 So today we're going to talk about how to become more productive by scientifically backed productivity techniques and methods that you can use to help yourself become more productive and get more done by this weekend. So let's get into it. Are you guys welcome to the MD journey, a channel completely dedicated to help students like you succeed on their journey with less stress. My name is Laksham, the internal medicine physician and resident in training. And I've been making videos just like this one the last two plus years. So if you're new to the channel, consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell to get two videos just like this one on a weekly basis. If you enjoy the video, make sure you show your support by hitting that like button as well. And now this is probably not the only productivity video you've watched. So to make sure you actually get some value, I want to share a few things that I've gained personally by following some of these techniques, particularly in med school, where it's normal for you to study about 10 hours a day. I said I was able to use some of these techniques to shorten my studying to five, six hours and finish by seven PM on those days and still have several hours to enjoy myself. In addition, I was able to use some of these techniques to help me do things outside of medicine. So that includes writing books, I think I wrote four books throughout medical school and I grew the YouTube channel and the blog. And I still was able to have enough time to spend with my significant other and now wife as well as family and friends. So if you're a busy student or you're busy with your job and you want to find a few extra hours a day and throughout your week to help you enjoy the parts of you that make you you go ahead and stay tuned. So the first productivity technique and method that I want to talk about is to improve your deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a concept that's made famous by the book peak as well as productivity experts like Cal Newport. Essentially, what deliberate practice is is focusing on a specific task within a work period. So for example, you may look at somebody who plays an instrument like a pianist and you think that to become really good at the piano, you just have to spend more hours. And there is some truth to that. But really the difference between somebody who is an expert and somebody who knows how to play the piano is not about the hours that they put in, but instead of what they put into the hours. And so the way you can take this concept as a student is simply ask yourself when you're studying within an hour period or two hour period, what specifically are you doing? And what's the goal? You know, normally for many of us, we may sit down and say, I want to review, but that is very umbrella, vague term. So instead, ask yourself, what's the best technique that you have to retain the information and learn it long term? Whatever the technique is, ask if you can make yourself do a specific technique for a dedicated period of 30 minutes to an hour and a half, essentially having these focused periods throughout your week and your day. Allow you to get the most bang for your buck in a short amount of time because you're using a high value skill to improve on something like retaining material for a course. The main takeaway is if you want to improve your productivity, how much you get done, ask yourself what you're specifically doing each task and take away some of the junk and focus on your highest value activity, whether that's practicing specific chords that you struggle with, if you're trying to learn an instrument or using your best study technique to work on retaining information. And if you want to learn more about deliver practice, then you can check out two books that I'll link down below. One's called Peak and that second one is called Defocus Written by Cal Newport. I'm getting to productivity tip number two, getting started is all you might honestly need. I know we may look at different corners of the internet to find a hack or a different tool that can help us get more done in the last time. There's an interesting phenomenon known as the Zygernic Effect, which essentially says that once humans get started, they kind of have a tendency of wanting to finish the task at hand. A great example of this and I'll link down the full description down below is scientists did a study where they essentially had subjects, they would give them puzzles, but less time than what it would take to actually finish them. So it was almost impossible for somebody to actually go through all of them, but the task was to do as much as you can. Now, when time was up, the subjects were told that they were done, they had nothing else to do, but 90% of the subjects still try to finish the puzzles. This just goes to show that sometimes it's not about the time or getting more done, but actually getting to the task that may allow us to finish it in the first place. So if you're someone struggling with productivity and you want to get more done, ask how long it takes you to actually get to the initiation of the task, whether that be studying or working on a personal task. Now, productivity number three is to take more frequent breaks. I'm a huge proponent of this because I think sometimes, especially students, we try to overwork what our body is naturally capable of doing. If we look at study after study and science, we see that productivity is probably best in a short amount of time. In fact, a study dated back to the 1980s evaluated factory workers and try to see if they could add an extra hour a day, as well as an extra day in the week, if that would actually improve the amount of results and output the factories my company saw, what they actually found was a decline in productivity and output by the workers and the factories with the addition of the extra day. So based off of that and similar studies, it seems like perhaps working less and frequently allows you to work more intensely and get more done. And these studies are consistent with other findings, such as the one done by the Federal Aviation Study, which found that working in 90 minutes chunks followed by a 10 to 20 minute break actually increases your focus by 16%. There's essentially this belief that humans have a natural uphill and downhill slope of their energy throughout the day, which makes sense. You know, most of us may feel energized around 10, 11 p.m. and