On today’s episode, we’ve got a COVID 19 special. So this morning I’ve been answering questions pretty much non stop just on Instagram DMS people been asked me, What can I do as a student who’s in lockdown who has to stay at home? What should I do to manage my time better to stay motivated at home? How do I do this? I’m usually at school, I usually have teachers telling me how to do my work or what to do next, or when I should take a break. I want to just quickly talk about how you can self manage yourself during these strange times.

And the reason why I feel like I can talk about this is because I do you know, 50 hours of my work at home anyway, this is something that I was kind of like what do you mean you’re struggling to self manage yourself? Because you know, I’m at home for a majority of my university course I live right next to my campus and I’ve got my computer here so I do most of my work from home. However, I understand that a lot of other countries they spend Most of their days at university from nine o’clock in the morning to maybe five in the afternoon. So for those of you who are now at home, I can understand how much you must be struggling. So I wanted to share with you the tips that I’ve built over the last couple of years that I’ve found really, really helpful for managing my time. So I want to start off with the biggest thing that changes everything for me. So when I find myself struggling to stay on task, when I’m struggling to not procrastinate, the biggest thing I do that changes at all is to leave my phone in another room. So I’m upstairs at the moment, I usually leave my phone downstairs with me when I study. And this just helps me so much. You know, I find myself just getting into that deep work or getting into my flow state being able to work on something consistently for an hour or two before having to take a break. And so I think it’s just so important to leave your phone in another room. If you find yourself getting on Facebook or Instagram every five to 10 minutes, it’s gonna break your flow state. So when you’re in that, you know, your optimum state when you’re being the most efficient you can be because you’re fully committed and you’re fully on task to the work you’re doing. When you break that flow, and you’re going on your phone and checking something, even though there’s no notifications there, or you’re just checking because it’s a habit, it really breaks that flow that you’re in, and it stops you from being as as as efficient as you. That’s really hard to say, as efficient as you can to leave your phone in another room is just massive, because it’s a habit we’ve made just to check our phones and just look at the notifications we’ve been given. Even if there’s nothing there, we just made it a habit to check our phones every five to 10 minutes and it really is detrimental to keeping us on task. And so that kind of leads to the next thing, which is the opposite, which is to take breaks regularly. And for me, I can work for four to six hours straight without having a break. However, I found that I do burn out if I do that. So what I’m more getting into is to work for one to two hours and then take you know a 510 minute break. Go grab a coffee, go for a walk or just go do something else for five to 10 minutes. And this helps refresh your mind and helps refresh you while you’re working from home. So rather than, you know, doing four to six hours, and then just getting burnt out, you can spend, you know, four or five days consecutively working on a project, where you’re spending, you know, 16 hour days, because that’s what I do, I would spend 16 hour days, especially over, you know, towards the end of the year, when you get your big projects, I would spend long hours working during the day. However, most people would spend a lot of this time inefficiently it wouldn’t be efficient 16 hours, but for me, I was spending, you know, 1415 of those hours, working efficiently, just in flow state working on my project, whereas if you’ve got your phone on you and you’re not taking breaks, then you might work for four to six of those hours of those 16 hours efficiently. And that’s just a waste of time and you find yourself actually feeling bad for yourself at the end of the day because you haven’t gotten done as much Do you want it to even though you spent so much time on it. So I think that’s really important to take regular breaks. And to just refresh yourself, go for a walk, go grab a glass of water, go grab a coffee, and just, yeah, that’s when you can check your phone for five to 10 minutes. But just know that when you’re in your flow state, and you take yourself out of that, to go take a break, it can be detrimental to the fact that it’s difficult to get back into that state. So usually, I’ll only go take a break if I’m finding myself drifting off and doing something else. But if I find myself that I’m just stuck into my work for, you know, the last three hours and I find myself just working really quickly, and I’m getting stuff done, and I want you to take a break for that reason, because, you know, I’m really enjoying what I’m doing and I’m stuck into it. However, I still might go grab a coffee or something just to take a break and refresh my mind. If you find yourself not being motivated, not staying on task and you’re just drifting off and you don’t really know what to do. It’s good just to stop what you’re doing to stop whatever you’re doing at that moment. And Because if you’re being inefficient and you’re not working as efficiently as you can in your flow state, then it really is just a waste of your time. So just stop what you’re doing. Go take your five minute break, if you do find yourself in that situation, come back, grab a pen and paper and just write out a plan of everything you need to do everything that you want done by the end of the day. And then you can start to schedule out in and you can start to say that you might need you know, three plans done three sections done in might need a virtual model and all this stuff. But then what you can do is plan that into your day. And then you can start to say, at six o’clock, I’m gonna be doing this, I might be doing my section drawing from six to eight, and then from you know, eight to 805 or take a five minute break and then from 805 to 10 o’clock, I’ll be working on my plans, and etc, etc. What it does by actually putting the stuff on paper, not just saying to yourself, but actually write it down. It really helps push you towards getting more done and it really helps Give yourself a guideline to what you need to do and what you have to do next and how long you should be spending your time on stuff. Because at university, your teachers usually give you this, you know, they might be saying, okay for two hours work on this and then you’ll be working on this and this and this. And they’ll do that all for you. But now that you’re working from home, that’s something you need to be able to manage yourself. And that’s gonna be really, really helpful for you working from home. So I hope you guys found those three tips helpful. If you did enjoy this video, or this episode, please go rate it on iTunes. If you’re listening to it on the podcast version if you’re watching the video, please subscribe, like and comment. And I’ll see you guys in the next episode.