Before you can prioritise your time, you have to figure out what you want to do and allocate any time for it. For me, that involves a Google Calendar where I have an event for everything I want to do. I treat it more like a to-do list rather than just a reminder of what needs to be done when. For example, I'll have tasks like "book appointment", "take creatine", "work on project" - which can be done whenever. Some are just reminders for things I should do around a certain date. I also have reminders on the first of every month to update my personal finance information and reach out to friends who I see less often to try and set up a meeting that month (this helps keep in touch with everyone - someone has to put in the effort otherwise friendships peter out.) I'll also sometimes highlight events in red if they're urgent or not to be missed.
In the following, I try to apply lessons from Adora Cheung's "How to Prioritize Your Time" talk to my observations about how I currently spend my time.
Focus on Real progress, not Fake progress - evaluate your goals and make sure the things you're working on actually get you towards your goals. You might find you can free up a lot of time this way
Prioritisation - make sure the thing you're working on is the most effective for achieving your goals. She suggests journaling every hour for a few days to identify how you're using your time. Grade the impact of the things you can work on and reevaluate this weekly.
Complexity - grade the complexity of your tasks and work on the low complexity and high impact things
Note: I think the talk doesn't touch on deadlines or prioritises that you can't control - you could say these fall under impact because if there is a deadline then missing it could have a strong negative impact. I have noticed that for me, urgency from things such as deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise) are a big motivator for getting things done.
Evaluate your week - were you learning, did you grade your tasks correctly, do you have consistent blockers, are you able to complete tasks in a timely manner?
Move fast and be decisive - be okay with making the wrong choice by just moving quickly and getting shit done. If you end up doing the wrong thing, get it done quickly, learn from that, and try to not do the wrong thing again. This is better than doing nothing.
Overall this talk wasn't super helpful for me and I feel like a lot of this is already in practice by anyone who is semi-organised. I do think I should go back to making lists more rather than just relying on my calendar lists.