How to take ownership of your time | Nasir Kharma | TEDxMaviliSquare
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WZMR6mlPG8 Video ID: 7WZMR6mlPG8 ============================================================ Transcriber: Anh Nguyen Reviewer: Ines Dif Hi, my name is Nasir Kharma, and I’m a 4th year medical student at King’s College London. As someone who gets bored quite easily, I find myself taking on many projects, challenging myself to be highly productive in 24 hours we have each day. That’s why I go to the gym 2-3 times/week. I also run and play basketball. I have a successful YouTube channel with over 650 000 subscribers. I regularly socialize and hang out with friends and do this while being a full time medical student, going to the hospital on most days and spending hours studying at home. As a result, I often get asked: ″Hey Nasir, where do you find the time to do these things?″ And I want to share that in this talk. The theme of this TED event is mirrors. And when I heard this, what came to mind is standing in front of the mirror and looking at the best version of you who you want to be in the future: the ″you″ that started going to the gym and is a happier and healthier person, the ″you″ that started side hustle with your friend and now earns extra income each week, the ″you″ that took 30 minutes each day to practice a new skill like yoga or coding or public speaking, and is now feeling accomplished as you become good at something new. In this talk, I want to share the basic building blocks that I use everyday to fit in everything that I want to do in my life. Taking ownership of your time, making promises to yourself and visualizing accomplishments. I think the most important step in taking ownership of your time, is realizing that only you are in control of your own time. I really don’t like the phrases ″I don’t have time″ or ″I wish I had more time″, as I believe everybody has enough time to do what they want in their day. It’s about realizing where that time is, taking ownership and control of it and using it effectively. The reason I say this is because I know that the majority of us, whether we realize it or not, whether we want to believe it or not, spend around an hour of the day, in the best case, just wasting time. And when I say wasting time, I’m referring to activities that bring little or no value to our life. A great example that I think a lot of us can relate to is scrolling through social media on our phone. Now, I don’t think using social media is inherently bad. In fact, I get a ton of value from watching things on social media. I’m just saying that once we pass that point and we’re sitting down, mindlessly scrolling through our phone, that’s when we’re wasting time. Now, we take that example and we look at it as a single event. You’ve spent an extra 5-10 minutes scrolling through your phone mindlessly. It’s not a big deal. But if you do that multiple times a day, every single day, then you’ll find that over a week, this adds up to a substantial time. And if that time adds up to 2 or 3 hours, then just imagine what you could be doing with an extra 2 or 3 hours in your week. You would never say ″I don’t have time″ or ″I wish I had more time″ again. And that’s just one example. We haven’t talked about going down a YouTube rabbit hole or calling, texting friends endlessly, binge watching TV shows. We haven't even touched those uses of time. Now, those things have their own value and they are useful. Just when you do in excess and mindlessly, that’s when it becomes a waste of time. The point is that each of us has within our day around an hour, not doing something that’s bringing us happiness, fulfillment, accomplishment. We can take that time, repurpose it, mode it, shift it and put it into something else that we care about: a passion project, a new instrument, a skill, whatever it is you want to do. So the first step is to realize that the time that you’re looking for, that you wish you had to do the things that you want to do, it actually does exist in your day. You need to identify, realize, take it and use it to do something you care about. The second building block is that I make promises to myself that I can keep. We’ve all been in situations where we tell ourselves that we’re going to do that tomorrow, or we’re going to start a new project when the clock turns to the hour, or I’m going to get off this couch after watching one more YouTube video. We’ve all been there. And one thing that really helps me break out of a situation like that is that I make a promise to myself. I truly believe that if I’m not going to hold myself accountable, if I'm not going to be my own hype man, if I’m not going to make sure I get things done, then who is looking out for me? It’s this idea of shifting my thinking from relying on external motivation, to relying on internal motivation. I don’t want to be reliant on anybody else or any external factor outside my control to make sure that things get done, which are relevant to me. If I tell myself that tomorrow I’m going to study at 9 a.m., then at 8:55, I will be on the desk, with coffee and snacks, ready to start. And the reason that I start working at 9 if I told myself that I’m going to start working at 9 is that over years, I’ve made thousands deals or promises to myself and I’ve delivered on them every single time. If I tell myself I’m going for a run in the evening, despite the weather, despite whether I’m tired or not, I have to go on that run in the evening because I told myself I was going to. Same for a meeting with a friend or completing a project on time or whatever it is that you need to do. If you tell yourself you’re going to do something, then stick to it, show up, deliver on your own promise. No one cares about you more than you, and nobody has more to gain or lose as a consequence of your actions than you. And when you’re identified with a person who is punctual, who gets things done, who delivers on time, who sticks to their promises, you will become that person and you are that person. So you take accountability of yourself and your own actions and do what you promise yourself that you're going to do. The last building block I talk about is visualizing your accomplishments. I love the nature of routines because I feel it holds a power over us as nothing else does. Once you’ve done something a couple of times or for a couple of days, you have the internal motivator that pushes you to continue doing. Humans don’t like to break routines. So I think harnessing routines and using them to our advantage is a very good way to extract as much value as we can from our time and do all the things that we actually want to do. And the best way that I find to maintain a routine is to visualize your progress and visualize your accomplishment of doing the activity. For example, you’ve gone to the gym 3 days or you’ve avoided sugary foods 2 times, or you made a smart spending decision that you otherwise wouldn’t have done. Make sure that you reward yourself. Anything you’re proud of, visualize it in some ways, shape or form, write it down on paper or a sticky note and put it on your fridge or on your desk in front of your monitors so you can see it every day. Write it on a whiteboard in your room, or put it in the notes app on your phone. You can even download all kinds of apps to keep track of habits and track your progress every day. Whatever it is, make your accomplishments easily visible and easily trackable. The easier it is to track your progress, routine, habit, the more likely you do it, and the more likely you get the positive feedback loop from seeing your progress and encouraging you to do that thing more. Before you know it, completing your tasks, tracking them and seeing your progress will become second nature. When you build that routine, you’ll have the opposite issue you had before. Instead of finding it difficult to start a habit, you will find it difficult to break that habit as you’ve been doing it for so long and have an internal motivator to keep it. If you’re skeptical or apprehensive about building blocks that I use to take ownership of my time, just try this, make a promise to yourself of something that you want to do, whatever that thing is, one time, specifying a date and time in which you’re going to do that thing, write it down on a piece of paper and place it somewhere where it’s visible. And lastly, walk into your living room and say that thing out loud. You've just made a promise to yourself. Now keep that promise. Thank you for listening.