How I Manage My Time - The Trident Calendar System

Transcription

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. So, over the last decade, I have experimented with dozens and dozens of strategies for managing my time. And I've been doing that because time management is, I think, one of the most important skills that we can develop and build in the world today. And it's because fundamentally, time is our single most valuable non-renewable resource. We can always make more money, but we can never make more time. And so really, the skill of time management is in being able to make the best use of that time, not necessarily for only doing productive things, but instead to use that time intentionally and effectively. So in this video, I want to talk you through my Trident method, which is a sort of three-pronged method for time management. And I'll show you exactly how I use these different methods in my life to manage my own time. And in the video description, I've also linked completely for free the templates that you can use to incorporate this into your life if you would like as well. So this aspect of the strategy was a total game changer when I actually tried bullet journaling last year. Now, bullet journaling is a somewhat fancy pen and paper method of productivity, but it's sort of been co-opted over the years by artists and people making ridiculously fancy and beautiful looking bullet journal spreads. And I was super enamored by this, and I thought, you know what, I'm going to try the bullet journal method. And so for the final four months of 2022, I painstakingly bullet journaled basically every day. And I sunk so many hours into my bullet journal method, and it was really good. But there was one aspect of the bullet journal method that completely changed the game for my time management, and that was this view, the year at a glance. Now, the point of this view is that you split up the entire year into these different columns. And so you end up having 12 columns that show the different months, and then 1 to 31 down the side that show you the different dates. And so what you end up with is these 366 blocks. Now, when I did this, when I did the bullet journal technique, this immediately gave me incredible insight and clarity into what the rest of my year was going to look like. Because this is not really a view that we see particularly often. If, for example, you use Google calendar or something, you tend to be stuck in the weekly view or in the monthly view. And even if you have like a physical annual calendar, you tend to flip the pages and so you never really see your entire year just laid out on a single page or two pages. So in January of this year, I decided I wanted to have a more digital way of having this kind of view in my life. And so, I decided to just make a Google sheet out of it. I think these days it's too easy to default to fancy apps and like, oh, what's the latest thing here? But I thought, you know what, a spreadsheet just does the job totally fine. And so I literally just went through on Google sheets and I created one of these year at a glance templates. And this is what the blank version of this looks like. So, as you can see, we've got the months down the top. We have color coded the months in like pretty colors and we've got the weekends color coded as well. And this is the template that you can download, just hit the link in the video description. It's completely free and you can duplicate this into your own Google sheet account if you would really like to. And this is what my version of this actually looks like. And I use this in two specific ways to manage my time. Firstly, it's really helpful for zooming out and getting a bird's eye view of my entire year so I can use it to plan my life. I'm filming this video, for example, in April, but I already know that this is the stuff that's kind of going on in May, and in June, I'm going to Austin for a bit, and then I've got this block of time to go on an adventure with some friends. And then I'm going on a retreat to LA later in June. And this is so helpful to get an idea of A, where things are, and B, it then allows me to plan things like weekend group trips with friends or being able to plan holidays in advance. So I can block out the time. I then reflect those changes in my actual Google calendar so the team knows exactly what's going on in my life. And I found this to be a ridiculously effective way of managing my time on a macro scale. And to make this easier to deal with, what you can do is when the months are gone, you can just right click, you can hide those columns. And now it's just way easier to see exactly what's going on in a given month and then what's going on for the rest of the year. So that's how I manage my time on the level of the whole year. Let's now move on to the level of a single week. But I've got to go somewhere right now. Be right back. Good morning. It's a new day and we are talking about component number two, which is all about ideal week planning. Now, here's the context behind this. So, essentially, we all have these goals and plans and stuff that we want to get done. Now, please don't cancel me for saying this, but there are literally just 24 hours in a day and we all have to decide how we're going to make the most use of that time. If, for example, you have three personal assistants and five private chefs and stuff, then obviously you will have more of those 24 hours that are free to do things that you want to do, rather than do things like laundry and cooking and cleaning and stuff. But fundamentally, those 24 hours or 168 hours a week are basically