Transcript & Summary: I Read 107 Productivity Books. Here's What Actually Works.

[00:00] hey friends welcome back to the channel so over the last 15 years of being absolutely obsessed with productivity I have read dozens and dozens and dozens of productivity books and loads more on Kindle but this is quite a lot of stuff and so in this video I want to break all of these down into a nine step framework these are the nine steps that I've personally distilled from all of these different books and all the research I've done and if you just follow these nine steps these are the main things [00:20] that are going to absolutely move the needle for your own productivity all right step one is to set your goals this basically involves thinking about where you actually want to go and what is the destination that you're aiming for because having a destination in mind helps you go on your journey and helps give you some sort of Direction now that doesn't mean that when we set a goal we should be completely wedded and attached to the outcome that we're striving for but it does mean that if you really want [00:43] to be productive and to me productivity is about using our time intentionally and effectively to work towards the things that matter to us we need to actually Define what are in fact the things that matter to us now there's various books to talk about dozens and dozens of different ways of doing this uh the way that I sort of synthesize all of these is into just three simple steps think about the long term think about the medium term and think about the short term so the long term time Horizon is basically like stuff like what do you [01:07] want written on your gravestone foreign term we're thinking sort of three to five years out like where do I possibly maybe potentially want to be three or five years down the line now the crucial thing for all this stuff is that you don't need to have perfect Crystal Clarity on this and your goals and your time Horizons and stuff are absolutely going to change over time but it's really helpful to know right now where do I think I want to be so that I can start moving in that direction because as they say it's much easier to steer a [01:35] ship that's moving than to steer a ship that's stationary and then the short-term time Horizon which is basically what are my goals for the year and in fact all three of these methods are the final chapter of my own book field of productivity which you can check out down below it's available for pre-order with a bunch of bonuses but that'll be a link down below but essentially the way that I think about this short term time Horizon is the 12 month celebration in each of the different areas of my life in work in [01:55] health and relationships what do I want to be celebrating 12 months from now let's say I'm having dinner with a friend and we're celebrating the progress we've made maybe on the health front it's like oh I'm celebrating that I've been to the gym consistently three times a week for the last 12 months maybe on the work front I'm celebrating hitting a revenue Milestone with my business maybe under relationships front I'm celebrating getting engaged or getting a girlfriend or whatever the thing might be and so if we're [02:16] condensing all of these different productivity books into the simple nine-step framework the question that you want to ask yourself is am I clear on my goals what am I actually working towards and if you're not clear on that or you don't have an idea then it's worth sitting down and doing some journaling for just 20 minutes to think about it and if you're clear on that then you can move on to the next step and the next step once you have set your goals is to break them down now it's all well and good having goals but really [02:39] setting the goal does not actually help you make progress towards it it's better than nothing but obviously there are a load of steps involved once you've set the goal to actually making it happen and therefore this step is really all about breaking our goals down into what are the tangible actions that we can take to make progress towards those goals now again depending on how many of these productivity books you read There are dozens of ways of trying to figure this out I like to keep things simple [03:00] and boil it down to the basics which is basically the question of what inputs do I need to do on a weekly basis that are going to get me to this particular goal for example for health if the goal is to build muscle or you can turn that into a smart goal if you really want to then the weekly input would be weight training three times a week with Progressive overload if the goal is I want to write my first book then the weekly input would be I want to spend 10 hours a week writing I don't really believe in like making a task list and [03:25] like breaking the goal down into like the 18 000 different things it takes to make the goal because that becomes way too complicated and a lot of kind of balancing reading about productivity advice with actually doing the thing is finding that sweet spot where you're taking the advice on board because the advice is generally good but it's not so overboard that it starts to become overwhelming so just to simplify all of this down what are the things that we need to do every week to make progress towards this goal and then once we're [03:50] clear on that we move on to step number three which is one of the most important ones which is to create time blocks and essentially here the idea is that we need to make the time for these different things that we've decided these weekly inputs we need to make the time for those things in our calendar now my favorite method for this is called the ideal week technique basically that involves just creating a new Google Calendar calling it your ideal week and creating calendar events for what time you want to wake up what [04:11] time you want to make go to sleep what time you're having lunch what time you're at work what time you're hanging out with your friends and family and date night and all that stuff and you start off creating the blocks of time for the things that you have to do and then you can move on to creating blocks of time for the things that you want to do there's some Nuance there like have to do can often be reframed to want to do in your own mind we can often choose to feel as if we have more autonomy in [04:29] situations than we actually do but fundamentally the ideal weak technique and using a calendar tells you how much time you have available to actually give to these things that you care about so for example if my goal is