 Today's video is brought to you by Picmonic. Imagine having an extra two hours of free time that you didn't have before to spend on yourself while still being an effective student. In med school, I use these extra two hours to get in the best shape of my life, write four books, spend quality time with my now wife, and most importantly, be super happy at the end of medical school. And in today's episode, I'm gonna show you exactly how to do the same for yourself step by step. Let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lexian, an internal medicine physician, and here on this channel, we make content to help people succeed on their medical journey or whatever journey you're on, but doing it with less stress. If you're new here and you enjoy the episode, I promise you there's so much more where this came from, so definitely consider it in that like button as well as subscribe and notification button. But in this episode, I wanna share with you the exact same approach that I use when I was a first year medical student because when I first started, things just weren't going my way. I wasn't getting the grades that I wanted but spending way too much time and had very little time to spend on myself. And while the traditional thought process is while I need to spend more time, use more resources to get better grades, I challenged myself to come up with a system where I could instead study more efficiently, we'll talk about it in a second, but then have more free time to then be able to spend on my favorite people, favorite hobbies, like working out, as well as just being able to just do absolutely nothing, like watch a basketball game and not feel guilty about it. So if you feel like your performance isn't quite there, but you just don't wanna make the commitment of taking away whatever free time you have left, then this episode is for you. So step number one to increase your free time is to do reverse planning. Now reverse planning is a three step process that I have taught myself as well as other medical students on how to increase and guarantee your free time without sacrificing your results when it comes to grades. Now step number one is to schedule your non-movable tasks and activities. Now even if you don't use a calendar, I recommend at least trying this for the first week or two on Google Calendar or iCal if you're an Apple user, but essentially step number one is to go ahead and book all of the things that you can't negotiate out of your calendar. So if you have to go to class with mandatory, if you have certain activities like an appointment or review session, a lab activity, or if you have personal obligations, like in the setting we have to go to our best friend's birthday dinner, or if you're religious and you go to church on Sunday, or if you can do another activity on the weekends, you would just book those off. So that's step number one. You wanna first have a visualization of how busy am I when I don't even have the time to be flexible. So if you have classes that are mandatory, other appointments, put those in first before we get into step number two and three. Now step number two, typically for most students, is to schedule in the time that they study. And when I was a medical student, this is what I would do. I would just call all of this study time. I probably should have put all of that in all caps because that's pretty much what it felt like. But really there was no start or end time or any type of goal of when I would have time for myself. And like I said before, even though my grades weren't ideal, I knew that spending more time wasn't necessarily the answer, or at least I challenged it. So the first thing that I now recommend doing for all students, especially if you are struggling with more free time, is to now schedule in an hour at the start and end of your day that's dedicated to yourself. So for a lot of people, an hour at the start of the day may be dedicated to something like working out. So for example, I would typically wake up around 5.30 or 6 o'clock when I was in medical school. And so I may have scheduled a workout from 6.30 to 7.30 and call that my gym session. And so we can put that in a certain code. We'll just say glue makes me happy. And so all of the 6.30 to 7.30 slots will be for the gym. To now I've already dedicated an hour to myself on something that I really enjoy for this setting is my personal fitness. And I feel happy at the start of the day that I'm actually focusing on something that I actually wanna do versus going to class. Now the second part of this is to dedicate some time and a latter happy day for something that you really enjoy. Now this can obviously vary. So for example, you may actually enjoy going to your best friend's birthday dinner. So you may not actually really need something additional to be fun on Thursday, but on Wednesday you may say, oh, there's a basketball game. So I love basketball. So I'm going to watch, I'm gonna say if you're a Lakers fan. If you're not, I'm sorry, it's okay. But on Wednesday, I'm going to watch a Lakers game. On Tuesday I may dedicate an hour to read a book that I've been wanting to read. So I really enjoy reading. And then on Friday I may spend a longer session. So instead of an hour, it may be a dinner day with my wife. Now for most students, I recommend starting with an hour because most struggle with finding that much free time. But once you start getting a hang of this, you'll start to say, okay, it's okay for me to have two hours dedicated to spending time with my wife. And instead, now I have to be more efficient and not waste two hours and inefficient study techniques. So now when we look at this calendar, we can already see the things that you have to go to as well as the things that you want to go to and you've already dedicated free time to yourself. Now the anxiety comes from what a Lakshman and how do I study with this amount of time where I'm usually used to studying all the way to 9 p.m. I don't have time for a Laker game or a dinner day or reading for fun. Honestly, all of that is bogus because here we'll have to talk about how to really get efficient with the time you have remaining. Most of us are familiar with idea Parkinson's law that says that work will fit the time that you allocate to it. So if you give yourself 10 hours to do something, it's gonna take 9.99 hours to do. If you give yourself five hours, you're gonna somehow figure out how to do it right at five hour mark. And so that is really where