Hey guys, welcome or welcome back to my podcast.
It's Machine. Y'all already know what time of
year it is? Ramadan is literally like 3 days
away. If you aren't already planning,
getting ready, what are you doing?
You need to get started. But even if we plan very
meticulously for what we're going to do and when we're going
to do them, a lot of the time we end up failing and just falling
short on our goals. We have way too many
responsibilities, way too many different facets of our lives.
School, whether you're in high school, middle school, you're in
college, maintaining your friendships and spending quality
time with your family. Maybe you have a job or you have
a younger sibling that you need to take care of.
And then on top of all of that, you have your Ibad, your Ramadan
goals, doing everything that you wanted to do that can get a lot
like really fast. It can burn you out before
you're even in the second week of Ramadan and you just feel
extremely just done. You don't want to do anything
when you shouldn't be feeling like that in this special month,
which is why today I'm going to be going over how to balance
your life during Ramadan. No matter how busy your schedule
is or how many commitments you have.
Here are a few tips that you can use to hopefully lighten the
burden that you have during this month so that you can focus more
on your Ebada and building a relationship with God.
My credentials just so y'all know, I'm not, I'm not a fake.
I am currently a junior in college, I'm studying data
science. I'm doing my bachelor's and my
master's so I'm seeing undergrad courses and grad courses right
now. So my workload is kind of heavy.
On top of that, I also do social media.
Regardless of if you see that as a job or not, to me it is a job
and I have to put hours aside for that, for editing, recording
even just like thinking of video ideas.
So that takes a lot of time. I also live alone, so meal
prepping is on that list of responsibilities I have because
if I'm not cooking, I'm not eating.
Yeah, those are I guess my credentials, the things I'm
going to have to be balancing this Salamadon.
So with that in mind, I'm going to be giving guys these tips,
scheduling and time blocking. I know this one may seem a
little basic like the why wouldn't I do that?
It's like the first thing that comes to mind, but I really want
to stress the importance of literally planning your day down
to AT and make sure you have your day planned at least the
day before so that you know exactly what you're going to do
and when you're going to do it. Find a calendar that works best
for you. You can literally just use the
Calendar app on your phone. You can use Google Calendar if
that's what you prefer, Outlook, Notion calendar, that's also
really good one. And then what you're going to do
is you're going to schedule in everything.
And when I say everything, I quite literally mean everything.
Schedule what time you should be in bed by, schedule what time
you're going to start making a thought, schedule what time
you're going to lock in for school, what time you have
classes, what time you work. Like when I say every single
thing, I mean every single small thing.
Like, I don't care how miniscule it is, I want you to put that in
in there. And then what I want you to do
is add a reminder to every single time block that you have
in there and have it remind you 10 to 15 minutes before so that
you know that you have something else to do in a little bit.
That way, you stay on top of your game.
You get a reminder before you have to do something and it's
not just hitting you in your face like, oh, since when did I
need to do this? Or Oh my God, the time passed by
so fast. And I didn't mention this, but
also time block. You're about the time block when
you're going to pray, time block when you're going to read the on
when you're going to, I don't know, Quran journal, like
whatever it is that is your goals for this Ramadan.
Input time into every single day so that you can work towards
those goals because that's honestly the most important part
of this month. So make sure that you have at
least like one hour. If you really have a busy
schedule, maybe less, but try to have at least one hour where you
fully immerse yourself in God and religion and in doing about
that, because we don't want to miss out on that aspect.
Yes, life gets busy, but we need to remind ourselves why we're
here. And that's honestly the whole
purpose of this month, to remember the Quran and to
increase our worship because we're here for one reason and
one reason only. It's extremely easy to forget
that reason, but this month is here for us to remind ourselves
and we should use it to our advantage.
That leads me to another thing. Schedule in naps.
And I say this only if you are a nap person.
