Speaker 1: Now I always seem to get questions from students in the audience all about time management. And so in this video we're going to talk about my 12 top time management tips for students. Let's go for it. Tip number 12 is to avoid cramming because cramming is ridiculously inefficient. Yes, it seems like it is. People always like really struggle to make the most of their time and therefore you end up cramming for your exams. But like four hours of cramming the night before an exam is way, way, way less efficient than four hours of studying for the exam spread out over a few weeks or potentially even a few months. And this is because of how memory works. Generally we want stuff to be going into a long-term memory because then recalling it is way easier than if it's just sort of staying in our short-term memory. Which brings us on to tip number 11, which is to learn how to study effectively. This is a thing that I've been making videos on about for the last like four years on this YouTube channel, but how to study effectively for exams and just generally how to learn effectively is something that no one ever teaches us in school or at university. I picked it up in my second year of medical school when we happened to have a psychology lecture as an optional thing, which was all about the science of memory formation and how memories are formed and therefore how to study for exams effectively. And at that point I was just like, oh my God, why has no one ever told me this before? And since then I really applied all of these different strategies like active recall and spaced repetition. Those strategies for effective studying basically freed up tons and tons of my time while I was at university. And I really wish I'd known those strategies when I was in school as well, because it would have just given me so much more spare time to do things I actually wanted to do rather than the thing I had to do, which was study for my exams. If you want a good resource on this, my friend Unjaded Jade has actually a very good book on this, The Only Study Guide You'll Ever Need, where I actually feature in this. I have a little paragraph about spaced repetition, which is sick, so you should read this book. You can also check out my Skillshare class on studying, that'll be linked for free down below. Or check out any number of the 15 videos I have on the topic of effective studying, that'll be linked all down in the video description. All right, tip number 10 is to be a little bit experimental about your self-care time. Now this is an area where I don't want to get cancelled for this, but with a lot of students there's this idea that, oh, you know, studying is so hard, it's so stressful, just wait until you start work. Studying is so stressful, I need three hours every evening to wind down, and I need to be watching TV, and I need to be scrolling Instagram, because that's my self-care time. To which I would say, like, that's all well and good, but it's okay to experiment a bit, and to question your assumptions about how much, quote, self-care time you actually need. If you are, for example, a student at university, and there is the option of going to all these different clubs and societies and stuff, or there is the option to sit down and watch TV for three hours, I can basically guarantee, when you get to the end of your university experience, the thing you'll regret not doing is taking part in all these different activities and trying out different things. We tend to, as students, tend to waste a lot of time, and even as adults, under this guise of self-care. I'm not saying self-care is, I'm saying, like, you know, self-care is very important, it's a really important part of avoiding burnout, but you can kind of be a little bit experimental about it, by which I mean, if you currently think you need three hours of self-care to watch TV every night, try two and a half hours one night, and see, like, genuinely treat yourself as a bit of an experimental, like, subject in a study, like, see how do you feel with two and a half hours of self-care time versus three hours. Cool, two and a half hours versus three hours, no real difference to your own self-care and your own mental health, fantastic, you have just freed up half an hour of your time. If your goals are genuinely to watch TV for two hours, three hours every evening, that's totally fine, you do you, but generally, most students kind of wish they had a bit more time to do more things like take part in more societies, or more clubs, or learn new skills, or even just study for their exams in a less stressful way, and often, we tend to waste a lot of time doing pointless crap like watching TV and scrolling social media. Alright, tip number nine is to figure out what does, as a student, your ideal ordinary week look like. So if you were to fast forward in your Google Calendar or whatever to a blank slot, how would you actually like to be spending your time, if you could design your life however you wanted, and then compare that with how you're actually spending your time. Now when I was a student, I would find that how I actually wanted to spend my time basically did not include any watching of TV, unless it was a social activity, did not include any randomly scrolling through social media, and yet I found myself doing a lot of that. It did include spending more time reading, and then I wasn't making time for reading. So it's like, every now and then, actually thinking, what does my ideal life as a student look like, and why is my current life not like that, and what are the strategies that I can use to bring my current life closer to this ideal life, this ideal ordinary week that I have. Tip number eight is to completely scrap the idea of revision timetables. Revision timetables are a complete myth, they're a total waste of time, they're just a way for us to procrastinate, they're a way for us to feel good about the fact that we're planning to do all this revision, but then when we get around to it, we don't actually follow the revision timetable, unless you're one of those very few really conscientious students who follow a revision timetable, but if you are, you probably don't need to watch a video teaching you how to manage your time. Generally, for lazy people like me, and for most students in the world, following a timetable for revision for studying is just super, super, super hard. I've got a video with an alternative way to do a revision timetable. I call it the retrospective revision timetable, rather