Top 8 Productivity Hacks of All Time

0:00as a biomedical engineering bsms student content creator and business owner I think I've tried almost every productivity hack out there and in this video I'm going to summarize some of my favorites several of them very popular many of them evidence-based and all of them used by me on a daily basis and I really hope that this straightforward list will save you time as you try to be your highest performing self I thought it would be appropriate that I start out with one of the most popular techniques out there that's usually in the context of students but I've certainly applied it outside of school and it's called the

0:32Pomodoro Technique and I'm going to be using my iPad so that I don't mess up the definitions of each of these techniques the Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that involves breaking work down into 25 minute intervals separated by short breaks it aims to reduce the impact of interruptions improve focus and increase productivity and the steps can be outlined as the following step number one you pick a task step number two you set a 25 minute timer step number three you work on your task until the timer is up step number four you take a five minute break step number five every four pomodoros you

1:08take a longer 15 to 30 minute break now do I believe that in general this concept is very effective absolutely and has it worked for millions and millions of people out there absolutely and so I would recommend it but has it worked really effectively for me personally not so much especially in school with the classes that had more complex Concepts the Palmetto technique and it's 25 minutes didn't give me sufficient time to get in a good working Flow State now what is a good flow state that is one in which you are so locked in on a task you are so focused you were so dialed in

1:48that you don't even recognize that the time is passing by I think we've all experienced this before and that's where we are the most productive because it's not as draining as it would be otherwise so that's where we want to get to but the Palmetto technique didn't give me the sufficient time to get there I personally needed more closer to 45 minutes but what did the Pomodoro Technique do really well for me it actually helped me prevent a lot of my procrastination why because it made the initial task a lot less daunting than it would be otherwise so for example it's a lot easier for me to think of okay I

2:25will go to my desk and study for 25 minute increments all I got to do is get that first 25 minutes versus studying for four hours straight right and so maybe if I took a step back it would be the same amount of total studying I would have done 25-minute block increments and it would have a total of four hours together but because I wasn't thinking of it as all four hours in one run it was a lot easier for me to get started and right procrastination is associated with the fear or with the hesitation of just getting started and that has done a really good job of that

2:58but something that I found that was even better with my procrastination something that helped me a lot more was this next technique that we're going to be talking about the five minute rule is a productivity technique that involves committing to work on a task for just five minutes before deciding whether to continue or to move on to a different task now let's give a real life example of this and look at the three simple steps that the five minute rule would call you to do so let's give an example that you need to write a paper right but you are constantly being distracted by your phone by people or whatever the

3:34case may be these are the three simple steps number one set a timer on your phone or laptop for five minutes number two when the timer starts you begin working give it your all even if you don't feel like working after all you can stop it literally five minutes if you like number three when the timer goes off see how you feel the chances are you've overcome the most significant hurdle which is to start and now you're on your way to finishing what you started for me I found that nine out of ten times if I could get the first five minutes started I have no problem completing the task in

4:08its entirety I really do believe that my whole life I've dealt with procrastination not because the task is actually really difficult or really complex it's just because I overthink I overthink like crazy I think about everything to its finest detail and that can be one of the biggest Inhibitors of success for me right because I just won't get started on something because I over complicated more than it needs to be the five minute rule has completely changed my life in that sense and I don't use a digital timer I actually use like an analog like an actual physical timer that I bought off of Amazon and it does wonders for me

4:46so whenever I have a big task at hand I'll literally just turn on that timer because it's already set to five minutes and I'll just get started and after the first five minutes when it goes ring like nine out of ten times I'll finish the task right and so a great example of this is currently I'm taking a bio computational class with modeling specific physiological behaviors right and so it's a very very difficult class and I'm already bad at programming as it is and so to get me started on watching a three hour lecture and on an assignment that will probably take me close to 15 hours in total is very very

5:24hard right it's very hard for me to get started on it I will literally start the timer I'm going looking at my desk because I literally have the timer it'll be for five minutes and I'll go ahead and watch the live stream I usually have no problem finishing so it is a game changer if you deal with procrastination try the five minute Rule and I would highly recommend just getting a analog physical um timer that you can just carry around with you and I think it'll do you wonders have night alarms I know we all have our morning alarms and the benefits of those are obviously continue doing

5:54that but when it comes to protecting and prioritizing their sleep because of how important it is for neuroplasticity API you learn your physical and your mental health your overall performance like we learned about all these things in neuro engineering and we learn about all the different studies that were conducted and the benefits of protecting your sleep and prioritizing your sleep is just undeniable right but a morning alarm clock I don't believe is sufficient to protect or prioritize that sleep a night alarm clock in combination with the morning one I think is the best method in terms of of doing that so what does a night alarm clock do that is your

