Productivity expert Ali Abdaal - Never procrastinate again (E235)

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance app. High Performance Foundation gives young people the tools and skills they need to kickstart their journey to a future where they can thrive. We can't wait to show you what the Foundation team have been working on. Sign up to the High Performance Half Marathon and kick off your fundraising today. Head to our website for more information. Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the show that unlocks the minds of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jay Comfrey and alongside our expert in high performing cultures, Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes and struggles of our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged and to grow.

1:07Here's what's coming up today. Ali Abdaal was one of the world's greatest teachers. He inspired and educated millions all around the world to build a life they truly love. He holistically combined disciplines from science to philosophy to create an integrated system of living themed around mind, body, heart and soul, which resonated with his loyal following of tens of millions of people all around the world. mostly people who are high performers don't consider it a grind they are genuinely enjoying the things that they do and they're getting into that amazing flow state where the time just sort of goes by and they don't even realize the time is going by and they're operating this mode where what looks like work to other people feels like play to them what would i do if money were no object if we are doing anything just for the money or primarily for the money it completely sucks all the joy out of it.

1:52Whenever you're faced with a choice, if it's not a hell freaking yes, I would love to do this. It has to be a no. So we recorded this episode just before Christmas, and I've been excited for the last few weeks for you to hear this because Ali Abdaal is a master of productivity. And this is the perfect time of year to listen to his wisdom, his lessons, his guidance. I mean, I think that his story alone is incredible. He started posting videos in his final year at Cambridge University. And then when he was a doctor, he continued to produce this productivity content and it just exploded. And so he decided to walk away from being a doctor and focus on this.

2:32And I'm really glad he has because he's since helped tens of millions of people. And now he brings his wisdom to high performance. And before we get going with today's episode, I'm really excited to tell you that if you download the High Performance app right now for free from the App Store, then you can be among the very first people to hear our brand new episode with Manchester United and Scotland midfielder, Scott McTominay. That's available right now on the High Performance app. But right here, it's time to welcome the brilliant Ali Abdaal, the productivity expert to high performance.

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4:39Well, Ali, welcome to High Performance. Thank you. We normally start with what is high performance? I'd like to start by asking you, what is feel-good productivity? So to me, feel-good productivity is the same as high performance, which is, at least my definition is, doing the things that matter to you, but in a way that's enjoyable, meaningful, and sustainable. And if we can kind of get that in there, then, you know, Party White's feel-good productivity is because we all want to be productive, but we also want to feel good along the way. and one thing that I don't like is this idea that productivity is about grind and hustle, and there's that quote from Muhammad Ali, which is like, I suffered through training for 10 years, and it was worth it to become a champion.

5:23But I think that it works for some people, but most of us don't want to suffer for 10 years just so we can lift some trophy at the end of it. We want to work on what's meaningful to us, but we want to do it in a way that's actually enjoyable, that actually feels good, because what's the point of productivity if you're going to be miserable at the end of it? So what's the first question our listeners should ask themselves if they want to be more productive? But actually, it is a grind. It is a struggle. It is a challenge. They do feel constantly overworked, undervalued and underloved. What's the first place we begin on this journey?

5:53So I think the first question is, what are the things within my control that I can do to make my work a little bit more enjoyable? You know, we all have to do things that we don't like to do. We all have jobs where even if you like your job, there's going to be aspects of it that you don't like. You know, we're all busy. There's lots of stuff going on. But I think what I found through writing the book and through kind of diving into the events around productivity and performance and creativity and all this stuff, if you can find a way to make whatever you're doing feel just a little bit better, experience more positive emotions in it, like make it more fun, make it more enjoyable.

6:24It boosts your productivity, it boosts your creativity, it reduces your stress levels, and it massively energizes you as well. Which means not only do you perform better in your work, but you also have more energy to give to the other important areas of your life, like your family or your hobbies or your side hustle. How does it energize you? So there's this idea of, so you know that feeling, we all have that feeling where there's certain people we hang out with, and you leave that conversation feeling energized, right? But then there are other people that you hang out with, and you leave that conversation feeling drained.

6:52and there's some weird kind of energy thing going on. It's not like glucose or like, you know, chemical energy, but there's some sort of, you know, psychologists call it like zest or vigor or energetic arousal. There's all these words for this sort of intangible energy that we feel when we're doing something we love or hanging out with people that energize us. And if we can find a way to get that sort of energy out of our work, which we do by feeling good about it, by having fun, by getting into the flow state, the stuff that you guys write about in your book as well. If we can do that, it means that you can genuinely get to the end of the workday feeling energized rather than feeling drained.

7:26And because for a lot of us, we've got families, for families that we come home to, it's often a shame when our families get the dregs of our energy because we've given all that energy at work. And because we feel so drained by the end of it, after the commute, we get home. And now it's like you've got these like you're running on fumes. But if you can make your work energizing by trying to make it fun, making it enjoyable and that's kind of what the book is about you can come home with more energy sometimes than even when you started even when you started the day with and that i think is like the thing to aspire to so when i was reading the book and i really enjoyed it ali but before i read it i came thinking about the the carl honora book of in pursuit of slow that really spoke to me when i read it a few years ago because i because i often feel my life is frenetic at times where it's one task to the other and one demand later on the next and carl's book reminded me of sometimes just slowing down a little bit and remembering to to smell the roses along the way can be really powerful yeah so i was thinking do we need another book about going faster being busier and being more productive i think the thing that i wanted to get across when writing when writing the book and this is why it's kind of feel good productivity rather than, I don't know, maximum productivity or something like that, is that firstly, it's not just about productivity.

8:46It's also about the satisfaction and enjoyment that we get out of life. But also, you know, having listened to a bunch of your episodes and interviewed a bunch of high performers on my podcast as well, mostly people who are high performers don't consider it a grind. They are genuinely enjoying the things that they do. And they're getting into that amazing flow state where the time just sort of goes by and they don't even realize the time is going by. and they're operating in this mode where what looks like work to other people feels like play to them. And, you know, there's so many stories of Nobel prize winners as well.

9:15You know, we've got a story in the book about Richard Feynman who, you know, helped build the atomic bomb and then was a physics professor, super young, and he ended up getting really burned out. And what he realized was if he approached physics with a spirit of play, trying to treat it with a little bit more playfulness, that cured his burnout and helped him find the equations that helped him win the Nobel Prize. So I actually think that, you know, it's not just about going slow, but it's actually, you know, go slow to go fast. If you actually want to be more productive, then approaching your work with the spirit of play is a way of being more productive, but it's also a way of just feeling better about your whole life.

9:50And there's some great examples and great stories in your book. I love the fact that Mark Manson, who's been on our podcast, described it as a much-needed antidote to hustle culture. I'd like to know why and how you came up with this antidote to hustle culture? Like, were you there? Were you the unhappy, overworked, overstressed doctor? And that's where all this came from. Pretty much, yeah. So throughout medical school, the great thing about university is that, you know, going into the hospital is optional. But when you start working, all of a sudden you hit with a ton of bricks where you realize that it's not an option anymore.

10:23Like, you know, I can't just decide in a given morning that I don't feel like going in. I have to go in anyway, obviously. And for the first few months when I was working as a junior doctor, you know, medical school hadn't really prepared me for it because you learn stuff, but you don't really know what it's like to actually have a job. And I was working, you know, 45 to 60 hours a week. And on the side, my YouTube channel was just sort of taking off my business. And so I was trying to juggle all these different things. And I ended up feeling pretty miserable in those first few months. And I would speak to my colleagues and they would be like, oh, that's just, you know, welcome to the NHS.

10:54This is just what life is like. But then I'd speak to my friends doing consulting or law, and they were also all feeling the same thing that like, I guess this is just what being an adult is like. You just, you know, you've just got to grind. But back when I was at university, I was obsessed with how to find efficient ways of studying for exams. Because I realized that if I could study more efficiently, it would just free up my time to do more interesting things. And so I found a bunch of psychology studies that explained how to study for exams. I applied those, and now I had all this free time.

11:24And so I use those same skills because I, you know, I did, I did one of my extra degrees in psychology. I was like, okay, I'm just going to find some papers to be like, how do you actually be more productive? And initially I was trying to free up more time because I wanted to work on my YouTube channel and like actually have a social life. But, but then I kind of found this idea that if you can find a way to experience positive emotions in your work through play, power, people, progress, purpose, kind of these different things that drive internal motivation, as you guys talk about in your book as well, then it just transforms the way you experience work.

11:54And so almost from the get go, as soon as I kind of discovered this, I realized, hang on. Yes, I don't have a choice about whether I turn up to work. And I'm a junior doctor, so I have to do what I'm told. But I actually have an enormous amount of choice in how I approach it. So before I discovered this, I thought that and I think this is a mistake a lot of people make that I'm feeling drained when I get home from work. Therefore, the solution is to work less hard. It's to kind of coast a little bit. It's to sort of do the bare minimum is to sort of just do what I'm told. let the senior doctors take all the responsibility.

