refinery
concept · in 24 sources (2019–2023)
Ali's Kanban view in Notion through which ideas move from idea to draft, email and published post or video.
Sources by year: 2019: 2 · 2020: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2022: 6 · 2023: 8
Also known as: idea refinery
Also named in the threads: Ali's weekly email newsletter (2018) · Ali promises to keep writing his weekly email newsletter forever (2018)
Questions
Often together
What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.
Notion (4)
What the videos say
The most important statements of each year; all statements.
2023
- 2023-01-07 · How @LanaBlakely Grew To 1 Million Subscribers #shorts — Lana Blakely says she would not have a YouTube channel without journaling: she does much of her thinking by writing, and her videos are things she has been writing and thinking about. — 00:00:00
- 2023-03-26 · 6 AI Tools I Use Every Day — recommendation: Ali lets AI do the grunt work of outlining to give his own brain ideas, but for his videos he still draws his own spider diagrams, whether or not AI helped. — 00:08:42
- 2023-07-01 · I Asked MKBHD and Mrwhosetheboss How to Grow on YouTube — Marques Brownlee says he is lucky that the videos he knows will do well, such as the hottest gadgets and collaborations with interesting people, are also the ones most interesting to him. — 00:00:23
- 2023-09-01 · 8 Steps That Got Me Millions of Subscribers on YouTube — recommendation: Ali's sixth habit: notice what you already listen to and consume day to day and use it as inspiration for ideas for your creative project, whether a business, a YouTube channel or your day job. — 00:08:48
- 2023-10-06 · 9 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started YouTube — recommendation: Ali says it is very helpful to think about a video's title and thumbnail before even thinking about writing it; his team only outlines a video once it has a good title and thumbnail. — 00:09:15
- 2023-10-13 · How to Make $10,000/Month Writing Online — recommendation: Ali: The first step of online writing, from Cole, is to generate lots of ideas and publish consistently, since you don't yet know what resonates or what you enjoy writing; Ali calls it the "forest of ideas". — 00:04:35
- Step three, the "pool of analysis": once your writing gets quantitative and qualitative performance and comment data, analyse it and spot patterns in which ideas are valuable. — 00:06:03
- 2023-10-23 · Why I almost lost 10 million views — Ali's lesson from his typing video: what is obvious to you can be amazing and inspiring to other people, and what you create and share online does not have to be original or unique. — 00:00:00
- 2023-11-28 · If I Wanted to Grow An Audience in 2026, I'd Do This — recommendation: Ali calls his technique viral replication: the easiest way to get content that works is to copy the title and thumbnail of content that has already worked and make it your own way, so you are not plagiarising. — 00:01:02
- When his viewers reached medical school and asked how to study, Ali followed Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create", documenting how he studied for his own exams without needing to be a guru. — 00:02:21
2022
- 2022-02-04 · How to Make Money Online — recommendation: David Perell tests ideas with screenshot essays: he writes 200 to 400 words, shares a screenshot on Twitter, watches the response and follows up ideas that do well. — 00:03:04
- Ali likes Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create": even now, he says, 90% of the videos on his channel document the process of something. — 00:12:18
- 2022-02-25 · How to Grow on YouTube - Live Stream with Ali Abdaal — recommendation: Ali: Instead of starting from SEO research, Ali says, start from the target audience: list their problems, make videos that solve them, such as a series on getting more leads, and do not worry about SEO for now. — 00:58:46
- Ali's idea generation machine has six or seven ways to find video ideas, such as looking at other YouTube channels, competitive research, Reddit and BuzzFeed. — 01:19:17
- 2022-03-03 · How To Start a YouTube Channel - Beginner’s Guide to YouTube — recommendation: Ali: For a beginner, what the videos are about does not matter yet: easy first videos are why you are starting a YouTube channel, a favourite thing of yours (assignment one at the Part-Time YouTuber Academy), what's in your bag or your skincare routine. — 00:03:24
- At level one Ali advises documenting rather than creating, since original content is hard and feels like a heavy lift. — 00:03:53
- 2022-06-21 · How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain — Ali: For songwriters, writers, YouTubers and podcasters, a second brain of captured ideas means sitting down with abundant ideas to choose from instead of wondering what to write this week (week of 20 June 2022). — 00:02:56
- 2022-07-22 · How Much YouTube Paid Me For 10M Views — recommendation: Ali nearly skipped the website video as outside his productivity niche; his test was whether a video would be useful to at least one person, and he knew how to make websites. — 00:05:50
