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Stop Wasting Time - 5 Time Management Skills to Master

2024-02-21 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His medical past, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

In the last part of his three-part series on managing time outside a nine-to-five job, Ali sets out five skills to develop: prioritisation (goals, the daily adventure and side quests, a weekly review), time blocking in three levels, focus through single-tasking, follow-through with the Unblock method and accountability, and energising your work with play, power and people.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — The third video of the series: five key skills for managing time outside a nine-to-five

  • ★★★ Ali says developing five key skills will greatly improve your time management and free your time, energy and attention for what is truly important in your life. — 00:00:29 · time management

00:00:37 — Skill one: prioritisation, with goals, the daily adventure, side quests and a weekly review

  • ★★★ A key breakthrough in Ali's time management came when he stopped saying "I don't have time"; he thinks no one should say it, because the real reason is always that the thing is not enough of a priority. — 00:00:58 · time management
  • ★ If someone forced you to make time to study Japanese for an hour a day, Ali says, you would find the time: it is a matter of priorities. (hypothetical) — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Ali says the point of his time-management series is not to squeeze more into your time but to do more of what is truly important to you, so it is all about prioritisation. — 00:00:58 · time management
  • ★★★ To get better at prioritisation, Ali advises having goals in and outside work: your priorities and how you spend your time are then reverse-engineered from those goals. — 00:01:48
  • ★★ Ali's own goal, he says, is to be financially free with a few thousand dollars a month in passive income. (hedged) — 00:01:48 · work optional, passive income
  • ★★ Ali calls knowing what you actually want to do and turning it into goals ridiculously important for prioritising your time. — 00:01:48
  • ★★★ At the start of every day Ali asks "what is today's adventure going to be?", meaning the single most important thing he wants to get done that day, often something outside work. — 00:02:17 · daily adventure
  • ★★ Ali frames the day's main task as an adventure because feel-good productivity holds that we work better and with less stress when work feels good, and the framing encourages finding the fun in it. — 00:02:47 · daily adventure, feel-good productivity (concept), Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ When Ali had a nine-to-five job, his daily adventure would have been going to work and then spending two hours editing his YouTube video in the evening. — 00:02:47 · daily adventure
  • ★★ Once you know the day's adventure, Ali says, put a time block for it in the calendar; he is amazed how few people consistently time-block what matters to them. — 00:02:47 · daily adventure, time-blocking
  • ★★ Each morning Ali also picks one or two side quests, usually in health or relationships, such as calling his grandma, going to the gym or getting his 10,000 steps, and time-blocks them. — 00:03:16 · daily adventure, Ali Abdaal's grandmother
  • ★★★ Ali's third way to improve prioritisation is a weekly review: spend 20 minutes every week reflecting on how the previous week went and setting priorities for the next. — 00:03:16 · weekly review
  • ★★ Ali runs free weekly review workshops every Sunday at about 4 p.m. UK time, where usually a few hundred people do a weekly review that he facilitates. — 00:03:45 · weekly review
  • ★★ Ali says running the weekly review workshops makes him actually do his own weekly review, and attendees love them because they make them do theirs. — 00:03:45 · weekly review

00:04:14 — Sponsor read for Skillshare

00:05:37 — Skill two: time blocking and its three levels

  • ★★★ Ali calls time blocking, creating blocks of time in the calendar for what matters, a ridiculously valuable skill in health, relationships and relaxation too, though people often use it only for work. — 00:05:42 · time-blocking
  • ★★ Level one of time blocking puts appointments and reminders such as a doctor's appointment or filing taxes in a calendar; Ali says the brain is not a place to store such information. — 00:06:11 · time-blocking
  • ★★★ Level two of time blocking, Ali says, is blocking everything in your calendar day to day, not just specific appointments. — 00:06:11 · time-blocking
  • ★★ With a nine-to-five and still today, Ali blocks work, both commutes, video editing, the gym, social invitations and visits to his mum, so his calendar maps his time. — 00:06:40 · time-blocking, Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★★ Ali says time blocking increases freedom and joy: it ensures time for health, work and relationships and shows the free blocks for intentional relaxation, while without it people default to scrolling TikTok or Instagram. — 00:07:10 · time-blocking, TikTok, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali suggests experimenting with time blocking for a week or a few, blocking time to read, play the guitar, learn Japanese or call your grandma, and seeing how it feels. — 00:07:39 · time-blocking, experimental mindset, Ali Abdaal's grandmother
  • ★★ Ali calls the ideal week a third level of time blocking and a really cool time-management tactic. — 00:08:08 · Trident calendar system, time management, time-blocking
  • ★★ When Ali polls his audience in surveys and talks, focus is one of the most common things people struggle with. — 00:08:08