12:23I'm just a junior. I'm just going to do my job. But actually, approaching life and work with that sort of kind of coasting attitude is actually really draining on our energy levels. You would think it would leave you with more energy because you're expending less effort. But actually, it really drains us to be constantly watching the clock to be like, oh, there's something about this sort of intangible sort of energy where when we're engaged with something, it weirdly generates energy. So it's somewhat counterintuitive, but the more effort you put into something, the more energy you'll get out of it.

12:54And, you know, we see this with our hobbies all the time. Like if you're really devoted to something and you're playing the piano or like working on a painting, whatever the thing might be, hanging out with your friends, hanging out with your kids, you leave that interaction feeling more energized. And this is kind of this idea of the flow state. If you can get into that flow state, it generates energy. And so I realized that when working as a doctor, a huge part of my energy levels were based on how I approached it rather than on what was going on around me. I think you've got something really useful to share with our listeners here that for many of them seem to go into the same pattern that you experienced.

13:29That school you told, work hard, get good grades, get good grades, you get a good job. And we often do that, get the job and then feel disillusioned of, is this what I've invested, in your case, eight years at med school to arrive here? so what advice would you give to anyone listening to this that that is finding themselves having played the game of working hard getting the good grades getting the job and then feeling disillusioned what's the first step you'd advise them to take so i think the first step is i would say do whatever you can that's in your control to make the things that you're doing feel more feel more worthwhile and there's a there's a specific way of thinking about this um so when sociologists do studies on measuring people's life satisfaction and happiness and stuff.

14:16One way of doing it is by giving people surveys, be like, how happy are you? But there's another method, which is, I think, more interesting. And that is where they give you like a little pager, or I think these days, it's like an app on your phone. And randomly throughout the day, they'll ask you a question on this app. And the question will be, would you like to fast forward what you're currently doing? So they look at what proportion of someone's life would they want to fast forward. And so for example, even though I enjoyed working as a doctor, if you gave me the option to fast forward the workday to the end of the workday, so I could go home and do what I really loved, I would take that option most of the time.

14:49That's not a fun place to be. Because that means, especially if it's work, at least eight hours of your life, every single, at least a third of your life, you would rather not experience than experience. Which sociologists would say means that you're more likely to be depressed, more likely to feel unfulfilled, more likely to feel like life is not worth living, because you would choose to fast forward it. And so I think the first step, and this is a question I always ask myself, if I ever have that feeling that, oh, I would choose to fast forward this moment, then I need to take a step back and think, okay, maybe I'm stuck in this job for now, but what can I do right now to at least try and enjoy the process?

15:25And I think this is something that anyone can apply. How can I approach this with a little bit more playfulness? How can I approach this with a little less seriousness? How can I just dial down the importance that I put on my work? We all think our jobs are incredibly important. But actually, this feeling of importance and this feeling of seriousness leads us to feel stressed and feel like everything we're doing has such high stakes. And, you know, most jobs, the stakes are not actually that high. Even in surgery, in brain surgery and heart surgery, the way they approach it is by having music in the background, by having a bit of a laugh, a bit of a joke.

15:57Because even surgeons that are dealing with life and death recognize that if you take it a little less seriously, you actually perform better. but I love the idea that the way that we do stuff without us doing anything else our brain and our body start releasing serotonin endorphins and when you said that in the book I was like man I know the exact things that I do that make me feel like that and I had no idea why doing this podcast for example made me feel like I was plugged into the electricity mains whereas my former job being a sports host used to make me feel like that but no longer gave me that thrill which is why I now do this and not that.

16:32It's worth thinking about, isn't it? Yeah. And I think that's a really good point that this thing that gives you energy can absolutely change over time. So I think, you know, I speak to a lot of young people who are doing their first one, two or three jobs. And there's almost a sense of like, oh, the thing I'm doing now is the thing I'll be doing forever. And that's not true at all. You know, you guys have had multiple different careers. I've had, I guess, multiple different careers. You know, the world is changing such that we are very rarely in the same job for like our entire life and so you can find ways to approach whatever you're doing right now with that sense of engagement with that sense of play with that sense of taking responsibility um but you can also find ways to then get out of it if you realize it's not what you want to do so would you tell us then how we do find our energizers yeah absolutely so there are three big ones conveniently they all start with a letter p so there is play there's power and there's people.

17:23And this actually overlaps a lot of the stuff with a lot of the stuff you guys talk about in your book. A lot of these are based around this idea of internal motivation, where the reason you are doing something is for the sake of the thing itself, not because of some reward you're going to get. So the reason we're doing this podcast is for its own sake, because we enjoy having conversations and we like the fact that our message can be shared with people. Yes, there is like, you know, it's probably going to get some sponsor revenue for this and I'm hoping to drive book sales. But like fundamentally, I'm enjoying this conversation and I hope you guys are as well.

17:53And so we have internal motivation. On that note, one question I often ask myself is, what would I do if money were no object? Because money is the prime external motivator. If we are doing anything just for the money or primarily for the money, it completely sucks all the joy out of it. And I really noticed this when, you know, back in med school and when I was working as a doctor, my YouTube channel was a side hustle. I was just doing it for fun. and then it started to make money. But as soon as I started making videos thinking, oh, I should make that video because I'm getting a lot of sponsorship money.

18:22It just took all the energy, took all the fun, took all the joy away from it. Because all the research shows that when you're motivated by something external, it actually crowds out even the internal reasons for doing it. So these days, I really have to convince myself that when I'm making a video, I'm not doing it for the money. Even though the money is there in the background, I just try not to think about it and focus on enjoying the process, being fully engaged and focusing on the idea of service how can i make sure that what i'm doing is in service to someone else um and so that those ideas of play power and people feed into this thing of making anything more energizing so tell us ali because i like that logic but i'm interested in how how do you incorporate that so that every time you make a video you remind yourself of the sense of service and the sense of fun so that you don't get caught up in the in the routine of just doing it yeah that's a great question um it's kind of embarrassing but i actually have a list of a list of mantras or affirmations that i read out to myself before i film a video okay something that i've long struggled with where you know and i think anyone you know even if you're not a youtuber listening to this you can probably relate to this where you probably have some kind of work where you see on your calendar you're like you know you get that feeling of oh god okay i i guess i've just got to do this you're probably going to get drained at the end of it and so i'm obsessed with trying to find any way possible to get rid of that kind of feeling around videos.

19:47So when it comes to my little YouTube videos, the thing I tell myself is, I am not concerned about the performance of this video. All I'm trying to do is share a message that I think would be helpful to at least one person, at least one person. And this is an idea that I talk about towards the middle of the book around combating procrastination. You know, one of the big parts of why we procrastinate is because the thing that we're trying to do feels like a big deal. It's like, I really noticed this, I don't know if you guys did as well, with writing a book, because a book is a big deal, right?

20:17It feels like a big deal. It feels like we're going to get a publisher and it's going to be printed. And there's something about a printed thing that makes it very different to a Google Doc. And so I'd procrastinate so much. And what we find, if we look at the evidence around procrastination, is that if you lower the bar, just make it easier on yourself. Approaching YouTube videos and approaching my work is about lowering the bar. It's about thinking, this video is not, I'm not aiming for this video to get a million views. I'm aiming for it to help at least one person. And that is something that's broadly under my control.

20:43I'm aiming to enjoy the process while I'm doing it. It's under my control. And I actually think this applies to literally anything. The more we raise the bar for ourselves, for some Olympic athletes, yes, raising the bar is how they get to high performance. But if we're not at that level yet, and we are struggling with procrastination, like we all do, even Olympic athletes in some areas of their life, they struggle with procrastination. The more you're struggling, the more you want to lower the bar, just to make it super easy to get started. Really interesting. And I'm really keen to talk about this idea of unblocking the things that are holding us back because I am the king of procrastination.

21:15We didn't quite complete the conversation about finding your energizers. The three Ps, we know what they are now. What were they again? Play, power, and people. Right. So play, power, and people. Before we move on, would you just complete that for us so that for people listening to this, they're like, right, I'm going to find my energizers, play, power, and people. But what do we ask ourselves? What do we do together? there okay so play let's start with play essentially play happens when we are highly engaged with something but also when the stakes are low so this is the idea of kind of making it feel sincere rather than serious this is something that alan the philosopher alan watts used to talk about love that phrase in your book go on let's play more on that so imagine you're playing i don't know a board game with friends or something like no one wants to play with someone who takes it too seriously it's a bit of a drain they're like obsessed with the rules it's like you know it just kind of sucks the fun out of it.

