Speaker 1: This was me in 2019. But much more interestingly, this is my calendar in 2019. At the time, I was working five part-time jobs and studying two and a half degrees at once. And actually, it was quite a blissful time before I even knew that this productivity video sphere even existed. So all of the tips and techniques that I was using to manage my time just were coming through myself and through a lot actually of trial and error. And now, a few years later, I feel much more read on the topic. And very interestingly, I found that a lot of the tips and formulas that I had developed to manage my own schedule were very similar to those that the literature had found and that experts have found. So today, I thought it would be quite interesting to walk you through exactly how I plan and schedule my calendar from the bottom up for a very, very busy week and showing you all of the rules, the schedules, the formulas, and the systems that I create to kind of make the ideal week happen for me in a way. These are both evidence-based tips and tips just based on my experience, but hopefully, they will be helpful to you. Before we get started, little side note, the ideal calendar, in my opinion, is having no calendar at all, but if you are forced to have one through your life circumstances like me, hopefully, some of the tips in this video might help. But having said that, don't be too rigid with these structures. I fully believe that the less structures there are, the better. But okay, let's get started. So the first thing I will do when building an effective calendar is be aware of my three-parts bit for the day. This is based on the fact that throughout the day, two things are guaranteed to be happening. Number one is that my energy levels will fall throughout the day, and the second thing is that the power of temptation will increase throughout the day. And what I mean by the power of temptation is what Dan Ariely described as the ability to continuously say no to things diminishes throughout the day as we are doing this. The way that I like to visualise this is having this huge pot of ability to resist temptation, and every morning, I start out with a fresh pot. And what this means is I might go to make breakfast, and I'm going to make something healthy, even though I might want a donut. But I'll say, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to have a good, healthy day. But as I continuously do this throughout the day, the ability to resist things that I actually want to do becomes less and less and less, and this pot becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. And what happens by the end of the night, for example, you might recognise this, if you've been restricting food throughout the day, you'll have a midnight snack by completely raiding the fridge. So I keep in mind that I'm going to have less energy throughout the day, and things are going to get more and more tempting throughout the day. So it's going to be much harder for me to resist things as the day progresses. Keeping these two things in mind, every single day of my week, from a macro standpoint, gets divided into three main parts. So the first part of every single day is reserved for activities that are high energy and high temptation. These are the tasks that require a lot of brain power or physical power, and also that I can be very easily tempted to do something else. So tempted to leave things that I'm not enjoying that much. These might be studying for an exam. This might be doing a task for work, which is not particularly fun. This might be a huge project that I've just been procrastinating on for so long, because it's not the ideal way that I want to spend my time. So all of the things which I don't particularly love to do go into this first part of my day, because this is the part where I am the strictest and the part where I have the most energy. The second part of the day is reserved for activities which are high energy, because I'm still buzzing at this point, and also activities that require a little less resistance to do. So this might be going to the gym, for example, because I actually enjoy doing this. This might be hanging out with friends, because I really enjoy doing this, or fun activities or fun projects, or the fun parts of studying that I would like to engage in. So these go into the second part of my day. And the last part of my day is where I have the lowest energy and the highest ability to be tempted by other tasks. So this is where procrastination is very easy. So keeping this in mind, I'm not going to leave like this huge work project, which I really don't want to do for the last thing at night, because it's almost guaranteed I'm just going to get in bed and think, nah, I'll do it tomorrow. So there's no point in scheduling anything major or not fun for this part of the day. This is for my personal creative tasks. This is for things that I would actually like to spend my time on that don't particularly require huge amounts of energy. These will go into the last part of my day. So in this way, I keep this rule in mind, and I have like this invisible three-part division of my calendar every time that I'm booking in tasks. So if I have to do something, or if I have to work for something in the week, the first question I will ask myself is, how likely am I to not want to do this task, and how much energy will this take? So depending on these three factors, it will either go into any part of my day. The second rule is the mission impossible rule. And this was a new one for me because I'm definitely the sort of person who if I put something on my to-do list, I want to, and I physically need to get it done. I will not go to sleep until I've ticked everything off. And this used to be my behaviour in the past. However, I've realised that this is not only a bit problematic, I'm sure you can see why, but also it's not ideal even for the tasks that I am doing. This very interesting study in 1927 done by Zegnark, Zegnark, Zegnark? Zegarnik. Basically said that our brains tend to stay occupied with a task until this task is completed. And what this means is if you start something, but you haven't finished