Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to The Academic Society. It's Toyin here. Today, we are talking about time management. I know that time management can really be an issue and a struggle in grad school because there are so many things that you're responsible for and it's hard not to feel guilty when you prioritize one thing over another. In today's video, I'm going to share two main tools or skills that you need to hone in on to master time management in grad school. So if you're interested in that, keep watching this video. I'm Toyin, the founder of The Academic Society. I got my PhD in math. I landed my dream job as a lecturer and I also create these videos to help grad students and academics with time management and productivity. And I also share a little bit of my academic lifestyle. So I recently did a presentation for the Grad School Summit. It was an online virtual event hosted by Blackening Grad School. And in it, I was part of a duo presenting on time management and in my presentation, I shared two main skills that you really need to work on and master to handle managing your time and organizing your life in grad school. And so those two things are structure and prioritization and both of these things take time to get it right. So a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error, but when you do master these two things, your life will be so much better. Let's talk about why we need structure first. So throughout our whole lives, we typically had a lot of structure, especially when we were younger in elementary, high school, even undergrad. There's quite a bit of structure, a lot of deadlines and due dates weekly. So you're always working for the next deadline. However, in grad school, your deadline may be months away or even years away. So how do you convince yourself to do work for something that is not going to be due for a long time? It can be so easy to procrastinate. It can be so easy to not be motivated and lose focus when you do work because the deadline is so far away. And so this lack of structure in grad school can really make it difficult to manage your time because you may wait forever to start a assignment or a project or a paper that's due in the long run, but then have to rush and get it all done at the end. So how can you make sure that you can space it out and balance it so you're not so overwhelmed and so that you don't procrastinate? You need to add your own structure. And so this is a skill that takes time to be honed in, creating structure for yourself when you have a lot of unstructured time, like you will in grad school. All right, so how do you add your own structure? How do you just start from scratch? Well, my first tip is to know yourself. So first, figure out when are you most productive because it can be very difficult to convince yourself to do work when you're working at a not optimal time for yourself. For me, I am a morning person. I know that if I start working on something in the afternoon after lunch, I'm gonna give up after one or two hours because I'm just gonna be drained no matter what time I started that day. However, if I wake up at 6 a.m. and start working by 7, I will work for three to four hours, no problem, being productive, checking things off my to-do list. So I know that if I need to get something done, I'm gonna schedule it early in the morning. That may not be the case for you. You may be a night owl. You may be a midday type of person or an evening person, but it's really important to know yourself and to know when am I most productive. And if you don't know, test some things out. Try waking up early one day and getting work done. Try working after lunch. Try working in the evening. Try working at night. See how you feel and take note of if you were able to get more work done, if you felt better, felt more motivated at certain times of the day. Also, knowing where you can work is really helpful. So when I first started grad school, I made a commitment to start all of my assignments the day that they were assigned, and I did that. So I would go home after they were assigned, sit on my living room floor, work, and I would only be able to work for like an hour, and then I would just be over it, want to watch TV, wanna do something else. I'd even wanna clean over doing the work. And that's when I realized, oh, working at home is not the business for me. I actually needed a dedicated workspace. So I always ended up going to my office or to a library or a coffee shop in grad school. But now that I'm working at home, I had to find a new place to work at home. So what I did was I dedicated half of my living room to be my home office. I have a desk there, I have my desktop computer, and I know when I sit there, it's time for work. If I'm not sitting there, I'm not working. And so I've really trained myself to really be in productive mode when I'm sitting in that spot. So while you're at home, it may be your room, you may need to put a note on the door to say, oh, I'm working, please do not disturb me. Maybe the kitchen table, but just try to find some dedicated spot and try to always go there when you're working and see if that boosts your productivity. All right, so this is part of creating structure for yourself, knowing when and where you can work. And then finally, creating a daily routine that works for you. So especially working from home now, it's so easy to just laze around in bed, not getting out of bed until 11 a.m., or eat breakfast in front of the TV and then realize, oh no, three episodes later, I haven't started working. But I found that when I create a daily routine for myself, I'm actually excited to do my routine because I've created something that really works for me and something that really