iCanStudy — Lesson Transcript Lesson: Self-management (Kickstart → Catalyst) Source: https://learning.icanstudy.com/learning/pr-academic/ph-kickstart/st-catalyst/ls-self-management/pg-self-management Videos on the page: - "Overview of self-management" (3:40) — transcribed below (Part 1) - "Self-management training challenge" (11:38) — transcribed below (Part 3) --- PART 1 — VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: "Overview of self-management" Self-Management is our ability to manage ourselves, which includes time management, task management, and prioritization, focus and attention management, managing your sleep routine, managing your skill development, managing everything that allows you to operate and move through life in a way that is productive. And by productive, I don't mean just being busy and doing things, but I mean having a clear understanding of your goals, creating a plan to get there, and aligning your actions and behaviors so that you can consistently do the work that allows you to achieve your goals, no matter what those goals look like. People with great self-management skills are more flexible, more adaptable, and more resilient to changes and obstacles so that they can keep themselves in an optimum state even when they're busy and tired and overworked. And the reason self-management is so important is because learning never in the real world happens in isolation. Maybe in some research articles, learning is this mysterious, mystical thing that just happens inside a lab. But in the real world, learning is affected by so many other factors outside of just the learning. For example, there's no point being the best learner in the world if we procrastinate so much that we never even sit down to do the learning in the first place. Self-management affects our planning, our goal setting, our overall productivity, it affects how we manage distractions and procrastinations, and ultimately, self-management skills are the things that allow us to protect our time and energy and attention. In my view, self-management is about equipping ourselves with the tools to take back control of our own lives. In a modern, busy society, we are constantly pushed and pulled by different companies and industries that are trying to grab our attention and get us to do what they want us to do. And our meager human brains were never adapted to deal with that type of pressure, at that type of intensity, at that type of frequency. And so to regain that control and sense of autonomy over our lives, we need these frameworks and tools and techniques that we can apply to fight back. And then once those become new habits, they become part of just how we think and operate and navigate through the world, even if our ultimate goal in life is just to have a nice settled job and go for hikes on the weekend and go camping with the kids or whatever it is. We need these tools and techniques and frameworks to achieve that goal in the first place. Otherwise, our life is no longer in our control. We're not setting the course. It is set for us by the societal factors and pressures that are diverting our attention and time. In the 21st century, it is sadly very difficult to live a simple life, let alone try to live a life where you're being more ambitious about achieving certain career goals or certain learning goals. So throughout the program, we're going to be teaching you a series of different techniques and tools that will help to improve and develop your self-management skills. These are the same tools and techniques that I personally use and have used for many years, and that I've taught to thousands of people to help them have a more balanced, happy, fulfilled, and aligned life where they feel like they're in control of their time and what they're doing with their time and energy, which in summary really means that we're going to teach you the skills so that you can live life on your own terms. --- PART 2 — LESSON PAGE TEXT (including the expandable panels) What is self-management? Learning rarely happens in isolation. It must be balanced with responsibilities, distractions, and challenges. Whether we can achieve our goals depends on whether we have the habits and systems in place to stay focused, manage our time, manage our energy and attention, avoid procrastination, and prioritise our tasks. Self-management is about creating those systems: the habits, routines, and environments that make consistent action possible. Self-management frees you from feeling trapped by what feels like a constant stream of urgent tasks. It allows you to prioritise competing demands, optimise your environment, and bring your attention and focus to what truly matters. By creating systems that reduce reliance on willpower, self-management allows you to stay disciplined without expending all of your energy just getting through each day. Misconception: Self-management turns you into a robot Some people feel that developing self-management techniques creates a more restricted and artificial life. However, this is only the case if self-management is approached incorrectly or excessively. Self-management should always be aligned to give you the freedom to achieve your personal goals, whatever they may be. Achieving even the simplest personal goals is difficult without investing in self-management skills. This is because the society we live in now is heavily artificial to begin with. We are faced with artificial challenges and artificial pressures. The modern human is surrounded by distractions and social influences that far exceed what the human brain is naturally developed to deal with. Some of our goals may even rely on meeting complex man-made requirements that society demands of us. As such, it is nearly impossible to "intuitively" or "naturally" overcome these obstacles. To achieve a natural and intuitive level of freedom, we must learn deliberate frameworks and techniques that we can use simply and sustainably. When these become habitual, they will be as easy as how you are living now, while giving you greater control and freedom over your time and output. Misconception: Self-management creates toxic productivity Some people seek self-management without purpose. This is often called toxic productivity. However, self-management should always be aligned to helping you achieve your personal goals, whatever they may