I worked 100 hours a week for over 4 years and it seriously did suck uh but it did get easier week by week once I learned how to manage my time and tasks properly in this video I'm going to tell you how I used to schedule and the problems that started causing and then how I schedule now at the end of the video I'll also give you a summary of all the main changes that I made so you can go and apply those yourself if you're new to this channel welcome I'm DrJustin Sun I'm a learning researcher learning coach and head of learning at I can study I'm also a former medical doctor for the last decade I have worked with tens of thousands of people around the world to help them learn more efficiently now before we jump into it I'd really appreciate if you give this video a like it really helps with the algorithm so for some background information I didn't work 100 hours a week because I thought it was cool to be honest I just had a lot of things I was interested in and I had a probably still do have an extreme personality as I talked about in some of my other videos in my first year of uni trying to into medical school I was studying 120 hours a week sometimes even more and mostly because I was just really inefficient at learning which fast forward is kind of the reason why I do what I do now you definitely don't need to be studying 120 hours a week to enter into Medical School unless you have no idea what you're doing like me when I entered medical school I wasn't studying as much maybe around 30 hours a week but then I started tutoring and I was doing that to between 20 to 40 hours per week I was really involved in University Club committee events and organizing conferences so that was like another 10 to 15 hours per week it's also the time of my life where I was starting to get really into reading through learning science research and uh getting deeper into my teaching so that's when I did my adult learning and teaching certification that was like another 10 hours a week eventually I would end up setting up a nonprofit organization here in New Zealand mentoring students from lower socio economic positions teaching them some of the skills that i' picked up over the years so for a period of my time I was managing a nonprofit starting a new business tutoring full-time study with Medical School uh doing University Club events all simultaneously and then when I started working as a doctor it was even worse because I was doing 60-hour rosters and in that kind of period of my life like early 20s it was just like a lifestyle for me if you ask any of my uni friends they'll tell you that I was always busy but doing all of that stuff is what made me feel really energized so you know it's kind of if you if you love what you're doing then you know time flies now just so no one misunderstands me uh I want to make a couple things really really clear first of all I wasn't doing 100 hours a week consistently every single week during those years I would do probably between 80 to 100 hours a week uh and I did take some time off like when I went on holiday for you know like a couple weeks I tried not to work so much and there would have been some weeks in there where I did you know less than 30 or 40 hours secondly I am incredibly privileged in fact a lot of what I've achieved is is because I am privileged I don't come from a really well-off family my parents are immigrants and you know just trying to make ends meet but I was well supported I didn't have any stresses at at home you know my my parents and you know loved ones supported me through that I didn't have a lot of other responsibilities I didn't have any have any dependence so I was able to just focus on myself and I know that that is something that a lot of people aren't able to do so in that way I was very lucky now having worked with so many people that do have all these other things going on I know how much more challenging it can be and if you're one of those people that in that type of situation and you're watching this video then I think the advice that I'll give you uh will help you as well thirdly and this is important I do not recommend working and studying as much as I did it is not a better or a cooler way to live it was just my personal decision and I just just wanted to do more things I think in today's culture it is incredibly admirable to say no I don't want to buy into the whole hustle mentality and kind of just like sticking to what you really want for yourself if you don't want to be that busy then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that just because you're not working and studying so much that you pee blood it doesn't make you a more inferior person this is a video for people who want to do more and do all of those things and are struggling to fit it all in I'm just sharing some of the things that I learned that made it easier to balance and not fall behind Okay so how did I schedule and why did it not work out at the start I used to schedule using a physical notebook in fact this physical notebook I trolled through my cupboard and found the actual notebook that I was using to schedule uh and track my tasks back when I was like 17 18 years old and I used to have these very ambitious Todo lists and it used to just look like this you know fairly straightfor to-do list I just crossed things off when I got them done I was also very very strict with myself um partly because I was so sleep deprived and emotionally fragile I started writing like really abusive things to myself in my Todo list yes I know like I I already mentioned this I had very extreme personality but like I would say you know like I'd call myself like I I would like actually I'll like insult myself in my own to-do list I'll tell myself like imagine if you fail and um yeah so anyway it was really really bad um actually very abusive sort of things and then eventually I started doing some basic kind of like really really basic daily scheduling and you can see this is kind of what it looked like just like you know writing down each day and then what I was going to do that day and then at some point I must have discovered the concept of time blocking where you just block out periods of time in your day to to do certain tasks and you can see that I attempted to do these sort of time blocks just on paper like that I mean you can see it's essentially just like