6:33reminder to wrap up deep late night combos to wrap up work to wrap up the movie you're watching to wrap up any shenanigans that you're doing because of the fact that so many times during night we lose sight of the time right because a lot of us associate with that time to be up our rest or our play time so that's not when we're necessarily looking at the clock but it comes at a heavy price because if you're just looking up and you're like oh my gosh it's 3am then you go and try to go to sleep you're probably not waking up in time that you said that you would wake

7:05up at the next day right and throws off your schedule for the next day and if you don't fix it that day after then it's going to have that domino effect for the remainder of the week right so that night alarm clock should be there to remind you that all right turn off all of those distractions um mute your notifications put on sleep mode on your iPhone go and do your skincare routine go and brush your teeth and go to bed right and I think that again it to reap all the benefits of having good quality sleep you need to be insured that not only you waking up at

7:42the right time but you're going to bed at the right time as well so for me personally I use two night alarm clocks the first night alarm clock is for me to do just that in terms of wrapping up the current tasks that I'm doing and then the second alarm clock is no phone right like that's the time where I don't go on my phone anymore in terms of using social media or anything like that and so those two alarm clocks really helped me get into the right mental state to go to bed and not just go to bed but be able to go to sleep right away and to

8:09have that quality sleep um that I'm looking for and so I really do think that a night alarm clock in combination with a morning alarm clock is really the way to go the delegation technique is a time management method that involves assigning tasks to other people more capable in terms of two things either expertise or bandwidth in order to increase overall productivity and shout out to my friend Liam who helped me really understand the importance of this and if you've never done this before I would highly recommend you sit down and figure out what one hour of your time costs I'm so serious about this so pause this video

8:46there's a ton of YouTube videos out there that go over this process can help you but it is so imperative because it's only then that you can make informed decisions in terms of where to allocate your time that you get the most out of it I know that there's that cliche saying of time is money but it really does apply here right because once you understand that your time is limited your time is finite and also that you have a set of skills and also interest right like you might not be interested in doing certain tasks and that's okay too and you have to consider all those

9:20factors when you're deciding on is this task necessary for me to take on personally or can I delegate it to someone more capable with the two things in terms of expertise or bandwidth in order to increase that overall productivity and pharmaceutical companies are actually a really great example of how to execute delegation effectively on a really large scale right and for those that are a little bit unfamiliar with the pharmaceutical pipeline I got you covered don't you worry I'll explain this in a really easy to understand manner if you're looking at all the beginning steps you're looking at something called early drug Discovery when you look at the end steps

10:00you're looking at animal studies clinical studies and the logistical steps in order to actually get the drug on the market now guess how long it takes to go from the beginning steps to the end steps you can leave your guesses in the comments 10 to 15 years 10 to 15 years and sometimes actually a lot of times it takes even longer than that now why does it take so long it's because there are an ample I mean an ample number of intermediate steps between the beginning and the end now if a pharmaceutical company was to do every little step themselves it would be practically impossible to get that drug on the

10:42market so this is what they do number one they recognize that anything outside of their subject matter expertise is not worth allocating resources in-house to complete whatever tasks that may be and so they will delegate they will Outsource those tasks to a third party that has the two things that we're just talking about in terms of the bandwidth to complete it and the expertise to complete it and so yeah could a pharmaceutical company save money up front by doing those tasks in-house probably but a successful company has to take a more holistic approach to their decision making and think about the long term right and so they understand that

11:24they have a finite number of employees who have a finite number of hours that could be working on projects if you bring certain scientists onto a project that's outside of their expertise one it's going to take them longer and two now you gotta find replacements for the work that they were doing prior to you moving them right and so delegation is such an important productivity tip it doesn't just apply to Big Pharma companies right it applies to any type of business Endeavor and any type of group work it's imperative to make best use out of the talent on your team especially if you're a leader I know

12:00that if you're watching this you most likely want to be a leader the batching technique is a time management method that involves grouping similar tasks together and completing them in a specific period of time rather than switching between different tasks about the duration of the day and this is important because context switching which refers to the active shift in your focus from one task to another is actually a very disruptive and time consuming process as it requires the individual to reorient to refocus every time to that new task so avoid this at all costs if productivity matters to you avoid this in every way that you

12:36possibly can these are some ways that you can apply this right now if you're the type of person to sporadically respond to emails throughout the day stop that just allocate an hour of your time where you respond to all emails while you have your browser up while you have gmail.com already up while you're already in that zone you might as well drafted the emails to everyone else if you're the type to run errands across multiple days stop that allocate one day several hours of that day two running errands why because you're already gonna be in your car you're already gonna be at a convenience store and a lot of