22:03But you also don't want to play a board game with someone who's completely half-arsed. Because that's no fun either. It's like, they're like, oh, whatever, it's just a game. It's like, no, come on, man. Like, you know, you want someone who approaches a board game sincerely, but not seriously. And that is how we, that is one of the ways we get this feeling of play in our work. So whatever the work is, whether you're doing a presentation or, I don't know, making a YouTube video, or in my case, writing discharge letters as a doctor, whatever the thing might be, instead of thinking, this is serious, think this is sincere, and I'm going to give my attention to this.

22:33There's another practical thing that I do every day, which is at the start of the day, it's generally useful to ask yourself, what's your number one priority? Because if you just got that number one thing done for the day, it would be a win. And this is widely validated in loads of studies. All the productivity books talk about this. Ask yourself, what's your most important task every morning? But the way that I rephrase this is I basically ask myself that question. But what I say is, what is today's adventure going to be? and it sounds corny, it sounds cliche, but even just framing something as an adventure just changes the way that we feel about it.

23:06And this is the amazing power of the mind. The mind can tell us all these negative things about ourselves, like, you know, you're worthless and, you know, this is not going to work. And why would you bother doing that? And we're so good at listening to our mind when it tells us negative things. But the mind is so powerful. If we just tell ourselves, today's adventure is going to be doing this presentation. Today's adventure is going to be updating my CV because I haven't done that in a while. Even just thinking like that changes the way we feel about it makes us approach it more in the spirit of play because you shared a brilliant bit of research in your book around those people that are told that they're in the fittest five percent and those people that are told they're in the unfittest five percent and the difference that makes on how much they enjoy working out yeah absolutely so a huge part of how we feel about stuff is based on the self-belief that we have about it and so as you mentioned you know they've done these studies where they split up groups into into two people they get them to exercise on a bike or something.

23:58And then randomly, they'll split them up completely unrelated to their performance. And for half of them, they'll say, you were really good. You performed like way above the average. And the other half, they'll just tell them, oh, you know, it's such a shame. You performed way below average. And there's actually no difference between their performance. And then they'll bring them back like a week later and see how hard they're trying and how much they enjoy the exercise. And maybe unsurprisingly, but I think it's interesting anyway, the group that's told that they were good at the thing that, oh, well done, you know, you performed above average.

24:24They do perform better the next time around. and they also feel better about it. And so this speaks to that thing of like, if you tell kids that they're underperforming or they're not very good, then that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't just apply to kids, it applies to adults as well. So a huge part of how we approach our work is getting that sense that we're actually confident and we're actually good at the thing. And I think we get that from, positive feedback from other people, but we can also tell that to ourselves. So there's another really cool study that we talk about in the chapter around power, where, you know, again, they split these, you know, they're like getting people into an exercise lab and split them into two groups.

25:00One group, they're told, you know, just keep cycling or whatever the thing is. And the other group, they tell them, when you feel like you want to slow down, just tell yourself something motivational. Tell yourself, I got this, you know, I'm good at this, I'm going to power through. And again, they find a huge difference just by telling yourself, I've got this, I'm going to power through. It boosts your performance and it also boosts your enjoyment. That's weird. It's like you get these like motivational quote bullshit type things all the time and we're like oh what just some random motivational motivational quotes are really really helpful there's a really interesting concept on on the third p bit on on on the people we surround ourselves with and there's an idea from organizational psychology refer you refer to a relational energy and you write about it really brilliantly would you tell us a little bit around the importance of of why we of who we choose to surround ourselves with how that can lead to us being more productive.

25:52Yeah, no, it's ridiculously important. So it's like that idea that I mentioned earlier around, you know, there are some people that energize us and some people that drain us. Now, we've all had this experience, but organizational psychologists decided to actually study this in a big, you know, a couple of big corporations. And what they asked everyone to do was like, rate how energizing or draining their colleagues were. And they used all of this data to create a sort of energy map. And they looked at who are the people that are consistently energizing people? And who are the people that are consistently draining everyone?

26:20And they found that the people who were doing the energizing, they were better liked, they performed better, they were more productive, they got paid better, they had higher evaluations from all their peers. Everyone wanted to work with them. But the people that were draining consistently, no one wanted to work with them. They were less liked, they were less productive, however you measure their performance. They had lower ratings with their managers. And so what these organizational psychologists said is like, A, you should try and become one of these energizing people. B, you should try and surround yourself with other people that lift you up rather than bring you down.

26:48bring it there's a bit that i'm going to nick shamelessly ali from your book where you talk about the four different types of people you can surround yourself with from cheerleader charlie would you tell us about it absolutely yeah so this is a um this was from a study that they did where they tried to figure out okay you know we all know that there are some people that energizing and some people that are draining what's really the difference between them and how do you become the sort of person that lifts people up and they found this basically down to two things it's like when you're responding to others, either it's passive or active, and then either it's constructive or destructive.

27:24So the absolute worst place to be is active destructive. So if you give me some good news, oh, you know, my book's coming out and I'm like, well, you know, that means that you're going to not have any time to spend with me, right? Like, you know, that's I'm actively responding to you, but in a very destructive way. There's no way that sort of person is energizing to be around. And if you find yourself being that person, then, you know, it's not a particularly good way to live life. The best place we want to be is active, constructive. Oh my God, that's incredible. I'm so happy for you. You know, it must feel amazing.

27:54I know how hard you worked on this book. Can you tell me more about it? Like, you know, how was the publishing process? We want to be around people like that. They respond actively and they respond constructively. They lift our energy. If you have someone that is active, destructive, if you have an active destructive in your life, do you speak to them and say, look, the way that you respond is really unhelpful for me? Do you just not call them and hope that slowly things fizzle out between you and they're no longer part of your life? Like what's the way for people that listen to this thinking, God, I'm married to an active destructive.

28:25I work with an active destructive. My best friend is an active destructive. What do they do? So there's kind of two things you can do. Number one is you could cut off the relationship, but obviously that's, you know, if they're a distant relative or a distant friend, okay, great. You don't need to talk to them. But if there's someone that you have to see every day, you know kim scott has a great book called radical candor which is all about you know how do we actually be candid with the people around us and how do we have that conversation in a way that allows us to give people feedback on how they're making us feel and there's a book i'm rereading at the moment called non-violent communication which gives a really good framework for this so how to have these difficult conversations so non-violent communication is it's it's a book written by this guy i think his name is michael rosenberg and he specializes in conflict management But this guy specializes in that sort of thing.

29:11And he's broken it down into a framework, which has like four steps. So observation, feeling, need, and request. So if, you know, for example, we were trying to, I'm just making this up, but if we were trying to give feedback to an active destructive person, we would start with an observation. Hey, you know, Johnny, I noticed that when I shared news about my, you know, latest promotion at work, you responded with an eye roll and said you know you know does that mean i'm not going to spend any time with you so that's the observation we're just trying to explain the facts then we've got the feeling and the need and so the way that this guy says you talk about feelings is i felt x because i needed y and i didn't you know and that and that didn't happen so it's not i felt hurt because you were a dickhead to me because that's kind of attacking the other person and like no one no one ever hears that instead it would feel you know i felt a little hurt by that because i would love to feel accepted and empowered in this relationship and i got the sense that that's not what happened so i felt x because i had had the need of why you make it about you not about exactly yeah because if you make it about them they're going to read it as criticism and then they'll just come back at you and then you're in a row right anytime someone feels they're being criticized in any any domain of life they will respond defensively it's the only thing they can do either either they submit or they get defensive and neither of those are options that we really want and the final one is request johnny you know would you be willing to respond in a more active constructive way next time i give you next time i share news with you perhaps i don't know asking me more about it in an enthusiastic way and it sounds so simple and like saying it out loud sounds a bit cliche but observation feeling need request this is the method that this guy uses in all sorts of conflict situation with like the most extreme polarizing people coming together.

31:05Because there's two other groups on that. And I think what your full box model that you shared is really good is because we often hear the world in binary terms. You're on the bus, you're off the bus, you're an energizer, you're an energy sapper. But there are other positions that people can take that I think is that offers us more insight into the subtlety and nuance of life would you tell us around those two other boxes yeah so you know the active and passive is a spectrum and constructive and destructive is a spectrum so the other two boxes would be passive constructive and passive destructive so this is where you know passive basically meaning you know if you say i got a promotion at work they'll be like oh cool that's nice yeah you know it's nice it's like it's fairly passive response it's not it's not adding to the conversation it's not building on it um and so you can do that in a constructive way like oh that's nice or you can do it in a destructive way, which is like roll your eyes and be like, oh, cool, you know, in a sort of sarcastic tone.

31:57And this is where, you know, a lot of people, I took some improv comedy workshops when I was at university, because I was, I was reading books about like, you know, I wanted to reinvent myself at uni, wanted to be more charismatic and stuff. Everyone recommended take some improv classes when I was, when I was reading books about it. So I took some improv classes. And one of the main things you learn, like the main thing you learn in improv is this idea of yes. And anytime someone says something in an improv class, you respond with yes. And you build on it. You never say no. Like if someone says like, oh, and the sun is shining and it's shining pink.