the same for everyone. And assuming you're sleeping for 8 hours every night, we all basically have 112 hours in a given week that we can play with. And the point of component number two is that we want to define the ideal week, i.e. our absolute ideal allocation of those 112 hours per week. And this is a method I've been using for the last eight months or so, ever since I started working with my CEO coach, Eric Partaker. And Eric has worked with a couple hundred CEOs of really high growth companies, and me. And this is one of the methods that he asks all of his clients to do, and apparently it's a method that always gets some results, and it's certainly gotten me a lot of results over the last eight months. And so, instead of you having to pay several thousand dollars an hour for Eric's time, I'm just going to teach you the method straight up. And it's actually fairly straightforward to do. All it involves is going on Google Calendar, and it involves creating a new calendar so that you've got a completely fresh slate where you can do your ideal week planning. Cool. So I've now created Ali's Ideal Week, and now you can see it's shown up in my Google calendar right here. And this is completely free. Everyone can use Google calendar. You don't have to pay a penny ever at all. Now, at the moment, my life is a little bit of a mess because of the YouTuber Academy happening and because of all the book stuff going on and all the meetings with the editors and the agents and all of that fun stuff. So what can often happen is that I actually don't have that ideal lunch hour in which I'd like to cook a healthy lunch. And so instead, a product that I've been finding a lot of use of is in fact Huel, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Now, I've actually been a paying customer of Huel since 2017, and since my penultimate year of medical school, and actually when I first started this YouTube channel six years ago, I've been taking Huel fairly regularly. And there's broadly two types of Huel that I really enjoy. The first one is Huel Black, which is often what I have in the mornings as part of my morning routine. It's 40 grams of protein, 400 calories. I just add water, blend it up in the NutriBullet blender thingy, and then it turns into a genuinely tasty smoothie that has all of the right macros and all of the micronutrients that I might need for the day. And the other Huel product that I get a lot of value out of is the Huel Ready to Drink. And again, I've been getting deliveries of this ever since I I I don't quite think this started in 2017 because this wasn't a thing in 2017. I think like since 2020, this has been a thing and I've been getting regular deliveries of these. And it's basically a whole meal that's 100% nutritionally complete in a single bottle. And if on a given day I don't have time to have a proper lunch, then the Huel ready to drink is an absolutely fantastic lifesaver. My favorite flavor is banana. I think that's the best one, but all of the others are pretty tasty as well. Now, the best way of trying these, I'd say is the variety pack because it gives you like three bottles of all of the four different flavors. If you're interested in trying out any of these Huel products, including Huel ready to drink, then do hit the link in the video description. And if you use that link, then you will get two free products along with your Huel order. You will get a free t-shirt, which is genuinely good and it's nice and elastic and like makes you look hench, which is a fantastic like quality t-shirt. And you'll also get a shaker so that if you don't want to use a like NutriBullet blendery type thing, you can just like put the thing, put the powder into the water into the shaker, shake it up, and now you have a nutritionally complete meal that's basically ready to go. So thank you so much Huel for sponsoring this video. And the point here is that basically I want to define what are the containers of time where in an absolutely ideal week, not necessarily a perfect week, but in an ideal ordinary week, how would I choose to be spending my time? So for example, I've decided that like in my ideal week, Monday through to Friday, I'd like to wake up at 7 o'clock and then I'd like to have the first hour of the day for my morning routine. And this is a thing I'd like to happen every day, and so I'm going to repeat this daily. And I'm going to give it this yellow color because that like signifies the sunrise or something like that. And you know what, why not add an emoji to it just to make this a bit more fun. So we can see that this has now shown up across my ideal week. And because I want to get my eight hours of sleep, I want to aim to be asleep by 11:00 p.m. and therefore I want to be starting to get ready for bed around 10:00, doing my reading, nighttime routine, all that fun stuff. And I'm going to repeat this every single day, and I'm going to give this a lavender color to signify nighttime. Fantastic. So we now have a block for waking up and we have a block for sleeping. And now I can figure out what I want my ideal ordinary week to look like in the rest of the time. I've decided that in my dream world from 8:00 till 9:00 every morning, I'd like to do breakfast and journaling. And in that block, I could maybe have a breakfast meeting with someone or maybe go for a morning walk. And then I want my actual work day to start at 9:00 a.m. every day. And so based on my own energy levels, how would I like my ideal work day to go? Now, obviously, this is going to vary a bit depending on how much control you have over your own schedule. For example, when I worked