either reinforce or weaken a behaviour making it therefore harder or easier for us to get work done. If this sounds intense please bear with me a bit longer because it will really start to make sense. There are four relevant types of reward reinforcement schedules. Everything that we do falls into one of these schedules. Even if you don't have any calendar or planning at all and think you are just doing things randomly, that randomness will be one of these schedules and the reason this is important is because some are better or worse than others. The first type is a fixed interval reward. This is where you get a reward after a fixed interval of time. So for example if you put on a Pomodoro timer to work or if you put on a forest to work and you think I'm going to stop working in half an hour or an hour and then I can do whatever I want. The second type is fixed ratio. This is where we get a reward after a certain number of tasks is done. Thinking for example I'm going to write 800 words right now or I'm going to do 50 questions. Next we have the variable interval pattern. This is where we get a reward after a certain amount of time that keeps changing and is undetermined. So for example when you stop working when you feel that you've done enough, when you're too tired, when someone else tells you to stop. This is similar to winning in a video game when you don't know when exactly you're actually going to pass that level specifically. Lastly there's the variable ratio pattern. This is where you get a reward after doing a certain amount of work but that amount changes all the time and you don't know what it's going to be. So this is again thinking stopping work when you feel that you've just learned enough or when you have done enough for the day. This one is similar to playing a casino where you keep doing actions but you don't know after which action you will get your reward. Now you might have already noticed that the first two, the fixed ratio and the fixed interval type, are the ones that we tend to use the most when it comes to scheduling because it's easier to divide our work into chunks and make sure that we've done everything and to plan our day. We say that we have to do 50 questions a day for the next 20 days to prepare for the exam or that we have to study from two o'clock to four o'clock today and we tend to fix things in this way. They can be very attractive or easier to plan and schedule in work but the issue is they are a lot less effective than the variable schedules in making us motivated to complete the work. If you have a consistent hard start and a hard stop for an action which is then followed up by a more pleasant activity you are going to be less likely to want to do this work action in the future and this is where my scheduling always fails. There is what I believe to be a very simple solution that leverages the same type of addiction psychology in order to make the work itself more interesting for us. If we don't know when the hard end of a task is and what comes after it we're much more likely to want to do that task again in the future but how the hell do we plan in this way? Before I continue with how to create this calendar I'll talk about If you have these two things in common with me. One, you need to wear various different hats. Two, you do a lot of work on your computer. Three, your environment has a tragically large impact on how successfully you work. Sigma OS will change your life. It's nothing new that you add to your routine or your work. It's an internet browser so it replaces things like Safari and Chrome and it is very embarrassingly for them genuinely a million times better. I would never thought that tiny changes could have made such a huge difference in this regard but in Sigma OS having separate work spaces for everything you do so for me that's like medical student, YouTuber, writer, business things, procrastinator means that every time that I go into one of these spaces I'm in a different headspace mindset and therefore much more likely to successfully complete those work. There's no bookmarks but all important tabs are always locked and open at your computer at all times. I have hundreds of open tabs but unlike before there is absolutely no clutter. Everything is so well organized, renamed and labeled. It's amazing. There's shortcuts for everything so your computer becomes a literal extension of your brain. It even carries all of the Chrome extensions like video speed controller without which I'm not gonna lie this would have been a complete deal breaker for me. If you want to see how I plan, use and organize with Sigma OS specifically they didn't ask for this but I'm genuinely so passionate about it. I've made a whole video walking you through my computer setup so you can watch it if you want to see the unlisted video linked below. It's not a video but I do have a link that will give you free access to Sigma OS for you to see what I am raving about. Genuinely I could not recommend it more. I cannot imagine going back to Chrome after trying this. So yeah to the main video. To build this new type of calendar you first need to audit what your work tasks and reward tasks are. Now the work tasks that we're procrastinating on are a lot easier to find I'm sure but the rewards are a bit more difficult to identify. There are many different ways I reward myself. I have one a good work done reward. So this is what I do when I am done completing a task and it can be things like being allowed to scroll on my phone, getting some food, lying down playing a game, talking to my friends. Then I have the second type which is the reward for not doing work. So this is what I do to lower my anxiety. Basically what do I procrastinate on when I'm not working and this tends to be or playing more games or just scrolling on my phone or spending hours and hours trying to find the perfect black t-shirt online. So there's those things. To complete this list you can add what is the first thing that you tend to do in the mornings and next what you do when you are falling asleep especially if you do things like revenge, bedtime, procrastinate. So this shows you what your attention likely wants to go to when it feels that it has the less guilty freedom to do it. And lastly what do you do to relax or calm yourself down. Everything that falls into this category of reward is really important because it always tends to come after the work that we need to do and very often tends to compete with it. This is very important to identify especially if you have like me an interest-based nervous system versus a importance-based nervous system. If you find it very easy to do the most important thing next on your list maybe just click off this video because actually it's gonna be completely unhealthy or you might not even be here in the first place. But if you have an interest-based nervous system this means that the things that you find rewarding or interesting or that hold your attention most in the moment are the ones that you are going to be most likely to want to do. When interesting or stimulating things become much more attractive than the important or necessary ones this is a huge problem and I'm going to talk later about the importance of identifying, managing and reducing stimulation but at the moment it's very important and helpful to have this audit of what your work and rewards are and if you're embarrassed it's fine so am I I'm working on it. Now hopefully by this point an obvious realization is while we tend to work on our strict fixed schedules we tend to play or reward ourselves on variable schedules. We don't plan when we're going to scroll on our phone, we don't plan when we're going