The Best Personal Development Tip Medium Taught Me in 2021

It helped me write more — guilt-free.

I accidentally came across an interesting Medium article where a Medical student was talking about how he was earning nearly $5000 a month in freelancing while being a full-time student.

“That’s a whole new perspective on time!” I thought.

I had always been a bookworm. Be it for reading or writing.

But since I started preparing for my Medical College Admission Test nearly a decade ago, I had never been peacefully able to read or write.

Stricken with what people call the “Medical Students’ Guilt”, I was always hammered with the thought that I’m doing something that’s not going to help my career.

I was constantly bothered by the feeling that I could have instead read a Medical Textbook or prepared notes for an exam.

And this feeling didn’t go away even after graduation since the expectation to stay updated is even higher when you are a doctor.

I digress.

So this article I was reading on Medium was not about any special personal development tip, but about his freelancing journey.

However, the essence of one line caught my eyes.

“I had time segmented for my freelancing work. I always did 3 hours of freelancing per day, and I had it saved for that purpose, no matter what else I had to do.”

Then it dawned on me.

We will always be busy people in life, and if we continue to feel guilty about reading books or writing content or doing anything in that case for our pleasure, we will never get to do them due to guilt. and in turn, we will die regretting that we never did what we loved to do.

You need to get a chunk of a guilt-free Time fragment

Finding time to write when we have a job or studies is extremely difficult. Especially, if we are in a field that often expects us to be updated.

The author was having a wonderful technique where he was pre-allocating a certain chunk of time for his non-career-related stuff such as freelancing.

I realized I can use the same technique for my writing and reading.

With time and experience, I realized there are two methods to do this.

Pure Method

I would allocate a block of time for my leisure writing and reading such as 5 am to 8 am or 9 pm to 12 midnight etc.

It was perfect. I could concentrate better on my writing or reading and I was guilt-free since I had the feeling that it is a well-thought-out part of my timetable, which wouldn’t disturb my career or studies.

But there was a problem.

I couldn’t always adhere to a certain time. Emergencies and unexpected are commonplace in my field.

Hence I found out an alternate method.

Timer Method

Instead of planning exact start and end times, I would rather plan for a duration of time.

3 hours a day!

So I kept a timer whenever I was doing my leisure activity and as soon as I had to go somewhere, I paused the timer and got that done.

Then when I was free again, I went back, restarted the timer, and got my work done.

Once my timer’s duration allowance was over, I was done for the day.

The problem with this method was that although it allowed flexibility with time, it didn’t exactly bring the sense of satisfaction or completion like a preallocated time would.

However, at the end of the day, I got the stuff done and that’s all that mattered.

Thank You So Much but, I’m So Sorry!

As you must have noticed by now, I haven’t noted down or given a link to the source article which inspired me to try this method.

That is because I can no longer find that article.

Initially, I didn’t think it would work so I didn’t bother saving the link. Now that it worked and I want to write an article on it, I could neither find the source article nor do I remember the name of the author. However, I couldn’t help writing about this technique, since it made a huge difference in my life.

So I’m really sorry my fellow Medium writer, if you wrote that article please comment here I will definitely link to it. On the contrary, if you are someone who came across that article and remember whose that was, please drop the link or their username in the comments, so I will go and find the article of that inspirational person.

Whoever that is, thank you so much for changing my life.