3 tips to better manage your time
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 6:57 am
Hello my dear friends and welcome to this new episode of Walk With Johan. It is a great pleasure and a great honor to have you with me today. Today, then, I am going to talk to you about a subject that fascinates me. It has, for a very long time, been my hobby or a hobby in any case. I have read dozens and dozens of books on the subject, I have followed training courses, I have watched hours and hours of videos, I have even created a training course on the subject, which I called "stress-free productivity". We are going to talk about "time management". I will try to give you three tips to better manage your time.
Of course… so, we all have too much to do. Time seems to be the most important resource, the resource that is the most limited. I will try to explain to you among these three tips that time is not… Of course time is something extremely important, but it is not necessarily the most important. But time management, I see it as both an art and a science, really.
And I prepared a short list of three essential things for you. So, it's not exhaustive. I could have probably listed 50 important things, but I chose three. I invite you... if you want to korea whatsapp number data know why I chose three, I invite you to listen to my episode "The razor, a tool that I use more and more". It's an old episode of Marchez Avec Johan in which I share a great tool with you. So, I invite you to listen to this episode right after.
So, here are three little tips to better manage your time.
First tip is to write everything down.
So, it sounds silly, it sounds simple, it sounds stupid, but having been around a lot of people and having worked with a lot of people, well I know that this is not something that everyone does. I invite you to really see your brain as a tool, a super important machine for thinking, not for storing information.
I like the analogy. I think I read it in Getting Things Down by David Allen. I don't know how they translated it into French, but it's one of the most complete books on productivity. He has a system that's really good, a little hard to follow, but in any case, he taught me a lot. And in fact, he takes the analogy, he tells you that a computer has RAM. RAM is memory... what we call random access memory. It's what we use for current tasks. If you give me a number, and I have to remember the number 14, I'm going to put it in my RAM, it's going to be there in my random access memory so I can remember it in 2 minutes.
And we have a hard drive, 'well computers have RAM; our brain has RAM, random access memory, and the computer also has a hard drive to store things that we will need later but that we will have to go and find with efforts that are not available right away, and we also have a part of our brain that works like that.
If we try to put too many things in our RAM, in our RAM, if instead of saying "ah, hey, you told me about the number 14, 'end of the number 14 that I have to remember to talk about it again in 2 minutes", it's OK. On the other hand, if I say to myself "hey, tonight I have to remember to go buy some bread and tonight I also have to put a folder aside to record a video tomorrow morning and also I really have to remember to send an email to the accountant because he forgot this, this and this", if I put all that in my RAM, it's as if, on my computer, I had 10 programs open at the same time. What's going to happen? It's happened to all of us. The computer will heat up and slow down. Well, it's the same. If we try to put everything in our RAM, if we try to remember everything, if we put things in our head, well we're going to overheat.
So, it's so easy. Take a post-it, do whatever you want, but write things down. Today, we all have our smartphones at hand, write down, create a note, whatever, you write in it, but write things down. If you have things to do at a given time, write them in your calendar, but set up a system. Don't trust your memory, especially not. Don't trust your memory. Your memory, you can trust it in itself, but spare it the basic things. Your brain is there to think, it is there to reflect, to solve problems, to have complex thoughts, it is not there to remember that you have to go buy bread or yogurt. So, use your brain to think, and for the rest, you write down, write down, write down. First.
Of course… so, we all have too much to do. Time seems to be the most important resource, the resource that is the most limited. I will try to explain to you among these three tips that time is not… Of course time is something extremely important, but it is not necessarily the most important. But time management, I see it as both an art and a science, really.
And I prepared a short list of three essential things for you. So, it's not exhaustive. I could have probably listed 50 important things, but I chose three. I invite you... if you want to korea whatsapp number data know why I chose three, I invite you to listen to my episode "The razor, a tool that I use more and more". It's an old episode of Marchez Avec Johan in which I share a great tool with you. So, I invite you to listen to this episode right after.
So, here are three little tips to better manage your time.
First tip is to write everything down.
So, it sounds silly, it sounds simple, it sounds stupid, but having been around a lot of people and having worked with a lot of people, well I know that this is not something that everyone does. I invite you to really see your brain as a tool, a super important machine for thinking, not for storing information.
I like the analogy. I think I read it in Getting Things Down by David Allen. I don't know how they translated it into French, but it's one of the most complete books on productivity. He has a system that's really good, a little hard to follow, but in any case, he taught me a lot. And in fact, he takes the analogy, he tells you that a computer has RAM. RAM is memory... what we call random access memory. It's what we use for current tasks. If you give me a number, and I have to remember the number 14, I'm going to put it in my RAM, it's going to be there in my random access memory so I can remember it in 2 minutes.
And we have a hard drive, 'well computers have RAM; our brain has RAM, random access memory, and the computer also has a hard drive to store things that we will need later but that we will have to go and find with efforts that are not available right away, and we also have a part of our brain that works like that.
If we try to put too many things in our RAM, in our RAM, if instead of saying "ah, hey, you told me about the number 14, 'end of the number 14 that I have to remember to talk about it again in 2 minutes", it's OK. On the other hand, if I say to myself "hey, tonight I have to remember to go buy some bread and tonight I also have to put a folder aside to record a video tomorrow morning and also I really have to remember to send an email to the accountant because he forgot this, this and this", if I put all that in my RAM, it's as if, on my computer, I had 10 programs open at the same time. What's going to happen? It's happened to all of us. The computer will heat up and slow down. Well, it's the same. If we try to put everything in our RAM, if we try to remember everything, if we put things in our head, well we're going to overheat.
So, it's so easy. Take a post-it, do whatever you want, but write things down. Today, we all have our smartphones at hand, write down, create a note, whatever, you write in it, but write things down. If you have things to do at a given time, write them in your calendar, but set up a system. Don't trust your memory, especially not. Don't trust your memory. Your memory, you can trust it in itself, but spare it the basic things. Your brain is there to think, it is there to reflect, to solve problems, to have complex thoughts, it is not there to remember that you have to go buy bread or yogurt. So, use your brain to think, and for the rest, you write down, write down, write down. First.