Transcription
I have spent the last five years experimenting with almost every productivity and time management tip out there. These are five small habits, some that are evidence-backed and some of my own, that I now use to get the absolute most out of my time. It's how I've worked a full-time job in banking with a two-hour commute while starting and running a YouTube channel, which I now upload on every single week alongside working on three other projects at the moment, eating well, working out, getting 7 hours of sleep at night, and still having time to do things I love like seeing friends, family, reading, and trying out new things. Let's get into it.
The very first habit is fill in the empty minutes with portable tasks. When I was working in my banking job, I spent about 2 hours a day commuting, 1 and a half hours on the train, and then another 30 minutes walking between stations. That's 10 hours a week, which is basically just another working day sitting there being wasted on commuting. And I would go as far as to say most people use that commuting time to scroll through social media or to play games on their phone. And I used to do this, too. It was a great way to just escape the day-to-day. It is the path of least resistance and it feels good in the moment. It's so easy to scroll through social media and all of these empty moments that we have throughout our day. It's not just commuting on the train, but waiting for a family or friend, waiting in the car for your kids, waiting for a meeting. These moments feel like they're lost time. They feel like they're empty time. But there are so many pockets of time throughout the day like this that can be filled instead with something called portable tasks. These portable tasks, they are things that don't take up much time. They can be done either using your phone or using your brain and they don't require much focus. So, this could be things like organizing the apps on your home screen, editing content whilst you're on the go, using your brain. So, thinking through a problem or working through an idea or spend the commute tracking your finances for the week. I have a completely free budget tracker that makes this super easy to do and you can do it anywhere on the go. It's linked in the description or you go to nisha.meist. Utilizing these empty moments would buy you back almost one working day. If you're someone who's always saying I don't have time to do things that I want to do for myself, seeing friends and family, going out, utilizing this community time, utilizing these empty hours will give you back the time that you can instead use to do things that you love. Just try this out for the next week.
Moving on to the next habit, and that is match your task with your energy levels. When I first realized this, my life completely changed and I'd never looked at productivity the same way again. I used to think that my mental capacity stayed constant throughout the whole day. Like doing a task at 7:00 a.m. would take the same time and effort as doing it at 6:00 p.m. Turns out it doesn't work that way. Our bodies don't work that way. Our bodies go through natural peaks and dips in energy and focus throughout the day. And once I understood this, I tried and tested it and completely restructured my entire schedule. I stopped working out first thing in the morning. For months, I used to force myself to go to the gym at 8 a.m. because that's what I thought I should do because everyone seems to do it. But my best creative ideas would pop up during that time and I'd lose them or I had to keep running to my phone to write them down mid-workout. What I was doing was using a task that energized me, which is working out, at a time when I was already high energy in the morning, and then putting the task that required mental energy after that, when I was depleted. It was completely mismatched. So, I switched it. Now, I do my workouts at 2 or 3 p.m. as an energy boost when my creative juice starts to run low, when my mental capacity starts to get drained, and I use my mornings for deep focused work. Understanding your unique patterns isn't easy. It really comes down to self-awareness. So, I recommend tracking your energy for a few days or just think about when you normally do your best work. When does your energy dip? When are you the most focused? And when you start aligning your tasks with your energy levels, you'll end up finding that you multiply the quality of work that you produce. It takes less time and it feels easier. You're generally making work more fun because you have more energy to give to it.
And speaking of managing different types of work, if you're thinking about starting a side business, one of the biggest energy drains is trying to do absolutely everything yourself. It makes starting a business feel impossible when you realize you're not just the founder, you're the entire team. When I launched this YouTube channel, I thought I was just making videos. But suddenly, I was the writer, the editor, the designer, the marketer, wearing every hat. And almost every founder I speak to experiences this same overwhelm, like you're being pulled in 10 different directions at once. Here's the thing. You don't actually have to do it all yourself. And that's where today's sponsor, Shopify, changes everything. Shopify powers 10% of all US e-commerce and millions of businesses worldwide. Instead of cobbling together different tools for payments, inventory, shipping, returns, and design, Shopify handles it all in one place. When I set up my first online business on Shopify, I went from idea to live store in minutes. By day one, I had a professional shop ready to take payments and run itself. plus 24/7 support backing me up. It felt like having an entire business team without the overhead. So, if you've been sitting on that side hustle idea thinking you don't have enough time, don't let the overwhelm stop you. Sign up for your £1 per month trial today at shopify.co.uk. That is shopify.co.uk to sign up for your £1 per month trial.
