Name: Why Your Schedule is FAILING You
Uploaded: 2020-06-08T04:26:12.000Z
Duration: 12 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When people think schedules, they usually think of something restrictive, tedious and

We want fun, freedom and the ability to do whatever we want.

Don't schedules work directly against that?

In fact, I argue that creating and sticking to your schedule will add more freedom to

First, thank you to everyone who voted on the med school insider's channel community

I made this video because you voted for it.

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And without further ado, let's get to it.

The foundation of this video is that every system is perfectly designed to produce the

Therefore, we must follow a process to create a system that incentivizes us to behave in

a way that we want and makes it difficult for us to deviate from that path.

As Jocko Willink says, discipline equals freedom.

In this context, we're referring to self-discipline, which means “the ability to control one's

feelings and overcome one's weaknesses; the ability to pursue what one thinks is right

You see, our default state is to be wildly distractible and impulsive, doing things that

make us feel good in the moment, while avoiding those things that make us feel bad.

But this is not an effective way to live one's life.

By practicing self-discipline and creating a schedule that you stick to, you can create

the day, and ultimately the life, that you want.

This empowers you to actually choose whether spending three hours of watching TV or browsing

Facebook is actually aligned with your life goals, or whether it's a distraction that

numbs you in the moment, but pulls you further away from becoming an effective doctor.

I've gone over this in countless other videos.

It's most effective to focus on one of two things at any moment: intentionally maximizing

work, or intentionally maximizing relaxation, fun or rejuvenation.

This is why I advise against having the TV on in the background while you try to work.

Rather, focus on deep work and getting into a flow state for two hours.

Crank through your homework or studying or whatever it is.

Then spend the next hour, or whatever you designate in your schedule, to relax with

This intentional dichotomy of time allocation allows us to maximize the rewards from being

productive and the enjoyment and pleasure from relaxation and free time.

So, why is it so hard to stick to our schedules?

People generally avoid specifying their goals and creating a schedule for three main reasons.

First, it takes upfront effort and planning.

It's much easier to simply not put in the effort to list out your long term goals and

then put in the work to create a schedule to help us achieve those goals.

Second, people do not like to specify goals because then they are drawing the boundaries

and the definitions as to when they have failed.

Jordan Peterson calls this "willful blindness."

But by setting goals and knowing when we fail, we will ultimately come out ahead.

By not setting goals and therefore not knowing when we have failed, we end up just failing

Third, many of us succumb to the phenomenon of learned helplessness and assigning identity

I will spare you the psychology derivatives in the theory of depression, what you need

to know is that learned helplessness is essentially when we believe that we have no control over

We learn to believe that we are helpless.

We practice a form of this when we assign our identities to our failures.

For example, you get a C in math, and then you tell yourself that you're just not the

And this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you will continue to do poorly in math.

If instead you remove your identity from the equation and instead say, “I did poorly

this semester in math, which means my study habits were not effective and require tweaking,”

you now have now empowered yourself to make the changes in the future that will secure

This may seem subtle, nuanced, and even a little woo-woo, but believe me when I say

this is tremendously powerful and you're almost certainly not using it to your advantage.

First, remove the idea or thought that you're a failure from your vocabulary.

If you start this process and resort to calling yourself a failure, you will quickly get discouraged

Here's the thing – you will not 100% stick to your schedule.

I consider myself a very disciplined and structured person, but even I don't get anywhere near

Rather, we want to work towards achieving as much as possible in the schedule, and strive

to increase the accuracy week after week.

But it's better to his 50% accuracy for an entire year than it is to hit 90% for one

week but then give up because you focus on falling short by 10%.

Next, it's important to be cognizant of how you spend your time.

For me, I only tracked my time for a couple weeks, after which I was much more aware and

didn't feel the need to track my time as closely.

My tool of choice was RescueTimer on my computer, and now Android and iOS offer features to

show you how you're allocating screen time on your phone.

By understanding how you're currently spending your time and energy, you'll be better equipped

to figure out what could be sapping more time than you expected.

You can then determine how to reallocate that time and energy more effectively.