be. Self-management is all about giving you the skills to spend your time and attention the way you intend to. The door to freedom As time passes, life tends to become more complicated and difficult to manage as responsibilities and challenges increase. Effective self-management skills are the key that opens the door to a life of greater freedom and control over the type of life you want to live. Your ability to achieve goals depends less on your potential and more on your ability to take action and execute. What your self-management score means for you Based on your diagnostic results, you are currently at Level 1 for self-management. This means that you may struggle to manage your time and tasks and focus effectively in relation to your learning goals. You might find it difficult to balance priorities, leading to feelings of being overwhelmed and falling behind despite being busy. You may also struggle with procrastination and distractibility significantly. By building these skills, you can take control of your time and tasks, setting the stage for growth and success. This is an opportunity to build foundational habits and strategies that will help you take control of not only your learning but also how you spend your time for the rest of your life. Your current habits might include: - Frequently missing deadlines or rushing through tasks at the last minute, compromising the quality of your work. - Avoiding engaging with difficult or complex learning tasks, often prioritising easier or less meaningful activities. - Struggling to establish and stick to a schedule, leading to inconsistency in your efforts. - Spending time on tasks without clear goals, resulting in a lack of focus or direction. - Procrastinating excessively and getting easily distracted. Over time, these habits can lead to a cycle of stress, diminished motivation, and further setbacks. You might feel... - Overwhelmed or trapped by the demands of your learning tasks or life responsibilities. - Frustrated from being unable to maintain consistency or make meaningful progress. - Anxious or guilty about falling behind on goals or underperforming. - Lack of confidence in your ability to manage academic or professional expectations effectively. - Frustrated with lingering habits of procrastination. - Unsure about how to effectively develop new habits and remove old ones. The opportunity ahead The program will help you create structured schedules, prioritise important tasks, and overcome procrastination. You'll gain practical tools to break large tasks into manageable steps, enabling you to focus on the actions that lead to meaningful progress. These changes will empower you to take control of your learning and time management and build confidence in your ability to succeed. Self-management and every other dimension Your ability to learn from this program also depends on your self-management. Even if we teach you techniques for learning, you need the self-management skills to practice, reflect, optimise and come back to learn more. Habits of procrastination, distractibility, or issues with scheduling can prevent you from making the most of this program. For this reason, some of the first lessons you'll encounter in the next stage will focus on giving you self-management skills before going through learning skills. As you have scored relatively low in self-management, we recommend you place extra attention on those lessons to unblock your path of growth moving forward. Training self-management (sustainably) Until you gain control over your time and attention, it's impossible to devote meaningful effort to the development of other components in your learning system. Through the program, you'll learn to establish a level of self-management that gives you the space and freedom to focus on growth and progress. 1. Managing your time and tasks Right from the start, you'll develop foundational strategies to manage your time and tasks effectively, align your actions with your goals, and create routines that eliminate unnecessary decision-making. By reducing the mental load of managing day-to-day tasks, you'll free up cognitive resources to engage deeply with your learning. Over 90% of the problems with scheduling, procrastination and prioritisation we see hold people back are addressed in the first few stages. 2. Key skills and habits for excellent self-management You will learn a combination of these skills intermittently throughout the program, starting from the techniques that make the biggest difference first. Time management: Create realistic and effective schedules that you can follow for as long as you want. Learn to avoid overscheduling or "fantasy" schedules. Implement time-blocking, time-boxing, and how to look at your schedule to find danger zones or flow zones. Task management: Prioritise critically and accurately without letting emotional biases or "false" urgency distract you. Use to-do lists and create a system for screening and executing on tasks based on time required, importance and urgency. Focus and attention management: Create focus zones, remove procrastination, increase focus and depth of concentration and learn to enter flow states at will. Discover how you can think about focus sessions to find flow triggers and how to set yourself up for maximum concentration and minimal procrastination, even when outside of your ideal environment. Planning and goal-setting: Create safe, high-impact plans that help you form the safest path to achieving your goals. Learn about reverse goal-setting, scripted actions, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that cause most plans to derail. Habit creation: Identify existing good and bad habits that are typically invisible. Systematically retrain habits to become more effective and efficient, helping your self-management and learning to run on autopilot. Self-management training challenge (recommended for you) Based on your results, the following self-management training challenge is recommended for you. Watch the video and follow the instructions to start improving your self-management today. Summary of the "reality check" steps from the video: 1. Make a schedule 2. Track your time alongside this schedule 3. Compare your schedule vs. the actual time tracked 4. Identify barriers (be specific) 5. Overcome barriers through either accepting or addressing. Accepting vs. addressing barriers Accepting: There is nothing more you can reasonably do to change this. Addressing: Making changes to eliminate or reduce the impact of the barriers. Most people accept issues before sufficiently exploring how they may be addressed. Often, many barriers we "accept" are not impossible to address; rather, they are just uncomfortable to address. Therefore, it's important to realise that the decisions we make about whether a barrier is something we accept or address is about what level of discomfort we are willing to tolerate. Note: You do not have to address every barrier. There are barriers that create so much inconvenience or discomfort to address that it is perfectly reasonable to decide that you are unwilling to remove this barrier. In these situations, think if there are ways to at least mitigate the impact of that barrier. Recommended task (add to your focus list): Complete the "reality check" challenge. --- PART 3 — VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: "Self-management training challenge" Let's upgrade our self-management skills with the self-management challenge. I'll teach you the challenge, and you should apply this every single day moving forward until your self-management has become better. The challenge we're going to do is called a reality check, and this is such an important challenge for people that struggle with self-management because self-management is one of these dimensions where it really doesn't matter what technique you use or what strategy you use, because if there is this issue, almost none of those techniques will work for more than like 1 or 2 weeks. So if you've ever felt this situation of like not being able to stick on top of your schedule, or you always feel like you're busy but you don't have enough time to do the things that really matter, and you can't prioritize, or you aren't prioritizing but it doesn't seem to be enough, or like you're always procrastinating and you never seem to be in control of your energy or your focus. All of these things. There are lots of individual techniques that can help with pretty much everything. That is actually the easy part about self-management, because unlike with something like deep processing, where it's about your thinking habits that have been ingrained for years and years, and it just takes a long time to unlearn these old habits and then relearn these new habits, and it just takes weeks. Self-management techniques are like plug and play. Like, you can pick up a self-management technique, learn it, understand it, use it, apply it in your life and get immediate value. And you can spend, you know, weeks and months like tinkering to make it even better and better, but it's very easy to get value and to solve problems with self-management techniques. And yet people that really struggle with self-management and have struggled with self-management for a long time really struggle to use those techniques. This reality check challenge directly addresses the root cause behind why. So here's what you do. First of all, you're going to make a schedule. I'm not going to give you any instructions on how to make the schedule for now, at least. We will teach you how to do this in a while moving forward, but to start off, I want you to just make a schedule. If you've already made a schedule, that's fine. You can tick this off. The second thing you're going to do: try your best to follow the schedule, but I want you to track the time you actually spend. So you're going to end up with two different schedules. I would do this for at least a few days, maybe even up to a couple of weeks if you feel like you want to get a really accurate sense for yourself. That's important for this challenge. So you end up with two schedules. One is a schedule you planned to do, and the second is the one you filled in retrospectively by tracking how long things took. So if you had, like, studying for two hours on Tuesday at 4 p.m. until 6 p.m., but you actually, in reality, were distracted from 4 to 4:45, and then you fell asleep from 4:45 to 5, and then from 5 to 9 p.m. you were studying. Then you fell asleep again or whatever it is. Like, your in-reality schedule is usually going to look very, very different. In fact, when you look at your in-reality schedule, this is the thing that makes you feel sad and disappointed, because it can be so far from what you originally planned. That's okay. We're going to work on that. So once you have these two schedules, we're going to calibrate and see what the differences are. And here, what I want you to do is look at this discrepancy and try to figure out what is a trend. Like, is there a common reason why certain things take longer, certain barriers and obstacles? And usually these are things that you're well aware of. Like, a really common example is that I have all these people that schedule in doing a certain amount of study as soon as they come home from work. It's like, okay, cool, that fits into your schedule perfectly, except in reality when they come home from work, they're so tired that they aren't able to focus. They don't do it, they procrastinate it, whatever it is. And so that's the reality. That's the reality check part of this challenge. We need to understand what the reality of the situation is and then isolate these barriers into specific factors. We don't want to just say, oh yeah, I've planned it in my schedule, but then knowing in reality that there's a 50% chance that it's going to happen like that, because we know like every single day like we're too tired. That's the reality. And one of the most dangerous things about self-management is living separated from this reality, thinking that the reality is an exception and that our ideal schedule is like the baseline, but it's usually the other way around. Most of the time, the baseline is that plans do not go according to plan. Schedules get derailed. Priorities need to be reshuffled. Things pop up. Energy and focus and concentration, the amount of sleep that you get, these are things that happen in real life, and you cannot manage yourself navigating through the pressures of real life if we don't think about the influence that these real life pressures have on us. So be holistic and note down specifically what are the barriers and the trends that consistently seem to create this disparity between the way that you schedule it versus what you actually did. Once you've got this list, we move on to the next part, which is to either accept or address. Accepting the barrier means that this is a reasonable thing to expect. And honestly, there's not much more I can do about this. Sometimes that's life. If you are working full time and then studying full time, you've got 2 kids and a mortgage to pay, and you're tired as heck coming home from work, and you have to make dinner, and you've got to take out the trash, and your laundry hasn't been done in a week. It's perfectly fine to say, hey, I feel tired when I come home from work and it's hard to concentrate. Like, it's reasonable, and you might have already tried a lot of things to improve your energy levels, and you may have made some nice, good progress to get to the point that you are at now. So accepting is saying there isn't anything else that's reasonable or realistic or sustainable that I can really do about this. In reality, when I coach people, what I often find is that there are things that you accept can't be changed, but there are actually things that we can do if we think a little bit outside the box. So one great example of this is that one of the students I was working with in the past was in a very similar situation to what I just mentioned. They had a young kid, they were working, they were also studying trying to enter into medical school at the time. And so in that situation, you know, it's terrible that they were studying from like 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. every day because they were just busy all hours of the day. And so in that situation, it's true, like, there's not much more that he could have done. And so his solution, thinking outside the box, was first of all, he changed his job. He got a job that had more flexible working hours that he could also work from home. It didn't pay as much, but it was important enough for him to focus on his studying. He also moved houses. He used to live quite far away from the city. His commute going to and from university was quite long. He moved closer to a suburb next to his parents that allowed him to save some time on commute, but also because his parents were so close by, the parents were able to help with childcare. Now that wasn't the best financial decision. He did lose some money from doing that. But again, in the scale of what was important to him and his priorities, that was the decision that he was willing to make. And so when we think about whether there's a situation that we are accepting versus something that we can address and do something about, we should also think about it in terms of what is comfortable for us. Most of the things that we say there's nothing more that we can reasonably do about are just the things that we think it's too inconvenient to do something about. The inconvenience and discomfort of solving this problem is not worth it for the benefit that it would bring. And that's a perfectly fine decision to make as long as you are thinking about it critically and making that decision. I'm not saying like sell your house and move and whatever and change your job. Like I'm not saying to do that. But if it is important for you, and if you think that yes, it's inconvenient, but actually I'm willing to do that to achieve this and have this benefit and to solve this problem, then this is something that moves from accept to address. It's just that addressing it involves multiple steps and it takes a little bit of time. One of the really common examples I see with students is with procrastination. They often say, well, I get distracted, I can't focus, all of these things. We can put that in the column of accept. I just accept that I can't focus, I can't concentrate, I procrastinate all the time, I get distracted, all of these things. But if we are putting it inside there, we're saying we can't do anything about it, which means we are willing to just live with that or hoping it's going to fix itself, which is probably not. And so when you think, am I willing to just live with that problem forever? Then we start thinking again, okay, well, maybe there are some more things that I can do that I can't be bothered doing, but I probably should do to move it from the accept column into the address column. Now, when we do have things in the address column, we want to be very tactical. We want to be very specific. If you say, "I've got an issue with procrastination," don't just say procrastination. Be specific: what are you procrastinating with? When? Why? What have you tried doing about it? What can you do next? Now, I mentioned before that this challenge directly addresses a thing that stops most people who struggle with self-management from actually improving in the first place. And that's because most people either don't realize that the reality of what's happening on their days is completely different from what their intentions are. Which means that it's impossible to plan, it's impossible to improve because you're just completely disconnected from the real issues. Or you know what the issues are, but there are so many things that you either accept that you cannot change, or you think you should address them, but you're not specific enough in terms of addressing it. And if any of these things happen, then it doesn't matter what the technique is. Even if I teach you a technique, you either don't know that you should use it, or you don't think you can use it, or you don't know the problem specifically enough to actually use it. And so by doing this challenge, as you progress through the program, and we teach you new techniques on self-management, these become tools that you can use to address the things that you've identified need to be addressed. And by doing this challenge, not only do you gain an awareness about what reality is and issues and discrepancies and your plans and intentions versus what really happens, you'll just start getting an appreciation for the nuances of the challenges you're trying to address and overcome. If you have an issue with getting distracted, you realize that the solution isn't just focus more, because you already tried to focus more and it didn't work. You're gaining more experience and you're gaining more self-awareness about really what it takes to address these issues properly, until eventually you don't have any issues to address.