Speaker 1: Back in college, I was one of those kids who always had a job while in school. At first, I worked as a barista, making mediocre latte art for poor students. Then I added on a tutoring gig for high schoolers, and then front desk at a yoga studio, all the while taking full-stack classes. As you can imagine, an 18-year-old punk like me didn't know how to handle that kind of responsibility, especially since that was right around the time Hunter x Hunter started to air. And my grades paid the price. Any sane rookie would have dropped work to focus on school, but I really liked having the extra cash to fund my luxurious $6 specialty coffee addiction. So after years of learning and experimentation in the productivity space, I slowly began to develop smarter strategies that eventually allowed me to work a full-time job and study consistently. By the end of college, I was working over 40 hours a week as an EMT, studying for school, and preparing for the MCAT all at the same time. And I wasn't burning out. I was locked in. Hey Misty, activate focus mode. I was able to carry the system into medical school at Cajun Koi Academy. In my third year, I was working full-time in rotations, studying, and grinding on my YouTube side hustle. So I want to share the principles I use for arranging my life so all the pieces of the puzzle fit. And I hope the lessons I've learned from managing my own time can help you find balance, no matter what kind of job or academic schedule you have. So the first big, mind-boggling idea I adopted was to schedule my life around focus, not time. Let me explain why with an analogy. Our focus is like a phone battery that drains throughout the day. Even if we're not playing Pokemon Unite or texting someone, we can give our focus some juice with things like coffee or cold showers, but it's going to drop regardless as the day goes on. As our brain gets tired, our focus is lost and we enter battery-saver mode. And our brain hates being tired. It starts to complain like a hangry child. It wanders, it daydreams, it starts to feel bored, we get headaches, and the more and more we push, the worse our focus actually gets, and the more likely we are to procrastinate, burn out, and fall prey to temptations of more fun activities. Before I paid attention to scheduling my life around focus, I used to organize a work day like this. I'd wake up at 9.30 and drive to work by 10am. I'd then work a 10-hour shift, head to the gym on the way home, eat a quick bite, and then start studying at like 10pm. I'd go until about 2am or something before just passing out from pure exhaustion. And let me tell you, this absolutely sucked. I'd be totally blasted after work, my mental battery was depleted, so my focus was shot, and I could never finish studying. And I remember thinking, jeez, I wish I had like 5 more hours every single day so I could actually get through my studies. But that wouldn't actually work either. Because contrary to conventional thinking, I believe our most valuable resource is actually not time, it's focus. If I can't even read a paragraph because I'm running on E, hallucinating after a long work day, then it doesn't even matter if I have 5 more hours, or 500 more hours. My battery is fried. But then, I had this crazy idea. What if I moved this study block from here, to here? So I was studying when my battery was actually full. Such a simple idea, but I'd never thought about it that way before. I always assumed that as long as I scheduled in time to study during the day, I was good. But I didn't take into account my fluctuating focus. So to maximize focus, I wake up and do the most intense studying before I even go to work. And as my energy levels drop throughout the day, I'll do less rigorous studying, in the pockets of time I can find at work, like brain dumping concepts onto my notes app, or redrawing mind maps from memory. And then, late in the day, when my energy is low after work, I can relax with easier light studying, like reading or burning through some flashcards. I'd break up my day by focus, and tackle the most intense studying when my focus is highest, because it demands the most brain power. And then I can allow the natural progression of my energy throughout the day, to determine how to study optimally and efficiently, and reduce burning out. But I do want to point out that for me, my focus is highest in the morning. Contrast that with my best friend over here, whose focus is actually highest at night time. While my battery drains throughout the day, there are some mutant night owls whose batteries start drained, and then slowly charge throughout the day. He's definitely not a morning person. Obviously Akuma. Come on Misty, drop the alarm. It takes a while to wake up in the morning. So for him, his schedule might be opposite of mine. So he can move his study block from here, back to here. But the whole idea is to plan our study intensity according to when our battery is fullest. But like many degenerate students, I'm a chronic snoozer. I'm one of those roll out of bed five minutes before class, bed head and lecture kind of rookies. So even the thought of getting up earlier is triggering to me. But I eventually figured out a Jedi mind trick that helps make the mornings feel less awful. And it's another easy mental kickflip. Instead of setting an alarm in the morning, or having a scheduled wake up time, I only set a strict bedtime. To me, mornings sucked because I felt rushed and sleepy going into work. And of course, dispatch would bombard us with emergency codes right when I clocked in. It's like they were waiting for me. The goal of this flip is to sleep earlier, so my body naturally wakes up in the morning. Not to the soul-crushing sound of an alarm, and not on any particular schedule. That way I could enjoy a productive and peaceful start to every single day. So if I needed to get up to study before work, I wanted to be studying by 6am to get at least three hours of focused work in. But using the trick, I'd move my bedtime earlier by one or two hours. So if my normal bedtime was midnight, I'd get to bed by 10pm. This way it doesn't matter if I get up at 4am, 5am, 5.30, or even 6am. I'd naturally wake up when I do, on my own terms, fighting demons. And the morning would just be less awful overall. Even after a couple days of using this rule, I noticed a huge difference in my overall mood during the day too. I don't feel rushed, so I'm not stressed out. I'm optimistic because I've already studied early in the day, and I don't even have to think about it when I get home from work later. And honestly, I never thought I'd say this, but there's something very peaceful about the wee early hours of the morning. No one's awake, social media is dead, it's quiet, and there's just less distractions. Once I realized that waking up earlier actually worked for me, I could start to shift my circadian rhythm to align it earlier in the day. And there are some evidence-based ways to do this. One of my favorite ways is getting light exposure, preferably natural lighting, about half an hour to an hour when I wake up. And absorbing that natural light into our eyes actually helps us move that clock forward. If there's no natural light early in the day where you live, then overhead lighting is more optimal than low lighting, like a desk lamp or something. So after I began medical school, I no longer had a full-time job. But being a medical student on