Moment 55 - This Method Will Boost Your Productivity: Ali Abdaal

00:02You know people talk about how they'll put on their to do list clean house and it'll sit on a to do list and clean house, that's a big thing thing and it and that'll sit on your to do list for like I don't know two weeks or whatever, but if you do if you time block and write in your this is what I do on the weekends because so Monday to Friday, my schedule is ran by the meetings and things I have to do so I'm a slave to the calendar Saturday and Sunday come around.

00:26I wake up, I'm like, okay, I'm like what the fuck? How does this thing work this life? Yeah, I'm like, it's empty I've got loads of things I know I could be doing right now but nothing, no one telling me what to do in in a in a life of mine where I'm told what to do every five minutes, um, so I time block on the weekends, which means clean house would become at 11 till 12 I clean the kitchen because then it's like time sensitive and like task specific yeah, and that' that's been an absolute game changer for me. And I also think in the era of working from home yeah where you know people are sat at home, they have a tasks, they have to.

01:06it's like always the question, it's almost like we prep for this because like this is literally like the the three partt structure of my book, which I've been like just having in my head for the last last few weeks where like step one is how do we beat the procrastination. How do we get started with doing the thing and part two of the book is how do we sustain, how do we actually keep on going doing the thing and I. There's just, uh, so in, in, in terms of mindset, the thing that I've found that actually moves the needle is focusing on trying to make it fun and I really, I really like that word fun like.

01:39I think there's something about the word fun that is so like, childish, but also fully speaks to like, fun basically means in intrinsic motivation, like something is sufficiently enjoyable that you do it for its own sake, rather than for the fact that you've got a sponsor helping you or you've got a deadline or things like that, um.

01:56There's one, there's one story in particular that III often come back to and that's like sometime last year I was I was working at the hospital, it was pandemic season, ET cetera, ET cetera And I'd gotten to the end of like a 13 hour long shift and I was just about to go home and the nurse said to me, oh Ali can you put a cannula in this patient her like IV line is tissued and she needs fluids overnight and my heart kind of sank. I was like oh no, like if the nurse wasn't able to put the cannula in that means there's a patient with difficult veins. It means it's going to be hard to put this in and I sort of had this mindset of like all right, then fine and sort of grudgingly took out the cannula and got all the equipment in a tray and I like as as I was doing this, I there was a patient in the bay next door where they were just like talking to a family member or something and saying oh, you know that this hospital has been amazing, everyone is so nice and what a pleasure it is. You know freaking love the NHS kind of vibes and I realized that in that moment I was not being like a good.

02:57Model internally for what I want the NHS to be and what I want a good doctor to be and there's something that Seth godin, uh, who, uh, who I've been following for a while says, which is that.

03:07It's the difference between have to and get to and so I was considering as like oh, I have to put in this cannula, and I remembered that blog post I read from Seth Godin where he said instead of thinking of have to think of it as get to I realized oh, I get to put in this cannula. I get to make a difference in this patient's lives and and life, and give her fluids overnight, so that she's not going to dehydrate because of her morning sickness and just that mindset shift immediately made me feel so much better about it and I was like, oh I get. To do this, who cares if I've been working for 13 hours? This is fun, this is privileged, this is cool and I put it in and we had a nice chat and I felt really great about it afterwards and now like that. And so that's one of the mindset things that I just always come back to if I'm finding myself not enjoying something and therefore my focus goes, I get distracted, I procrastinate.

03:51Instead of thinking I have to do this, I think I get to do this.