I know some people they can't nap if they're like if you're
going to sleep, you're going to sleep for like 3-4 hours maybe
the whole entire day. Like if you're one of those kind
of people, please don't nap like you want to use your day to the
best of your ability and not waste any of it.
Or if you feel worse after taking a nap.
I feel like sometimes, most of the time, honestly, if I take a
nap, I wake up and I just feel so much worse than I did before.
And it takes a long time for me to readjust and like feel good
enough to like actually start doing things.
So not something that I will personally be doing.
But if naps help you and you're the type of person that can take
like 1020 minute naps and feel free, energized and go about
your day, then definitely schedule those into your
calendar. My next step is reframing
Ramadan and what I don't know about you, but I feel like
growing up in Ramadan and my family was just a lot of reading
Quran to the point where at least for me, it was like it
burnt me out so fast. I'll handle like a little about
it. My parents like they're so on
their Dean and they can't do things like that without feeling
burnt out. I don't know how they do it
because I honestly just can't. I've tried and it burns me out
so quick and it took me a long time to kind of internalize
this. But Ramadan does not mean that
you need to do every single thing.
Rather, it is more about consistency, especially if you
have time constraints, if you have other responsibilities that
you need to do, it's honestly better to focus on, at least in
my opinion, on your consistency rather than the amount of things
that you're doing. Because if you're doing a lot of
things one day and then the next day you just fall off, there's
no reason to be like you're not getting a lot out of that.
You'd be getting a lot more if you're focusing on one thing and
you're consistently focusing on that for all of Ramadan.
That way when Ramadan ends, you're more likely to keep that
habit in your life. And it's easier to just have it
as a daily thing instead of just focusing on like 20 different
things. And it's like the next day,
maybe you're doing like 5 of the things on your goal list.
Like it's not a very good way to go about it.
So what I want you to do and only take this advice if you
genuinely like, you know that doing a lot of things is gonna
do worse for you than good if you can't do all the things
alone about it much although like to you for like I wish.
But if you know that's not going to go well for you, I want you
to cut down that list of 100 different goals that you have
into 5 or less goals. Narrow down that list of things
that you are going to put your time towards.
That way, you can put more time focusing on these things and you
can become more connected to them.
So, for example, if you want to learn the meaning of the Quran,
right, let's just say you focus on surahs that you have
memorized already and you recite every single day when you pray.
So focusing on learning that the seed of those surahs is going to
be a lot better for you in the long run than focusing on like
larger surahs or like any random, you know, places in the
Quran. Like it's more beneficial to you
to do it the other way. And that way, going back to our
calendar, you can input time block for focusing on each of
your goals. So let's just say you have three
different goals. So you can put in time blocks
for focusing on each of the three goals, whether that's 30
minutes, whether that's an hour longer, like whatever it is,
You're just overall going to have more time to focus on those
goals. And you're going to have more
time to become better and well versed or overall get more out
of it than you would if you were like stretching yourself out to
20 different goals. My next tip, and this does sound
a little bit sick again, but commit to what you say you're
going to do. A lot of the time we say we're
going to do things, but we just don't follow through.
And this is the month where we need to stop doing that.
We need to follow through with what we say we're going to do.
As someone goes by, your motivation level is going to
change. It's going to go lower and lower
and lower. You're going to feel more tired.
You're going to start having mood changes.
I don't know about you, but I feel like doing Ramadan, my mood
definitely does change based off of just like different sleeping
habits, sleeping later, waking up earlier, being tired all the
time, not having enough food, not drinking enough water, like
all of it just combined does definitely change my mood.
So all of these things combined, it's really going to be
important for you to stay hard on that discipline.
Regardless of how you're feeling in the moment, regardless of if
you want to do and what you don't want to do, you need to
get up, tell yourself, like this could be my last Ramadan.
Honestly, like take what you can out of this.
This is such a blessed month. You can get so many good deeds,
so much Hassanat, and we should be taking it to our full
advantage. Given like this is also
something that I need to hear IA lot of the time, just like sleep
through the day just so I'm not hungry and I wake up a little
bit before I thought and then I go down and make myself some
food eat. This is not how we should be
living through and spending our time during this blessed month.
