What Lamine Yamal can teach us about time management
He turns 19 on Monday, July 13, one day before starting in his first World Cup semifinal on Tuesday, July 14. Two years ago, at the same kind of tournament, he was still doing homework in his hotel room.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 14, Lamine Yamal lines up for Spain against France in Dallas with a place in the World Cup final on the line. At just 19 years old, Lamine Yamal has already achieved more than many athletes do in an entire career. While most teenagers are balancing school, friends, and hobbies, he has learned how to handle studies, elite-level training, international travel, intense media attention, and the pressure of performing on football’s biggest stages.
Everyone gets the same 24 hours each day. The difference often comes down to how you prioritize your time, stay disciplined, and focus on what matters most. Here are the time management lessons anyone can learn from Yamal’s remarkable rise.
Why multi tasking is the real productivity killer
Here’s what actually made his success possible: he protected small, separate windows of time for school and soccer, and moved between them deliberately instead of trying to hold both in his head at once.
Multitasking does the opposite. The American Psychological Association’s research on task-switching (multitasking) shows that jumping between unrelated tasks carries a real cost: your brain needs time to reload the rules and context for whatever you just switched to, and that reload tax adds up fast when you’re constantly bouncing between an email, a text, and the thing you were actually supposed to be working on. A teenager doing homework between training sessions isn’t multitasking. He’s single-tasking on a schedule, one block at a time.
How to steal his method
You don’t need to be a professional soccer player to benefit from the same setup.
Time blocking is a powerful strategy for managing competing priorities, and many high performers rely on it to stay organized. The idea is simple: instead of hoping you will find time for everything, you intentionally assign specific blocks of time to each important area of your life. For Lamine Yamal, that meant balancing elite-level football training, schoolwork, travel, recovery, and personal commitments while still performing at the highest level.
A time-blocking approach helps you create clear boundaries between different responsibilities. A student-athlete might dedicate certain hours to classes and homework, reserve training sessions for football, schedule recovery and rest, and protect time for family and personal life. Knowing exactly when each task belongs, you avoid constantly feeling pulled in different directions.
For everyday people, time blocking works the same way. Instead of starting each day with a long to-do list and trying to fit everything in whenever you have a free moment, you create a realistic schedule that gives every important task a dedicated place. You might block the first hour of your morning for focused work before emails and notifications take over, reserve time after work for exercise or personal projects, set aside an evening block for cooking and family, and schedule time to learn a new skill or pursue a goal.
Even small tasks, such as grocery shopping, meal planning, or household responsibilities, can have their own time slots. The benefit is that you stop relying solely on motivation or memory and start building a system that helps you consistently make progress. By deciding in advance where your time goes, you protect your priorities and make sure the things that matter most do not get pushed aside by less important distractions.
The lesson is that being busy does not automatically mean being productive. The people who achieve the most are often those who are intentional about where their time goes. Whether you are managing school, work, fitness goals or personal projects, creating a structured schedule can help you make progress in every area without letting one priority take over everything else.
