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Music, Reading and Note-Taking - Productive Day in the Life

2020-06-10 (said on 2020-06-01 — implied: date said in the video; uploaded 9 days later) · Vlog or day in the life · Ali · recording, 8:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: His own numbers, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali logs a lockdown day (1 June 2020): Notion journaling, a team meeting, guitar and a new singing class, a lot of procrastination and his thousand-word writing challenge, with rules on afternoon caffeine, a 10 p.m. productivity cut-off and taking notes he will stumble across again.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Morning: half an hour in bed, journaling on Notion, weigh-in, coffee and oats, the weekly team meeting

  • ★★ Ali wakes at 8 a.m. with his alarm, lies in bed doing nothing for half an hour, then does his morning journaling in Notion on the iPad by his bed. — 00:00:00 · iPad Pro, Notion
  • ★ On his Wi-Fi scales Ali weighs 72.46 kilograms with 16% body fat. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ At 10 a.m. Ali has his roughly weekly half-hour team meeting on Zoom with Christian, Angus and Elizabeth about the next month's videos, articles, podcasts and Skillshare classes. — 00:00:29 · Angus, Skillshare classes

00:00:58 — Procrastinating on the phone, rereading Anything You Want for a Book Club video, JustinGuitar music theory, lunch, Liberty Medics admin

  • ★★ A five-minute toilet break turns into half an hour of watching covers of John Mayer songs on YouTube on his phone, and later another 20 minutes on his phone. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali calls the iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard, used on the sofa, his favourite casual writing setup. — 00:01:27 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ With Apple Music's Pure Country station playing on the HomePod, Ali rereads one of his favourite books, Derek Sivers's Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur. — 00:01:27 · Kindle
  • ★★ Ali's team is planning a Book Club video distilling the main insights of Anything You Want, which is proving tricky because the book is a collection of 40 short lessons. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ In JustinGuitar's music theory course Ali learns that the chord triads he knows from the piano also work on the bottom three strings of the guitar, which he calls a game-changing insight. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Ali calls motivation a myth but thinks it helps to make use of bursts of motivation when they come, as he does by watching more guitar theory lessons over lunch. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ali and some friends have set up a new business, Liberty Medics (as heard), and he spends half an hour on admin ahead of its launch. — 00:02:26

00:02:55 — The afternoon slump: thumbnail shoot, a 3 p.m. coffee, overhead shots, standing-desk writing and the thousand-word challenge

  • ★★ Between 2 and 3 p.m. Ali procrastinates on the guitar and spends a long time shooting the vlog's thumbnail, realising he has done nothing useful for three hours. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali says caffeine at 3 p.m. is a bit dangerous because it stays in the body for a long time and can reduce the quality of sleep. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali allows himself a 3 p.m. coffee because he has a twilight shift at 4 p.m. the next day (2 June 2020), so he can stay up late reading paranormal romance fiction and sleep in. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali says setting up elaborate shots, such as an overhead shot of his coffee, is how he procrastinates when making a vlog, and it makes everything take about four times longer. — 00:03:32
  • ★ At his standing desk Ali switches to his colourful mechanical keyboard, which he finds nicer to type on than the Apple Magic Keyboard. — 00:03:32
  • ★★ From 3.30 p.m. Ali spends an hour writing for upcoming videos, talks content with his team and looks through their video ideas database in Notion for ideas to move into production. — 00:04:01 · Notion
  • ★★ At 4.50 p.m. Ali moves to the sofa with the iPad, which he says seems to be his dedicated writing device, to continue his daily challenge of writing a thousand words. — 00:04:01 · iPad Pro

00:04:30 — A Twitter rabbit hole on the Black Lives Matter protests; the first day of a 30-day singing class

  • ★★ Browsing Twitter, Ali falls into reading articles and watching videos about the Black Lives Matter protests, tweets and retweets, wonders what more he could do with his platform to help, and feels depressed about it for an hour. — 00:04:30
  • ★★ Ali starts a 30-day online singing class; for its first project he records his story, musical background and favourite genres and sings a bit of John Denver's Country Roads. — 00:04:30
  • ★★ Though he cringes at talking about himself on video to strangers, Ali says he has paid for the singing class, wants to improve his singing and will do every exercise the coach sets each day. — 00:04:30

00:05:16 — Writing on luck and serendipity; why he takes notes he will stumble across again

  • ★★ To reach his thousand words for the day, Ali spends 50 minutes writing about luck, serendipity and how to maximise it, after a discussion with his friend Bobby Siegel (as heard) on a YouTube livestream earlier in the week. — 00:05:16
  • ★★ While writing, Ali revisits a Farnam Street podcast episode he heard and took notes on in October 2019, and finds good ideas he had forgotten. — 00:05:46
  • ★★★ Ali does not trust his memory, so he takes notes on what he reads, watches and listens to, and takes them in a way that he will stumble across them again, since otherwise he might forget they exist. — 00:05:46

00:06:15 — Chamomile tea and the Brilliant sponsor read

00:06:45 — Piano after the 10 p.m. cut-off, notes on old articles as relaxation, bed

  • ★★★ Ali has a new rule for himself: he has to be productive before 10 p.m., and after 10 p.m. he is not allowed to do anything explicitly productive unless he really feels like it. — 00:06:45
  • ★★ Ali gets absorbed playing Lord of the Rings and Phantom of the Opera music on the piano; he says it is not productive because it is not deliberate practice, but it is fun and it is his wind-down time. — 00:07:00
  • ★★★ To people who ask when he makes time to relax, Ali says he finds taking notes on articles he read long ago fun and relaxing, so it does not really feel like work. — 00:07:29
  • ★ At 11 p.m., as his concentration wanes, Ali types his daily reflection on the iPad and reads on his Kindle before sleeping. — 00:07:29 · iPad Pro, Kindle

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Asked how he counts his thousand words a day, Ali says he uses Notion. — video description · Notion
  • ★★ Asked to upload his singing videos, Ali says they are on Instagram and he does not want to dilute his YouTube channel with them. — creator comment
  • ★★ Asked when his productivity class comes out on Skillshare, Ali answers in two weeks. — creator comment · Skillshare classes

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Anything You Want · iPad Pro · Notion

Also: Angus · Christian · Derek Sivers · Kindle · Skillshare classes

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