13:15convenience stores already next to each other so you might as well take advantage of that and make it as much of an efficient process as possible another example well if you're the type of individual to clean sporadically throughout the duration of a week stop that utilize one day where you take the time to allocate a few hours to cleaning and because you already have your products out because you already have your mop or your vacuum out it's a lot more efficient for you to complete that in its entirety in one specified time does that make sense good time blocking I don't think this one needs as much of

13:53an explanation as the other ones but a 10 out of 10 a must if you're not scheduling using a calendar you are out of your mic pause the video and start doing it right now like you have to and I'm going to go over all the reasons for this here in a little bit um I could probably make an entire video on time blocking solely on its own but I'm going to try and keep this as short as possible go over how to do it as well as some of the important things to note so let's begin with how to do it you can take a monthly weekly or daily

14:32approach to this but I actually believe probably the best method utilizes all three so this is how you first start with a general monthly outline and this will have your reoccurring task so if you're a student these are your classes you know that you're going to have certain classes Monday Wednesday and Friday this is your time to start off by creating that monthly outline uh starting with those classes then you do weekly revisions weekly revisions consist of any task or obligation or responsibility that extends across multiple days and so if you know that you have a client that you need to get their work done within a specific block

15:18of time in the second week of the month then you block that out how many hours you need per day for that week that's how you block it out that's your weekly revisions then if you do daily revisions those are if you had something come up or you just needed extra time to complete a task that you didn't foresee those are reserved for those daily revisions and I really do believe that time blocking is probably the most important or at least one of the most important within this list and there are a ton of templates there are a ton of tutorials on YouTube that go over how to

15:55do this and so in your own time do that but before that let me just go over some of the key points to time blocking so that you don't have the wrong idea of what time blocking is people hate the idea of scheduling with an encounter because they think that they'll be too rigid and they don't want to be like a robot and they want more freedom in their life they want time to be spontaneous no like I can't get over how silly that is because time blocking is not just about blocking out time for homework or blocking on time for client work no you need to block out time for rest as

16:38well as play too right and so a lot of us especially if you're watching this video and you're following me you're very much keen on how to be as productive as possible Right like we are individuals that work a lot and we love the process of working and now we want to figure out how best to do this officially so we don't burn out time blocking is how you do this because a lot of us when we are resting or playing we feel guilty like leave your um comments right now if you agree with me when you rest or you play you feel super anxious or guilty because you're

17:14like oh I could be better using my time um working on this or working on that and so you don't even allow yourself to fully rest and that's why when you say that you have those rest days you're not actually feeling much better the next day because you're probably feeling anxious the entire day and so when you time block and you tie block with a monthly outline first then you do weekly revisions and then daily revisions you know the time that you're allocating for rest and play is entirely okay and so you allow yourself you give yourself permission to give you a hundred percent to the relationships or to whatever

17:48activity that you're doing for rest and play right so that's one point to to mention because I know a lot of people have the wrong idea of what time blocking is meant for number two if you're going to be doing these daily revisions do whatever you possibly can to make them the night prior and not the day of because us as human beings we make thousands I mean thousands of decisions every single day some of them we don't even know that we're making they're subconscious right but it's actually within those decision-making processes that we hesitate that we second guess and these things delay us from actually

18:31getting the tasks started and ultimately completed this is what a lot of us procrastinators we included struggle with and so the great advantage of time blocking is it doesn't even expose you to the opportunity to second guess or to hesitate and that's why it's so important to do it the night prior so that on the day of you know exactly what you're doing and there is no Delay from you getting those tasks completed number three time yourself too many times we allocate three hours to writing an essay only to find ourselves actually writing that essay needing seven hours to complete it and this doesn't only ruin that day's

19:08schedule but it most certainly will bleed into the following day and has the potential to affect your entire week schedule and after having talked to a lot of my friends this is actually where a lot of our anxiety stems from because in our heads we're capable of working non-stop right like we're capable of being productive to the Max and so we will pack our schedules but we'll get into Wednesday and Thursday and realize goodness we're still trying to complete Tuesday's tasks or oh my goodness we're still trying to complete Monday's task and it will certainly provoke a lot of anxiety because you start second guessing what

19:49you're capable of you start second guessing if you're being efficient or productive when in reality you probably are and the only issue that you had was you mismanaged how much time to allocate per task and it's not your fault necessarily because how could you possibly know if you don't actually time yourself for each task and I know that that's not a habit that might come naturally to us but I promise you if you start getting the habit of doing that so for example if you are writing an essay again for a specific course write this down have a certain part within your Excel sheet or whatever the case may be

20:24to put in how much time it took and just bring up a timer or use your phone to time you and over time after you see how many inputs you had into that Excel sheet you'll be able to average that time and have a much better idea of how much you should be allocating to writing an essay or specific task for a specific course and this is only for the academics but it can apply to anything right and if you treat it like that I promise you it's so good at time blocking that when you hear a task that might not be something that you might

