Ep. 16: Productivity

Happy Friday, everyone!

This week, I want to share some of my favorite tips and tools to stay hyperproductive. This one is geared towards our high schoolers!

This past weekend was also Diwali, which is a Hindu tradition that celebrates knowledge over ignorance, which is quite on brand for this week’s topic so I thought I’d share:

Check out how we celebrated on my personal blog at EhmAcademy.com:

Let’s get right into it!

1. Get a calendar. I personally live by Google Calendar and using it has allowed me to thrive in medical school, manage a private tutoring business, publish research projects, keep a consistent workout routine etc. Organization is really the key to success and it starts at the humble calendar.

For students not using a calendar of some sort, it’s imperative that they start (especially if they’re doing sports, have tutoring, going on class trips etc!). If you’d like me to record a short video of how I use my calendar to organize my life, please reply to this email and let me know!

2. The second step to getting organized on a calendar is to have a place to act on that calendar. For this, I use an app called Notability. It’s 100% free. Organizing Notability so that your workflow is streamlined for examinations (and in preparation for finals) is vital for getting A’s.

Taking in tasks/documents/assignments from email or class or wherever there is a task to be done can be accomplished in Notability with ease! Again, if you’d like to see how I organize/act on my class work, life work, and many projects, please hit reply to this email and let me know!

3. To-Do list. Another humble but powerful tool nonetheless. I personally use Notion for my to-do list(s) which also serves as my second brain (which I talked about here), but Apple notes or any other note app can get the to-do list done! There is something special about checking off things as you complete them!

THATS IT! Really spending time designing a system around getting work done is what gets your work/projects done over time. All of this is elegantly explained in the handbook of Productivity, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Extra tips & tools:

The Pomodoro technique works wonders for tasks that bore you to death but just need to get done (doing board questions, anyone??). I use this free Pomodoro app which is great because you can change the intervals of your work/break sessions depending on how dreadful your task is.

1 browser for 1 hat: To keep myself on track with the many hats I wear, I use a separate browser for whichever role I’m doing work for. For example, if I’m doing medical school work, I only use my Firefox browser and ONLY do tasks related to school/hospital/medical work. NOTHING ELSE. On the other hand, Let’s say I’m speaking with students/their parents or working with my teaching team, I ONLY use my Google Chrome browser (Firefox is closed and out of sight). This way, I’m focusing only on one job at a time, giving those tasks my 100% attention. Essentially, I am batching my work, both of which have some great science to support as noted in the book, The One Thing by Gary Keller.

Lastly, Time Blocking. Often, I block out chunks of my time (1-3 hours at a time) for projects or tasks. In these blocks of time, NO ONE can interrupt me as a rule. So, my phone goes on Do Not Disturb and as a show of respect for myself, I do not break my focus in these dedicated work blocks.

That’s all this week!

I hope you all have a super weekend planned 🤓 

I’ll see you next Friday! 🌻 

Deepak

Currently: 📖 : Reading | 👀: watching/listening | 🎵: song of the week | 🥷: Team messages

📖 : How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie  

👀 : The Pacific on Netflix

🎵 : Jupiter - Ash Walker

🥷: Really proud of the curricula & personal blog up at EhmAcademy.com 📤️ : [email protected] for more info ⚡️