Productivity Lab (2024)
project history · status: running · last event: milestone (2024-12-12) · owner: Ali · last mentioned: 2024-12-17
Told alongside: Ali says he is releasing his life productivity system as a course soon (2024) · Part-Time YouTuber Academy (2020) · Ali's first book, which a publisher asked him to write (2020) · Ali expects Productivity Lab to pass a million dollars in sales by its twelve-month mark (2024)
About: Productivity Lab
| date | event | what | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-02-27 | announced | Ali's one primary goal for his business is Productivity Lab, a productivity community with a waiting list. | 7 Life Lessons I Wish I Knew Sooner 00:02:55 |
| 2024-03-01 | milestone | Ali's one goal for his business in 2024 is to launch a new product, Productivity Lab, and try to get it to $5 million a year in revenue; everything else is filtered with that in mind. | 7 Mistakes to Avoid While Building Your First Business 00:04:38 |
| 2024-03-29 | milestone | Productivity Lab, Ali's new online community for productivity enthusiasts, not yet launched, aims to help members double their productivity, focus and consistency, notably through daily Zoom co-working sessions. | Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus 00:24:37 |
| 2024-04-16 | milestone | Ali says the free workshops are part of the free version of Productivity Lab ("productivity" as heard), a new community he is building of ambitious entrepreneurs, creators and professionals to double their productivity while enjoying the journey and making friends. | How to Do More in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months 00:18:53 |
| 2024-04-23 | milestone | Ali says he teaches his goal, plan and system framework in an upcoming productivity course in Productivity Lab, his new community for aspiring and ambitious entrepreneurs, creators and professionals. | My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom 00:10:06 |
| 2024-05-14 | announced | Ali says Productivity Lab is a new product his company is launching around next week (week of 20 May 2024), and the retreat held a session on it. | A Week in My Life · Vlog 00:03:11 |
| 2024-05-21 (happened 2024-05) | launched | Ali says Productivity Lab, a new experimental product, launched a few days earlier, with checkouts on a platform called Spiffy (as heard). | A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses 00:08:26 |
| 2024-05-21 | milestone | Ali says Productivity Lab is currently sold out. | A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses 00:37:33 |
| 2024-05-24 | milestone | The day before this video Ali gave a class for Productivity Lab, where many members were struggling with trying to juggle too many things. | 7 Life Lessons I Know at 30 But Wish I Knew at 20 00:27:25 |
| 2024-05-28 | milestone | Ali does the weekly reflection every week with members of Productivity Lab, his community for people who want to double their productivity, in a facilitated session. | 5 Productive Things I Do Instead of Mindless Scrolling 00:02:38 |
| 2024-06-11 (said on 2024-04-14, implied) | milestone | Ali spent most of the day on the structure of an upcoming course, the Life Productivity System, a cohort he will run as part of Productivity Lab, simplifying it on Miro and FigJam boards. | A Productive Week in My Life 00:07:44 |
| 2024-06-25 | milestone | Productivity Lab, Ali's community for entrepreneurs, creators and professionals, is starting a monthly book club, and Slow Productivity will be one of its first books. | How I Manage My Time Without Burning Out 00:21:27 |
| 2024-06-28 (happened 2024-06-27) | milestone | At a Productivity Lab session the day before (27 June 2024), Ali's journaling prompt asked what it would look like to triple the time, effort and money spent on health; as a result many members hired personal trainers or joined gyms and exercise classes. | How to Not Screw Up Your 30s 00:21:52 |
| 2024-11-12 | milestone | In a sponsor read for his own product, Productivity Lab, an online community of entrepreneurs, creators and professionals with Zoom co-working focus lab sessions and weekly reflection workshops, Ali says he joins the sessions for three hours each morning and that doing this every day pretty much doubles his productivity. | Why You’re Overwhelmed - 5 Ways to Beat Stress 00:10:13 |
| 2024-11-15 | setback | Ali's team tried to spin Productivity Lab off into its own business and brand, which overcomplicated everything; in November 2024 it decides to sell everything under Ali's own name again. | I Got Married and Moved to Hong Kong! (Life Update) 00:16:13 |
| 2024-11-22 | milestone | Productivity Lab, the product Ali's team launched in 2024, has made $869,000 in sales over its first seven months. | How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months 00:00:00 |
| 2024-11-22 (happened 2023-10) | looked back | Productivity Lab began in October 2023, when Gareth on Ali's team was doing market research on what to do with a productivity course. | How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months 00:01:56 |
| 2024-12-12 | milestone | Ali calls the focus log the single biggest focus hack that too few people talk about; he teaches it to all his students in Productivity Lab and in his course Life Operating System. | 6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet 00:14:14 |
| 2024-12-17 | looked back | About nine months earlier Ali first taught his life productivity system course to Productivity Lab students, with templates and processes built in to help them keep a focus log. | How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System) 00:23:04 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).
