 All right, guys, what is going on? Lux here from the MD journey, helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. Tell me if the following sounds like you. You're stressed. You feel like you're working yourself into the ground. You're having trouble relaxing. And when you try to take some time off, you feel guilty. If you answered yes to any of the following guys that you are going to love today's video, where I am answering a question from one of my subscribers who sent me an email saying, Lux, I'm having trouble with those things. Here's my calendar. I am trying to study for the MCAT and I am struggling. I want some free time and want my personal sanity back. And so I recorded a video response to her and I showed her on her calendar, what kind of things I would change if I was her. And so she was nice enough to allow me to share this video with you guys. And so I know you guys will take a lot from it. Hopefully for those of you are in the same situation as my friend, hopefully you will enjoy this video and can make some changes to regain your own personal sanity. So we're gonna get to that video. But first, if you do enjoy this video, make sure you give it a like, join the community by subscribing to the channel. And also, if you enjoy the content like this, I'm a huge geek about productivity, learning how to study better and just hacking both your medical journey while staying motivated and pumped and excited. So in the links, you will find a lot of different resources that I love to give my students, free guys, free video courses just to help you guys out. So those will be in the description, but let's get to this video. I'm going to be helping my friend Lacy after this intro. Hey Lacy, first of all, thank you so much for sending the email and allowing me to make this video and kind of share it with other people who kind of have your same problem. So I wanna quickly just summarize for the people watching this of what your email entailed. It basically says, Lux, I'm stressed, I'm studying way too much, having trouble taking time off. And more importantly, like I feel like I'm working myself in the ground and whenever I do take time off, I feel guilty. So I totally relate to everything that you kind of mentioned in your email because that used to be me. And thanks for sending your Google Calendar. I know you probably thought I was overkill, but it's actually a perfect way for me to help you as well as other people watching this because there are people are gonna be watching this video and it's like, yes, that's me. I have this issue where I kind of feel like I'm working and then rest when I can. But I'm gonna kind of go through your calendar and give you some tips on how you can particularly switch that and flip it around. So let's pull that up. I pulled it up in this fashion so hopefully it turns out well. But basically what I see when I look at this first is I just see work, actually find this humorous. So thanks for letting me kind of go. But you have this little section called personal sanity. And this is so true because I feel like a majority of our calendars normally look like this. Or when we can fit it in, we have like this part of personal sanity. I do see that you have it in other places. You look like you meditate every morning. You kind of dedicate these small bits of time to personal time for yourself. But the reason I always say first that you're having so much issues is it looks like you're trying to fit your school and educational obligations before your personal ones. So the first thing is let's restructure and let's flip this on its head. If you're having trouble balancing and relaxing, I would actually encourage you to do that first before you put anything else on your calendar. So we're gonna break this down to a first couple of steps that I like to teach the rest of my students on doing when we're trying to make them a little bit more productive but also feel a little bit more sane. So I want this personal sanity to honestly be a majority of your calendar or at least to be the majority of the focus. So the first thing that I want you to do is to find things in your calendar that are basically at the same time every day. You can't really reschedule them. So I would assume that's like the anatomy right here or your ecology labs. So your classes for one would be good examples of things that you obviously can't reschedule. And so put those into your calendar first and it looks like you obviously have those a perfect. Anything that you also repeat. So I know you said you mentioned that you were doing research and for everyone watching this video you're obviously studying for your MCAT. So you're trying to figure out how to balance your life while studying for the MCAT. And so we'll get back to that point about the MCAT towards the end of this video. But first schedule and those repeated tasks that aren't able to be moved around. So do your ecology, your clubs that you have to show up to. And then before you start scheduling in your MCAT before you start scheduling in maybe like studying for your anatomy or tutoring, whatever this may be I want you to schedule in your personal sanity. The goal should be to aim for one to two things that are important to you that you would look forward to. So for many people it's fitness some people are taking out spending time with their family for you it may be reading I see that you play the cello. So I don't know if this is a repeated task that you're doing for personal sanity. If so maybe you want more than just what is this probably like 30 minutes that you're giving yourself. So schedule those in first. A lot of the things that I recommend to my students is maybe do one thing in the morning before they wake up and then one thing to look forward to at the end of the day. So currently in your calendar I see that your evenings look free how realistic they are free most of the time. I probably guess that you're probably working yourself into these late hours and then by the time you want to have some personal sanity you're probably just getting tired. So schedule something maybe close to the morning near when you wake up. So if you're somebody that really likes to go to the gym whatever time you wake up maybe make it to where you may meditate but then go to the gym every single day if that's something you like or if you like reading then do that for like an hour or 30 minutes but get that personal sanity in first and then schedule in something for the end of the day. It can be at different times depending on the evening and how your schedule starts to look but maybe it's watching your favorite TV show maybe it's