a calendar with times blocked out to study different things so that was how I managed my time and my tasks for the first year of those 100h hour weeks and in order to make sure that I got everything finished I would sacrifice sleep which is again why I just slept very very little and if it wasn't already clear do not do that if you need to be writing abusive things to yourself in a to-do list and reminding yourself what would happen if you fail and uh just sacrificing sleep every single day there is something wrong with the methods that you're using and please realize that earlier than I did so in summary what I was doing is I was using a physical schedule I was being very strict and not giving myself any room for error and I was compromising sleep to get everything done every single one of these behaviors is problematic first of all using a physical notebook to schedule and manage my Tusk this is probably the most minor point of them all but I would never really go back to doing it that way now by using a physical schedule but then also having lots of tasks to do made it very difficult to adjust my plan if things went a little bit wrong like yes I could just literally like open it up and like you know scribble things out and and rewrite my plan but it just takes too long couldn't be bothered and it just increases that friction so it makes me less likely to make these small adjustments and stay on top of new circumstances or situations or priorities that arise and as a principle that I always follow now I always assume things will not go as planned right think about this in any given week there is a pretty good chance that something unexpected will happen now we don't know what that unexpected thing is yet because it's unexpected but we can say that something will happen and just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean we can't plan for something so to make it easier to do these little adjustments I now use a digital calendar and over the years I have experimented with a lot of different apps and personally I just use Google Calendar now it works very well for me and I'll show you exactly how I block out my time and make my schedule at end of this video the second thing I used to do was set these really really strict schedules with no room for error followed by compromising sleep to try to get everything done this is where the real problem begins as in this really screwed me over and I would even say that by scheduling this way it just eviscerated any chance and hope for me to stay on top of things and not fall behind see by having such a strict schedule I had no time to like this video but also it made it impossible to plan let me explain firstly I need to address the elephant in the room do not sacrifice sleep sacrificing sleep is really a good option trust me as someone who has sacrificed much more sleep than I should have please learn from my mistakes sometimes it is genuinely worthwhile to sacrifice sleep to get more done but if you're having to do this consistently that is not going to be sustainable it's dangerous and it's counterproductive sleep is incredibly important for your brain's health research even suggests that sleep deprivation leads to dementia and Alzheimer's but if you're like how I was sacrificing sleep all the time you probably don't really care about being healthy you just want to be productive so to you I will say it is very counterproductive sleep is necessary for memory consolidation it's what actually helps you use and retain the information that you learn during the day spending so many hours studying that you don't sleep is like spending all day trying to fill a bucket and then just before you go to sleep you drill a hole in the bottom of it sleep is also incredibly important for cognitive performance so when you're sleep deprived you are a slower less focused version of yourself so now not only do you have a hole in the bottom of your bucket you have to fill that bucket during the day with only your feet and you normally don't even realize how impaired you are when I was really sleep deprived I thought I was at my like 70 80% of my Peak years later when I actually recovered from all that sleep dip looking back on it now I was probably only at 30% but at the time I just had no idea that that's how bad it was you also can't really train yourself to sleep less there's been a lot of research over the years around different sleep timings and the research consistently Trends towards the idea that you have to get a continuous 7 to 9 hours of sleep to function properly and very very few people can do with less than that I personally need 8 and 1/2 to 9 hours of sleep per night which is on the higher side and actually it took me some years to accept that the only thing that really does seem to reduce your sleep requirement is actually age when people get older they do require less sleep but we're talking about when you're in your you know 50 607s 80s you maybe can do with less sleep and based on my YouTube demographics I'm guessing that that's not going to be you for 99. 9% of you so when I had a really strict schedule and compromised on sleep this is what would happen I would have all of these things that I needed to get done and then I'd put all of it into my schedule and by the end of the day I would get it all done because I took no rest and I didn't sleep that combination meant that I had no break and I burnt out and I actually I became depressed I was depressed for 10 11 months and it took me around 2 or 3 years to really fully recover from the physical and emotional burden of having just pushed myself so hard and being so sleep deprived for so long again I I seriously do not recommend any of the stuff that I did back then and yes before you leave that comment I know I'm an idiot so if we don't compromise on sleep which is a smart thing to do then this is what would happen we'd have this huge list of things to do and then we put them on the schedule but because we need to sleep we wouldn't get it all done so how do we win it seems on one hand we either compromise on sleep and we lose or or on the other hand we don't get everything done and we lose the trick here is to pick your losses it is true you're going to lose in one way but sometimes we have to lose the game to win the championship if we lose on sleep we lose on a lot of things it's