What is said about it
44 statements, by date (the events above are the turns of the thread; these are the details).
- 2024-03-01 · 7 Mistakes to Avoid While Building Your First Business — Ali says he is not wedded to the Productivity Lab revenue goal: if the business does not get there he does not really care, but it is a cool destination to work towards. — 00:05:07
- 2024-03-29 · Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus — Ali's three priority projects now are Productivity Lab, his new product, the Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator and his website; without tracking his time on them he could spend months on other things. — 00:09:07
- 2024-05-14 · A Week in My Life · Vlog — Ali lists his company's five key objectives for the year: Productivity Lab, onlyblah.com (as heard), email, the YouTuber Academy and systems. — 00:01:44
- 2024-05-14 · A Week in My Life · Vlog — Ali's team spends an hour on quest planning, starting with the commercial side, as it gears up to launch Productivity Lab, the company's big project for the year. — 00:10:48
- 2024-05-21 · A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses — Ali says $457,000 has been made through the Productivity Lab checkout, bringing his course revenue across platforms to roughly $10.1 million. (hedged) — 00:08:56
- 2024-05-21 · A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses — Ali describes the cohort-based course, run live over the internet through Zoom calls for a cohort of, say, 300 people; Productivity Lab runs this way, as the YouTuber Academy did for about three years. — 00:20:32
- 2024-05-21 · A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses — Ali: The Productivity Lab offer: 12 months of community access, the life productivity system, the daily focus lab, reflection rituals and expert workshops. — 00:38:12
- 2024-06-11 (said on 2024-04-14, implied) · A Productive Week in My Life — Ali: The night before, Ali felt uncertain and a little stressed about his business: his team is launching a new product, Productivity Lab, without knowing how it will go, and his YouTube channel has fewer views this month (June 2024) than last. — 00:02:32
- 2024-06-11 (said on 2024-04-14, implied) · A Productive Week in My Life — Ali: Seen from the outside, Ali says, the launch of Productivity Lab will be fine: the product will be good, and if not, his team will fix it. — 00:03:07
- 2024-06-21 · 5 High Income Skills for Students to Learn in 2026 — Ali: Henry also designed some of the sales pages for Productivity Lab, for which Ali thinks they paid him $10,000. (hedged) — 00:26:35
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: When Ali earned 50K a year as a doctor in the UK, he never imagined he could build a business with numbers like Productivity Lab's, let alone with a single product. — 00:00:00
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Gareth proposed building a $300 productivity course and attaching a productivity community to it. — 00:07:10
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: The product that became Productivity Lab was first called Productivity Club. — 00:07:10
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Some of the mistakes Ali's team made in creating Productivity Lab came from losing focus on what the product even was. — 00:14:37
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab was built on the idea that the true secret to productivity is accountability and execution, actually doing the thing rather than consuming content about it. — 00:20:18
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab's framework: set the goal, take action, reflect and celebrate, then repeat, with a fourth pillar of building and refining your productivity system. — 00:24:38
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali's team got Productivity Lab ready in January and February 2024 and launched it around April 2024; since then, to November 2024, it has been iterating on it. — 00:31:01
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali campaigned to name the community Productivity Pirates, with pirate-themed branding; the team was against it, talked him out of it, and the name is now a running joke on his team. — 00:34:10
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Someone who replied to a tweet suggested the name Productivity Lab; Ali's team donated $1,000 to a charity of their choice and bought the domain for, he thinks, about $10,000. (hedged) — 00:35:32
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: In Ali's Instagram poll on the community's name, 18% chose Productivity Pirates, 60% Productivity Lab and 22% neither. — 00:41:53
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali's team opened a waitlist for Productivity Lab on 18 March 2024. — 00:42:22