than the prospective revision timetable. This is the strategy that I still use whenever I need to learn or study for anything at all, and I found it to be way more effective in terms of efficiency of studying, and also enjoyment of studying, and also actually being more efficient with managing my time than any other revision timetable that I've ever tried. Tip number seven is again something a little bit controversial, but when I got to university, I set a rule for myself, I was not allowed to watch TV unless it was a social activity. This rule transformed my life because it freed up hours and hours and hours of time where when I was in school, I was wasting all this time watching TV shows like Gossip Girl, and 90210, and The Vampire Diaries, and Grey's Anatomy, and stuff, and yeah, these TV shows were great, but at university, I decided the only TV I'm allowed to watch is if it's a social activity, and so every week, you know, when Game of Thrones was on, we would have Game of Thrones nights, where we'd get up a monitor or a projector in my room, invite some friends over, get some pizza, and that was really fun, and those are some of my happiest times of being at university, but beyond that, I didn't really watch any TV. And now if I think back to my university experience, do I regret not having seen The Office? Hell no. No. God, please, no. No. No. No. Do I regret not having seen more TV shows? Hell no. But am I really glad for the time that I spent working on this YouTube channel, or learning how to code, or learning other skills, or even just studying for my exams in a way that didn't stress me out during exam term? Absolutely. I'm so glad I did that instead of watch TV. Tip number six is the rule that nothing good ever happens after 2am. I think this is from How I Met Your Mother or something, and I first learned this tip in my second year of university, and I found that every time I stayed up until post-2am to hang out with friends or to do a chill of some sort, nothing good ever came for it. I think 2am is the cutoff point at which, you know, you've already had your deep conversations from like 10pm to 2am, nothing good happens between 2am and 6am, it just means you completely screw yourself for the next day because now you're burnt out and tired and exhausted and you have to go to lectures and you're falling asleep in lectures and it just becomes a total nightmare. So 2am was like my curfew. Tip number five is to use a calendar and run your life religiously based on your calendar. There are so many people I know still to this day, even adults, that don't run their lives from a calendar and it just boggles the mind because it's so hard trying to remember all of the things that you have to do. The other great thing about a calendar as well is that it lets you be more intentional with how you're using your time. So let's say you decide that, you know, one of the things I want to do at university is take part in this extra project or something. You can look at your calendar and you can decide, do I actually have the time to do this? We don't need to beat ourselves up because we think we should be doing these 100 different things. But if you run your life based on your calendar and your calendar is broadly accurate, you can physically see, do I actually have the time to do this? Let's say, you know, I want to do my studying, I want to do my sports, I want to do my socialising, I want to do my sleep, I want to do my self-care. How many hours are genuinely left in the day to actually do other things? And if you run your life with a calendar, you've got an accurate idea of what that is. And if you don't run your life through a calendar, A, you might end up wasting loads of time. But B, you might also end up trying to beat yourself up and flagellating yourself for not doing enough. When realistically you're doing so much, you just don't know it because you happen to not use a calendar. And that relates to rule number four, which is to schedule absolutely everything. We've talked about scheduling classes, scheduling sports nights, scheduling like social events, scheduling literally everything. Even travel time, I used to schedule in my calendar. When you schedule things, you can then start using these little pockets of time that you free up for doing something intentional rather than something unintentional. Now, again, generally scrolling Instagram or TikTok is an unintentional way to spend your time. Broadly, most people I know don't scroll Instagram and they're like, you know what, this is something I really want to be doing. I'm fully being intentional. I'm living my best life right now by scrolling Instagram. Instead, it's just one of those things that you end up doing because you've got like 12 minutes and you're like, well, you can't do any work in 12 minutes, so you might as well just scroll Instagram. That's not intentional. And the thing that I always tried to tell myself when I was at university and even now is time is the only thing that we have. Time is the only resource that we have that we can't make more of. We can always make more money, but we can never make more time. And so why am I squandering my time on this earth, my precious time on this earth, doing something that I actually don't actually genuinely want to do? And so what I found is when I schedule everything using a calendar and I find these little blocks of time, I also try to not squander those minutes because, you know, 12 minutes here and there between between classes or whatever is actually a lot of time that could be spent reviewing flashcards or reviewing notes for the class or even just kind of deciding to take a walk around the block without like having anything in your airpods or even something active like relaxation rather than something totally passive and bad like scrolling social media. I've sort of hated on social media a lot. Like if you again, I'm not anti social media. I have built a career off of social media, but I am in favor of us using our time in the most intentional way possible. So whatever you're doing, just make sure you're doing intentionally and you're not just falling into these bad habits, which is so easy to do when you've got a zillion other things going on, especially in your life as a student. Tip number three is to embrace welcome distractions. Now this is why I would always prop my door open at university with a little doorstop and why I think this little $5 doorstop is one of the best purchases I've ever made because my door