like winning the game but then your whole team is hospitalized afterwards if we lose on not getting everything done that day we can still recover from that at the beginning I said that having strict schedules and compromising on sleep makes it impossible to plan this is the reason your schedule does not matter it's what you do that matters if every day you schedule more than you can achieve and then every day you don't achieve that the day you scheduled versus the day you lived are different different this is incredibly important it's probably one of the most important lessons around time management in this video to start improving your time management you have to know how you're truly spending your time not how you wish you could spend your time here's what I did that made things much easier I stopped scheduling as much instead I just set myself these big daily goals and just general time blocks for when I'd get things done like morning for studying and then afternoon for work and then evening for Club activities something like that and then I switched to time tracking instead so I just simply measured how long I was spending on each of my tasks and at the end of every week I would just look at what my days really looked like and after doing this for around 3 or 4 weeks here's what I realized number one it's very difficult to predict the time it takes to complete a task sometimes I'd finish in half the amount of time time that I thought it would take sometimes it would take two or three times longer over the years I've gotten better at estimating time but even now to this day ye after years of being attentive to this I still under or overestimate by a margin of around 25% that's a big margin number two overestimating how long something takes is not a big problem when you underestimate and then it takes you longer than you expected it makes it difficult because now you have to go back and rearrange your tasks and priorities and reschedule things it actually switches you out of the flow of the day and it makes you spend more time and effort and attention on shuffling things around and also places more stress on you as well if you overestimate and you finish earlier than you expected well now you've just got more free time that you can use however you want and what I found was that trying to be ambitious with how long a task would take me was not actually worth it to squeeze out an extra 30 minutes or even even a couple hours of extra productivity and ended up being much better to plan for the worst and head out a few of the smaller tasks if I did manage to finish some things earlier and I had a unexpected Gap and number three flow is the most important thing of all the amount of time it took for me to get stuff done varied wildly depending on what I did before or after that task or what time of day it was for for example I realized that I was actually really effective in the morning which surprised me because I am not really a morning person and also I realized that it usually took me longer to do tasks at night which again was surprising because I always felt really productive at night when there were no distractions but after being really aware of my time and my tasks I realized that I was actually making more errors and I was slower so the same task would take me around 10 to 20% less time if I just did it during the morning and I could get that same level of no distractions just by putting on some headphones and just removing the distractions from my environment I also realized that my efficiency goes up just before lunch just before dinner and just before a workout or an appointment I think this was just because I have more urgency because I know that there's something coming up imminently and so this realization was really important because it made me start thinking about tasks not in isolation as just things that I block out on a calendar but rather sequences of tasks that I change throughout the day to keep me in Optimum flow this is something that I've paid a lot of attention to over the last few years and it's probably the biggest technique that I use on a daily basis most days I actually don't really have to worry about a lot of other things as long as I create a chain of events and tasks that keep me in flow I'm generally pretty productive now it does take some time and reflection to figure out what type of flow and sequence makes you most productive and what's Optimum for you so you're going to have to do a little bit of trial and era to figure that one out so putting all of these things together here is how I schedule now thankfully I don't do 100 hour weeks very often anymore but I still think I'm a pretty busy person and this method of scheduling works more than good enough for me I find it very easy very sustainable and most importantly it actually allows me to enjoy life which is important by the way so number one I use Google Calendar as you can see here and before I go in and just start randomly adding random tasks in here I'm going to take a step back and pick my losses this is about prioritizing it's genuinely more important than time management because it dictates what you're doing during that time if you want to learn a little bit more about time management versus task management then you can check out this video here and what I'm going to do during the step is really figure out what my top one or two biggest priorities are what are the things that if I were to get them done cont tribute to helping the future version of me the most what would the future version of me be the most thankful for if I were to do it today and then everything else is actually just centered around doing the one or two biggest priorities so for example let's say that the most important thing for me to do is to review these five lectures that I've covered the question is then where do I put it so this is Step number three which is creating generous time blocks while keeping the flow and sequence in mind so I know I tend to do well with concentrated cognitive effort work in the morning and studying and reviewing lectures seems like it should take a lot of cognitive effort so therefore I'm going to schedule that in the morning so let's make a Time block here I don't like waking up too early and there we go I've added my time block now here you can see that I've scheduled between 9:00 a. m.