it, there will be a part of your brain that's continuously focusing on that task. And you can use this to your advantage. If there is a huge project, like for example, a essay that I want to write, or if you want to write a book, or if you want to do something really, really big that takes a lot of time, it's really good to put a time in your calendar just to remind yourself that this project exists. So for example, even though I don't write my newsletter strictly every single week, I do have a reminder in my calendar every week for it. Because what that does is throughout the week, as I look at my calendar and I see the reminder of, oh, I need to write a newsletter, it will open up this task in my brain. And even though I'm not consciously thinking about it randomly throughout the day, as I'm working, or as I'm in the shower, it might just pop into my mind again, and I'll go, oh, what should I do for my newsletter? And equally, if there's something huge that, for example, I want to start a course, I want to do something big that I don't have a strict deadline for, but it's a huge task, I might just put this random deadlines in my calendar just to remind myself that the task exists and to open this in my mind. Getting comfortable with not accomplishing tasks and using a calendar more as an inspiration and a guide as to what I want to spend my life with tends to be really, really helpful. And I found that going from not putting things in my calendar, if I'm afraid that I won't complete them because it will really bother me, to actually putting them in my calendar, knowing that this is a mission impossible, that I'm not actually going to do this, much more helpful because I end up doing those things much more if I put them in my calendar. Anyways, the mission impossible is also something that I keep in mind when I'm doing a task anyway. In a study done by Fishnark, it found that if you are continuously doing things that you don't enjoy or forcing yourself to do work when you're finding it unenjoyable, it can lead in the long-term to procrastination or failure on those tasks. So I keep this in mind a lot. Once something is too painful or not fun or not enjoyable, I just stop. I used to be very good and very proud of myself for overriding my stop, stop, stop in my mind. Now I'm like, no, if I'm not enjoying this, we're done. We're taking a break, we're moving on. I don't care that I've blotted out in my calendar. If it's not good enough, then I'm going to find time for it at a productive time later in the day or the week, but not overriding the signals of your brain that I must do this because I thought I needed to is, I found in the long-term, much more healthier. Next rule is the PR rule, and I call it this because both Parkinson and Roosevelt come to the same conclusion, and it basically just states that work expands to fill the time that you allocate to it. So it's quite a well-known rule, but I use it in a bit of a different way. So what this basically means is if I say that I'm going to write my essay in three weeks or I'm going to write my essay in five months or I'm going to write my essay in three days, very often the quality of the work is not going to be too different in these three different forms. So if you give yourself a very, very strict and ridiculous deadline, sometimes you will end up doing a lot more than you expected. So this is one way around it. If you have a huge task, sometimes if I have to do something like create a sales page, I will give myself two hours to do it in my calendar, and I'm going to put myself in the mindset of I'm forced to do this now in this time only, and then I will get so much more done rather than booking out a 10-hour shift for one day and going like, oh, I'm just going to do this slowly and get lunch and then do this again, which, I mean, is fine, but I get a lot less done even in 10 hours than I get with a very intentional two-hour stint, and then just having fun for the rest of the time. So this tends to work very well for me. Another thing that I do around the PR rule is that I will not book work in my calendar. I will only book the finished product in my calendar. So what I mean, for example, is that if I have to film this video, there's a lot of steps that go into it. So I have to research, I have to think of title, need to think of thumbnail, need to think and edit the hook, need to actually script the whole thing, need to do the research on the studies, need to put it together, need to actually sit down and film it, need to export it, edit it, add the extra layers of editing, which takes so long, and then export it and then make it ready and then put the descriptions and all that stuff. If I had to book all of these different events in my calendar, it's almost guaranteed that I'm just not going to do some of them. So if I just have this slot in my calendar for edit this video, I might come to that time and be like, oh, I can do this later, it doesn't matter. So I put none of this in my calendar. The only thing I will put is, let's say that the video is due to be published on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I'll put a day event of saying, publish the video on calendar scheduling. And what this does is that it gives me full freedom, but also a lot of forced deadline to get this thing done by then. So I'm telling myself, I don't care when you do this. I don't care when you find the time, like just do it whenever, however fast or slowly you want to do it. I just know that it needs to be done by this time. And that puts me under a lot more kind of positive pressure to do it and gives me a lot more freedom rather than allocating all of these slots in the calendar to just fill up and clog up the whole thing. And also because there's such small insignificant tasks, I can very easily go, oh, I can do this edit when I do the export, or I can do this thing when I do that thing later and end up doing nothing. So giving yourself full freedom with very strict finish only deadlines, I think is a great way to get more things done. The next rule is the morning glory rule. And I really, really like this because this is from- Jake sent me hi. I'm so