00:08:21 — Skill three: focus

  • ★★★ Ali says focus, like almost everything in life, is a skill that can be honed, learned and developed. — 00:08:37
  • ★★ Most people who struggle with focus, which Ali says is basically everyone, have not actively tried to develop the ability. — 00:09:06
  • ★★ To develop focus Ali recommends reading Cal Newport's Deep Work, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow and Dan Koe's new book The Art of Focus. — 00:09:06 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ Ali says improving focus comes down to the core principle of single-tasking: we focus best doing one thing at a time, not several at once. — 00:09:06 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali cites data he attributes to McKinsey that US workers lose 25 to 27% of their workdays to multitasking and distractions, which over a 40-year career he reckons is a whole decade. (hedged) — 00:09:36
  • ★★ Ali says that if viewers are interested and say so in the comments, he can do a three-part video series on the art and science of how to focus and get things done. — 00:09:36
  • ★★★ Focus matters for managing time, Ali says, because focusing during your nine-to-five gets more done there, so work does not bleed into evenings and weekends. (hedged) — 00:10:05
  • ★★ As a medical student and a doctor, once Ali could focus and get through his work during the day, he no longer had to study so hard or update his portfolio in the evenings. — 00:10:05
  • ★★ Outside work, Ali says, focus means actually doing what you blocked time for; drifting from a Netflix show to TikTok, Instagram and Twitter makes the time neither relaxing nor energising. — 00:11:00 · Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth time-management skill is follow-through: actually doing what you say you are going to do. — 00:11:00 · time management

00:11:16 — Skill four: follow-through, the Unblock method and accountability

  • ★★ From the managers and leaders he has spoken to, Ali says follow-through is a surprisingly rare skill in the workplace. — 00:11:25
  • ★★ Skipping a time-blocked gym session to scroll instead is terrible for time management, Ali says, because time management rests on intentionality and then time blocking. — 00:11:55 · time-blocking, time management
  • ★★★ Ali's Unblock method against procrastination, in the middle three chapters of Feel-Good Productivity: clarity against uncertainty, courage against fear, and getting started against inertia. — 00:12:26 · Unblock method, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ To build follow-through Ali recommends accountability: an accountability buddy, a friend to go to the gym with, a personal trainer, or a pact with friends to publish a video a week or study an hour a day. — 00:12:55
  • ★★ Structures that give you accountability make you much less reliant on your own willpower, motivation or discipline, Ali says, and tap into the power of the people around you. — 00:13:25
  • ★★★ Public commitments also give accountability: for the last six years Ali has written his weekly email newsletter, Sunday Snippets, pretty much every Sunday. — 00:13:25 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ As a doctor, Ali would get home from a Sunday shift at 11 p.m., remember his newsletter, write it in bed on his iPad in 20 minutes and send it, because he had made a public commitment. — 00:13:54 · Sunday Snippets, iPad
  • ★ No one would have cared if Ali had skipped a week of his newsletter, he says, but he cared. — 00:13:54 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali wrote Sunday Snippets every Sunday for six years, four of them while he had a full-time job, and credits the accountability. — 00:14:31 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers what accountability mechanism they could add to the thing they struggle with, to make following through much easier. — 00:14:31
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth skill is energising your work: as you get good at time management, he says, you realise time is often not the bottleneck; energy is. — 00:14:31 · energisers and drainers, time management

00:14:48 — Skill five: energising your work with play, power and people

  • ★★★ For his first few months as a doctor Ali was miserable, drained after work and without energy for what he wanted though good at time management; it came to a head one Christmas Day, and he realised he could make his work energising. — 00:15:01 · time management
  • ★★★ Ali's three strategies for making work energising are the three Ps, play, power and people, the philosophy of his book Feel-Good Productivity on turning work into a source of energy. — 00:15:01 · play, power, people, Feel-Good Productivity (book)

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali says managing his time well as a full-time doctor in the UK let him start and grow his YouTube channel and business on the side. — video description
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked for a full video on how to study, the channel points to Ali's three-hour video on studying. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: accountability buddy · daily adventure · deep work (concept) · play, power, people · time management · time-blocking · Unblock method

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Ali Abdaal's mother · Cal Newport · Dan Koe · Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: Deep Work (book) · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Flow · The Art of Focus

Organizations: Instagram · McKinsey · Netflix · TikTok · Twitter

Concepts: 10,000 steps a day · energisers and drainers · experimental mindset · feel-good productivity (concept) · Flow state · passive income · Trident calendar system · weekly review · work optional

Products: iPad

Also centred on accountability buddy: The Power of Accountability Buddies ☝️

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