to build more muscle and get six-pack abs or whatever the thing is and I know that I need to do weight training three times a week for let's say an hour that means I need to find three one-hour blocks of time in my calendar and then maybe with some buffer on either side for getting to the [04:50] gym and getting back home now if I physically don't have those blocks of time in my calendar because let's say I'm working two jobs and have a family then it's going to be really tricky then I should reconsider what my goal actually is and whether it's actually realistic for me to be able to hit the gym three times a week now the way I think of these blocks of time is that these are containers they're simply containers and the first step to actually making time for this stuff is to create the containers when I was [05:10] working on my book field productivity link down below I had containers for about three hours basically every morning of the week from 9 to 12 Monday through Friday except Wednesdays which was like team meetings day I would focus the first three hours a day on book writing now how many words I got done was like a further down the line thing but it's like the first step was to create those containers and then you can fill those containers with the time effort energy Blood Sweat tears whatever it takes to fill those containers but [05:34] the point is you have to create the containers in the first place and that is where this technique of time blocking really shines let's now move on to step four which is to plan your day and often the single best productivity tactic here that a bunch of different books talk about is the idea of setting your intentions as the first thing you do in the morning so before starting your work day you think to yourself what do I actually want to accomplish today this book make time by Jake Knapp and John [05:56] zuratzky it's very good this talks about their daily highlight where you just ask yourself what is today's highlight gonna be similarly the book The One Thing by Gary Keller talks about what is the one thing I want to get done today Harvard Business Review says what is your MIT your most important task Brian Tracy's book eat that frog talks about what is the rock that like tricky thing that you've been procrastinating on that's what's that one thing that you want to get done first thing in the morning the [06:16] point is a lot of these different productivity books and experts Converge on this one single piece of wisdom which is every single day ask yourself what is the actual most important thing you want to get done that day and then make time for that thing in your calendar and then if you actually do the thing even if you do nothing else then the day has been a win and if you just can do that every day for 365 days you'll make so much progress that'll it'll be insane my personal favorite way of framing this [06:38] exact question is asking myself the question of what is today's adventure going to be and this is great because you get the benefit of trying to figure out what's the most important task but secondly you also get the benefit of it just feeling a bit more enjoyable and again this is the philosophy of feel good productivity which is that if you can make your work feel good then you become more productive by default and you have more energy and more creativity and less stress and then life is just better alright then we move on to step [07:00] number five we have planned our day we have got the blocks in the calendar for doing the thing at that point all that's left to do is to just get started and this is going to depend on what the context is so let's say you're a student studying for a chemistry exam and you've got in your calendar 10 a.m to 11 A.M study for chemistry exam and let's say the clock hits 10 a.m now that at that point you have a choice do you follow your intention do you do the thing that previous you said that you wanted to do in this time block 10 to [07:27] 11AM or do you not follow your intention and do you procrastinate and do you faff around and do you do whatever the hell you possibly can make a cup of coffee go for a poo whatever the thing might be do you do whatever you can to avoid doing the thing that you're that your higher self has already decided that you were going to do at 10 o'clock this is something honestly that I still struggle with even though I'm considered to be a productivity expert I've literally written a book on the thing I've read [07:48] hundreds of research papers and dozens and dozens and dozens of books on the thing I still do struggle with procrastination I had a filming block on my calendar from nine till 1 pm it is now 12 30 and for the last three and a half hours I've been procrastinating in various ways from filming this video I went for a walk I made a coffee I made another coffee I went to the toilet I hung out with the team a little bit I chatted to my housemate I did everything I possibly could to avoid doing the thing which is like sitting down and [08:13] actually filming this video similarly let's say it hits 5 PM and I'm like all right 5 P.M to 6 30 is my gym slot and I hit 5 p.m and I'm like oh I know I should go to the gym and I know my previous self told me that I'm gonna go to the gym right now but there's some sort of resistance some kind of emotional blocker that's making me feel oh I don't really want to go to the gym and this is where things like motivation and discipline come in a very disciplined person would say you know what 5 PM and I'm gonna go to the gym [08:37] regardless of how I feel about it let's just go I admire the sorts of people who have that much discipline a very motivated person although motivation waxes and wins would say I feel really motivated to go to the gym right now the way I think of it is I prefer something that I call the unblock method that I talk about in the book which is basically about identifying what are the emotional hurdles that are holding me back from doing this thing that I have said that I wanted to do and trying to understand those emotions trying to name [08:59] the emotion trying to reduce it trying to overcome it and trying to act in the face of that emotion But ultimately when all is said and done generally we just need to get started with doing the task because generally getting started is way harder than actually keeping on going all right so that was step number five let's move on to step number six which is to stay focused so at this point we're sitting down to study for the chemistry exam or go to the gym or film the video whatever the thing might be [09:19] and at this point