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How to Make Productivity More Fun

2022-07-20 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 12:20 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His medical past

Ali argues that sustainable productivity comes from making work fun and, for boring tasks, from gamification: he walks through the eight core drivers of Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis Framework from Actionable Gamification, prefers the five white-hat drives (meaning, accomplishment, creativity and feedback, ownership, social influence) and finds the black-hat ones, such as putting money on the line, unsustainable.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Fun as the secret to sustainable productivity; gamification and the book Actionable Gamification

  • ★★★ Ali says the secret to sustainable productivity is making what we do more fun: then productivity takes care of itself, without needing discipline, grit, willpower or motivation. — 00:00:00 · feel-good productivity (concept)

    “When you're having fun, productivity takes care of itself”

  • ★★★ For things that are just boring but have to be done anyway, Ali's answer is to make them fun with gamification. — 00:00:12

  • ★ Ali says gamification has been co-opted by companies such as Amazon to make their workers work more and more. — 00:00:30 · Amazon
  • ★★ Ali calls Yu-kai Chou's Actionable Gamification a really good book and says he would like to interview Yu-kai Chou on his podcast at some point. — 00:00:38
  • ★★ Actionable Gamification is a textbook for designers of games and products, but Ali says reading roughly its first 10% gives solid principles for making anything you do more fun. — 00:01:07
  • ★★ Ali's core thesis: video games have found a way to make boring stuff more fun, since nobody has to play them, yet people play for hours after a hard day of work. — 00:01:07

00:01:36 — The Octalysis Framework's eight core drivers; drive one, epic meaning and calling

  • ★★ Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis Framework lists eight core drivers that video games tap into; Ali says understanding them lets us reverse-engineer them into boring tasks to make those more fun. — 00:01:36
  • ★★ The first core drive, epic meaning and calling: if what you are doing feels part of a wider meaning or purpose, Ali says, it automatically becomes more enjoyable and motivating. — 00:01:56

00:02:19 — Drive two, development and accomplishment: progress bars and ticking off a to-do list

  • ★★ The second core drive, development and accomplishment: Ali finds levelling up, like hitting a new level in World of Warcraft, remarkably motivating. — 00:02:19 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ To bring accomplishment into a boring task, authors often track their word count with a progress bar against a daily target such as 2,000 or 4,000 words, and watch it fill like a levelling-up bar. — 00:02:48
  • ★★ Ali finds it really helpful to make a to-do list and tick things off: crossing items out is incredibly satisfying and taps the core drive for development and accomplishment. — 00:03:03

00:03:17 — Drive three, empowerment of creativity and feedback: shortening the feedback loops

  • ★★ The third core drive, empowerment of creativity and feedback: in games such as Elden Ring players die to a boss night after night yet stay motivated by finding different ways to beat it. — 00:03:44
  • ★★★ Because what we procrastinate on usually has a long-term payoff and no immediate reward, Ali's strategy against procrastination is to shorten the feedback loops. — 00:04:14
  • ★★ For an exam a year away, Ali suggests testing yourself every week as a personal challenge; he approached tests and exams as a personal game, in friendly competition with friends. — 00:04:45

00:05:14 — Drive four, ownership and possession: ownership of the outcome, the process and the belief

  • ★★ The fourth core drive, ownership and possession, taps a fundamental need for autonomy and control, which video game designers take huge advantage of. — 00:05:14
  • ★★ Ali clocked about 190 days of play time on World of Warcraft because it was his own character to upgrade, with his own gold, jewelcrafting and inscription. — 00:05:14 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Ali applies the ownership drive in three ways: ownership of the outcome, ownership of the process and ownership of the belief. — 00:05:44
  • ★★★ When work or school feels boring, Ali advises putting in a little more effort, ownership, initiative and responsibility instead of coasting on the bare minimum: the thing usually becomes more fun, as autonomy drives intrinsic motivation. — 00:06:13 · identified motivation
  • ★★ Ali calls Daniel Pink's Drive a really good book, all about intrinsic motivation. — 00:06:42
  • ★★ Without ownership of the outcome you can still own the process, Ali says: at work or school you are told what to do but usually not how, so you can make the how your own. — 00:06:42
  • ★ A junior doctor writing discharge summaries, Ali suggests, can make the boring admin their own by changing the fonts and formatting so the summaries are clearer. — 00:07:11
  • ★★★ You always own the belief, Ali says: whenever a task feels boring he reframes "I have to do this" as "I get to do this", from a Seth Godin blog post he read a few years ago and keeps coming back to. — 00:07:41 · Seth Godin, identified motivation
  • ★★ The more Ali tells himself a thought, the more natural it becomes: when he thinks he has to film all his videos today, he tells himself he gets to, and that it is really fun. — 00:08:10 · identified motivation

00:08:39 — Drive five, social influence and relatedness: studying with friends and online co-working

  • ★★ The fifth core drive, social influence and relatedness: we find things more fun when people in our social group also do them and we can do them as a group, as in World of Warcraft. — 00:08:39 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Studying for medical school exams, Ali and his friends went to the same library, each on a different subject, and did Pomodoros together (25 minutes of work, five minutes of break), which made studying a lot more fun. — 00:09:08 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ If you cannot work with people in real life, Ali points to Focusmate, a Zoom co-working accountability buddy, and Writer's Hour, a free Zoom co-working session the London Writers' Salon runs four times a day with about 300 people writing. — 00:09:37 · Zoom
  • ★★ Ali calls the first five drives the white-hat, nice ways of gamification and the other three the black-hat ways, which make life more game-like but not necessarily more fun. — 00:09:37

00:10:00 — The black-hat drives: scarcity, unpredictability, loss and avoidance; putting money on the line

  • ★ The sixth core drive, scarcity, is wanting something we do not have, like a piece of game gear with no intrinsic value. — 00:10:07
  • ★★ The seventh core drive, unpredictability and curiosity, is what slot machines and casinos exploit: the unpredictability of the reward fires dopamine release. — 00:10:36
  • ★★ The eighth core drive, loss and avoidance: we fight hard to avoid losing something, and video games exploit the fear of missing out with daily quests. — 00:10:36
  • ★★ One way to use the black-hat drives against procrastination is putting money on the line: give a friend a significant sum to keep until you have done the thing. — 00:11:05

00:11:34 — Purpose as the ultimate driver of intrinsic motivation; pointer to a video on finding it

  • ★★★ Ali does not like putting money on the line with a friend to fake-motivate himself and does not find it a particularly sustainable strategy; he prefers the five white-hat drives. — 00:11:34
  • ★★ Ali calls a sense of purpose, the first core drive, the ultimate driver of intrinsic motivation, though it can be genuinely hard to figure out. — 00:11:34

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked by a viewer how to make a productivity system for their life, the channel replies with a link to Ali's video How to Build Your Ultimate Productivity System. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Actionable Gamification · gamification · Octalysis Framework · Yu-kai Chou

Also: People: Daniel Pink · Seth Godin

Works: Drive · The Gap Between 'Have To' and 'Get To'

Organizations: Amazon · London Writers' Salon

Concepts: accountability buddy · identified motivation · Pomodoro technique

Products: Elden Ring · Focusmate · World of Warcraft · Writers' Hour · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Deep Dive

Also centred on gamification: 5 Essential Tips for Long-Lasting Productivity

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