Hey guys, welcome back to the blog. If you're new here, my name is Saeed.
- Alrighty, time drain number one is social media. This is an absolute classic. We all waste tons and tons of time on random scrolling and random watching of YouTube videos without any real purpose behind it. Now, if your social media use is intentional, then great, you're living your best life. But for most of us, and certainly for me back in the day and still a little bit to this day, our social media usage is not that intentional. The whole point of these social media companies, like the reason they pay hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers to work on these social media apps, is so that they can hijack our attention and get us on this hamster wheel slot machine dopamine thing of just feeling as if we must constantly check TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or whatever the thing is. And because all these platforms are now algorithmic rather than chronological, you will never be up to date. You will never catch up with the newsfeed because there's always more that these algorithms are feeding us. Now, there's a bunch of different practical strategies that we can use to stop the scrolling hijack. The first one is, back when I was trying to break my social media addiction, I installed a free app called One Sec. And basically, that artificially added a loading screen to all my social media apps. So, I'd open Twitter and then it would be like, "Nope, you gotta wait 5 seconds. Do you still want to open Twitter? And it would give me a link to Kindle and Audible, which were the apps that I selected as ones I wanted to give me, which are generally more intentional. And that really helped break the cycle of scrolling because when it takes five freaking seconds to open Twitter, you then realize, "Oh, hang on, in that time, do I actually want to open Twitter or not?" And then most of the time, I would choose not to open Twitter. The other thing I personally found super helpful is to just remove all social media apps from any of my iPhone home screens. So, in order for me to now open Instagram, I have to swipe down, physically type in Instagram, and then click on the thing, which is just a level of friction where my fingers haven't yet developed the muscle memory to like do the thing, whereas you know, back when it was on my home screen, it would just be swipe, swipe, swipe, Instagram, cool, done. And before I knew it, I'm scrolling the newsfeed even though I never intended to.
- Screen time limits on phones are another good one. There's also a good app called Opal that a few friends of mine have found real value in, where it physically stops you from accessing those apps. People sometimes log out of the apps; they uninstall the apps. Also, this might be a bit of a hot take, but genuinely, I think these social media companies have run a massive scam that has convinced us that we need to scroll social media to relax. I've heard so many people say this, like, "Oh, you know, scrolling TikTok for 2 hours before bed really helps me relax." Really? I'm pretty sure I've never seen any study that confirms that TikTok is anything other than a stimulant and reduces the quality of your sleep. Humanity did not evolve to be constantly scrolling and getting that dopamine hit as a form of relaxation. Sure, I appreciate that we all need ways to relax, but generally, there are ways to relax that are relaxing rather than scrolling social media apps. Time drain number two is the news. Cause if it's something that's big that's happening in the world, then chances are you'll just end up being at least vaguely informed about it. But for most things, the news cycle is designed for entertainment and for clicks and for views and eyeballs, rather than for informing us about current events. You know, it's important to be a civic citizen. It's important to be informed about what's going on in the world. But again, like with all things, reading the news should be intentional rather than reactionary or default. So, an intentional way of reading the news is, sometimes I will think, "You know what? I feel like reading the news right now." And I'll open The Economist and read the world in brief. Or I'm thinking, "Hey, there's this big thing happening in the world right now. I really want to find out more about this specific thing." Then I will do a session where I go out and actively seek more information about the thing. What I stopped doing, what I used to do back in the day, which would waste so much time, is habitually checking the news every day.