was always open, which meant people could always come in and have a chat. Now this did mean that when I was studying and was when I was trying to focus, I'd occasionally get interrupted by friends coming in to have a chat or coming in for a cup of tea. But those were welcome distractions. Like I wanted my friends to interrupt me because ultimately I realized that the point of being a student isn't so much about the grades that you get or about the degree that you get at the end of it. Although that is a part of it. But really the point is, you know, the friends you make along the way and like the vibes and the connection and the network, those are really nice moments that if I had shut my door and focused on work to be more efficient and more productive, I wouldn't have had those moments and I never ever remember any amount of time I spent studying, but I do remember those moments. This whole productivity and time management stuff, I think should not come at the expense of our friendships and relationships in life. By the way, just a quick snippet from me from the future and you get a little sneak peek of our new setup. But if you're interested in getting more from your time as a student, you might like to check out a couple of my online classes over at Skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Now I've been teaching on Skillshare since 2019. My most popular class is all about productivity strategies, which are great if you're a student. And my second most popular class is all about evidence-based study tips. This is me compiling absolutely everything I know, including a load of scientific evidence and stuff around what makes the most effective study techniques. And you can find all of that over for free on Skillshare by hitting the link in the video description. And if you're one of the first thousand people to hit that link in the video description, that will give you a totally free one month trial to Skillshare where you can check out these classes. So there's the productivity one. There's the studying one. I also have a whole masterclass on how to use Anki, which is the world's best flashcard software. These classes between them have had literally thousands of five star reviews from students all around the world, and they are completely free. Also on Skillshare, other than just my 12 or 13 classes, you can access thousands of other classes from all sorts of topics, including entrepreneurship and personal finance and video editing and interior design and cooking and textiles and manufacturing. Basically, anything you can imagine learning, you can learn on Skillshare. So if any of that sounds up your street and you want a way more detailed guide to how to manage your time, how to study efficiently, how to use flashcards properly as a student, again, it's completely free. Check out the link in the video description and thank you so much Skillshare for sponsoring this video. All right, we're nearly done. Tip number two is something that I used to do a lot, which is to use downtime in the school holidays and university holidays to study. So what I would do at university, our terms were quite short. They were only eight weeks long and we had these enormous six week long holidays when I was in medical school. And so during term time, I would tend to fall behind because it was actually genuinely really hard keeping on top of lectures. I would always fall asleep. I never did enough work, et cetera, et cetera. But I kind of used term time as socializing time because that's when all my friends were around. And so I'd always prioritize socializing over studying. But then in the holidays where broadly I was bored because all my other friends were at university or they lived too far away or I didn't really have much to do, that would be when I would go to the local library and I'd be using that time to catch up on the work that I missed during term time. And I'm really glad I followed this formula basically throughout the six years of medical school because it meant that I was able to make the most of the university experience doing the thing that you can only do when you're at university broadly, which is spend loads of time with your friends and just hang out and do cool stuff through clubs and societies. And I spent the otherwise fairly boring time where I was on my own or with my brother during the school holidays. I spent that time studying and catching up instead. And finally, tip number one is that however you end up managing your time as a student or as not a student, you can choose to be satisfied with how you spent your time and how you spent your day. This is something I used to struggle with back in the day. I used to have a tendency to beat myself up when I felt like I wasn't productive enough that day or I didn't get enough studying done or I didn't get through the subjects that I had on my crappy revision timetable. I used to beat myself up about that. And I realized fairly recently actually that me choosing to beat myself up doesn't actually change how much work I've managed to do. It doesn't change anything about how effective my studying was. All it does is just make me feel bad for the rest of the evening and make me struggle to sleep because I'm like, oh my God, I'm somewhat stressed that I didn't get enough work done. And it doesn't even help me, it doesn't even galvanize my motivation to do more work the next day because it's like every day is an individual day. And if I've done badly one day, I'm not any more likely to do well the next day. And so the real hack here is however, like whatever you manage to do, however much studying you manage to do, however much socializing you manage to do, at the end of the day, you can simply choose to be satisfied with it. You don't have to think like, oh, I'm a bad boy for not doing enough studying. Like there's just like no need for that. It tends not to have any benefits. And the major drawback is that it just makes us hate our lives. So that's a little final tip to take home with you, hopefully. If you got to this point in the video, thank you so much for watching. You might want to check out this video over here, which is a video I made, I think about four years ago and is one of my most popular videos about studying. And it's all about the power of active recall, which is the single most important study technique in the world. So check out that video over there if you want to study more effectively. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next video. Bye bye.