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How I Manage my Time as a Doctor + YouTuber - 9 Time Management Tips

2019-07-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 13:46 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His own numbers

Ali, a full-time junior doctor with a YouTube channel and a business, gives nine time-management tips: three principles (owning your time, the 80/20 rule, Parkinson's law), three tactics (the two-minute rule, batching, never watching TV alone) and three tools (Alfred, Forest, 10FastFingers).

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why people ask how he manages his time; principles, tactics and tools

  • ★ Ali is a full-time doctor who also runs his YouTube channel and his own business, and people often ask him how he manages his time. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ The change that mattered most in Ali's time management was recognising that his time is fully in his control: he is always doing what he most wants, so the gym is never "no time", only not a priority. — 00:00:29

00:00:41 — Owning your time

  • ★★ Ali's second time-management principle is the Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule: for most things in life about 80% of the results come from about 20% of the inputs. — 00:01:11
  • ★ Ali thinks Marie Kondo's minimalist, tidy-home approach holds that only 20% of your possessions bring you 80% of their value. (hedged) — 00:01:11

00:01:13 — The Pareto principle, for exams and for learning guitar and other skills

  • ★★ In school and university exams, Ali says, 80% of the marks often come from 20% of the content: really understand that 20% and you can work out how to get the 80% of marks. — 00:01:43
  • ★★ Ali taught himself the guitar and the piano a few years ago by following YouTube tutorials and using JustinGuitar. — 00:01:43
  • ★★★ To play guitar while singing, Ali says, you only need four chords, which cover the vast majority of pop songs: buy a guitar for about £30 second-hand, learn the chords with JustinGuitar and practise for two weeks to a month. — 00:02:12
  • ★★★ Ali applies the 80/20 rule to every skill he has taught himself, from piano, graphic design and coding to photography, video editing and YouTube: they are not as hard as they look, and you can focus on the 20% that gets you 80%. — 00:02:42

00:03:16 — Parkinson's law

  • ★★ Ali's third principle is Parkinson's law: work expands to fill the time we allocate to it, so with a deadline the next day we get much more work done. — 00:03:17
  • ★★★ Ali says Parkinson's law applies to almost everything: you can always be a bit more efficient by giving yourself less time to do something. — 00:03:17
  • ★★ Ali sees Parkinson's law as a way past perfectionism: churn work out, knowing that if you give yourself a short time to do it, things just work out. — 00:03:46
  • ★★★ Ali's first time-management tactic is the two-minute rule from David Allen's Getting Things Done: if a task will take less than two minutes, do it now rather than put it off. — 00:03:46

00:04:00 — The two-minute rule

  • ★★ Ali tries to do tasks that take under two minutes there and then, so they do not sit in his mind or on his to-do list, such as putting the mug behind the camera in the sink. — 00:04:29

00:04:50 — Batching emails and filming

  • ★★★ Ali's second tactic is batching, from Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek: answer all your emails at once rather than five minutes every hour, so you are not context switching. — 00:04:51 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ Ali calls Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek the single book that has most changed his life and says anyone interested in productivity should read it. — 00:04:51 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali puts out at least one video a week partly because he batch-films: on the day of this video he films about six, then edits them over the week or sends them to his editor. — 00:05:41
  • ★★ Ali now has an editor for his YouTube videos, which he finds very exciting. — 00:05:41
  • ★★ In the last two years, Ali thinks, the only TV he watched on his own was an episode of Game of Thrones, when no one came round, an episode of Chernobyl and a season of You on Netflix on a flight. (hedged) — 00:05:41 · Game of Thrones, Netflix

00:05:54 — His rule for watching TV

  • ★★★ Ali's third tactic is his rule, kept since university, that he is not allowed to watch TV on his own: TV is fine as a social activity, but alone he wasted so much time. — 00:06:10
  • ★★ Ali feels he has missed nothing by not seeing The Office or rewatching Breaking Bad and Friends: he loses nothing by not watching TV alone and gains a lot of spare time. — 00:06:39
  • ★★ Ali cites statistics that the average American spends three hours a day watching TV. — 00:06:39 · United States
  • ★★ For many people, Ali finds, the default after getting home from school or work is to put on Netflix, which he says is fine if it is what they intend and it makes them happy. — 00:06:39 · Netflix
  • ★★★ Ali has no Netflix account and thinks his life is much more fulfilled and interesting because he used the time for other things than TV, such as his websites, his business, friends and YouTube. — 00:07:07 · Netflix
  • ★★ Ali says his TV rule does not mean there is anything wrong with relaxing or that you have to hustle all the time. — 00:07:07
  • ★★★ Ali thinks a big part of how he manages to do so much is that he spends no time watching TV. — 00:07:36
  • ★★★ Ali's most important time-management tool is Alfred, a Mac app that lets you do anything with the keyboard: Command-Space and "saf" opens Safari instead of a three-second trip to the dock. — 00:07:36 · Alfred, Safari, Microsoft Windows

00:07:45 — Alfred and keyboard navigation

  • ★★ With Alfred's file search Ali types a file name and it opens at once, instead of spending 10 to 20 seconds clicking through folders in Finder or Google Drive. — 00:08:13 · Alfred, Google Drive
  • ★★★ Ali calls shaving about ten seconds off almost every interaction with the computer, as Alfred does, absolutely game changing. — 00:08:54 · Alfred
  • ★★★ Navigating your computer with the mouse wastes a lot of time, Ali says: use Alfred, Spotlight Search or the Windows key and type, since keyboard shortcuts are much quicker. — 00:08:54 · keyboard navigation, Alfred, Microsoft Windows

00:09:18 — Forest, a Pomodoro timer

  • ★★ Ali recommends Forest, a Pomodoro timer app: a tree grows over the 25 minutes and dies if you leave the app, so it also stops you being distracted by your phone. — 00:09:19 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ Ali used the Pomodoro method of 25 minutes' work and five minutes' break for exams and no longer really uses it, but expects to use it for his postgraduate medical exams because it makes studying more of a game. (hedged) — 00:09:48 · Pomodoro technique, MRCP

00:10:20 — 10 Fast Fingers and typing speed

  • ★★ Ali has done the 10FastFingers typing test about once a month since he was 13 and has gone from about 80 words per minute to a consistent 130 to 140. — 00:10:20
  • ★★★ Ali recommends testing your typing speed on 10fastfingers.com and working to improve it: faster typing shaves seconds off each computer interaction, which over ten years saves a lot of time. — 00:11:19

00:11:30 — Sponsor read and newsletter plug

In the description and comments

  • ★ Asked which camera he films with, Ali points to his gear list on kit.co and to his video How I Make My YouTube Videos, which covers his gear in depth. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 10FastFingers · 80/20 rule · Alfred · batching · Forest · Parkinson's law · two-minute rule

Also: People: David Allen · Marie Kondo · Tim Ferriss

Works: Breaking Bad · Chernobyl · Friends · Game of Thrones · Getting Things Done · JustinGuitar · MRCP · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Office · You

Organizations: Netflix

Concepts: keyboard navigation · Pomodoro technique

Places: United States

Products: Google Drive · Microsoft Windows · Safari · Spotlight

Also centred on 10FastFingers: How I Type REALLY Fast (156 Words per Minute)

Also centred on Parkinson's law: How to be More Productive in Lockdown

Also centred on two-minute rule: How to Stop Procrastinating

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