32:27You don't say no, it's not pink. It's blue because that's draining the energy of the group and it's destroying the vibe you're creating. You say, if someone says the sun is shining and it's pink, you said yes. And it's actually got rainbows coming out of it. Like you're taking what they say, you're agreeing and you're building on top of it. What if you disagree with what they've said though? Even in an improv class, in an improv class, you just go for it. you yes and it anyway um but in real life if someone says something and you're like i don't agree but should we bring the negative should we go no i think you're wrong but it's good to say that sometimes i think so i think there are some occasions in life where so and anytime we respond negatively it's going to drain the other person's energy if it's an issue that we really care about like you know if i don't know your partner is saying i really want to go here and you really don't want to go there then you know there's a way of having that conversation in a way that says, actually, I'm not, oh, it's, you know, I like that you suggested that.

33:19You know, for me personally, I was hoping we could instead do something like this, you know, that sort of stuff. But it just depends on if you want to be an energizer in the situation, which you don't have to be, but if you want to, then generally approaching it in a constructive fashion is better than kind of directly disagreeing with someone. That's not to say we can never disagree with people. Obviously, we have to disagree with people sometimes, but we have to also recognize that disagreeing with someone generally reduces the energy of the conversation. Right. I think this is so helpful. You know, once people have heard what we've spoken about so far and they've thought, right, actually productivity can be great.

33:50It doesn't have to be toxic and all this hustle culture people talk about. But I also know that a few weeks after I've listened to this episode, the procrastination is going to come because it is something that I have lived with and struggled with my whole life and beat myself up about all the time. You know, the play Hamilton, when he talks about there's a million things I haven't done. I'd love to talk to you, please, about how we can unblock yeah absolutely um so procrastination is something that literally everyone struggles with um you know i've read the studies on this i've interviewed professors who specialize in procrastination who've like published papers for decades on it i think the thing to say before all of that is um you know you guys are a fan of oliver berkman's book 4 000 weeks yeah well i i love that book one of the great insights from that book is that there is just simply too much to do.

34:40And the recognition that we will never get around to all of it. I loved your interview with Shane Parrish as well recently, where he was saying that, yeah, if you've got 10 priorities, you're probably going to feel pretty overwhelmed because no one can get on with having 10 priorities. And so one of the big things that I like to do, I call it the energy investment portfolio. It's basically like a one-in-one-out system of the things that I'm allowed to work on. Because I like having rules for myself. Because if I have too much stuff that I'm working on, I'll end up feeling overwhelmed. And even though I've written a book about productivity, there's actually very little I can do if I just have too much on my plate.

35:17And so I have a sort of bucket list. And then I have a list of the things I'm actively working on, my active investments. What's the bucket list? The bucket list is all the things that I would like to do if I had unlimited time. But then there's a much smaller list of things I'm actually doing. And I try and limit that thing to somewhere between three and seven items. Because that's like the limit of human memory. We can hold somewhere between three and seven things. Usually five is about the average in our brain at any given time. And so if, for example, my goal is to, I don't know, go to the gym three or four times a week.

35:48That's one of the things on that list. That's not a thing that I can just do randomly. I'll go gym when I have time. Because I've got to make the time. If one of those things is, you know, in lockdown, I made the mistake of trying to take guitar lessons, singing lessons, and piano lessons, and art lessons. Because I was like, I've got all the time in the world, lockdown. And it was just too much. and I was approaching each of these lessons thinking, oh God, I don't want to do an art lesson again. I realized I should just delete three of them and only focus on one at a time. So there's profound value in, you know, as Shane Parrish and Oliver Berkman say, just like getting rid of like the nice to haves and focusing on what are the actual essentials.

36:22And then if we do happen to have an extra spare couple of hours in our day, which most of us probably don't, then we can look on the nice to have list. You move stuff from your bucket list across to your do list if you like. But it's a one-in-one-out system. so I tell myself I'm not allowed to put anything on my to-do list unless I also remove something from it do you have big like you know you're publicizing your book at the moment would promote my book would that be something that's on that list or does it need to be um like tighter than that does it need to be more specific than that no so for me promote my book is one of the so there are only two work-related things that I have on my list one of them is promote the book i.e going on podcasts and stuff yeah the other one is make more youtube videos those are the only two things.

37:01And so I've said to my team that like anything that's on my calendar that is not one of those two things has to go off the calendar because those are the two big priorities. And really making videos promotes the book, promoting the book helps promote the videos. How often would you review this, Ali? I look at it about once a month or anytime I feel overwhelmed. Because usually when I'm feeling overwhelmed, it is a sign that my to-do list just has too much stuff on it. And I really ask myself how much of this is actually essential. And sometimes there are periods of life where everything is essential.

37:34But more often than not, we, you know, especially people who listen to a podcast called High Performance, we like to take on too much stuff because we want to do all of the things to a really high standard. We don't want to be like, oh, you know, I want to say no to that thing. That seems cool. I want to say yes to that thing. But there's a couple of strategies that I found helpful. So this tool I bring up here, one of them is something from a writer called Derek Sivers which is hell yeah or no so whenever you come whenever you're faced with a choice if it's not a hell freaking yes I would love to do this it has to be a no yeah and the problem that we all have is that like we'll see something we'll be like yeah this seems kind of cool but the thing that kills you is when sort of death by a thousand paper cuts when you say yes to the things that are maybe a seven out of ten enthusiasm or even worse when you're like you know if you look at the calendar six weeks out you're like oh that's a a lot of empty space in the calendar six weeks out yeah i can say yes to that giving that talk even though you know and then she's good for you you know i know she's talking to you damien i know he's just the king of busy busy yeah like so i struggle saying no so this is your tip i struggle with it as well i i find it so hard i sometimes have to like offload it to my team or i have to be like i have to give myself 24 hours window to because if someone asks me something the temptation is to say yes because i'm a people pleaser and i want to be nice i want to do the thing and it It would be fun.

38:50But sometimes I say, oh, sorry, let me check my calendar and I'll get back to you. Or let me check, yeah. Like Shane Parrish said to us, you know, he had a colleague who would never say yes on the phone. Yeah, Daniel Kahneman. He was in his apartment and Daniel said, yep, okay, well, I can't say yes because I'm on the phone. Then he said, why are you not saying yes? He's like, because I need the thinking time. I once worked with a CEO who said to me, whatever the request is for your time, but just ask yourself, if they weren't asking for in six, 12 or eight months time, and they're asking for today, would you say yes?

39:21So in other words, if that request is for now or tonight or tomorrow, is it a yes or a no? And if it's a no, then it should still be a no because very quickly that six months turns into, oh, I've got to do that thing tomorrow that I said yes to six months ago. Yeah. And what was the second one? The second one is a strategy called the ideal week. So this has been the single best strategy that I've ever found for curing overwhelm. and basically the idea here is that um you create a blank google calendar and you call it your ideal week and you just block out what does your ideal ordinary week look like what time are you waking up what time you're going to sleep what time you're picking up the kids what time you're going to work when you're at work roughly what are the broad things you're doing like you know are you on zoom calls all day are you on deep work when you get home like how often do you want to have a date night how often do you want to hang out with your friends how often do you want to i don't know, played five-a-side football and you put all those into your ideal week calendar and then you see what happens.

40:17Normally, what people realize is two things. Number one, they realize I actually physically do not have the time to do all the things I would like to do. And they also realize, therefore, oh, I need to do some prioritizing. And the great thing about the terrible thing about a to-do list is that it's not constrained by anything. You can just keep adding stuff to a to-do list, but you can't keep on adding stuff to a calendar because we all have the 168 hours that there are in a week and we're going to sleep for i don't know however many of them so there's like 112 hours left to play with if you have a job that's at least 40 to 60 hours gone if you have kids that's at least 30 hours gone if you want to have date nights that's another three hour and before you realize it you look at your this ideal week calendar and you realize oh crap i only really have one evening a week where i can do something which means if you want to take art lessons and singing lessons and do that talk and do that project at work and take part in that committee and join the, you know, parent teacher advisory board for the school.

41:12You just physically don't have the time for it. So this is so helpful for me because whenever I want to take on something new, which is some kind of recurring commitment, like a regular Zoom call or a regular meeting or a regular lesson, whatever the thing might be, it has to go in the ideal week calendar. And if there's not space for it, either it doesn't happen or something else has to go. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. At Mint Mobile, their favourite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. I made the switch because I was tired of those ridiculous bills and sneaky charges from my old provider.

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43:39and this is helpful you know because effectively you're self-employed right you're in that beautiful position of choosing do i want to do this or not yeah this still works for people that know that for 8 10 12 hours a day they will be doing a job yeah exactly they should so around those times, they should still be doing this and within the job probably. Yeah, absolutely. So this was one of the things that I really realized when I had a full-time job because working as a doctor, it's not like regular. It's like every week is a different kind of shift pattern. Some weeks you're working nine to five, some weeks you're working like 4 p.m.

