How to 16x Your Time Management Immediately (from a Med Student)

If you clicked on this video because the typical advice to follow a perfect or strict timetable didn't work, then you're in the right place. Because throughout my undergrad and postgraduate degrees, and now at med school, I made a reliable and flexible way to manage time, using a three part strategy called the Pyramid Time System. And it helps maximise my time to study efficiently, but still leaves me with time in the day to do more of the things that I care about. So to improve your time management for the week, I'll start with a question that might feel like an attack, but it's going to take away a lot of pressure from you. The question is, have you ever called yourself a perfectionist? And if so, have you actually done anything important perfectly? Because for me, I scored full marks on some exams here and there, or played a piece on the piano perfectly. But beyond that, I haven't really done anything important perfectly, so it wouldn't make sense for me to say I'm a perfectionist and that's not a bad thing. Because we've made it this far without things being perfect. So it's not reasonable to expect yourself to follow perfectly planned timetables for perfect time management. So to start improving your time management, what you should do is create your sub-perfect week. And that's by writing down what you'd want to do in a perfect week, and what you've actually been doing in the past few weeks. Then find a middle point that's a slight improvement from your past few weeks. And I'm not going to ask you to plan for more than a week ahead, because I know random things come up last minute for students. So for me, some things I'd do in a perfect week would be going to the gym 5 times a week, practicing the piano 5 times, studying 5 times, reading 5 times, and making a video every week. But realistically in the past, I've compromised on one thing or another. So now, I gradually just add one day of piano or gym again to progress towards that sub-perfect week. So if you're at school or uni, this could be adding another topic to go through in the week, or even spending more time on a hobby you have. These gradual additions are specific to what you're comfortable with. And over the days, it's going to compound your time management so that you get close enough to that perfect week. So now you have an idea of what's a realistic improvement to manage time over the week. But how can you manage time better on a day-to-day basis? So there's two parts to this, and the second part's going to give you a lot of freedom that a calendar might not be able to do. So the first part is about answering this question. If there was one thing that, if you didn't do, would guarantee that you'd fail to reach your goal, what would that one thing be? Like for me, one thing that would guarantee me failing to grow this channel would be to stop making videos. Which means the single most important thing for me to do is to keep uploading videos. So if you have exams coming up, that one thing that could be the difference between you passing or failing your exams could be you not doing enough practice exam questions, or not spending time on the topics you're not confident in. So ask yourself this question for all of your goals, and make it more specific than the goal we had for the sub-perfect week. So now you know what tasks to do, but you need to know the best way to structure each day to maximize time management. And to do this, you should phase your tasks. And that's by grouping together different tasks to different phases of your day. And usually that's in three phases, mornings, afternoons, and evenings. And in each phase, make sure to get one of the bigger tasks done. And you've figured out these tasks from the first part of this section. Because by phasing these tasks, you're less likely to get overwhelmed, which is what doing all the big and urgent tasks at the start of the day would do to you. So on a weekend, I'd have a written note to go to the gym in the morning, read around a certain topic and do questions in the afternoon, and work on these YouTube videos in the evening. And I'll have the note in front of me as a reminder. And on weekdays when we have uni or school, split the day into an hour before uni or school, after uni before dinner, and then after dinner. One of the reasons this phased approach works well is because, yeah with a calendar, you might schedule in two hours to study, but then how long does getting into focus take, or what if a certain topic takes longer or shorter than you thought. This phased approach gives you space for flexibility, without running into the next phase of the day. And now for the third part, how do you effectively manage time for the hours within a phase, and for all the other smaller tasks. There's two parts to this, and doing them both is how you can literally save hours every day. So usually when people use a calendar, they somewhat randomly block in some time for studying or something else. But in my videos, I try to give personalised advice where the different parts of the strategy work together. So the first thing you need to do is figure out how long each big task in a phase takes. Because let's say with gym, I have to include the walk to the gym, being at the gym and walking back. Which ends up at around two hours, even if gym itself was only one hour. So for studying, you might plan to study for two hours, but the time it takes to get into deep focus means you spend a bit longer to get through what you're studying. But when you figure out how long each of these big tasks take, you'll have an idea of how much time you have left over at the end of each phase. And this gets us to the next part, which is batching small tasks. At the start of each day, write a note of all the small tasks you can think of. And when you have spare time at the end of a phase, go through these small tasks in batches. It's exactly how I'm able to reply to most of you in the comments. I reply in this gap of time towards the end of a phase. And usually when I'm trying to be extremely efficient, I'll study flashcards when I rest at the gym in between my sets or even on the train. So for you, these smaller tasks might be to check your emails, to organise your notes for the next phase or to tidy your room. Just anything that can be done quickly in the downtime of your phase. And look, it's definitely important to take breaks too. So if you have over 10 minutes of free time in a phase, maybe go for a walk, reply to your friends or just relax a bit. This time management system is a big part of getting things done. But if you don't know how to study effectively, then time management isn't going to do much for you. So in this video here, I talk about the study system I use that helps me remember everything I learned at med school with only a few hours of studying a day. And you can learn how to do this by watching this video.