Despite being minimally neurotic, being productive is still essential to my life as a writer, reader and student. After some thought, and consulting Ali Abdaal’s twitter thread on his top productivity tips, here are some tips on productivity and time management that I wish I’d known when I was younger.

1. We own all of our time: If you are playing games or doomscrolling, there is no excuse to say “I don’t have enough time”. We are all in control of our time and how to prioritise it.

2. The daily highlight: Write one thing that you must get done each day and prioritise it: everything else becomes secondary.

3. Eat the frog: When you sit down to work, get the most difficult task done first. This will make all the other tasks seem trivial in comparison.

4. To-do lists: The reason things fall through the cracks is often because we have not written it down. Physically planning things is more convincing than simply telling yourself you will do it.

5. Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time we allocate to it. If you give yourself the whole day to finish one lecture, you will inevitably use all that time. But if you give yourself one hour in the morning, you will somehow manage to squeeze it in then. Leverage artificial deadlines.

6. The choice to be satisfied (the most important). If you are a highly neurotic productivity nerd, it is easy to beat yourself up at the end of the day, telling yourself that you could have done more. Instead, you could be satisfied with what you did get done, and be grateful simply for being alive.