44:09to midnight, some weeks you're working like 4 a.m. to 12 p.m. You know, there's all sorts of weird stuff. And I would just make sure to block out all of those in the calendar ahead of time. As soon as we got a rota, it would just go straight in the calendar. And then I'd be able to see, okay, cool. I know it is a priority for me to work on my YouTube channel on the side. And I know it's a priority to see my mom at least once a week. When am I going to do those things? You know, my mom lives in St. Albans. I was in Cambridge. So it's like an hour's drive. Okay, cool. I've got to build that into the calendar.

44:35And I would plan this out sometimes weeks ahead of time. And that doesn't mean things can't change if anything, you know, if there's an emergency at work and suddenly I have to stay an extra four hours, you know, that's life. But at least the intention is there. And, you know, again, coming back to this idea of feel of good productivity and high performance, as long as we are doing the things that matter to us in a way that's intentional and effective and sustainable, like even just knowing that I would like to spend one evening a week with my mom, or I'd like to have a date night a week, helps us move more towards that future that we're trying to build for ourselves.

45:05I still don't see where this links to this elimination of procrastination. Ah, good point. So we haven't yet gone to procrastination because you mentioned that you felt overwhelmed with all the stuff you had to do. That's right, yeah. So I guess step one is to really eliminate the things that are actually on, you know, the non-essentials. And now for the things that are essentials where we're still struggling with procrastination, like let's say you've decided it's a major priority for you to write your next book. And you know that that's going to require at least two hours a day of writing time.

45:36There's sort of three things that hold us back generally when it comes to procrastination. Those are uncertainty, fear, and inertia. and usually in that order. So uncertainty is the first one. Uncertainty is where like, you know, you have to do a thing, but you don't really know what you're trying to do. It's a bit vaguely defined. You don't really know when or where you're going to do it. Maybe you don't even know why exactly you're doing it. So something that's very uncertain is, I should probably get fit. Well, you know, what the hell does that mean? Does that mean I'm trying to go to the gym three times a week?

46:08Does that mean I'm trying to go for a run? Is it just about calories and calories. What does get fit mean? So many people procrastinate on getting fit because they have get fit as a thing in their mind. And no one can pass that. You know, students struggle with this as well. It's like, I've got to revise for chemistry. It's like, even that is very uncertain. What does revise for chemistry mean? Does it mean I'm doing a practice paper? Does it mean opening the textbook? Does it mean watching a YouTube video? And having to do that thinking, you know, when it comes down to it is a massive thing that holds everyone back because having to think and do something at the same time, it's just like, It's really hard.

46:39Most people can't manage it. And so step one is to really define what are you actually trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? What is the thing? And crucially, when are you going to do it? And this is where putting it in the calendar is the single most important step. A lot of people who have normal jobs will be living their work life with a calendar because that's where the meetings go in and the calendar invites and the Zoom links and all that stuff. But there's a real unlock to be had when we also use a calendar for our outside of work lives. For example, putting date night in the calendar, putting the kid's doctor appointment in the calendar, like whatever the thing, putting filming a YouTube video in the calendar, whatever that might be.

47:13If it's in the calendar and we look at our calendar every day, which most professionals do, we know that at least we have carved out that container of time to do the thing. So that's step one, carve out the container of time. Any questions on that or should we go on step two? Perfect. Good. Makes sense to me. Cool. So let's say we use this example of, I don't know, someone listening to this wants to write a book. It's a bit of a project. They've always wanted to write a novel or something and they've never been able to find the time. But now they're like, cool, I have blocked out in my calendar an appointment with myself, just like I would at work from, I don't know, 8am to 9am every morning before I go to work.

47:45I'm going to do some writing on my, make some progress with whatever my book project is. And I would normally suggest doing something like try to write 200 words a day, something really obvious, something that's very trackable. So this was something that just leapt in my head. So because I can think of the thing that I'm not doing that I need to do. So when I get this time to myself that I've allotted, let's say it's a two hour slot on Tuesday between one and three. Before I begin that, do I need to set myself what does success look like in this next two hours? It's really helpful. Yeah, spending the first like two or three minutes of anything asking yourself, what do I actually want to do here?

48:21Is stupidly helpful. I think a mistake a lot of us make, and I do this a lot myself, is that we'll see a thing on the calendar and we'll just dive straight into it. But actually, if we just spent even 30 seconds thinking, hmm, what am I actually trying to do here? It would kind of narrow our focus. It would help us see, okay, that's the thing. And the mind is very good at following instructions and getting to a goal. If we see what the goal is, then it's easy enough for us to be like, okay, cool. That's the goal I'm trying to work towards. But if we don't know what the goal is, then we start to meander around.

48:52We start to get distracted. And this is why a lot of writers in particular track their word counts. They're like, I'm going to do 300 words today. I'm going to have 500 words, thousand words because it's really obvious and there's all these apps that let you track your word count you can do it microsoft word and stuff as well and so one thing i often advise people and i tried try to do this myself is what is your equivalent of the writer's word count is it for example number of slides in the present i'm going to try and do at least 10 slides in the presentation is it like number of minutes of the workout anytime we can track something we get the sense of progress and a sense of progress is also one of those things that drives internal and intrinsic motivation it feels really fun it feels like yeah i'm making progress so what is that equivalent for you what is the equivalent of the writer's word count yeah good really helpful so at this point we've got the thing in our calendar and you sat down to do the thing and it's maybe that one to three one or one p.m to 3 p.m slot and you've asked yourself okay what i'm actually trying to do and you're like okay cool i'm gonna write write this next chapter often a thing that holds people back then is one of the things that blocks people is fear fear and anxiety where you know this is where it's like, oh, but, you know, I'm trying to write this book, but what right do I have to write this book?

50:00Who's going to read it anyway? What's the point? Oh, God, everything I'm writing, oh, you know, I read, I read high performance, and it's such a good book. But like, every, you know, every time I try and write something, it just sounds shit in comparison. And we get the self doubt, we get the fear, we get the sabotage. The mind is basically a survival machine. And one of the main things it's trying to protect us from is social disapproval. in theory being back in caveman days we were all in these little tribes and if you were ostracized from the group if the group didn't like you, you would be out on your own and left to fend for yourself and you'd probably get mauled by a lion or something like that so genuinely keeping the people around us happy and not drawing attention to ourselves in a negative way is like part of the brain called the amygdala the amygdala is trying really hard to keep us safe the amygdala doesn't realize that society has evolved, advanced beyond that point where if a friend laughs at you because you had the audacity to write a book, it's not the end of the world.

50:54It doesn't mean you're going to die, but the mind thinks that we're going to die. And so there is so much fear and anxiety caught up in anything that involves putting ourselves out there in some kind of way. And that's another thing that leads to a lot of procrastination. Well, I think you're a textbook example of someone that can teach us around this topic because we hear from a lot of listeners that often it's the fear that inhibits them taking the step towards where they want to be. as somebody that has pursued a medical career to the level where you're a practicing doctor and then you choose to walk away from it.

51:28That takes a lot of courage to do that. You must have confronted fear yourself. Yeah, so there's actually, I haven't thought of it in this context, but there's actually a three-part method I talk in the book about how to confront fear. And if I think about it, I did all three of those things when it came to this decision to leave my day job. So step number one is to name the fear. to shine a spotlight on it and figure out what's actually going on here. And so when I was making the decision to take a break from medicine or leave medicine, I was like, okay, what am I actually scared of? And I realized the thing that I was scared of was two things.

52:04Number one, if my YouTube channel doesn't work, then I will go back to medicine and people will laugh at me for having failed. So that's a fear of failure. And there was another part of me that was like, if I leave medicine, I can no longer call myself a doctor online. And calling myself a doctor is good for my business and my brand and stuff. I was like, is there anything else? No, those are the two fears. I'm afraid of failure. If this doesn't work out, people laugh at me. And I'm afraid that people will stop following my stuff. People will think less of me because I'm not a doctor anymore. So even just naming those fears is super, super helpful because most people don't even get to that point where they're just like, oh, I'm procrastinating from this thing.

52:44But reveals it for what it is. Step number two is to try and reduce that fear as much as possible. So, you know, there's something that Tim Ferriss uses called the fear setting exercise. I do this at least once a year. So if anyone wants to Google fear setting exercise, there's just a bunch of questions that will come up on Tim Ferriss's blog post where you really just sit down and you ask yourself, okay, what is the worst case scenario? What would I do if the worst case scenario happened? What can I do to mitigate the risk of the worst case scenario happened? And how will I make sure I'm okay even if the worst does happen?

53:18And so in my case with leaving medicine, I'm afraid that people will laugh at me if I go back to medicine. Cool. Worst case scenario, they'll laugh at me. How long will they laugh at me for? 10 minutes? Most people are too obsessed with themselves. They're all thinking about me. No one is thinking about me. There's this thing called the spotlight effect in psychology where we all walk around thinking like a spotlight is being trained on us and everyone is analyzing our every action. And so any kind of mistake we make, any kind of faux pas we make, if we tell a joke that doesn't land, it'll, you know, we'll think about that for hours, if not days afterwards.

