The Secret to Getting More Done in Less Time
by Jeremy Kim
Everyone has the same twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But how is it that some people get more done compared to others?
Welcome, Supernovas, to the start of a brand new school year! Returning to school is always a huge mixing pot of emotions, whether it be the excitement of meeting your friends again or the dread of facing the long hours of studying and homework. No matter which side of the spectrum you find yourself on, hopefully this article will be of great benefit to you, as it will offer a variety of valuable insights as well as little tips and tricks to help you succeed both inside and outside the classroom. Time is your most valuable resource, and how you use it will determine how much closer to your goals you will get.
So what’s the secret to getting more done in less time?
It comes down to your habits.
In his #1 New York Times best-selling book Atomic Habits (a great read by the way), James Clear talks about the notion behind the 1% rule: Becoming 1% better every day for 365 days will make you 37 times better than you were on day one. The system he built for building good habits is to make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
I have an analogy for those of you who are taking or have taken the 7th grade Biology class at our school. Does this graph look familiar to you?
This is the reaction energy profile of an endothermic reaction! Just like in biology or chemistry, where some compounds need an initial activation energy to form something new, we also need an initial activation energy to get work done. In our case, habits are catalysts that decrease the needed activation energy of our desired result:
Habits are the secret to getting the same amount of work done with less energy.
So what are some habits that we can implement to help us in an academic context? Let’s dive in to our first actionable tip:
Actionable Tip #1: Remove your phone from your working environment. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.” — G. Stanley Hall
Make it a habit to set up a specific place to work. If this is done correctly, as soon as you sit down in that chair, your body will know that it’s time to get to work. This way, you don’t need to rely solely on willpower every single time you need to study, hence “decreasing the activation energy” like we talked about earlier.
Setting up your environment means clearing the clutter off your table and making a space where you would actually enjoy doing your work. It can also include things such as going to the library and listening to a specific study playlist. Set up all of your materials before you start studying for your study session to flow more smoothly without needing to get up. All of these little additions will eventually lead to a drastic change in your output.
The number one thing you can do for your focus is to remove your phone out of your sight while you work. That five minute phone break can quickly and too easily turn into four-hour long doom-scrolling sessions, and that’s the last thing you want - totally not speaking from experience - while you’re trying to finish up that one English essay due at midnight! The best way to do this is to simply turn on do not disturb on your phone and put it in another room while you work. All distractions out of sight!
Did you know that in a survey conducted in 2023 in the United States, the average teenager spends nearly 5 hours on social media every day? The goal should be for you to be in control of your phone, and not let your phone control you. So how do you make sure you don’t waste your life away on your 6x3-inch portable hunk of metal?
Let’s take a look at our next actionable tip:
Actionable Tip #2: Set up an agenda or online calendar to keep track of your schedule.
“The future you is depending on the current you to keep the promises you made to yourself yesterday.” — Jordan Ferrone
Let’s talk about time management.
The way you plan out your time is just as important as actually spending it. It’s like money. Just like how we need to budget our money, we need to budget our time. The best way to do this is to use some sort of planner. Using these tools are so helpful because they can offload your brain from remembering all of your tasks so that you can better focus on other important things, which once again, decreases the activation energy required to start your tasks in the first place!
Here’s a short list of some specific resources to help you plan out your time:
The Science Academy Agenda: Our school provides one for us every year and encourages us to use it! It’s a free resource that everyone in our school has access to.
Google Calendar: You can use Google Calendar or any other online calendar app to keep track of and remind you of your upcoming events as well as just time-blocking your day in general.
Sticky notes/notes app: Write down your thoughts and reminders quickly for later, similar to how an agenda works.
Notion: Notion is an online application that allows you to use all of the aforementioned functions in a single app. It does take a little bit of getting used to, understanding all of the variety of features it offers. I highly recommend searching up YouTube tutorials on it if you are interested.
Here’s one final bonus tip for those that read all the way through:
Bonus tip: Nutrition, exercise, and sleep.
“A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” — Confucius
Sometimes we get so busy that we completely forget to give our physical body its basic needs to even function properly! This may come as obvious to most people, but it’s surprising how little attention is paid toward these pinnacles of life. Trading your health away is rarely worth the cost. Let’s go through each of them individually, taking a look at why they’re important, as well as the solution to each problem.
Nutrition
Food is to your body as gasoline is to a car. Without food, your body won’t run properly.
Eat three meals a day with a healthy balance of carbs, proteins, healthy fats, and vegetables.
Exercise
Trust me, if you don’t include exercising in your routine, you will never get around to doing it. You’re not going to do fifty push ups on a random Tuesday because it “feels right”. If you have a P.E. class, take it seriously because learning about your body and its limits is just as important as all of your other educational classes.
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), you should try to have 5-10 hours of moderate physical activity and 2-5 hours of vigorous physical activity every week.
Sleep
Here is a little tidbit from my personal experience: Yes, eating and exercising is important, but I found that sleep is the most important thing that you can do for your body and mind, yet it’s so incredibly difficult to get enough of it between our busy schedules and playing Brawl Stars with your friends.
A lack of sleep can (will) lead to crankiness, risky behavior, and an overall decrease in cognitive function, and I’m sure that many of you noticed that about you as well whenever you don’t get enough sleep.
Here are two ways you can get consistently good sleep:
Sleep and wake up at around the same time every day. In other words, set a bedtime for yourself. 8-9 hours of sleep is ideal, but don’t get less than 6 or more than 10.
The 10-3-2-1-0 rule is a general rule of thumb for making sure what you do during the daytime helps you sleep at night. Each number corresponds to the number of hours before your bedtime.
10: No caffeine
3: No food or drink (water is okay)
2: No more work
1: No more screen time
0: Number of times you can hit the snooze button
I have to admit, I’m definitely not able to follow all of these rules all the time, especially the work and screen time ones. Just keep in mind that these activities near your bedtime do affect your sleep in one way or another.
TL;DR
Good habits will help you do more with less; set up a good environment for work and remove your phone from it; manage your time with agendas or online tools; make sure you eat, exercise, and sleep well.
Image Credits:
Potential energy graphs by Frederick Ernst