just reading books whatever it may be going for a run but schedule that in. Some of the times they may be really unique so catching dinner with a specific friend significant other but schedule those in. So now you have your repeated tasks that usually your classes you have your personal sanity starting to be built in you have a system to where the start and the end of the day are meant to relax you and to look forward to now find time for your study. So it's very easy and I used to do this too where you see this slot from seven to 11 you're like well I'm just gonna put all that MCAT but as you mentioned in your email you're not always using that time effectively you specifically said that sometimes you study and you feel like you're focusing an unnecessary amount of time on the fluff and everybody watching this video can relate sometimes we study and we spend too much time on fluff but when you schedule your life like this and your school schedule like this because you're focused on personal sanity you'll have less time to kind of dedicate X amount of time or you know whatever to studying. So during the seven to 11 block let's say after scheduling your personal sanity you may just have eight to 10 30 or eight to 11. That's fine. But schedule those times in now that you realistically would want to work on the MCAT. I mentioned that I'd get back to the MCAT towards the end. So let's do your school studying first because that will probably come first. So the times of the day that you would typically study for anatomy or your ecology class schedule those in too. And then schedule in these slots for your MCAT. Sometimes the problem is is when you schedule a huge chunk like this students and I'm not saying that you do this we'll schedule in the time but we don't really decide what we're gonna do on the 28th between five to eight. We basically wake up and say I'm supposed to do MCAT stuff and then try to figure out what to do during those three hours. But it's very easy to want to get distracted and to not be as productive as we want for those four to three hour chunks. So what I encourage you to do is have an overall schedule like this is fine. First, obviously restructure it to where your personal sanity comes first. But then when you have these blocks I like to call these my work hour blocks. You know that you're gonna be working on your MCAT for three or four hours. The night before or the morning of I want you to dedicate 30 minutes to an hour for specific tasks. So for your MCAT it may be for the first hour I need to get to through the first chapter of the biology review book. The next hour I want to do 20 questions and review them. And then the final hour you may want to do some flashcards, whatever it may be. But schedule in specific time slots. I like to call this scheduling your hours or 30 minute increments because then it keeps you very accountable. It avoids those instances where you feel like you're studying the fluff because what's gonna happen is let's say five to six you tell yourself I'm gonna make myself read chapter one of the bio section. I would encourage you from six to seven to do a totally different task. Don't make it bio, make it. I need to do 30 questions from U-World Q-Bank, whatever. Because it's so different, if you start getting very distracted on your first task, you're gonna get behind your third or your second task and you may not even get to your third one. So do that to where you schedule in time and you have to meet your deadlines. It also makes you very focused when you're studying to avoid studying the fluff because you only have a set amount of time versus three to four hours which seems like an eternity. So it's only 30 minutes seems to be a time that works at least well for me and a lot of the students that I teach to be a very focused amount of time. So do that. So schedule in your work hours and the night before the morning of, schedule in little slots within those where what you'd like to do. So just to review now, like we've scheduled your whole schedule to where your personal sanity comes first. Now you have some work hours that you wanna do with the time that's left and every single day, either the night before the morning or if you're gonna schedule a specific task to do within your work hours. So same thing for your anatomy, you may say this is my time to do anatomy but if this is your study hour then you may say first 30 minutes I'm going to review this portion of the body or this lecture and then the next one may be I'm gonna do these practice questions or do my homework assignment but give a specific task versus just making all of that anatomy. So I think you get the gist of that. Just that practice in itself I feel like helps so many students make sure that they are using their time appropriately and they feel productive cause you're getting a lot of various tasks done. My last thing on this work hour thing and then I have one more tip for you is to add in these little buffer times. So normally, I do this too where we'll schedule five to six, chapter one, six to seven, chapter two, seven to eight, 40 practice questions and we rarely do we get through all of that on the time that we're scheduled it. Some things may go over time some things we may finish faster. So what I encourage you to do is 15 minutes before the task and 15 minutes after the task given a buffer time. So if you think the task will take you an hour makes about an hour and a half dedicated to that task because it may take you longer it may not wake up on that day it may take you longer to meditate or get ready. So you may have some dull time where you don't even get to begin but then you may also be taking longer on the task. So it just gives you a little bit of wiggle room in case a task is taking too long and if you manage to finish before that dedicated time you can start on your next one you can take a break and do another personal sanity task or you can just completely, you know try to get all your tasks done quicker to where you have some more of a break towards the end. So add in those buffer times you may not feel like you have as much on your calendars and you normally do but I'd feel like most of my students and including myself when I do this are more productive because we're meeting our deadlines we're not having that thing where we have 10 things on our to-do list but we only get to the first three we get to that point where our to-do list is only five items but all five items are done. So the latter option is much better and one of the last tips I'll give you for restructuring your calendar and getting that balance is this day and you know this may