the key thing that you need to do for your productivity to really level up your productivity is honestly it's really simple it's to just stay focused on doing the thing that you said you were going to do and not getting distracted not trying to multitask not trying to task switch just doing the thing there's some evidence that I saw recently that like apparently the average worker wastes 28 of their day in terms of efficiency because they're trying to task switch or because they're getting distracted over the [09:42] course of 10 years that's a whole like three years over the course of a 40-year career that is a Whole Decade that we've wasted because we are trying because we're getting distracted that's just an insane amount of time to waste and so you can level up your productivity by quite a lot by just getting good at focusing on the thing this might involve turning your phone off or chucking it across the room or having it face down out of sight out of mind it might involve turning on a focus mode on your [10:03] computer so you don't see notifications it might involve putting headphones in if you're in a coffee shop or if you're in a co-working space or something so that people don't necessarily interrupt you deep work by County airport is basically an entire book talking about how to focus and so if you struggle with focus and you know personally that this is the step that you struggle with then seek out some books seek out some resources on how to stay to focused because if you can stay more focused again you're massively boosting your [10:24] productivity now we come to step number seven which is more of a kind of guiding philosophy throughout this whole system which is find a way to make it feel good I'm gonna do another little plug for my book feel good productivity here because that's literally what the book is about but the secret to productivity is not discipline it's a joy and when we can find a way to make our work feel good when we can find a way for our work to generate positive emotions then we become more energized and the fact that [10:45] we're more energized means we're more productive we're more creative we're less stressed but it also means we have way more energy to give to the truly important things that matter to us and so the trick here really is to ask yourself that question what can I do to make my work feel good for me that involves putting on the Lord of the Rings music in the background while I'm working it involves maybe going to a coffee shop and treating it like more of an adventure it involves reducing the seriousness with which I approach the [11:05] work so that I feel like the stakes are lower and generally when the stakes are lower it allows us to approach our work with more of a feeling of play can I find a way to bring people into the thing can I do co-working sessions with my friends or with my team can I do Zoom co-working sessions there's this thing called London writer Salon that does daily co-working four times a day writer's hours where you get on a zoom call with like a couple hundred other people and they share like a little bit of motivation around like five minutes [11:29] at the start five minutes at the end everyone just works for the other 50 minutes it just makes it way more fun it makes the work feel more good than just sitting on my desk grinding away doing it by myself so at whatever stage you are of the productivity Journey ask yourself that question that guiding philosophy how can I change my approach to this work such that it actually feels good right step number eight is to then recharge your energy so you've done all this stuff but now the main thing that [11:52] you want to do is to take appropriate breaks so that you don't don't burn yourself out now this involves conserving your energy during the work day and also recharging your energy at the end of the work day and so what might that look like it might look like taking a walking meeting rather than sitting down on your desk and take a meeting if you can it might involve going for lunch but instead of sitting down somewhere for lunch in front of your desk doing the work getting a sandwich or something and then going for [12:14] a little walk it might involve taking a break every hour four to five minutes 10 15 minutes and going to get a cup of coffee going to the toilet chatting to some people doing some stretches doing whatever it takes to recharge your energy productivity is to an extent about time management like you have to create these containers of time and if you don't then you know obviously time is a finite resource but even though time is a finite resource energy is a renewable resource and we can renew our energy throughout the workday and at the [12:38] end of the workday by doing things that are appropriately recharging now one easy way of doing this is to just make a list and on one side of the list ask yourself what are the things that genuinely recharge your energy when you do them and then on the other side of the list ask yourself what are the things you find yourself doing when you're drained of energy so for example for me what are the things that recharge my energy well going for a walk to recharges manager going to the gym often recharges manager reading a book playing [13:02] the guitar these are the things that recharge my energy but when I'm actually drained what are the things I end up doing scrolling Tick Tock scrolling Instagram scrolling twitch Twitter watching random Youtube videos those are the things I find myself doing but it's weird because those things don't actually recharge my energy and so this whole idea of recharging involves sort of nudging our Behavior towards the things that we know give us energy rather than the things that we feel like we can only do when we [13:25] don't have any energy and this energy thing is kind of weird because generally for an activity to be recharging it does require some input of energy like if you're completely drained then going for a walk would be the last thing that you want to do but counterintuitively going for a walk is actually going to generate way more energy than just plonking out on the sofa and scrolling through Tick Tock now there's another really great way of recharging your energy and that involves learning new things and [13:48] learning new things for me I find to be an incredible way of generating more energy which gives me more energy to give to the other important things in life but also learning new things and expanding my knowledge and my understanding is generally a core value of mine which is why I'm thrilled to say that this video is