this concept applies. Now, if for example, you realize that Thursday you have less time because you have this dinner date on Wednesday, you pretty much have no time to do additional studying because you want to watch that Laker game, then you may have to force yourself to say, well, Tuesday is where I have the most amount of free time. So where can I make sure that I study and doing it super effectively? Now, this is a good point to talk about how to have an efficient study system. If you're new to this channel, I definitely recommend checking out some of our study playlists, which I'll link down below, as well as some of our top study videos that we have here on YouTube. It's really an idea of how you can become more efficient without necessarily spending more time. And one of my favorite ways of helping students identify that they're actually already wasting the time that they wish they could have had for free time is before they do this activity, is that they go ahead and put on the calendar things that they're currently doing. So what are they doing for class? What are they doing before and after? And then ask them, how effective was this time slot that you were previously using here doing whatever method? If you're reading your notes or watching a specific video on an external resource, how effective was that to your upcoming quiz that you had or your test? If you can identify a few things in your schedule saying that actually wasn't worth my time, that is a good thing to start taking out. And you can start to do that with each and every single one of activities. That would be step number one. Now, after removing those least effective or least important tasks, if you're still having trouble saying, well, I don't really know how to use this time effectively because I feel like I need this much time, then one of the things I would recommend is checking out some of our programs down below, including the rapid study accelerator, essentially helps you identify what type of study techniques you're using, which ones are essentially bogus without you being realizing or which ones you should start actually doing more. And if you need even more help where you know your current study approach is not working and you need some ideas of what other things you could be doing and do things that I recommend is checking out the level of your studying program down below, as well as our one-on-one coaching. If you really need that one-on-one kind of help to help improve your studying, all those programs would be linked down below. One of the favorite strategies that we like to show students is how to take this time that they spend in class, absorbing information, to something that they can come home and immediately start reviewing. So ideally, you're taking notes in class in a way that you can easily come back and essentially quiz yourself, whether that's through flashcards or an outline or a Word document or whatever it may be, but essentially you would be then force yourself to review the lectures from that day. If you don't have a good approach of taking notes yourself, sometimes the best use of your time is to use a high-yield resource to really fill in those gaps and that's a good time to bring in today's sponsor, which is PicMonic. Now, if you're not familiar with PicMonic, they have hundreds and hundreds of videos on any topic you need to know for your medical school or medical career and essentially you can find any topics of you're learning about diabetes and metformin. You can watch the relevant videos from the lectures that day. So if I went to class in the morning and I was learning about different diabetic meds, I can essentially watch this minute and 52-second video about metformin and get an idea of all these interesting images that are purposely made to make sure that I understand those key concepts of metformin. I have the text down here in case I forget or lose something and then I can quiz myself to make sure that I truly understand that lecture and then I can go and learn about the next medications, whether it's like sulfonylureas or liposides, et cetera. So that would be a great time to use a high-yield resource like PicMonic down below. Now, if an all-in-one resource like PicMonic is something that you're interested in, then definitely recommend checking it out using the link down below. And if you're interested in getting started and use the code, the empty journey at checkout, you'll also get an additional 20% off thanks to our friends at PicMonic. And as always, thanks to PicMonic for being a sponsor of today's video. But as you can see, my friends, the schedule really started with the stuff that you couldn't move and then forces you to actually schedule into things that you really want in your life, which is you, and then using that extra bit of time saying what is really necessary and what can I truly get done in five hours? I was studying for 10 hours, what was the waste of time? How can I become more efficient? You really start to think a little bit differently. Again, if you need more thoughts, if you need more strategies and ideas of whatever things you're doing, all the programs down below, both paid and free, you guys can check out for more info. Now, the last thing I wanna leave you guys with is with an idea from one of my favorite books called The Slight Edge, which focuses on small things that we can do, truly make a big difference in compounds over time. Medical school itself, for example, is four years. You focus each and every day of trying to get just a little bit better on how efficient you can be in focusing more on your happiness and free time. You'll be both a happy med student and as well as more efficient with the time that you have left. So again, if you're somebody who's not quite getting the performance, it's not really about putting in more hours, but using the hour you currently have and using it more effectively and making sure you have that time for yourself so you can remain motivated and happy throughout the process. As always, guys, if you have more questions, make sure you drop in on the comment section down below. If you did enjoy this video, probably enjoy this video right here on how to use Onky Like a Pro, as well as this video right here on how to study in medical school step by step. But with that, my friends, as always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Make sure you hit that like and subscribe button. I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care. Peace.