- 2022-08-05 · How to Start an Email Newsletter — recommendation: Ali: Asked what to write about in a newsletter, Ali says you can write about whatever you want: for a new creator it is about finding content you enjoy creating for its own sake. — 00:04:52
- Another option Ali gives for a newsletter is curation: each week share the things you read, listened to or watched that you found interesting. — 00:06:49
- A third option Ali gives for a newsletter is to write every week about something that interests you, which is how Morning Brew started. — 00:07:47
2021
- 2021-02-04 · How Writing Online Made me a Millionaire — recommendation: Ali: Starting a blog, Ali says, is not about coming up with something interesting to write: it is just documenting what you are already doing. — 00:02:56
- David Perell advises new writers not to think about what the world will be interested in but to write about what interests them, down to super niche topics. — 00:12:55
- 2021-04-11 · How To Build A Website in 2026 — recommendation: Ali's only bar for what to write about is whether it could be useful to at least one other person, such as insights from a book or a podcast episode, or life as a first-year medical student. — 00:15:07
- Ali often comes back to Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create": thinking of documenting what you do anyway makes ideas to write about easy to find. — 00:16:06
- 2021-07-04 · Productivity for Lazy People - The RAD System — recommendation: Ali: Since taking Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain course, Ali uses his Twitter scrolling on the toilet, in bed or waiting for a bus to find ideas, which he saves into his notes and expands on later. — 00:03:44
- 2021-10-10 · In Conversation with Charlie from Charisma on Command #ptya — recommendation: Charlie Houpert: Charlie's lists for his own audience: athletes such as LeBron James, singers and YouTubers do not do well; Game of Thrones and Marvel actors and world-known A-list celebrities do, and so do the topics confidence, respect and keeping a conversation going. — 00:12:07
- Charlie Houpert: Charlie's content tip: break ground on things that are new to you and cannot be found in a book or by asking someone; such videos are interesting because they probably tell people something never said before. — 00:29:55
- 2021-11-13 · How I Run this YouTube Channel - Day in the Life — recommendation: Ali: When a valuable video topic is one Ali does not know much about, his team brings in expertise from books, interviews and experts, because the aim is inspiring educational content that helps people live their best life. — 00:07:43
2020
- 2020-07-07 · My Creative Workflow with Notion — Ali: Every video idea Ali has goes straight into a Notion Kanban board, his idea refinery, where it moves from "no status" or "idea" through writing, script review, ready to film, filmed, with the editor and ready for publication to published. — 00:01:15
- Ali's Notion board holds 49 videos with no status and 47 ideas, just under 100 video ideas collected over time. — 00:01:15
- With a board of ideas, Ali and his team never start a video from scratch; like writers with a good note-taking process, they never need to start from a blank page, which is no fun at all. — 00:03:04
- Ali uses the same Trello-style Kanban board in Notion for his blog posts and email newsletters as for his videos. — 00:03:34
- 2020-08-20 · The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System — Ali: The first Building a Second Brain principle, borrowed creativity: creativity is about remixing existing ideas from what you read, watch and listen to, adding your own spin and combining them in interesting ways. — 00:01:35
- The third Building a Second Brain principle, idea recycling: ideas are not single use, as Ali used to think, and can be recycled and reused over time. — 00:03:18
- The sixth Building a Second Brain principle, start with abundance: you are never starting from scratch; to write about motivation, search your second brain in Evernote or Notion for the word and draw on the articles you have read and annotated over the years. — 00:07:14
- 2020-11-24 (said on 2020-11-20, implied) · A "Productive" Day in my Life (Lockdown) — Ali: The Academy's two-hour live session, with around 250 students on Zoom, teaches the idea generation machine for never running out of content ideas: eureka-moment strategies, the birdsong technique, the coal mining method. — 00:02:55
2019
- 2019-10-19 · How I use Notion as a Resonance Calendar — Ali runs his ideas database as a Kanban "refinery": ideas, his own or from what he consumes, move from no status to idea, draft, email and published, ending as a blog post; he supposes he will add a further stage for ideas turned into a video. — 00:10:01
- 2019-12-11 · What's on my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020) — Ali uses Notion as the idea refinery for his content: a large inbox of the ideas he is working on, which may become drafts and then email newsletters. — 00:03:11