as a doctor, I just had my entire block being like 9 to 5 workday or whatever the shift was, and then I would just have to do whatever just happened on the day. I couldn't quite decide, you know what, these are my four hours of deep work time. But as an entrepreneur, I can decide how I spend my time. And actually, increasingly in jobs, especially in knowledge work, you actually do have the ability to talk to your boss or your manager and say, hey, this is how I work best. I would love it if we can kind of find a way to fit my calendar around this. And then obviously, based on the needs of the business and of the team or whatever, things will have to adjust accordingly. And so I've added in the blocks for the weekly team meeting, the weekly team lunch, the weekly content squad meeting, and my two meetings a week with Angus, who's my general manager. And I've added in the blocks for when I want to have lunch roughly and the blocks for when I want to have dinner on weekdays. And this is already very helpful because now I can see what is the other time that I have to play with. And then I can adapt this ideal ordinary week based on how I'd actually want to spend that time. So, Tuesdays to Fridays, for example, I want to have several hours in the morning as a deep work block for writing. And in my ideal week, I'd like to do a gym session Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, and maybe Saturday morning if I happen to be free on the Saturday morning. Now, the other main thing I need to do in my work day is filming. And so I'm going to put in my various filming blocks into the calendar. And obviously, this work day schedule is very specific for me because basically all I have to do in my job is writing and filming. But if your job is a little bit different than that, then maybe you might have a block for checking Slack or checking emails, and you might do that once or twice a day so that you're batching those interruptible activities and you're not just spending your entire day being like derailed by all the various emails coming your way. Alternatively, maybe you have more meetings than I do, and therefore you have more meetings in the calendar at all the different blocks. The point is, mold this to whatever works for you. But the point is we want to create these containers within our ideal week where in an ideal ordinary week, we would be intentionally using our time in this way. And what you can base these containers on is firstly, what are the constraints of your job, but also how are your own energy levels? Like, if you're managing your own energy, do you do your best creative work in the morning or in the evening? Do you have a slump after lunch and therefore maybe you want to take calls then rather than do particularly deep work? And the great thing about this, and what I do, is that I also intentionally schedule in the personal life and relationship stuff that I want to put into my ideal week. So, for example, in my case, ideally, every Thursday evening is date night. So I know that I have that fully scheduled in the calendar, and now the rest of my life can fit around that. And then on Monday evenings as well, I'd like to go to a kickboxing class and have a mini date night as well. In my ideal week, Tuesday evenings would, for example, be a social dinner with friends because I'm trying to learn how to cook and I like having friends over. And so I've decided just by default, every Tuesday evening is going to be free so that I've got an easy slot where if a friend is visiting London or if I want to invite people over, just by default, I don't have to think too hard about it. It's a Tuesday evening. And conveniently, the cleaner rocks up on a Wednesday and so I can leave the kitchen in a mess and then the cleaner will sort it out. That's fantastic stuff. I might decide on Wednesday evenings by default, I'd like to drive home to have dinner with my mom and grandma. I might decide to leave weekends completely free for friends and family and other things in life that are happening. Now, having this laid out in front of me is incredibly useful and this is in fact the system that I follow basically every week. And then obviously there's other stuff that kind of derails this sometimes. Sometimes there's an urgent meeting that can't be missed or sometimes I have to go pick up my mom from the airport and then a filming block gets derailed. But the point is, I have defined the parameters of my ideal ordinary week, and now I don't need to be fully wedded to them, but at least I've actively decided that on average, on a Wednesday morning, I'd like to be doing a deep work block of writing because that's the main thing that moves my business forward, and it makes sense to do that in the morning while I have more creative energy. Similarly, the fact that I've basically decided that Mondays and Thursdays are going to be date night, that then means that those evenings are sacred and like if someone says, hey, do you want to hang out and it's a Monday or Thursday night, then my default option is, no, sorry, I can't make it. Can you do Tuesday instead or Friday instead? And if it's super, super urgent and it's like an internet friend visiting London and they're only here on a Monday, then I can say to my girlfriend, hey, do you mind if we switch date night to Tuesday or whatever that week. So the point is, this kind of system allows a level of flexibility and I found that over the last eight months of using it, it's just freed up so much head space from my life having to think about these things because now at least I have a default structure that I can follow. The other