Moving on to the next habit that I've implemented, and that is not writing to-do lists. I used to be obsessed with to-do lists. I'd write down everything I needed to do and then I'd just stare at it like not knowing where to start. Here's what I figured out. Tasks are like water. If you don't give them a container, they'll just expand and fall whatever space you give them. But if you treat them like ice, putting them in a predefined space, suddenly they have boundaries. So, I've ditched to-do list completely. Every single task as soon as it comes up goes straight into my calendar now. Need to call my bank takes a 15-minute slot at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Need to check emails, blocked out at 3 p.m. Need to call my sister, recurring slot every Sunday morning. If it's not in the calendar, it's basically not going to happen. And the bit that's made me even more productive is I batch similar tasks together. So all my personal admin, sorting out finances, moving banks, setting up new automations, Thursday afternoon, done. All my content planning batched together. This way I'm not constantly context switching throughout the day. And the difference this has made has been huge. I really recommend you just try it for a week and then throughout my day if I'm running behind or one task has taken longer than I expected and I've missed the deadline for the next one. I just drag that over to another slot in the future. Therefore, it doesn't get forgotten. It doesn't fall through the cracks and I'm not carrying around this mental burden of what am I supposed to be doing right now. Highly recommend trying this out. Just try it out the next week and see how much more productive you are.
The next habit is stack active tasks with passive ones. This one is a complete game-changer. Instead of doing one thing at a time, I've started stacking active tasks with passive ones. So, how does this work? Passive activities are normally physical things like walking, doing the dishes, working out, meal prepping. Active activities are mental things like listening to a podcast, thinking through an idea, brainstorming. Now, multitasking on two passive or two active tasks doesn't work. You can't run a meal prep at the same time. You can't write an email and respond to a message at the same time. But if you habit stack one of each, that's where the magic happens. So, here's how I use this. Just this morning, I voice noted myself ideas for this video as I was walking. I call a friend whilst I'm cleaning my wardrobe. I listen to podcasts whilst I'm at the gym. I respond to messages whilst I'm commuting or on the train. Think about all those tasks you do that don't need 100% of your brain. That's your opportunity to stack something else on top. You're probably sitting here right now with a portable device in your hands that you can do absolutely anything on. This makes stacking tasks one of the easiest ways to implement more productivity into your life without needing to find extra hours in the day.
The next habit is keep your life organized. I used to waste so much time just looking for things. Where's that invoice? Which folder did I save that script in? What was that website I bookmarked? And it was eating into my actual productive time without me even realizing it. Then I stopped trying to remember where things are and started creating systems that do the remembering for me. First I organized my browser. So I pinned the tabs that I use the most. And these change month. It could be notion, my circle community calendar, a specific file that I always access, a project that I'm working on. They're always pinned to the top and they're in the same order. Sounds simple, but it's probably saved me 20 minutes a day. Then I've tackled my Google Drive. This was chaos. Files everywhere random names like final_final_v3 folders inside folders so I created a very simple folder structure business personal content within each there's very clear subfolders the key is to make it so ridiculously simple that future you cannot mess it up when you save a file it should be so obvious where it goes when you're looking for something it should be so obvious where it's saved and then here's a habit that keeps it all working once a week whether it's the end of the week or the start of the week. Spend 10 minutes doing a digital cleanup. Delete the files you don't need. Move things in the right folder. Clear out your downloads folder. It's like tidying your desk but digital. It will send you countless hours of frustrated searching later.
That's it. Those are five habits that have completely changed my life. If you enjoy this video, you'll also enjoy this video right here on 17 small habits that made me rich. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you next.