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Because memberships always face churn, Ali's team first sold Productivity Lab only annually, collecting a year's fee up front for a year's commitment. — 00:42:48
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: The goal for Productivity Lab in 2024 was not revenue, though it made about $800,000, but to iterate the product until users got a lot of value from it. — 00:45:00
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — announcement: Ali's team will turn the Productivity Lab material into a self-paced course sold for $300, some time in January 2025. — 00:46:16
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: At about $1,000 a year, Productivity Lab needs only a thousand members joining each year to be a million-dollar product; at $10 a month it would need 10,000. — 00:47:20
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — announcement: Ali's team wants to offer Productivity Lab scholarships at some point, as it has for years for the YouTuber Academy. — 00:50:10
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab was priced at $97 a month. — 00:50:33
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab, hosted on Circle, offers daily Zoom co-working sessions run by hired productivity coaches, weekly reflection workshops on Fridays and Sundays across time zones, and monthly and quarterly planning sessions. — 00:50:33
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: A Productivity Lab member who had procrastinated for five years on a software side project built its minimum viable product after a couple of weeks of Focus Lab co-working sessions. — 00:51:31
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab now offers one-on-one onboarding calls with its productivity coaches. — 00:52:01
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — announcement: Ali's Circle workspaces will be redesigned in the website's style: a free Ali Abdaal Academy section in blue, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy in red and Productivity Lab in purple. — 00:53:47
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab's Focus Lab sessions run several times a day, some led by its coaches and some by members called alchemists. — 00:55:20
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab's course is now on about version four, simplified after each round of student feedback, whose main point is still that it is too complicated. — 01:03:07
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: After many versions, the course's life productivity system settled on four S's, your system, skills, yourself and space, with life compass, annual goals, quarterly quests, balanced weeks, joyful days and focused hours. — 01:05:44
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: The first Productivity Lab cohort had about 500 people, many of them entrepreneurs, nine-to-five professionals and parents without much time; a few hours a week on the course was too much. — 01:06:42
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali first delivered the four-week Productivity Lab course as a live cohort in about May 2024. — 01:07:07
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab's first launch brought 615 sales and $458,000, reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and drew 27 refund requests. — 01:08:26
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: After later rounds of about 300 and 200 students, Productivity Lab has about a thousand members. — 01:08:54
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: After one refund request complained about the onboarding, Ali's team completely revamped Productivity Lab's onboarding. — 01:13:42
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: More than half of Productivity Lab's refund requests say the session timings do not work for the member. — 01:14:07
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: A friend who runs several membership programmes told Ali that overwhelm is the biggest reason people cancel memberships, so his team is making Productivity Lab feel less overwhelming. — 01:15:32
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab is deliberately not an "access to Ali" product: members get value from what the team built, with only a monthly Q&A with him. — 01:15:59
- 2024-11-22 · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months — Ali: Productivity Lab has had about 100 refund requests so far. (hedged) — 01:20:52
- 2024-12-17 · How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System) — Ali says many Productivity Lab students reported that tracking their daily focus minutes showed them how little they focused and helped them increase it. — 00:23:36