to 12:30 p. m. which is 3 and 1/2 hours I know that reviewing five lectures should take me around 2 hours so I'm overestimating the amount of time by around 30% I used to overestimate by around 50% but nowadays I'm I'm pretty happy with 30% but if you just starting start by being wider and more generous when you do your time tracking you'll get an idea about how wide your margin of error is for how long you think something will take versus how long it really did take now let's say that my second biggest priority for the day was to film a amazing YouTube video where I deliver great content for free okay well let's do that one in the afternoon and I'm pretty comfortable with some margin of error that it's going to take me a couple hours so I'll block that out in the afternoon so now we've got our one to two biggest priorities blocked out during the day and everything else needs to fit around this remember these are the things that you absolutely have to get done these are the things that your future version would be most thankful for so that's the reason why we make this the centerpiece and everything else fits around it we're now going to add our second and third tier priority tasks onto this schedule and it doesn't really matter so much what is like third most important versus fourth most important versus fifth most important what matters more is the type of task how long it's going to take and how it's going to influence our flow during the day so let's say the next items that I need to get done is I need to design a workshop and make some lesson resources I want to catch up with some members of my team on a project that I'm working on and I want to fit in a workout during the day well I know that urgency is going to help me focus a little bit and I can see that there is some time before dinner after I've done my YouTube recording I usually have dinner around 6:00 p.
m. and it takes me around an hour so I'm just going to block that out of my calendar first so the workshop design will take me probably around 2 hours so overestimating I need at least 3 hours which means there isn't enough time to do it after my YouTube recording now if I was not as good of a schedule aka me like 10 years ago I would just be like yeah I can get it done be really ambitious and just try to fit that in before dinner but not anymore because I know that that's just not going to be worth it so what I'll do is I'll schedule my workout in this 2 hours instead because that's enough time for me and it works out because it's during the day I'll be relatively energized I'll be able to eat straight afterwards it works out well catching up with my team members around their project will only take probably around 30 minutes and I can probably do that just around after lunch just before I start my YouTube recording and that means that I'll need to make sure I finish in time as well to get onto my recording so so I just schedule that there team catchup and my workshop design I can do that after dinner and during the evening I know that I'm a little bit slower and I'm not able to concentrate quite as sharply but doing a workshop design is fine I mean I've done hundreds of those before I can do it pretty effortlessly and it should be easy enough to do and then after that I'll schedule in some break time for myself to give me a good incentive to try to finish everything during the day I'm going to give myself an hour of playing games on my PS5 at the end of the day and scheduling a break time something to look for to is something that I would recommend as well like you're going to need it so again you may as well make your schedule realistically reflect your day also I know that someone's going to ask me in the comments so I'll just tell you right now the game that I'm playing is called sea of stars and so just like that I've made my schedule and yes it is from 9:00 a. m.
till 1:00 p. m.