rotations was basically the same thing. Plus we still had to study after work too. But my work schedule was much more erratic. Some weeks I'd work night shift, some weeks I'd work early morning shift, and sometimes I'd work weekends. As a kitsune, I loved this spontaneous work schedule. But that also meant that in order to optimize for focus and maintain a strict early bedtime, I had to add another layer to my time management system. So to work with a flexible schedule, I had to start setting strict deadlines. Not just for studying, but for everything. From running errands, to meals, to even my free time. And I didn't know this at the time, but this was actually really useful because it touches on two very powerful psychological ideas. You may have heard of this theory called Parkinson's law, which states that work expands so as to fill the time given for its completion. Basically, if I had to finish something, like write an essay, and the deadline is in one week, I'm most likely going to procrastinate and spend the entire week writing that essay. Whereas if the deadline was in one day, I'd have to finish it by then. But regardless of what the task is, we're programmed to drag out our responsibilities to fill how much time we allow ourselves to work on. So setting strict deadlines addresses Parkinson's law because it capitalizes on this other principle about time pressure. There's this interesting paper from Japan that analyzed why people procrastinate on things. They found three main determinants for procrastination. How challenging it was, the rewards or the punishments for doing it, and how far away it was. But the most interesting thing they found was that regardless of how challenging it was or how punishing the consequences were, time pressure was always the main determinant for taking action. And that actually makes sense, right? If my presentation is tomorrow, I literally can't procrastinate on it. It doesn't matter how challenging it is. It doesn't matter what the reward is. It just needs to get done. So I would focus and I could do it. So medical school, my responsibilities were starting to pile up. But I also wanted a good work-life balance to see friends and go to the gym, produce music and stuff like that. So setting firm deadlines for studying or for projects forced me to focus and not procrastinate. But I also wanted to make use of the other two principles for not procrastinating too. So I'd give myself rewards for finishing, like going to see friends or going to dinner or something. And it also break down big assignments into smaller bite-sized pieces to reduce how challenging it was. And after doing this for a bit, I realized that it actually took me a lot less time to finish studying than I once thought. Before, I was just letting Parkinson's Law drag out all of my tasks. But using things like Pomodoro and setting strict deadlines helped me focus and fit all the studying and hobbies I wanted to get in. A strange paradox about productive people began to make sense to me. The most productive people do so much every single day, all because they can quickly transition their focus and block out distractions. It made me think about all those rookies I knew in college who were athletes on the school team, running multiple clubs, working a part-time job, dating the hottest babes on campus, and also maintaining top GPAs. They were thinking about some of the doctors I worked with, who were clinicians, faculty professors, residency directors, parents, they got kids, you know? And they all still find time to work on side hustles and enjoy their own hobbies. They were all way ahead of the game, and I think it's because they understand how important time pressure is on our ability to focus. And this is a good segue to the final principle I follow, which might trigger some of you rookies, but it's to stop doing shit you hate. By this point, I hope you all realize that I think focus is the most crucial asset to managing a busy schedule of work and school. But to me, focus no longer only applies when I sit down to study. It also applies at the macro level, at the big picture, you know, regarding my whole life in general. In med school, I also added on a YouTube channel as a creative side hustle. I was also working on a research project and studying for school. There was a lot of responsibility on my plate. Even with the strict deadlines, optimizing focus, and all that other jazz, I was struggling to keep up with my studies, and I was on the edge of burning out. And because there's no way to create more hours in a day, the only option left is to create time from cutting out the pointless stuff. Quit doing shit you hate. Quit doing the stuff that brings you no joy and no value. This lesson was a slap in the face. It hurts because it requires honest reflection to admit that I waste time doing a lot of pointless stuff. But once I did accept it, it was liberating. How many times have you gotten wrapped up or roped into doing something and felt like, dang, this is a complete waste of my time? Or think, wow, it's already 1am, what did I even do today? I think that even if it requires spending a little extra money or some time up front to stop doing these pointless things, it's going to be so much more worth it in the long run to maintain your focus over your life. And so taking a look at my schedule, I saw that there were a lot of tiny pockets of wasted time. For example, I used to go to the school gym to work out, and it was a 40-minute drive round trip, and I hate traffic. So I identified that, I sucked it up, and I bought a basic gym membership that was right downstairs. Another example for me was rallying my geriatric self to go out and get drunk with friends, but then I'd spend the entire next day hungover. And I'm not really about that anymore, and that's not bringing any value to my life, so it's going to get cut. Or spending time with toxic people I don't enjoy being around who destroy my mental health. Sorry, yeah, that's also going to get cut. That last one in particular was tough because I had to stop caring about how someone else would think about me. But if it's hard for you to say no to people, there's no need to be a jerk about it. Just be clear and have some self-respect to prioritize your own time. It's been a great first step for me to build a more fulfilling life, one that I actually choose. Of course, there are obviously some things that you hate and you have to attend to, but at least use this principle as a self-reflection tool. That way you can see what things in your life you can actually easily cut out that will contribute to an overall happier and more focused approach to life. And with that carved out time, sprinkle in some more studying or activities that you find fun fulfilling, like side hustles, relationships, and other hobbies. So those are the four principles in my system as I plan my schedule to make sure I fit in all the study I need alongside work. As you can see, it all comes down to playing Tetris with the time we have each day, whether moving things around, optimizing focus, or cutting things out completely that drain our focus. And to reiterate, this system works for me based on my brain type and my personality as a kitsune. So a different looking schedule might be better for you. If you have no idea what I'm talking about and you want to learn more about your brain type, then definitely check out this video right here.