not have become complete on your calendar but if you can I'd recommend you take the whole day off and that sounds a little bit intimidating especially with the MCAT or even with a normal schedule but you need that break even with the MCAT without the test I would recommend all my students to take a day off so to make this even more practical it sounds silly but first of all I would take this MCAT study to say off it may seem like it's the best day for you to study for the MCAT but I think it's gonna be the best day for you to have your personal stay at sanity and kind of rejuvenate over a tough week so what I would do is if you wanna wake up at 4.30 I'm totaled for phone-in of that but on a Saturday maybe wake up a little bit later and start scheduling in those fun things you wanna do on a Saturday even if you take a half day and you start studying down here that's fine but say okay you know I may go for a run this morning I may go have breakfast at this pretty cool place make you know watch a movie that I've been really wanting to do for three hours schedule those in cause you feel much less guilty when you can see that slot open in your calendar and actually execute the task and then like if you wanna study the latter half of Saturday it's totally fine but you don't feel as guilty doing the fun stuff in the early parts of the day and then getting to work the latter half or vice versa but I would encourage you to try and take this entire day off schedule your funds and you always have things when it's a Monday you know okay Saturday I'm gonna have a really fun day and even when it's fun day you know when you wake up you're gonna have something to look forward to you're gonna have something to look forward to at the end of the day as well that goes for every single day so regardless if you're studying for the MCAT if you're somebody watching this video that just has a normal typical pre-med schedule do that for your wellbeing, for your personal sanity. So that's my overall kind of package on how to become a little bit more productive as well as kind of remain sane. Another question that you asked that I think a lot of students may find beneficial is you're studying for the MCAT and you just kind of wanna know how to study for it and I'm gonna make a totally separate video but just to answer your question I see you're using exam crackers kind of your source and you wanna know whether you should make flashcards how to kind of study that and I will tell you that I will make a future video on it to be a little bit more detailed but you asked about me using Anki cards and I love using Anki cards and what I would recommend is use Anki cards for your weaknesses, the questions you get wrong and your mistakes. So if you're doing a practice question after reading like a chapter and you get a few wrong definitely make Anki cards on those and then the next day make it like a system where before you start your next phase of studying you do your flashcards. You review the mistakes you made from the day before and Anki's great for that. So that would be definitely a way I would use Anki. I wouldn't necessarily make a flashcard the whole time around because what I tend to find is that a lot of people will spend more time making the flashcards than actually using them. So do use the flashcards on situations that you know you don't actually understand the material and a great way to highlight those instances are things that you get wrong when you practice exams things that you just get wrong in questions or questions that you guess correctly but you knew they probably wouldn't have gotten correctly otherwise. So make flashcards of those that keeps your deck small it keeps it very easy for you to review your weaknesses and the other stuff you know you're gonna pick up over time. So have a system and maybe using Anki for your weaknesses. It usually turns into more of a burden for the students that use Anki the whole time. Especially when you're trying to find personal sanity. The last point I will make is that because you're trying to fit in the next few hours of MCAT studying within your hours that you're studying here it's going to be tricky. But I think if we use that system that we talked about where your personal sanity comes first and then find the time that's left over to schedule in very efficient studying sessions and work sessions I think you're going to have a much better result. So try that out maybe for a week. Send me an update. I think people would love to hear how this process goes. And yeah, I just hope this was helpful and feel free to send me an email on how it goes. Pretty sure people watching this video are going to be excited to see what your results are. But hopefully that helps. But best of luck on your journey. Best of luck on your MCAT. You're gonna do great. I will talk to you soon. All right guys, hopefully that video was helpful. Remember that your personal sanity comes first. And so to help your productivity, to help have some balance in your life, schedule, your fun, your sanity first. You will be able to efficiently use the time that's left to be effective on your studying. But use that skill to help yourself out. You don't want to be headed towards burnout as a med student and especially not as a pre-med at this phase. The journey is long. The journey really has no finish line. So you want to create the good habits now while you can regardless of where you are on your journey to be productive, to use your time, but make sure you have time for you. So hopefully you found those tips helpful. Make sure in the comment section that you wish my friend Lacey the best on her journey as well as on her MCAT that's going to be coming up soon. And if you are on your journey and you're on a similar phase as her, I wish you the best of luck as well. So make sure you give her some good mojo in the comment section. If you guys have any more questions or you want me to make a video response specifically to your situation, I don't have to share it with everyone like I did here. But if you want that kind of personal interaction, make sure you send me an email at themdjourney.com, add to email.com. I'd be happy to help you guys out. But if you do enjoy this video, make sure you help your friend out. Give me a like and subscribe to the channel. Again, lots of free resources in the description including my free video course on how I study from start to finish at medical school and a lot of my previous friends have found that to be helpful. So check those out in the description but that's gonna be it for this video. I will see you guys in the next week's video. Take care my friends.