nourishes me and makes me feel productive. So what I like to do is I actually wake up early. I wake around 6.15, 6.30. I do prayer, devotion, and a 10-minute yoga routine. And then I have breakfast. And then I do a coworking session with the members of my program, Your Most Productive Week Ever. And so in that program, we have a Zoom room where we co-work together and I typically work with the UK people because they've been up for longer, but I work with them in the morning. And then I switch over at 10 to work with my accountability partner, have lunch at noon, work with my accountability partner again. And typically by 3.30, I'm done working for the day. I've had a full day of work from 7 a.m. to 3.30 with a lunch break and a couple of rests in between. And then I go for a walk around my neighborhood. And then I come back, prepare dinner, and then I'm just having me time for the rest of the night. And I go to bed around, or I start getting ready for bed around 10 or so. And that really helps me knowing that I have a nice structure for myself. So you'll have to find your own structure and what works for you, but you can really manage your time well when you have a daily routine. All right, so the second skill that you have to hone in on, it takes time to get it right, but you will get it, prioritization. So knowing which things or in which tasks are more important than others, knowing when you should spend more time on one thing, less on the other, knowing when to stop working on something and moving on to the next, it takes time to hone that in. But the more you work on it, the more you will get better at prioritizing. Just being able to recognize and decide that this thing is more important than the others is a huge skill that you can benefit from in grad school. Okay, so how do you master prioritization? Number one, daily to-do list always is gonna be my number one step. I love having a daily to-do list because you get to see everything that you have to do at a glance. So you don't have to waste time thinking about what may need to get done. Just have it all there laid out. And then when you have that daily to-do list of all the things, then come up with a priority list. Try to find three things on that list that are most important to you. The three things that if you get them done today, you'll feel productive. Maybe there's a deadline coming up. You wanna do the thing that's due. Maybe you wanna work ahead and you wanna do that. It's up to you, but it's important for you to understand and recognize what things are most important. So choose those priority things first and then get to the rest later. And it may happen the next day. And so choosing the top three things to work on can be very tricky. And my tip for choosing the priority list is to remember your goals. At the beginning of the semester, I always like to set goals. So what are the top two goals that you have for yourself for the semester? Like if at the end of the semester, you've done these two things, it would be a successful semester for you. So what will inevitably happen in grad school is you will have a whole bunch of different things due that you have to work on at the same time. And it won't be physically possible for you to do them all. So you would have to make a decision, what's gonna get done and what am I gonna get an extension on? What's gonna get done now and what's gonna get done later? How do you decide when you feel that all of the things are important because they're due very, very soon. That's when it's important to go back to your goals that you set at the beginning. You can choose the things that align with your goals. And then you know for yourself that you had already said that this was important to you. And so that can help you decide what to work on first. The task that aligns with your goal versus another task that does not align with your goal. All right, so a mindset piece that really helps me with time management is kind of like reframing something that we always say. So we typically say something like, oh, I don't have time to do this today or I don't have time to work out. I don't have time to do these notes. I don't have time to do this. And you may feel bad for saying you don't have time to do this. You may feel like I should have time to do this. Everyone else is doing this. But I think if you reframe that statement, it may make you feel a little better about not having time to do something. So instead of saying, I don't have time to do this, reframe it and say, this is not a priority for me right now. It feels so much different to think about it that way. There are some things that are higher priority and it's okay if you prioritize those things over other things, you'll get to the other things later. So you shouldn't feel bad running out of time to do something. Perhaps that thing that you ran out of time to do something for was not a priority for you at that moment. There are things that are more important for you to get done. All right, so those are my two tips. Those are the things that I really think are really helpful for mastering time management in grad school. So that is creating structure for yourself as well as mastering prioritization, learning how to recognize and decide which things are more important than others. So I hope that you enjoyed this video. Let me know your takeaways in the comments of this video. Let me know if you learn something, something you wanna start implementing for yourself, or if you have a daily routine that you would love to share. Definitely share below. If you are new here, consider subscribing. And if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. It really helps this channel. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next week. Bye.