cool thing about this is that it really shows where genuinely where is the free time. Like I might decide, you know what, I'm really interested in the guitar. I want to get better at the guitar. And therefore I'd like to have one guitar lesson every week. Now, the question is, where am I going to where am I going to fit this one guitar lesson every week? I have these 112 hours that I can play with like everyone else does. And so I might decide, you know what, I'm going to finish work a little bit earlier on a Wednesday to have my guitar lesson. But I can do that because I'm an entrepreneur and I control my own time. But if this is what my calendar looked like and I was only getting home from my actual job at like 6:30 every day, and I knew that I wanted to have a social evening with friends once a week, go home for dinner with my parents once a week, and have date night twice a week. It's like, I actually don't have that much time to play with to fit in a guitar lesson. And that means I don't need to beat myself up about it. I might think, you know what, at some point in my life, when I have more free time on the calendar, I will fit in that guitar lesson, but it's just not a priority right now. And what I love about this ideal ordinary week exercise is that it forces us to decide what are the priorities in our life. It means we can't say, oh, I don't have the time. We can instead say, I'm choosing not to make the time. I am currently choosing not to make the time in my life for guitar lessons or singing lessons. And I'm currently choosing in my life to only go to the gym two or three times a week because I've decided that that's what the priority is. In the future, maybe once my book is done and I have fewer writing blocks or maybe I decide, you know what, I want to take a break from filming four times a week for a month and see what happens, I'll free up more time. But the point is, I now know how much time I have to play with. But until I did this exercise eight months ago, A, I would not have known that and I was kind of taking on too many responsibilities and too many too much stuff and then feeling overwhelmed. And B, on a given day, I didn't really have a default list of things that I wanted to do. And so I'd have to think every single day, it's like, okay, how do I want to spend my time today? And that's just quite a lot of thinking. Now, this is how this actually translates to what my ideal week looks like in real life. So right now we're in the midst of our part-time YouTuber Academy. So Mondays are literally taken up entirely from with PTYA stuff except an exercise block in the morning. Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, Friday morning, Saturday morning, and Thursday afternoon are all book time because I'm in the final stages of my book and so I need to make the blocks for that. I have various meetings in the calendar, so we've moved our team meetings to Tuesday. So we've got our team meeting and our content meeting on a Tuesday afternoon. We're doing a team training thing with our coach Eric and so that happens on a Wednesday afternoon. And this week I've had various lunches with various team members because I like to have a one-on-one lunch with every member of the team once every couple of months or so. Similarly, this week I did a podcast with my internet friend Sahil Bloom, so that happened on a Tuesday and then we went out to a restaurant. So you can kind of see how this calendar evolves over time and it evolves depending on what's happening in a given week. But this week, I've broadly stuck to the calendar. I've done book time when I intended to. Currently I'm in a filming block, which is why I'm filming this video. And then later today, I've got book time for the rest of the afternoon, so I can focus on making those final edits. And it's just so liberating to have this kind of system. I'll put the template for the Google calendar ideal week, if you want to check it out down in the video description. Again, it's completely free. You just click the link and you can download the template. And if you try any of the strategies in this video, I'd love to hear how you got on. Please can you drop me an email Ali@aliabdaal.com. I read absolutely everything, even if I can't reply to everything. And I just love to hear kind of what are the strategies and tips you found helpful. And maybe you can even leave a comment down below if you try any of this stuff out. Again, I'd love to hear what are the pros, what are the cons, what are the ways you've adapted it to fit your own system and your own life. All right, the final component of the Trident method is what we do on a given day. So we've talked about annual planning and what our annual life plan, year at a glance looks like. And we've talked about at the level of the ideal week, how we're trying to make the most of these 112 hours in the week that we have to play with and how we can use them more intentionally. And so now the third component of the Trident method is what we're doing on a given day. And so the way I manage my time on a given day is broadly I follow what is in the calendar. And again, having the calendar just makes it so easy. It is a Thursday right now, and I just literally follow whatever blocks I've put in my calendar. And generally on the weekend before, I will look forward at my calendar for the upcoming week and I will create blocks of time for the things that I want to do. So for example, let's say I'm looking over to next week, I've already got a lot of this stuff pencilled in because it's recurring events or it's ideal week stuff. And because I know that basically