our energies around eight or nine may not be as hot. And as a bonus tip while also increasing the amount of breaks you take, one of the things that I teach in one of my courses called Time Mastery is the idea that as you go throughout a day, perhaps increasing the amount of breaks you take or work in smaller chunks. So while at the start of the day, you may work at a 90 minute interval and then follow that up by a 10 minute break session, maybe later in the day instead and make them 30 minutes followed by a 10 minute break. It seems to follow the natural course of energy that we have throughout the day and still allows you to get more done without getting demotivated and unproductive. Now I have three more productivity tips and techniques to share with you guys. But before we get there, if you haven't done so already consider hitting that like button to support this video and the channel. And also let me know what your favorite productivity technique is to help you get more done in short amount of time. But now getting into tip number four is to have different forms of motivation to help you move forward. We already talked about the idea of productivity sometimes being dependent on getting started, but many of us don't have that issue. Instead, we may feel extremely productive and motivated at the start of the day. Sometimes many of us find that the output and the amount of work that we're able to do later in the day is really where we struggle to get more things done. One of the most common reasons for this, in addition to a lack of energy, as we talked about in the last tip, is also a lack of motivation. So one of my favorite things to do in medical school to keep myself motivated and going, but I was actually keep a list of done. Essentially, this was a list that I kept on my phone, a scratch piece of paper, or using the sticky note function on my laptop to indicate all the things I had done throughout the day. So if there's ever a point where I was feeling demotivated, I could simply look at that list and say, look, this is how much you've done so far, keep going, keep moving. And going back to the Zyger Nick effect, we have a desire to want to finish the things that we started. So if you create a list and you notice that you're crossing out more things throughout the day, you have a tendency of wanting to finish and get the rest of it done. At productivity number five, we have two more and I really enjoyed this one, which is to find your biggest form of distraction and make one small step today to remove it. Now for many of us, we all have the same form of distractions and that's usually something involving social media or cell phones. Now I made a complete video about how to minimize amount of time that you're spending on your phone, but one of the things I mentioned in that video is many of us get about 45 notifications a day on our phone. And usually we have a tendency of looking or responding in some form to the auditory and visual stimuli. At least 50% of those notifications that we get, we actually don't do anything. Sometimes we may see your phone and then go back to the tasks that we're doing. Initially, this may seem harmless, but there is a bit of energy that we actually have to lose from losing the focus from our current tasks to our cell phones. So if your phone is your main source of notification, do one small thing and this can be something as stopping the push notifications on your home screen or your lock screen that we don't see when you get a new text message or social media notification. And as a reminder, this tip is not to completely remove all distractions because that may be something you're able to do for one day, but not remain consistent for several days or three weeks. And this tip is meant to be small because if you can find your biggest source of distraction, simply eliminating that, whether it be a push notification or something distracting in your environment can help you get more done without you having to worry about minimizing your other forms of distractions just yet. My last productivity tip and technique is to practice batching. Batching is basically a productivity hack where you find a process. Let's say you're making a video for YouTube and you break it down into many different sections and then you do several of the initial steps together. So a good example would be instead of recording the video and then editing it and uploading it for YouTube, I may record multiple videos like I do here where I may record four to five out of time for you guys and then I can upload them to my laptop, focus on editing and then focus on the thumbnails and focus on uploading. Each of these activities have a specific part in my schedule and throughout my week and it keeps my focus on doing one thing at a time instead of all of the various steps that takes to reach completion. You can utilize batching in a variety of things in your life, including studying. I have a whole video on how to use batching in your studying to become more efficient. So I'll link that down below to avoid making this video long. Those guys are some of my favorite productivity tips backed by science to help you become more focused, get more done and less amount of time. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Before you leave, if you want more productivity tips, I will go ahead and link a playlist of all the different videos we have here on the channel. And if you want even more help to become a productivity machine, consider checking out Time Mastery, which will link down below in the description. It's a course dedicated specifically to help students become more productive in a short amount of time. And if you're interested in the course, you can also see what kind of results our past students have gotten. But that's basically it for this video, guys. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Make sure you drop your questions and comments down below, as well as suggestions for future videos. And if you haven't done so already, make sure you hit that like button if you enjoyed the video. And if you're not part of the community, consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell to be notified when we're putting out two videos just like this one every week. But thank you guys so much for watching this video, making it to the end for being a part of my journey. Hopefully, I've been a little helped to you guys on yours. I'll see you all the next one. Peace.