53:52But actually everyone's worried about their own stuff. You know, I'm worried, did I spill coffee on my shirt this morning? You're worried being like, damn, I haven't got the high performance logo on my Luda Lemon top. We're all thinking about our own stuff. We're all thinking about what we have to do. No one really cares. And I find this mindset of no one cares to be enormously liberating. And that was the thing that helped me start my YouTube channel in the first place. so we we we do we do what we can to name the fear to sort of reduce it recognize that no one cares ask yourself these questions but then the third step is that we need to act in the face of fear and often people describe this as courage courage is not the absence of fear it's it's acting even though you are scared and there's one technique that a bunch of people use that i i really like that i that i use myself called the alter ego effect or the batman method in one study uh the The Batman method is a more fun way of describing it.

54:37So essentially the psychologists, they got a bunch of kids together and they split them up into a few groups. And they asked them all to work on this, like solving this puzzle type thing. And for some of the kids that were like, you know, just solve the puzzle. For another group of kids, they were like, solve the puzzle, but think about something fun while you're doing it. But for the third group, what they said was solve the puzzle, but imagine you are your favorite cartoon character, like Dora the Explorer or Batman. And they called the study the Batman effect because they found that the kids who thought of themselves as their favorite cartoon characters, they smashed it in their performance on the task.

55:12They enjoyed it more. They were more creative. They were more productive. All of the good things because they got out of their own heads and into this Batman or Dora the Explorer alter ego. And there have been so many athletes and famous people throughout the years that have done this. So Kobe Bryant had his alter ego of the black mamba. Beyonce had Sasha Fierce. Adele had an amalgamation of like Sasha Fierce and this country singer called Someone Carter. it's with Sasha Carter so like in the early days of Adele's career when she was struggling with stage fright she would go out on stage and she would pretend that she is not Adele she is in fact Sasha Carter this like legendary country singer who's like amazingly you know confident and fearless so the thing that I do for this and the way I kind of got over this doctor thing is a bit grandiose but I imagine myself as young Charles Xavier from the X-Men series like Professor X because he's really cool he like teaches people and he's just a nice guy all around and like, oh, you know, I would like to be the guy that can teach people stuff.

56:08And so these glasses are actually fake because I had laser eye surgery. But when I put the glasses on, that's like my thing of like, I'm in that mode of being the teacher. And it's not about me. It's about trying to be of service to the audience. When I'm in my normal mode, you know, I'm in my head. I'm in like, I was worrying about what people think of me, all the usual crap. When I put the glasses on, I'm like, no, my goal here is to teach and to try and help people as much as i can and there is something around like a physical prop you know some people wear a hat some people put on a different and that's the sort of thing that actually is so easy for people to deride isn't it but actually when you show that vulnerability i think that's also really powerful because people are doing it and it's kind of interesting isn't it how you just taking yourself out your own head it makes all the difference so this is so good for people to hear because it helps with the uncertainty it helps with the fear what about if you're not uncertain and you're not fearful and you're kind of fine and you're happy but like inertia is just your everyday thing what do we do for those people yeah so inertia is in many ways the hardest one to deal with because you know uncertainty and fear have have some pretty strong action points um the thing with inertia is that you know even if you've got the thing in your calendar you're sitting down to write you've overcome the fear and like you know exactly what you have to do just taking that first step is often really really hard and you know there's a concept in uh in physics and chemistry called activation energy, which is that any chemical reaction needs an input of energy to get started.

57:36And once you put the input of energy in, then it's happy days, the reaction will continue to happen. And so what we need to do is try and figure out how do we make it easy to get over that hump, that hump of activation energy, that hump of procrastination, where we have to put a little bit of energy in. So one way is to reduce the friction as much as possible. so if for example i want to practice the guitar more often having the guitar like next to my desk is really sensible whereas if the guitar was in the cupboard and i had to walk all the way to my bedroom into the cupboard open like that's basically never gonna happen and so there's little tweaks we can make to our environment to make it easier for us to get started with the things we want to do in medical school i would sometimes i'd have my textbooks on the shelf like away from me uh i would never open them but i just put them on the floor next to my desk and It looked a bit non-aesthetic, but at least, you know, I could just reach down and grab them.

58:29And even just reducing the friction that little bit helps us do the things that we actually want to do. You know, similarly, if, for example, you're trying to not use your phone in bed because it's using your phone in bed is a bad thing. Putting your charger across the room is enough to not use your phone in bed, usually, because you're like, no one's going to walk across the room to use their phone when they're already in bed. And especially if the alarm is there, you have to get out of bed to turn the alarm off. So we can use this principle of environment design to reduce the friction for the things we want to do and increase the friction for the things that we don't want to do.

59:01That's really good. That's step one. And step two, I think this is where the idea of discipline comes in. So I don't like the word discipline. And I don't like the whole like, you've got to be more disciplined. And like the reason you're failing at life is because you're not disciplined enough. Discipline is when we use the limited resource of willpower to do a thing. I think you guys talked about this with Shane Parrish as well. willpower is a finite resource we don't have unlimited willpower we lose willpower during the day it's way harder to say no to a pizza slice for dinner than it is for breakfast because we just have less willpower it's harder to work out in the evening than it is in the morning because you just have less willpower which is why i've watched so many youtube videos about this trying to motivate myself to work out literally everyone's like if you do it first thing in the morning you'll at least be consistent with it and so the way i think of discipline is that discipline is fine to get over the hump.

59:53Sometimes you do just need to give yourself a bit of a nudge to get started for just two minutes or five minutes. And I call this the five minute rule. You just do the thing for five minutes. And at the end of the five minutes, you can decide, do you want to stop or do you want to continue? And most of the time, for most things, especially if we've done the energizers, play power and people, once we get started with a thing, we've started enjoying it. It's a good vibe. We're going to continue going with it. Back when I had a desk at the moment, I'm traveling, so I don't have this anymore but I used to have a five minute hourglass on my desk.

1:00:21It was like three quid off of Amazon and I would just turn the hourglass and that would be my cue to I'm just going to do the thing for five minutes. And then before I knew it, the hourglass was gone, I'm in the flow, I'm doing the thing. And that was another sort of prop that helped me get over the inertia. I might nick that to get my kids to tidy the room. Yeah. Well, again, you just need to tidy the room for five minutes, not keep it as vague as tidy your room because like you say, that's like getting fit. it's uncertain isn't it whereas tidy your room for five minutes gives them a structure of focus to be able to do it especially if you can you know this is something that james clear talks about in atomic habits especially if you can attach tidy room for five minutes to something else that you're doing um so like if straight after brushing your teeth you will tidy your room for two minutes or even one minute or even five minutes whatever the thing might be that sort of that habit stacking means that hopefully your kids have already built the habit of brushing their teeth, I suspect.

1:01:16And so they can attach tidying the room to a habit that they've already built. And that makes it more likely to happen. Really good. I think that we need to have a conversation and your book ends in this way and it ends it brilliantly when you talk about how we can sustain this. I'd love to end before we move on to our quickfire questions with some key learnings for people so that, you know, you listen to this in January, you feel energized, you feel ready, you write all your things down. You know, it's easy in January because it's January. but what can we talk about that means that come may people are still doing this stuff yeah so the final three chapters of the book are all about sustaining and it's exactly this question how do we do these things that matter to us but in a way that's actually sustainable because anyone can do something like anyone can go to the gym in january for like a week or two and then most people don't because there was something about the process that became unsustainable now there's sort of three different types of i guess three different types of burnout that we talk about in the book because often when something is unsustainable we feel like we either don't have the time we don't have the energy so when it comes to time the ideal week is the ultimate thing if it's in the ideal week it can happen if it's not if you're trying to go gym eight times a week and you've struggled your entire life to go to the gym even once a week it's basically not going to happen and we want to try and lower the bar and not set ourselves up to fail.

1:02:33And the way I kind of think of it is taking small steps in the direction we want is way better than taking a huge stride and then going off the bandwagon completely. And so the final three chapters of the book are basically about, you know, conserving energy during the day, taking appropriate breaks, you know, at the end of the day and taking vacations and weekends and stuff. And then finally, making sure that what we're doing is aligned with where we actually want to go. What I find helpful to think about is that it's totally okay to have different seasons of life. You know, in this season of my life right now, I am traveling the world and I'm making YouTube videos and I'm basically just doing those things and trying to keep my kind of various relationships up in the air.

1:03:11At the previous stage of the season of my life, four hours a day plus was focused on writing a book. And that meant that other things had to give. In the next season of my life, when I settle down and have some kids, I'll probably turn down the YouTube video upload schedule or maybe not make videos at all, or maybe not do the podcast at all, like whatever the thing might be finding a way to really figure out what are the priorities. And I think a lot of it comes back to that ideal week. If there's time in the ideal week, it'll happen. And if there's not, then physically, I don't have the time to do it.

