Understand this TED talk on time management & simplifying, with help from a neurolanguage coach

- Have you ever wished

that you could understand native speakers better

so that you can watch all of those fabulous professional

and personal development videos on the internet?

But have you also felt that you don't have a lot of time

and that's really difficult?

Well, then today's lesson is for you

because we're gonna watch together a video

on time management that is meant

for native speakers and I'll help you understand it better.

You ready?

Let's go.

Hi, I'm your English coach, Christina.

And welcome to business English with Christina

where you become better at English, better at business

and better at lots of other things too

like time management.

Today, We're gonna watch a Ted talk together

and it's called 'How to gain control

of your free time' by Laura Vanderkam.

And do you ever wish that you could gain control

or take control of your free time

or just your time so that you have free time

and maybe spend time doing more of the things

that you really enjoy.

It's something that I find is like a constant challenge also

because with running a business, having a personal life

and all of that.

Yeah, like the struggle is real, as we say in English.

So, I enjoyed making this lesson for you

because I learned a lot as well.

In this video, I'll help you understand

a lot of expressions from this Ted talk here.

But if you also wanna be able to actually remember

the expressions and then maybe use them in your real life,

I've got a worksheet to help you to do all of that.

It's free.

So, you may as well go and get it.

And it's over at christinarebuffet.com/worksheets.

And you can watch this video, use the worksheet,

follow along, and that's just going to make you learn

a lot more efficiently, a lot faster

and help you really get the most out of these video lessons.

Do you think that somebody who writes a book

about time management is always on time?

- When people find out I write about time management,

they assume two things.

One is that I'm always on time.

I was once late to my own speech on time management.

- One thing that I love about this video

is that they don't focus on like weird hacks

on how to find tiny moments of time in your day

like cooking your food a few minutes less.

"Mm...

Mm..."

Or recording your favorite show on the television

so that you can skip through all of the commercials.

- Another way to find 32 minutes to exercise?

Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?

- So, is spending two minutes less time to cook your food

or watching five minutes less of commercials.

Like, is that really gonna help?

Can we save time by being faster and more efficient?

Well, not according to Vanderkam.

- We don't build the lives we want by saving time,

we build the lives we want and then time saves itself.

- And if you think about it, we can find time

for the really important things for our priorities.

For example, in the Ted talk,

there was this one woman, her water heater broke.

And so she changed her entire schedule

to find the time to solve that problem.

- And so the key to time management

is treating our priorities as the equivalent

of that broken water heater.

So, how do we do that?

How do we treat our priorities

as the equivalent of that broken water heater?

Well, first we need to figure out what they are.

- In other words, you have to treat things

like their emergencies so that you find the time

to act on them now.

And maybe that means, first of all, figuring out

or thinking about and deciding

what your priorities really are.

And now, can you imagine doing a performance review

for yourself?

When you look back at the year and everything that you did

and you decide what you did well

and what you need to improve.

Okay.

Classic exercise in pretty much any company.

But what if you imagined a performance review today

for next year?

Think about that.

- So, I want you to pretend it's the end of next year.

You're giving yourself a performance review

and it has been an absolutely amazing year

for you professionally.

What three to five thing did you do

that made it so amazing?

So, you can write next year's performance review now.

- What does your amazing year look like next year?

Can you come up with a few goals that you wanna accomplish?

- And now we need to break these down into doable steps.

- And maybe now make your goals smaller

and easy to do today.

- And then this is key.

We treat our priorities as the equivalent

of that broken water heater

by putting them into our schedules first.

And we do this by thinking through our weeks

before we are in them.

- And what if you tried

like really tried the advice from this Ted talk?

Like, can you find 15 minutes

in your schedule maybe this week

or maybe next week to really take the time to do something

that's gonna help you move closer to your goal?

For example, if your goal

is to better understand native speakers,

what can you do 15 minutes a day?

Very soon, you can put it in your calendar

and you can do it.

I'll give you a hint.

There's a lot of things on business English

with Christina that you can use for that.

And you think that 15 minutes is it's too small

to actually make any difference?

Well...

- But small moments can have great power.

You can use your bits of time for bits of joy.

Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful

on the bus on the way to work.

It's about looking at the whole of one's time

and seeing where the good stuff can go.

I truly believe this.

There is time.

Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters.

And when we focus on what matters,

we can build the lives we want in the time we've got.

- Do you agree with that?

Do you think that small moments

have the big power to change your life?

You know?

Yeah.

I definitely believe that.

Now, maybe you wanna take a few minutes

to figure out your priorities.

What matters to you right now?

And can you find just 15 minutes

in your schedule to just put it in there?

Even if it's just 15 minutes to start,

you gotta start somewhere, but,

whatever you're gonna do, put it in the comments below,

let me know what you're gonna do, because as we say,

if you write your goals down,

if you tell someone about them, so tell me about them.

You're more likely to accomplish them

and that's what we all want.

Isn't it?

Now, if you enjoyed this lesson, I would love to know.

And there are three ways that you can tell me.

First, is give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube

and subscribe to my channel

so we can continue learning together.

Go over to christinarebuffet.com

and get the worksheet that goes with this lesson,

so I can help you even more.

And go ahead and watch this next video

which is another breakdown video.

That's a video made for native speakers

that I help you to understand.

And it's all about habits and motivation.

So very useful for improving your English in lots of ways.

All right, that's it for today.

Thank you so much for learning with me

and I'll see you next time.