every morning I want to do book stuff and every afternoon I want to do kind of filming stuff, and I want to go to the gym two or three times a week, I just need to add in those blocks. And normally I'd have those in as like repeated blocks that's just in every week, but right now things are very derailed thanks to the YouTuber Academy and so I'm kind of going week by week, but keeping in mind what does my ideal week actually look like. So for example, right now 7:00 a.m. badminton is not happening, so let's decline this one. Let's create a book time block on Wednesday morning. Let's create a book time block on Friday morning. This app is Fantastical by the way. It's just a fancy calendar version of Google calendar. The nice thing is you can duplicate events so it makes it super easy to like literally hit alt and then drag and now I can just duplicate an event rather than having to recreate it like I would in Google calendar. Let's put in my filming blocks. Now this is currently a bit of a problem because I don't have enough time for exercise here, so I'm going to have to create some exercise blocks. But then genuinely on the level of day planning, let's say it was a Monday, I would literally just follow whatever I have planned. So I know for example at 8 o'clock, I'm going to be doing my content planning for the session of the part-time YouTuber Academy. I've got my call with the exec students at 9:00 and then another one at 5:00. I've got more PTYA prep happening from 10:00 till 12:00. I have a YouTubers mastermind that I'm part of. I have the two-hour keynote that I deliver on a Monday. And then I'm going for Iftar and dinner at a friend's house that evening. And so on one level, that's just what I do on a given day. I just follow whatever is in the calendar. But there's another thing that I do and again, this is one of those things that I've started doing for the last eight months ever since starting working with Eric. And it's basically defining three daily quests. Daily quests, I mean, he calls it daily number ones or whatever. I call it daily quests because it's terminology from World of Warcraft. And basically the idea is that in the three most important domains of life, I have three quests that I'm doing every day. And that's in work, in health, and in relationships. And we've actually recently started a Slack group where we do this with the whole team so that we've got some level of accountability on this. And so for example, today, my health daily quest is to go to the gym after my book squad call. And then I make sure it's scheduled in the calendar. So I already have my exercise block scheduled in the calendar after my call with the book team. My work daily quest is I want to film stuff, which is literally what I'm doing right now, and that's already in the calendar. And then my relationship thing is that I want to call my grandma. And calling my grandma is not yet in the calendar. And so I'm literally just going to add it in here as a task. Call Nani. And that will show up in my calendar and now I know that that's going to get done because I look at my calendar multiple times a day because my calendar tells me literally what I'm doing. In fact, you know what, I'm going to be a good grandson and I'm going to call my grandma straight after filming this video and I can literally drag that task straight onto the calendar. And it's very convenient because it overlaps with the events and it means that I again, ensure that the things that I actually want to do are in the calendar. Now this method of like just literally running your life based on a calendar is completely game changing. I've been doing it in various forms for the last 10 years. And before I started literally living my life based on my calendar, I was so disorganized, I was so chaotic. But now that I live my life based on my calendar and on the level of annual, on the level of weekly and monthly and on the level of daily, I just follow the intention I've already set. That's been one of the main drivers of my productivity for the last 10 years. And specifically this trident method thing that I've been doing for the last eight months, since working with Eric in terms of the annual thing, the weekly thing, and the daily thing has been hugely helpful in moving me forward. And even though I'm I think at this point one of the most followed productivity experts in the world, like these three strategies are just have just been genuinely game-changing in terms of helping me make the most of my time and helping me boost my time management skills. Because as we've already talked about, time is the most valuable resource that we have. We can always make more money, but we can never make more time. And if we can use our time more intentionally, again, it doesn't have to be about being more productive with every single hour. It's about just being more intentional with it. Intentionally calling my grandma, intentionally making the time for date night or for having dinner with my mom. And the more I find that I define these containers and then actually follow them, the more I find that like life is balanced and fulfilled and meaningful and I'm happy and then it's like I don't have to stress about things because I know that the important things are getting done because fundamentally they are on the calendar. Now, if you enjoyed this video and you'd like some more time management tips, then check out this video over here, which is 10 specific other strategies that I found helpful over the last decade for managing my time. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you hopefully in the next one. Bye bye.