I have spent the last five years experimenting with almost every productivity and time management tip out there.
These are five small habits some that are evidence backed and some of my own that I now use to get the absolute most out of my time.
It's how I've worked a full-time job in banking, with a two-hour commute, while starting and running a YouTube channel which I now upload on every single week, alongside working on three other projects at the moment eating well, working out, getting seven hours of sleep at night and still having time to do things I love, like seeing friends family, reading and trying out new things.
Let's get into it.
The very first habit is fill in the empty minutes with portable tasks.
When I was working in my banking job, I spent about two hours a day commuting one and a half hours on the train and then another 30 minutes walking between stations.
That's 10 hours a week, which is basically just another working day sitting there being wasted on commuting.
And I would go as far as to say most people use that commuting time to scroll through social media or to play games on their phone.
And I used to do this too.
It was a great way to just escape the day-to-day.
It is the path of least resistance and it feels good in the moment.
It's so easy to scroll through social media and all of these empty moments that we have throughout our day.
It's not just commuting on the train, but waiting for a family or friend, waiting in the car, for your kids waiting for a meeting.
These moments feel like they're lost time.
They feel like they're empty time.
But there are so many pockets of time throughout the day like this that can be filled instead with something called portable tasks.
These portable tasks, they are things that don't take up much time.
They can be done either using your phone or using your brain, and they don't require much focus.
So this could be things like organizing the apps on your home screen, editing content whilst you're on the go, using your brain so thinking through a problem or working through an idea, or spend the commute tracking your finances for the week.
I have a completely free budget tracker that makes this super easy to do, and you can do it anywhere on the go.
It's linked in the description, or you can go to nisha.me.com.
IST.
Utilizing these empty moments would buy you back almost one working day.
If you're someone who's always saying I don't have time to do things that I want to do for myself, seeing friends and family going out, utilizing this community time, utilizing these empty hours, will give you back the time that you can instead use to do things that you love.
Just trial this out for the next week.
Moving on to the next habit and that is match your tasks with your energy levels.
When I first realized this, my life completely changed and I'd never looked at productivity the same way again.
I used to think that my mental capacity stayed constant throughout the whole day.
Like doing a task at 7am would take the same time and effort as doing it at 6pm.
Turns out it doesn't work that way.
Our bodies don't work that way.
Our bodies go through natural peaks and dips in energy and focus throughout the day.
And once I understood this, I trialed and tested it and completely restructured my entire schedule.
I stopped working out first thing in the morning.
For months, I used to force myself to go to the gym at 8am because that's what I thought I should do, because everyone seems to do it.
But my best creative ideas would pop up during that time and I'd lose them.
Or I had to keep running to my phone to write them down mid-workout.
What I was doing was using a task that energized me, which is working out at a time when I was already high energy in the morning.
And then putting the task that required mental energy after that when I was depleted.
It was completely mismatched.
So I switched it.
Now I do my workouts at 2 or 3 pm as an energy boost when my creative juice starts to run low, when my mental capacity starts to get drained, and I use my mornings for deep, focused work.
Understanding your unique patterns isn't easy, it really comes down to self-awareness.
So I recommend tracking your energy for a few days, or just think about when you normally do your best work.
When does your energy dip?
When are you the most focused?
And when you start aligning your tasks with your energy levels, you'll end up finding that you multiply the quality of work that you produce.
It takes less time and it feels easier.
You're genuinely making work more fun because you have more energy to give to it.
And speaking of managing different types of work, if you're thinking about starting a side business, one of the biggest challenges energy drains as trying to do absolutely everything yourself.
It makes starting a business feel impossible when you realize you're not just the founder, you're the entire team.
When I launched this YouTube channel, I thought I was just making videos, but suddenly I was the writer, the editor, the designer, the marketer, wearing every hat.
And almost every founder I speak to experiences this same overwhelm like you're being pulled in 10 different directions at once.
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Moving on to the next habit that I've implemented, and that is not writing to-do lists.
I used to be obsessed with to-do lists.
I'd write down everything I needed to do, and then I'd just stare at it, not knowing where to start.
Here's what I figured out.
Tasks are like water.
If you don't give them a container...
They'll just expand and fill whatever space you give them.
But if you treat them like ice, putting them in a predefined space, suddenly they have boundaries.
So I've ditched to-do lists completely.
Every single task, as soon as it comes up, goes straight into my calendar now.
Need to call my bank?
Takes a 15-minute slot at 2 pm on a Tuesday.
Need to check emails blocked out at 3pm.
Need to call my sister recurring slot every Sunday morning.
If it's not in the calendar, it's basically not going to happen.
And the bit that's made me even more productive is I batch similar tasks together.
So all my personal admin sorting out finances, moving banks, setting up new automations Thursday afternoon done.
All my content planning batched together.
This way I'm not constantly context switching throughout the day.
And the difference this has made has been huge.
Really recommend you just try it for a week.
And then throughout my day.
If I'm running behind or one task has taken longer than I expected and I've missed the deadline for the next one, I just drag that over to another slot in the future.
Therefore, it doesn't get forgotten.
It doesn't fall through the cracks and I'm not carrying around this mental burden of what am I supposed to be doing right now?
Highly recommend trying this out.
Just try it out for the next week and see how much more productive you are.
The next habit is stack active tasks with passive ones.
This one is a complete game changer.
Instead of doing one thing at a time, I've started stacking active tasks with passive ones.
So how does this work?
Passive activities are normally physical things like walking, doing the dishes, working out meal prepping.
Active activities are mental things like listening to a podcast, thinking through an idea, brainstorming.
Now, multitasking on two passive or two active tasks doesn't work.
You can't run a meal prep at the same time.
You can't write an email and respond to a message at the same time.
But if you habit stack one of each, That's where the magic happens.
So here's how I use this.
Just this morning, I voice noted myself ideas for this video as I was walking.
I call a friend whilst I'm cleaning my wardrobe.
I listen to podcasts whilst I'm at the gym.
I respond to messages whilst I'm commuting or on the train.
Think about all those tasks you do that don't need 100% of your brain.
That's your opportunity to stack something else on top.
You're probably sitting here right now with a portable device in your hands that you can do absolutely anything on.
This makes stacking tasks one of the easiest ways to implement more productivity into your life without needing to find extra hours in the day.
The next habit is keep your life organized.
I used to waste so much time just stacking. looking for things.
Where's that invoice?
Which folder did I save that script in?
What was that website I bookmarked?
And it was eating into my actual productive time without me even realizing it.
Then I stopped trying to remember where things are and started creating systems that do the remembering for me.
First, I organized my browser.
So I pinned the tabs that I use the most.
And these change month to month.
It could be Notion my circle community calendar, a specific file I always access a project that I'm working on.
They're always pinned to the top and they're in the same order.
Sounds simple, but it's probably saved me 20 minutes a day.
Then I've tackled my Google Drive.
This was... chaos.
Files everywhere, random names like final underscore final underscore v3, folders inside folders.
So I created a very simple folder structure, business personal content.
Within each, there's very clear subfolders.
The key is to make it so ridiculously simple that future you cannot mess it up.
When you save a file, it should be so obvious where it goes.
When you're looking for something, it should be so obvious where it's saved.
And then here's a habit that keeps it all working.
Once a week, whether it's the end of the week or the start of the week, spend 10 minutes doing a digital cleanup.
Delete the files you don't need, move things in the right folder, clear out your downloads folder.
It's like tidying your desk, but digital.
It will send you countless hours of frustrated searching later.
That's it.
Those are five habits that have completely changed my life.
If you've enjoyed this video, you'll also enjoy this video right here on 17 small habits that made me rich.
Thank you so much for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you next week.