- Alright, time drain number three is TV. Again, this one is going to be a controversial take. For the record, nothing in this video is meant to be construed as life advice. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm not telling you how to live your life, you can do whatever the hell you want. But I'm just sharing what are some things that I found helpful for me. Since my first year of University, I set a rule for myself, and I've still stuck with that rule, which is that I am not allowed to watch TV on my own. When I was in high school, I used to watch a lot of TV on my own. I would watch like 3 hours of TV every single freaking day, and it amazes me how much of my time I squandered when I was younger. But since university started and I realized I wanted to juggle loads of things, I wanted to socialize, wanted to see friends, wanted to try new hobbies and sports, also build a business on the side which was later a YouTube channel while getting through med school and doing reasonably well in the exams. And then when I started working as a doctor, I realized watching TV on my own is just a total time drain and a total time sink and there's no reason to do it. In my first year of uni, I decided to do an experiment where I wouldn't watch TV on my own, and I made it a point to check in with myself every few months to see to what extent do I miss the time spent watching TV. And I realized I didn't miss it at all. I realized that instead of using that time watching TV, I could use that time to try and learn how to research or to try and work on some websites or to try and spend more time with my friends or even just to study a bit more efficiently by doing flashcards. Throughout the year, I used to watch Game of Thrones. Alright, today is Game of Thrones finale day. We've got the set up. But I would organize Game of Thrones social nights in my room every week when Game of Thrones was happening. It would be a big social event; it would be super fun. That was like the one TV show that I watched in the last 10 years. But just not watching TV on my own has been the single rule that has freed up by far the most time of anything else I've done in my life. And if you're potentially interested in freeing up your time to be able to do more of the things that really matter to you, it's something you might consider trying as an experiment.
- Alright, drain number four is chores. This one is going to get even more spicy. The way I think about chores is that there are all these things that we must do to maintain our life, like cooking and cleaning and laundry and admin and returning parcels, and you know, things like that. If you enjoy doing those things, and for you, spending that time cleaning or cooking or doing laundry or whatever is intentional and effective and enjoyable, then great, keep on doing those things. For me, I don't enjoy doing any of those things. And I recognized at a certain point that most of these were chores that could be either deleted or automated or delegated. Now, this was a lot harder for me to do when I was a student, and I wasn't making any money at all. If I ever make more money in the future, I would outsource my chores. If your hourly rate is zero, for example, then it's very, very hard to delegate chores. And I think this is just a really important point. Like, money and time are interchangeable, and we can use money to buy back time. And when I discovered this, it just blew my freaking mind because now, time management doesn't just become about how can I be more disciplined or how can I time block more stuff in my calendar. It also becomes how can I strategically and intentionally deploy my resources, which I now have because I have a job with income coming in, to buy back my time. It's like I'm trading a less valuable resource, money, for a more valuable resource, time, because as we talked about, we can never get back the time that we've used, but we can always make more money further down the line. But the other way of thinking about this is, how much is that extra time worth to you? What could you do with that extra 2 hours? How much is it worth to you to be able to spend those 2 hours with your kids? How much is it worth for you to be able to spend those 2 hours going for a walk-in nature or reading a book instead or making progress on one of your hobbies rather than cleaning the house if you don't enjoy it? I'm saying, try it as an experiment. Try hiring a cleaner once or twice, see how it feels. If it works for you, amazing. If it doesn't, hey, it's just an experiment. At least you've got data out of it.
- And finally, time drain number five is squandering the spare minutes. Now, this is something that Matthew Dicks talks about in an amazing way in the book "Someday is Today," which is an amazing read when it comes to mastering time management and stuff. But basically, the idea here is that we all tend to squander the minutes. Let's say you've got, like, I don't know, 17 minutes before your next call or before you must leave the house to meet up with friends or your next gym session or whatever the thing is. It's easy to default thinking, "Oh, it's 17 minutes. Like, you know, I can't really get anything done in 17 minutes." And this is probably the thing that I struggle with most today still, even though I would say I'm pretty good at managing my time because I've eliminated all these other time drains. But it's like, you know, I'll just randomly be like, "Okay, 17 minutes. Cool. I guess I'll just watch a YouTube video. I guess I'll go on Amazon. I guess I'll go on WhatsApp and be like, 'Oh my God, I have all these things to reply to.' I will sort of be in this limbo mode of sort of doing nothing until it's time to do something." And what I'm really trying to get better at when it comes to time management is recognizing that really every minute counts. 17 minutes is quite a lot of time to make progress on, like, a thing that's meaningful to me. And the key is to just be intentional with how we're using those little bits of time.
So, I hope you found something from this blog that's at
least useful, at least one experiment that you could potentially try in your
life and see if it works for you. And if you enjoyed this blog, then over here
is a blog about “How to spend less screen time”, where we're going to be
talking about the key skills that you need to master to get better at managing
your time. So, that'll be in that blog over here. Thank you so much for reading,
and I'll see you there.
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