We should be using every single second that we have to our
advantage. Take that opportunity that's in
front of you and ride with it. Like again, this could be your
last Ramadan. This could be the last time that
you are able to fast and get all these good deeds.
Like family, you generally don't know another thing about staying
committed. The more that you tell yourself
you're going to do something and you don't follow through, the
more you're going to have or I guess the less faith that you're
going to have in yourself. If you keep on following the
cycle of not fulfilling your promises to yourself, you're
going to subconsciously start believing that you just can't do
things. And once you get into that
pattern of not following through and not doing things and just
being lazy, it's a very hard cycle to get out of.
So to not get ourselves to fall into that cycle, stop it before
it happens and follow through. My next tip is to plan your low
energy days. It's completely normal to have
days throughout Ramadan where you don't have as much energy.
So it's important to plan out what you're going to do on these
low energy days so that you can keep pushing through, but you're
not doing so much where you were.
You're feeling burnt out and like you're pushing yourself to
a level where you can't function properly.
And it's important to have these low energy days planned out so
that when you are having one of them, you can be like, OK, this
is my plan for when I am having a low energy day.
So you can switch up your schedule and just realign so
that you can still get the most out of your day.
So for example, let's just say you go to throw away every
single night you're having a low energy day.
OK you can go to the Masjid, pray maybe 8:00 or maybe your
low energy day is praying at home.
Whatever it is, have an alternative so that you're still
doing something. But it's not to the point where
you're feeling like Oh my God do I have to do this?
I literally just feel like I'm about to pass out right now.
Y'all need to be more gentle with yourself because no one is
going to be gentle with you if you aren't being gentle with
you. But on that same note, don't let
yourself off the hook just because you're being gentle.
You can do both and have that balance.
Like it's completely OK to readjust.
Rest when you need to, take naps when you need to, sleep in one
day if you need to, but scale back up when you're feeling that
energy again. One of the biggest things that
you can honestly do throughout this month is remembering Allah
Suppanatala and everything that you do, whether that is when
you're leaving the house to go to work, to go to college, to go
to school, whether it's before you eat.
Making DWA is the best way to remember a lot.
And there are so many Dwas that you can learn literally from
just like searching it up on Google that you can recite
throughout the day and have that be a remembrance of God,
regardless of if you're working 8090 hours a week like dua is
the it's a very small, but a very powerful way to remember
God and to get Hassanat throughout this month.
You wake up in the morning, say the blah for waking up before
you eat. Say the dua for before you eat.
There are duas for everything, like I think there's a door for
putting on clothes, leaving the house.
There's a door for when you start the car and you're like
traveling to work. There are doors for when you're
walking uphill or like upstairs. I don't know if that makes
sense. There is also a door for when
you're walking downhill or downstairs.
I don't know if that makes sense.
I hope you guys understand what I'm saying when I say that, but
point is, there are thoughts for literally everything and I think
it's extremely beneficial if you look into different thoughts
that you can incorporate into your life, especially again, if
you have an extremely busy schedule, just so you can
remember God throughout those small moments throughout your
day. At the end of the day, Ramadan
isn't about how aesthetic your routine looks.
It's not about how much you romanticize your goals.
It's not even about how many goals you have.
It's not about proving anything to anyone.
It's about intention. It's about discipline and it's
about consistency. It's about who you are when
there is no one else around to look at you and see what you're
doing. It doesn't require you to be
perfect. It requires you to put in effort
and that version of yourself that continually puts in that
effort to become better, to remember God even in the small
moments throughout her day. That is the you that's going to
come out of all of this. Underneath that is the you that
is going to keep on inshola those habits that you made and
turn them into things that you do on a daily outside of this
month. That is it for this video.
I hope you guys got at least something out of this and it
helps you in any way but that I love y'all more.
I'll see you my next video.