Name: I’m begging you to manage your time
Uploaded: 2026-02-21T12:55:27.000Z
Duration: 14 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

Forget everything that you think you know about productivity.

Present continuous

Literally throw it out the door, because it's not going to help you here.

To-infinitive

And in fact, I'm going to change your entire mindset around this.

We're talking about a time management secret that's completely backwards.

The more you slow down, the more time you actually have.

Now, I know that sounds completely insane, but just hang in there and I'll get into it.

Before we do that, though, I do want to preface that this is not going to be anything motivational.

So if you are looking for toxic motivation, this is not the video for you.

You're not going to get a hustle harder mantra from this because I'm talking about real life scenarios that I went through and how I'm able to manage my time but also manage my workload.

The first crucial shift that you need to have is that you need to slow down to actually speed up.

Stop trying to squeeze every second out of the clock unintentionally.

And the keyword there is unintentionally.

So let's cut the nonsense and dive deep into this so that it will make more sense to you.

a lot of people say the same thing, but what does this actually mean?

If you don't have a real set goal, then you're not going to know what destination you're going to go towards, and

therefore you're not going to know the journey.

For example, if you know you want fried chicken, that's one goal.

AKA you want the good grades, but you don't know where you're going to get the fried chicken.

Then you're just going to walk around aimlessly and hoping that the fried chicken shop will be there, but

it's never going to be there because it's in the next town over.

That's the exact same with your studies right now.

You know you want to get good grades, but

because you don't have the goal set to get there, you're just wandering around aimlessly pretending you're studying.

So you want to ditch the useless goals, like saying, I'm going to work on my project today, that's going to be pointless.

You want to be specific and be as realistic as possible as well.

Don't say, I'm going to learn an entire syllabus in just two seconds.

And instead it's going to set you back because you're going to feel so anxious about not being able to do it.

What you want to do instead is to say something along the lines of writing 100 words or writing 500 words for my essay before noon, or finalizing the presentation outline by 3pm in this way, you give yourself some dopamine hit because you feel like you've done something, so you feel like you're winning.

And secondly, it also breaks the goals down in order to have a very specific, tangible thing about it so that you can actually track the progress of your goal itself.

Once you have that, it makes it a lot easier for you to break it down into smaller actions.

For example, with the essay before, you can write down the outline first.

Afterwards you're going to write down the draft.

And once that's done, you can then revise it so there's an actionable step each part of the way so that you actually know where you're going and what road or path you're taking to get to your goal.

And this focus action was the one that changed everything for me.

When I didn't figure this out yet, I was literally all over the place and it meant that I was juggling a lot of plates, but

But by doing this, I started to see a lot more of what is going on in day to day life.

And therefore I can fit my studying around my entire life.

For example, if I have a social or an event that evening with the society and we have a meeting in the morning about it, and

then I have to come in early in order to set up the events, speaking to teachers, blah blah blah.

But also I have a tutoring session at 2pm and also I still have to make content for my TikTok and then I also have an exam tomorrow.

Then how I'm gonna plan that is to literally schedule my study sessions in between every single one of them.

It takes half an hour to go from home to uni.

I study during lunch break while I'm eating my food.

I'll study during lessons when I know the topic already.

Sometimes the content is pretty obvious and therefore I don't need to kind of sit there and listen through it.

Which means I can study for other subjects during my lecture time and therefore I save a lot of time already.

But all of this is done by saying I'm gonna finish one pass paper by 2pm I know that at 2pm I have my tutoring session.

So between that time, whatever time I have, I'll be working on my past paper.

This honestly makes it a lot less overwhelming for me, so give it a go.

You think faster equals getting more work done.

You don't end up having six packs just from doing 100 squats within five seconds.

Just because you're fast doesn't mean you actually get the muscles quickly.

What you get instead is just stress, mistakes.

And you end up feeling so miserable because you're like, oh my God, I didn't complete it.

I shouldn't have done this, I shouldn't have done that.

And you just end up spiraling out of control and instead you worry about it and you lose the time that you could have used to study because you end up worrying so much when you deliberately slow down, you work smarter, you then become intentional with your time and you make fewer errors and think more clearly.

And I want to say this is a trick, but it really isn't.

It's just that most people don't do it earlier than you need to have what's called as a contingency plan.

And this is a plan for when something happens out of your control, that you still have enough time to complete whatever studying you have to do, whatever essay you need to do, whatever it is.

For example, if it's the Christmas holidays, I don't actually know what my plans are going to be for Christmas most of the times.

But I do know that when I go back into university in January, I will have an exam.

So that means I will start planning to study from like end of November at least, or like early November, depending on the subject, how many months, how many content I have to cover.

But I try to start as early as possible and then give myself two weeks before the actual exam as contingency.

This means that if in the holiday season something does come up where I will be going out with my friends, going out with family, going on holiday, whatever it is, I already have two weeks planned at the end of it for me to have that in case time, so I still have that time to study, if that makes sense.

It also means that I actually push the deadline forwards and I intentionally try to finish all of my studying two weeks early.

If I do complete that Two weeks early then good.

if not, I still have the two extra weeks to complete my work.

Like no matter what, you're still going to win because you've set yourself up for winning.

So when that happens, you have less frantic mindset, you're not as scared and therefore you actually finish more work because you're not thinking about it 24 7.

Next one I talked about quite a bit as well and I talked about it in this schedule video, so have a look at that one.

But it's to not ignore the compound effect of doing small study sessions every single day.

Instead of doing 15 hours a day, you want to instead do just small 30 minute sessions every single day.

Having the 30 minute sessions more regularly than the one off cramming sessions means that you are applying your spatial repetition and also your active recall, which will allow you to stick the memory of the subject in your mind for a lot longer.

So this means if you have your mocks this time, but

then your exams next time and it's going to cover the same topic, you're still going to remember it.

Then you just need to briefly refresh it, but

you will still remember the majority of the content because you've done the correct techniques to make it stick in your brain.

So when that happens, you actually have the compound effect of all of the things that you're learning accumulating with one another.

And this creates a momentum like a snowball literally rolling down a hill.

Real growth comes from working smarter consistently and letting the process handle the rest.