1:03:38But another big thing is, you know, making sure that we take breaks appropriately. And we were in two minds about whether to include this in the book, because it seemed kind of obvious that obviously you should take breaks. Then we looked at a bunch of studies around this and found that there's actually some interesting counterintuitive things around taking breaks that that might be helpful one thing is and and here's an exercise that anyone anyone can do so have a think about what are the things that you find yourself doing when you feel drained of energy what do you tend to do when you're drained of energy for me it's like sleep i i'm a little i'm a kip man so have a kip okay that's pretty good afternoon nap what about you uh take the dog for a long walk solid you guys are very good at this well what most people would say is scroll TikTok, browse Instagram, go on Twitter, watch Netflix, go on my phone, scroll aimlessly, just lie on the sofa.

1:04:27So there's like one list of things that you do when you're drained. But then there's usually for most people a different list for what are the things that actually give them energy. So having a nap probably gives you energy. Taking the dog for a walk probably gives you energy. Going for a workout probably gives you energy. Going for a run will give you energy. Playing the guitar will give you energy. And for a lot of people, those lists are very different like oh when i'm drained i end up on tiktok but does tiktok actually energize me absolutely the hell not like in what world does tiktok energize anyone but does reading does reading a fiction fantasy fiction audiobook or fantasy fiction book energize me or does going for a walk energize me yeah and so a lot of the thing around kind of taking effective breaks is recognizing hey let me actually do the things that i know will energize me rather than the things that i just find myself doing by default and so there's practical things so there's like i removed all social media apps from my home screen of my phone.

1:05:17So if I want to get them, I have to like scroll down and like type them in. There's a really good app called OneSec. Have you guys come across this? No, of course. It's like, it's a free app. It's on iPhone and Android. Basically, what it does is that anytime you open Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, any social media app, it artificially increases the load time of the app. And it says, take a deep breath. And again, and after about three seconds, it asks, do you actually want to open this app? And if so, and gives you the button to open Instagram. But usually in those like one, two or three seconds, you're like, huh, I just found myself opening Instagram, even though that's not really what I want to do.

1:05:54And often that one or two seconds is all we need to remind ourselves that actually, you know what? This is not what I want to be doing right now. I'm interested in sort of exploring a little bit further the issue of burnout, because I've suffered from it and it's something that I still try and battle with about burnout. and last October, Jake and I introduced your publisher, your book, and you recorded a YouTube video because you couldn't be there. And I remember looking at it thinking, fucking hell, your life looks exhausted. Because you gave us a clue as to the amount of different activities that you do.

1:06:33Now meeting you has sort of challenged that idea that you seem to have a far better balance on it. And I'm interested on what are the top tips you would give us to be able to recognize burnout when it's coming close, how to stop it and how to avoid it for future. I think a big part of understanding burnout is to recognize what are the signs and symptoms. So there's usually two different ways that burnout presents. And there's a bit of a gender split here. So like guys tend to be more one than the other. But the two ways burnout presents is it's either a sense of exhaustion and like emotional exhaustion or it's a sense of feeling like the things that you're doing are meaningless like oh you know what's the point of going into my day job like what's the point of doing these youtube videos of writing this but like whatever the work thing might be for me i've recognized that i very rarely get emotionally exhausted but i will i will often feel like hmm i'm not sure this video has any point to it and I'll recognize that feeling of meaninglessness as, uh-oh, that is one of the core of things of burnout, especially for dudes.

1:07:38And so I need to do something about that because that's not a feeling that I want to just ignore because if I ignore it, I'm going to get deeper into that hole and then it's going to take way longer to get out of it and it's not going to be fun. So whenever I have that feeling of like, oh, this feels a bit meaningless, I'm like, cool, let's take a step back. And there's broadly three kinds of burnout that we sort of, we looked at all the evidence for this and sort of bordered down to these three things that people can take tangible action on. The first one is overexertion. we've talked about this point enough so often so much in this conversation around simply just trying to do too many things and if you're trying to do too many things it's basically a recipe for burnout there is basically nothing you can do about it other than delete those things off your to-do list or delegate them to someone else now if you have three personal assistants and a private chef and a nanny and a housekeeper you know those sorts of people can generally do more things because they have people working for them most people are not in that position and so the only thing that we can genuinely do in that position is to just get rid of stuff from our to-do list that is a way of combating overexertion burnout um then we have depletion burnout where the way that we're approaching our stuff is that when our energy is getting depleted and it's staying that way and this is where taking breaks and you know even going for a five minute walk in nature during the middle of the day if you can if you live near a park like going for a little run or a little walk in the park.

1:08:57So there's something around nature that's interesting. There's something about creative recharging. Like generally the things, you know, if you're taking a break from work and you're doing something creative, that's like not related to your work. That often brings people a lot of energy. There was an interview with Ed Sheeran that I watched, which was great. And he was like, he said that back in the day, music was his creative recharging outlet, but now music is his day job. So he's not, he can't do that as recharging anymore. And so he's taken up painting because painting is so different to music.

1:09:25He's not trying to monetize it he's not trying to sell his paintings and stuff so i think taylor swift paints as well like there's a bunch of like famous musicians who have all landed on painting as being the thing that recharges the energy because it's just so different from from the day job derren brown paints as well like there's so many cool people that paint to recharge themselves so part of overcoming depletion burnout is recognizing when are my energy energy levels going down and what are the actual what are actually the things that replenish them yeah taking the dog for a walk, painting something, whatever the thing might be.

1:09:54Pretty helpful. And the final one is misalignment burnout. Now, this is the trickiest one because this is like a thing that creeps on us over time when the things that we are doing are not aligned with what actually lights us up and what feels meaningful to us. And this is where you can apply all the strategies in the book. You can make work as energizing as possible. You can beat the procrastination. You can take the breaks. but if the thing that you are doing for work fundamentally is misaligned with what you actually want to be doing then we're going to have a problem and it's only a matter of time before you start feeling that sense of meaningless and purposeless because literally the thing that you're doing is to you feels meaningless and purposeless and so a big part of this is for people to and you know this is getting a bit heavy which is why we put this at the final chapter of the book.

1:10:43Really ask yourself, what do you actually want from life? One activity I did the other day was to write out my own obituary, where there's some evidence that this is actually really helpful, because you think to yourself, what would I want my obituary to say? Actually, Shane Parrish talked about this with you guys. He said, when you're 90 and you're in a coma, your family's around you, what would you want your family to be saying about you? And are you living life in alignment with what that 90 year old would want. And all of this stuff is about really, like, it's so easy for us to get so caught up in the day to day, because it's like we're driving with the and all we can see is just like what's in front of us in the headlights.

1:11:21And by doing that, we can often end up in a place where we're like, wait a minute, how did I end up here? And I've spoken to a lot of people in jobs that they don't like where they've like been doing it for a long time. And And then I was waiting for the bonus. And now I'm like 45. And I'm like, I don't know where my life went. And that is, whenever I hear stories like that, I find it really scary. Because damn, we only have one life and all that. I would really like to do whatever I can to help nudge my life trajectory to a direction that I actually want it to be. And so a big part of this is figuring out, like, begin with the end in mind.

1:12:01like what would i want people to say when i'm dying cool how can i reverse engineer that to maybe what my i don't know where i see my life going in the next five years again we don't need to be wedded to these it's just pencil sketching it out yeah therefore what do i want to be doing now and if you don't mind then ali would you tell us what you did write down in your own obituary so this is what i wrote up for my obituary this was like a month ago when i when i did this exercise i i do it every year or so but i just randomly decided to do it last month ali abdahl was one of the world's greatest teachers.

1:12:31He inspired and educated millions all around the world to build a life they truly love. He holistically combined disciplines from science to philosophy to create an integrated system of living themed around mind, body, heart, and soul, which resonated with his loyal following of tens of millions of people all around the world. In his personal life, Ali exemplified and lived his philosophy. He was disarmingly intelligent, yet always humble, and never made you feel less than. When you talked to him, you really felt like you were the most important person in the world, that he was relating to you in mind, heart, and soul.

1:12:57At the same time, he didn't take himself too seriously. He knew his work could be heavy, but he approached it with a lightness and ease that made it accessible and that inspired people to believe they could change their lives too. Throughout all the success he had flying around the world sharing his message, Ali's priority was always his family. He remained closely connected to his wife, his children and his grandchildren up until the moment of his death. He died peacefully in their idyllic family home surrounded by loved ones. We all mourned him, but his message lives on inside all of us and inspires us to live an integrated, connected and productive life.