to procrastinate and so we're making these addictive behaviors a lot more addictive by the way that we do them while we're making our work behaviors a lot less interesting and more likely for us not to want to do them by scheduling them in strictly. So how do we fix this and I'm not going to recommend scheduling in our scrolling and procrastination time don't worry. I'm going to recommend a new type of time blocking which on paper looks exactly the same but in practice makes all the difference when it comes to wanting to work. The first one is when approaching your calendar and scheduling in a time block for a task add as big buffers as can afford to the start and the end of that task so do not have a hard start time. This is not a time where you need to be working this is a window of time where you have the availability to work letting yourself intuitively start when you feel like it. The second and this is why the buffer is important do not have a hard stop or end time to your task. This of course involves no pomodoro and no farce if those work for you and time blocking is absolutely fine but in this case I would strongly recommend that you stop work when you feel too tired or when you feel that you've done or learnt enough. Thirdly when time blocking I fill in a whole window and I don't back to back different tasks or projects so project switching takes a lot of mental energy to go from one to another and I don't like to do this because in the long term it lowers my energy in the day overall and I have to stop working sooner than I would otherwise. In this case if I feel like switching a task what I do instead is even take a time short break and reconsider. Very often I find that I'm wanting to procrastinate rather than actually genuinely being invested in something else which is more important. The fourth is never to schedule in tasks or things that you need to do specifically into your calendar. You might do bigger projects in terms of saying that you have studying to do versus like YouTube or whatever but the bigger and the broader that I leave this the better I find that I end up working. I'm still recovering from having to force my brain to do stuff all the time I'm like really struggling with that so at the moment I find it more helpful to think intuitively on the spot what do I think is the more reasonable thing to do. Deciding on the spot also means that I'm always working on a randomized schedule because I don't know what to expect on that day I don't know when I'm going to start when I'm going to finish so it naturally builds randomization into the task therefore lowering the chances that I end up resenting it in the long term. The fifth one is to learn and work with your body clock. For example if I have a day of working from home I will usually not schedule anything before 10 or 12 because I know that not being a morning person it's unlikely that I'm going to do anything productive before usually 12 pm so when 12 o'clock comes I can either think I've already failed at four things I needed to do today or I can think oh I could start working right now. So kind of being a bit more reasonable and not too strict with how you know that you work might be really helpful. After completing this calendar the most important thing is actually what doesn't get written down in the schedule and this is the randomization of rewards after a task. In the previous step we will have identified what we tend to do when we finish a task. For me it is automatically always scrolling on my phone or watching a youtube video while playing snake it has to be one of these things and so now what I've done is I've completely changed this. I've created a random selection of six activities and I'll explain why I picked these specifically later and instead of doing my 100% guaranteed reward when I know it's going to come which is phone, scroll, youtube what I do instead is get these on a metal dice which has one on each side and I roll the dice and I have to do one of these actions. This means that I never know what my reward is going to be so now I have an extra layer of variability and randomness in my rewards during the day. The actions that I have are journaling, meditation, stretching, walking, calling a friend or listening to music. These tend to be really really helpful activities especially exercise if it's rigorous can give you some extra focus after it so that tends to be a really energizing and good reward activity. Now the reason I picked these is because one of my biggest pitfalls in the past used to be having very high stimulation reward activities and this is so so so bad because going from an activity of high stimulation to reward of high stimulation to trying to force myself to do an activity of high stimulation is so exhausting and I run out of energy a lot quicker throughout the day. It's a newish thing for me to consider but thinking of and knowing how stimulating certain activities are for me and taking this into consideration will then mean that I maintain higher levels of energy throughout the day. For example I find public spaces very very stressful and stimulating and even though listening to super energetic music or an audio book is normally quite a stimulating activity if I do it in public it then reduces my overall stimulation if that makes sense because it's more relaxing for me to do that than to listen to this thing. On the other hand what I usually tend to do is go from activities like listening to a lecture to listening to another fun youtube video on two times speed which has basically the same levels of stimulation and keeps me quite high and easily very very very exhausted throughout the day. So in this case I need to complement this with an activity which is stimulating in a different way or less stimulating overall. Ideally for an action you want to pick up complementary rewards which will then energize you more and make you more likely to be happy and do more work. The reason I picked these activities on my dice is because most of my work is quite mentally stimulating but it's alone quiet and physically very under stimulating so I've picked things which are on the other side of the spectrum they tend to have noise or sound or music or be quite like physically active so that I can re-energize myself and lower my mental stimulation. They have one sensory element and one of them involves other people which is nice because most of my work at the moment is completely alone. Having a combination of set time blocked workable but not set work hours, intuitive start and stop times which we pick on the spot, lots of careful attention paid specifically to what we do in between tasks and in what ways and how stimulating they can be has been the best way for me to maintain higher energy and motivation throughout my day not burnout and in the long term want to work more. With this video specifically I do want to mention that I'm very well aware of how limited the user case is and the usefulness potentially of this video is to people with circumstances quite similar to me. If you work mostly outside of the house as I used to do if you're a parent or a carer or face different sorts of challenges this videos might not be helpful at all and in that case firstly I apologize if you're here to hear this and secondly if you would want to I would really really appreciate if you named some techniques that you use or resources that you found helpful that are more specific to you so that would be great. In the end I do want to say don't be too harsh on yourself we all are just doing the best that we can and I hope that this helps. If you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think. Thanks, bye!