sorry. I've tried this so many times before. But basically what he did was that he stated that people that were very creative and very effective in their lives always started their day with something that they were looking forward to, even something tiny. It can be like buying your favourite coffee every morning, or it can be making yourself your favourite breakfast, or calling a loved one, or just having five minutes to yourself outside in the sun, drinking your tea in the morning. So it can be anything really, really small, but having something that doesn't necessarily need to go in your calendar, but can go in your mind for what you want to do the next morning will make you enjoy your day a lot more. And he says, if you get into the habits of this, your day will eventually be filled by things that you are only looking forward to. So I take this rule very much to heart. Every morning I plan something that I will enjoy. So that's usually a slow breakfast by myself for me, but whatever it is, I know that there is going to be planning around this time, this sacred time in the morning that might even be 15 minutes or five minutes, but there is this time. So anything that I will start to schedule in will be after this morning time for myself. Next is the fun factor. And this is my favourite part of the calendar. It's something that I've only started doing very recently. I think Ali mentions the fun factor, and I'm not sure what he means by it, but I thought it was very appropriate to describe this. There's this quote by Daniel Priestley that says that, good nature is the result of ease and security, not a life of arduous struggle. So some struggle cannot be avoided, but the struggles that we can avoid and the self-imposed kind of work that we need to do might actually be affecting us negatively in the longterm. So I've made it a rule to force myself to do activities that are fun, either by myself or with other people every single week. And I'm very, very aware of this. I can be the sort of person who can forget to socialise or can forget to interact with people quite easily sometimes, especially when I get very, very kind of caught up in work or I might just paint for days in a row and completely forget to interact with even my flatmate. So I have to force myself to do this. So in my calendar, I will book, for example, I'm going to go to a gallery by myself, or I'm going to have dinner with friends, or I'm going to go to the movie by myself, or the movies with someone else, or I'm going to have a nice time with someone. This will be physically blocked into my calendar. And as I have an overview of my calendar every week, I will go, okay, there's a healthy balance here of social activity. It will usually have a different colour to the rest of the things that I am booking in, but it tends to be my favourite part. Every time I look at my calendar, it looks happy, it looks excited. And also it kind of means that it's not just work in there. And I don't tend to hate it. It's not like this, oh, this terrible thing that dictates my life and just schedules all my work things. It's kind of my life on a screen in a positive way because I can organise it and put in whatever I want. So do not forget the fun factor, even if it's just taking time every evening for yourself. But I quite, I'm a huge fan of spending time with other people. So hosting a kind of board games night at your house or someone else's house, a dinner, a dinner by yourself outside, anything can be done. So would really recommend not forgetting the fun factor in your calendar scheduling. Lastly, we go into strategic over planning. And Atul Gawande said that not only are we easily distracted by mundane thoughts, but we also routinely forget small, but important things when we don't externalise them. So it's quite important to take all our things that we want to do and the things that we are planning to do and kind of write them down, either as a to-do list somewhere. I like just pulling up my calendar and finding a slot somewhere to think about something or to do something, a very easy way to organise my life. I no longer keep to-do lists, actually. I just put everything in my calendar when I want it to be done. Or even if it's like four weeks down the line, get back in touch with this person, even if it doesn't happen, when it comes up four weeks later, I can go, oh, like in a week would be a good time to meet this person. So it's quite good to have these slots in there and use your calendar to kind of accompany you in life rather than just these strictly book things. And don't be afraid to overbook. It kind of relieves your brain of having to memorise so many things and keep so many things stored. And also it just helps you kind of have things in place. And once they're there, it's actually that much more likely to do them. If you're also a fan of optimising things for your brain or better understanding it at all, a brilliant documentary that I would recommend is the Curious Brain on CuriosityStream, which I'm very kindly sponsoring this video. This is a very cool documentary series that kind of goes into different aspects of how our brain works, how it organises information and thought, how it interacts in society. And it's been really, really informative. Even as someone who spends a lot of time reading and thinking about my mind, there's been so much that I've learned and restructured through this documentary. So I would really recommend it as a wonderful watch. If you want to check out CuriosityStream, you also get access to Nebula, which is a streaming platform where a lot of educational creators put our videos together. So you get an ad-free experience of all of these videos and much more Nebula specials, which are very informative, educational, and interesting. The yearly subscription for both of these together is literally the price of a takeaway, and it will be linked in my description. You will have a discount to get access to those if you want to join me on Nebula. But otherwise, thank you so much if you made it so far. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Be kind to yourself and others and do bleep everything you think. Thanks, bye.