1:13:24Brilliant. And you shouldn't feel literally sweating while reading that. Cringe and feel anxious or nervous. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Because I think, you know, if anyone hears that and goes, what was that all about? Like, they've missed the point. Like, that's basically the perfect way to end this conversation because that's what it's all about. You know, we have 4 ,000 weeks on this earth. All that is left when we talk about legacy is the way we made other people feel. And what I loved about that, it wasn't Ali died in his huge mansion, his Ferrari is going to be donated to his children and his huge bank balance is going to live on.

1:14:00Like it wasn't about the finances. It wasn't about the things that you achieved. Everything there was about how you made people feel. And I think that you are never going to get it wrong if what really matters to you is how you make other people feel. Because actually, people will not remember with the best way in the world, the specific things that you said, all the things that you did, but people will remember how you made them feel. And how can it ever be a bad thing to have that plan for your life um and i applaud you for writing it and then for sharing on here thank you so much thank you that was i appreciate that that's made you feel vulnerable but it was a privilege thank you thank you thank you for letting me share that we finished with our quickfire questions the three non-negotiables that you and the people around you should buy into it's gonna sound so so cliche but sleep exercise and good food, basically.

1:14:53I actually had a... They were the foundations. Honestly, I was in... So I was in Morocco last week for a team retreat because now our team is remote. We get together every three months. And I'd been feeling this burnout when it came to filming YouTube videos for the last month. I was like, I don't want to film these videos. What's the point? It's like, who cares? Book promo anyway, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. And it was weird. Like there was one day where I just felt really energized. I was like, I want to film some videos. And I was thinking about it afterwards. words and my team was asking what was it about today that made you film like four videos in a day when you've not filmed in like a month i was like well i had eight and a half hours of sleep for the last two nights i did 20 minutes of yoga in the morning because one of our team members is a yoga instructor and i've been having meat and veg in morocco because they have a fairly healthy diet like god damn it sleeping exercising and eating well has led to a point where i've just banged out videos even though i haven't been able to for a month so i'm trying to make those non-negotiables what advice would you give to a teenage alley just starting out i'll say two things number one focus on enjoying the journey uh because you only get this time once and you can achieve all that you want to achieve while having fun along the way as long as you put your mind your mind to it the other thing i would say is take more photos i think i i started taking photos properly when i was like at university in in medical school and now sort of 10 years on I see these photos come up on like my iPhone all the time like on this day where I'm just like oh that's that was cool what is your biggest strength what's your greatest weakness oh I think my biggest strength is my ability to kind of break break things down like I used to do a lot of teaching when I was younger I love teaching when I was in med school and people would always say that I'm a good teacher I always be like oh I didn't I didn't really vibe with that very much because I just thought it was I just thought everyone was because it's not that hard to just break things down.

1:16:45And over time, I realized that actually, this is quite a useful skill. And kind of the more I've lent into that, like on the YouTube channel and the book, the more I guess worldly success I've had as well, which is kind of nice. I think my biggest weakness is that I think it's something around EQ. I think my IQ is pretty good, but I think my EQ is pretty low in the grand scheme of things, at least when I think about kind of the ways in which I sometimes interact with my girlfriend, the ways in which I sometimes interact with my mom. And I know you guys have, I enjoyed your chapter about EQ in high performance, about being more important than IQ.

1:17:20And that is really something I've learned over the years now when I'm managing my team, where all of the problems are people problems. And what it takes to get through those problems is the ability to understand people's feelings and recognize that actually the way that we operate in terms of feelings is very different to just a sort of logical or rational kind of way of thinking, which is why I'm, for example, reading nonviolent communication and reading books like Radical Candor, because it's like a thing that I really want to improve because I recognize like, oh, damn, you know, I see people in my life who are like really good, really high EQ, and they're really good at understanding the emotions and feelings of other people and like knowing what the right things to say are to encourage and comfort someone.

1:18:00And I think that to me is a weakness right now that I'm trying to improve at. if you could go back to one moment of your life what would it be and why there was a moment when i was i just finished my a-levels and it was the summer holidays before starting university and i had i'd been doing like kind of private tutoring for like gcc and a-level kids for like two years and i'd saved up a thousand pounds i was going to buy myself a macbook my first apple product couldn't afford them before then because apple products are overpriced but then i suddenly had a thousand pounds in my wallet. I was like, I'm going to buy an Apple product.

1:18:34And I made the mistake of finding a dude on Gumtree who was going to sell me a MacBook. And I went to Paddington station to meet up with him. I handed over a thousand pounds in cash and he gave me a MacBook. And I was like, great. And it was only on the train ride home back to Southend that I realized that the thing that he gave me was like a four-year-old model. It didn't really work. He'd scratched out the serial number. So it was clearly like a stolen product. I checked it up on the Apple website and they were like, yep, this product is no longer valid. And then I tried contacting him and tried to like being like then i found that he was you know had scammed other people as well and i was like you know i was 18 my entire life savings were out the window because i'd been working for this stuff for two years and i got scammed on this macbook and my mom very kindly was like you know what stop trying to pursue this guy because i was trying to bring like geolocate his tweets to figure out where he is to try and serve him papers for small claims and i was you know it was taking up a lot of a lot of headspace and so my mom very kindly was just like you know what i'll just buy your laptop don't worry about it like you know it's your first year of med school starting focus on that but i remember thinking at the time that like damn you know i need to find a way to recoup this thousand pounds and i remember thinking at the time that like i want i want to turn this negative into a positive and i made a list at the time around how can i make how can i make back the thousand pounds and i wrote down okay what am i good at i think i'm good at teaching i did well in the med school exams i know how to make websites I thought, what if I build a business that helps people get into medical school by teaching them how to do well in this exam and I build a website around it?

1:20:00And that business continues to run to this day. It paid for my medical school degree because I was making money in med school. That business directly led to my YouTube channel, which directly led to the book, which directly has led to me being here with you guys. And so I'd want to go back to that moment to sort of almost relive it, to appreciate that this was such a profound negative in my life. obviously in the grand scheme of things it's not that deep but for a kid at the time two years of life savings lost and I'd want to experience that moment again to feel that sense of I want to turn this into a positive because I think that moment gave me a lot of drive and ambition for the next 10 plus years Brilliant, a great story and a great reminder that yes, if that guy hadn't scammed you you might not be sitting here today Thank you Matthew There you go, when bad things happen who knows if they're bad or not Final question what is your one golden rule for living a high performance life if i won the euro millions the way that i spend my time would not change and i think that is i am like 95 of the way there there's a few things that i still do like sponsorships and stuff just for the money if i'm being honest but most other things i've kind of oriented my life in a way that if i won the euro millions it really wouldn't change anything about how i live and I would like, I'm trying to move towards 100 % as much as possible.

1:21:23Brilliant. Ali, thank you so much for this conversation. I think the standout for me is that it's one thing for people to come in and share lessons and learnings and psychological research and stuff that they've picked up over the years. It's something very different for someone to come in and be actually really vulnerable and really marry those things up with their true life experiences. And I think you've managed to offer us both. And I think the fact that you're able to do that makes the work that you're doing far more impactful for people thank you so much this has been wonderful damien jake what do you think loved it it was incredibly practical but also very personal i think ali's own story of you know pursuing a career of being a doctor and then choosing to walk away from that and recognizing he was a teacher as well.

1:22:14I think that made his examples even more powerful. I think my question to the people listening to this is, how much do you want the things that you say you want, right? So if you really want to live a more productive life, but actually a better, healthier life, then you really should start each day by thinking, what is the most important thing I can do today? And then the next question, what would make that thing fun? How do we bring fun into the equation. Where am I prioritizing time in my diary for myself and for recovery? What would people say when they gather around my deathbed if I carry on living like I am now?

1:22:48And I love the point he made at the very end there about if I won the Euro millions, I would live exactly the same way. Ask yourself that question. I mean, I think for me, the biggest thing would be I travel more. So why am I not traveling? Partly financial, partly time commitments, partly the age of the kids but if it really matters to me that much and you know i die in an accident tomorrow i will wish i'd travel more so you have to allow this stuff to inform you and change the way that you think in operating and living otherwise it's totally valueless you know that is a useless conversation if you don't do anything about it yeah yeah and it really challenged me because when we first discussed having Ali on the podcast a genuine concern was that are we sort of giving people more to do with less time is it the idea of you need to be busier you need to work harder you need to be smarter in in where you allocate your resources and actually I think it was the polar opposite it was about are you working on stuff that really matters are you are you spending your time doing things that bring your energy and joy and passion and they're all stuff that every one of us needs it's not about this toxic positivity this hustle culture that we feared it was actually challenging us to think about we all our time is finite are we using it in the best the most productive way that makes us happy thanks mate thank you mate you know what i just want you to do one thing having listened to that just tell someone on that note thank you very much for continuing to send in all of the messages you do about the podcast and the things that you're loving and learning from it.

1:24:26So please continue to spread the learnings you're taking from these conversations. Remain humble, curious and empathetic and we'll see you again soon.

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1:25:44At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success. like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.