20:59have necessarily done prior you'll just easily like automatically be able to block a certain amount of time within your schedule and still be able to get everything else done within a period of a week or a month and I really believe the people that can effectively time block or the ones that have the least amount of anxiety when it comes to the productivity world and they're also the most productive so please start time walking stack micro wins let's be honest let's have it sets of accountability here probably many of us aren't the most disciplined individuals and it requires discipline to reach a lot of these massive goals that we have in our lives

21:39because it's only through consistency over a long period of time that we'll see those results but the mistake that a lot of people make when they want to be more productive is they'll jump right into the deep end and try to take on these massive goals which will actually only discourage them even further because one the results won't come as quickly as they would like and number two now you have no proof that you're actually capable of achieving something if you constantly fail these bigger goals so stack micro wins I promise you this has been a life changer for me not just with my profession not

22:20just with school but literally in every facet of life we have goals and it's important that you're able to take that goal and break it down to a small goal that you are actually willing to do actually in fact go so far that it's laughable how easy that goal is to achieve and so one example that we always talk about on this channel is UM making your bed right but let's say that initially your goal was to be the best partner you could possibly be to your significant other a very adminable goal but you know that you being disorganized leads you to being undependable and that's a trait that your partner doesn't

23:13like so you want to change that but if you break that down a little bit you get to maybe I should start cleaning my room every single day because I know that I only clean my room sporadically and by then it's a mess maybe that's a place to start but you're like ah actually that would be a little bit too big of a stretch for me because cleaning your room every single day is not a trip no matter but let's break that down even further I don't even make my bed every single day a lot of us don't make our beds every single day so I'm gonna start making my bed every

23:44single day and that might be a goal that you laugh at because it's so small to the point that it's feasible it's achievable now if you can break down your bigger goals and make them into micro bowls and ultimately successfully achieve them making micro wins this is going to do two things for you it's going to build momentum right it's going to give you a positive force allowing you to achieve the second task a little bit easier than the first one and so on but number two it gives you a level of confidence right because you can keep your promises you've shown to yourself that you can remain committed

24:24to those promises long after the emotions in which you initially set them in have subsided because in most cases they will subside before you can actually achieve it right and so this is a different approach to life in general that I highly recommend you take these massive goals that you have in your life break them down into micro goals make the micro wins and keep your head down focused on those micro wins and when you look up you'll find yourself closer to those extravagant goals then more than you ever were before I promise saving the very best for last finding your why if you can't do this

25:12none of the stuff that I just mentioned matters none of the stuff I mentioned will carry you to the lifestyle that you've always dreamed up and even if you're lucky enough to stumble across that dream lifestyle I guarantee that you won't be able to sustain it why because life is hard as simple as that life is painful life is very difficult life is extremely tough right the one thing that we can guarantee about life is it's going to hand something pretty soon right in your face that's gonna be seemingly impossible to overcome and I believe it's in those moments that true Champions are made it's in those moments that Champions are

25:59able to dig really deep down in their souls and remind themselves of their purpose which serves something much bigger than the individual themselves do you understand the importance of that and so a lot of people talk about motivation a lot of people talk about inspiration and it's great to have it but it's not necessary and it certainly won't be in your life forever and always right these are emotion based and what we know about emotions is that they ebb and flow if you are basing the trajectory of your life based on emotions something that Ebbs and flows you're in for a very rough ride and then

26:47the other crowd will say oh then it's just discipline just be disciplined I would take it a step further right I would peel another layer back and I think when you do that you find the question of why of what is your purpose why do you do what you do you see perspective drives performance every day of the week how you view what you do if that's how you do what you do and it's only when you can get clarity within that purpose that it gives you a level of confidence even in the really tough times that makes you untouchable finding Clarity in your purpose finding

27:29Clarity in your why Finding Clarity in your why in terms of why you want to be productive why did you stay for the entirety of this video allows you to find direction allows you to find resiliency allows you to find and discover a level of Courage that you didn't even know existed before allows you to find contentment in the difficult times as well as the really good times right you're not too high you're not too low finding Clarity in your purpose is essential and that'll wrap up another YouTube video I think this is our fourth one um I've been thoroughly enjoying this process again my goal is to

28:12try and Aid in any way that can possibly Aid in your journey to achieving your full potential because you deserve nothing less and I think that there's so much negativity in this world um and I want to have this page I want the community that we've built across Tick Tock across Instagram across this YouTube channel on the newsletter to be based on positivity to be based on encouragement and if I can guide your life in a way that's both positive and encouraging that's a really really cool job to have so uh God bless thank you all so much and I love you all