very kindly sponsored by brilliant and Brilliant is the best way to learn maths data science and computer science interactively I've been using brilliant for learning since 2019 they've got incredible interactive [14:10] courses on all these different topics and it's really built for busy people if you're doing a lot of things in your life but you do want to make time for this learning stuff then even in just 15 minutes a day you can make meaningful progress in advancing the skills of these subjects that you care about for me personally my favorite courses on brilliant are the ones in the computer science category because 10 years ago now damn long time ago when I was applying to medical school I was actually torn between medicine and [14:31] computer science and I ended up going with medicine but I always had a part of me that was like ah I kind of wish I'd learned computer science as well just because it's really cool and because I enjoy Tech and coding and computers and so brilliant has given me a great introduction to computer science and the fundamentals of programming and algorithms and an introduction to Python and the way they teach these topics is so engaging and interactive that it genuinely makes it fun it makes it feel good and it makes it way more energizing [14:52] to do a course on brilliant than it does to do the alternative which would be to scroll something on social media now if you're interested in programming in particular like I am and they've got a brand new thinking in code course which helps you think about how code can be used to solve real world problems and one of the skills that I most attribute to any of the success I've had in life is learning how to code when I was quite young because learning how to code changes the way that you look at the [15:12] world it helps you see the problems in the world and helps you realize what are the things you can build solutions for and all of the businesses I've built over the last like 15 years of my life trying to make money on the internet and building businesses have fundamentally been Downstream of learning to code including this YouTube channel now if you're interested in trying everything that brilliant has to offer then head over to brilliant.org forward slash Ali abdall and that link will give you a [15:32] completely free 30-day trial and if you're one of the first 200 people to go to that link you'll also get 20 off Brilliance annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video but the final step in this nine step framework is to reflect and this might involve doing something like a daily reflection which is like how did my day go like did I do my daily highlight did I do the thing that mattered to me to what extent did I follow my intentions it might involve doing something like a weekly review [15:55] which is super helpful and reflecting on things like what were the top wins from last week what were the biggest challenges what were my biggest learning points what are the top three things I want to get done next week have I blocked her time in the calendar for doing those things actually doing that even just takes 20 minutes half an hour every single week it's just absolutely game changing and does move the needle for making sure that the things that we're going to do next week are actually aligned with the direction that we want [16:16] to go and then this reflection piece might involve doing something like a quarterly review every three months taking a look at the goals sheet and being like hey are these goals still the goals that I want I actually want to actively work towards because we're all pretty good at setting like annual goals but then we don't look at those annual goals we don't revisit them whereas revisiting them every quarter is remarkably helpful and I always find that when I do that I realize oh you know that goal that I set six months ago [16:39] in January honestly that's no longer relevant and so it doesn't really make sense for me to continue to work towards that thing even though it's no longer relevant to my life like people think that productivity is like this grindy type thing but actually a lot of thinkers philosophers psychologists have found over the years that meaning and fulfillment comes from the pursuit of goals that feel meaningful to us and so if we can find a way to figure out what are the things that bring us meaning and [17:01] for the record they don't have to be work things they can be spending time with your family all that kind of stuff but like defining what are the things that bring us meaning and then just intentionally doing those things that is what gives us a healthy balanced holistic life and then there are a few optional extras you can do on top of that you can learn to do stuff faster this is sort of the philosophy of efficiency you can learn keyboard shortcuts you can under type faster all of this you can use funkier apps that [17:22] like make it one percent more efficient for you to do something secondly you can learn to add systems for leverage you can use AI tools and other tools to boost your own productivity by using a system to leverage your own inputs you could potentially even add people to the mix if you have enough money you can delegate things to people if you're a business owner you absolutely should delegate things to people fourthly you can capture open Loops this is David Allen's book getting things done it's all about capturing open Loops in our [17:44] mind into a task management system of some sort and then clarifying those tasks and organizing them and then doing them and you can do stuff like building a second brain which is the book by my friend Thiago Forte which is all about building a personal Knowledge Management System for digital note-taking so that you can maximize your creative output like these are all really good things for productivity but I feel like these are all add-ons to the main thing and the main thing is basically figure out [18:05] where you want to go so make time for those things sit down and actually do the thing do it consistently for a long time and then reflect appropriately on like how you're getting there and whether you want to change direction along the way now if you enjoyed this video then I would love it if you could pre-order my book please there'll be loads of bonuses linked down below um and if you want to learn more about how to manage your time and my favorite method for time management I call it the Trident technique or the Trident method [18:26] that'll be linked in the video right over here so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye