Skip to content

12 Productivity Myths Wasting Your Time

2022-11-24 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 19:17 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness, Goals, purpose and life design, Books and reading) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His medical past, Family, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali goes through productivity myths: he defends brief intensity and hard work against an anti-hustle backlash, says productivity can be self-care, adds proximal and intrinsic goals to SMART goals, and argues that small pockets of time, a plain environment and fast typing all count.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Myth one: I should have been more productive

  • ★★ Telling yourself at the end of the day that you should have been more productive only makes you feel terrible, Ali says; he chooses to be satisfied with the work he did and begins again tomorrow. — 00:00:00 · choose to be satisfied

00:00:29 — Myth two: consistency is more important than intensity

  • ★★ Ali agrees consistency matters but says intensity has been given a bad name: not everything in life is a marathon, and some things can be sprints. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ A sprint such as a whole day spent getting a first YouTube video out need not be sustainable forever, Ali says; it just needs to help you work towards your goals. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Small periods of intensity punctuated by long periods of rest are also a very reasonable way to work, Ali says, depending on what you are working on. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali calls motivation a myth: you do not need motivation to take action and can simply choose to do something even when you are not motivated. — 00:01:27

00:01:35 — Myth three: motivation leads to action

  • ★★ Rather than motivation leading to action, Ali says, action leads to motivation: the more you do something and the more small successes you get, the more motivated you are to continue. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali agrees that a culture pushing people to overwork to the point of burnout is bad, but says starting a business, making passive income or succeeding in a competitive field takes hard work. — 00:01:56 · passive income

00:02:07 — Myth four: hustle culture is bad

  • ★★ To people who email asking whether a YouTube channel making $10,000 a month is possible on four hours a week, Ali answers absolutely not. — 00:02:39
  • ★★ Ask any successful entrepreneur, Ali says, and they will often say they hustled really hard and cared more about work-life balance only once the thing became successful. — 00:02:39
  • ★★★ Whether to hustle depends on your goal, Ali says: an extraordinary goal probably needs extraordinary amounts of work, while a balanced and chill life needs no hustle at all. (hedged) — 00:03:19

00:03:42 — Myth five: productivity is not self-care

  • ★★ Citing Grace Beverley's book Working Hard, Hardly Working, Ali says team productivity and team self-care are two sides of the same coin and often go together. — 00:03:48

  • ★★★ Sometimes the greatest self-care is being productive, Ali says: handing a dissertation or taxes in on time, or working a few extra hours in the evening, is the best thing for your mental health. — 00:04:21 · Mental health

    “Sometimes the greatest thing you can do for your own self-care is to actually be productive”

  • ★★ In some cases, Ali says, taking a break or a vacation is exactly what you need to boost your productivity. — 00:04:51

00:05:10 — Myth six: goals should be SMART

  • ★★ SMART goals are not wrong on the surface but do not tell the whole story, Ali says; he adds proximal goals, since evidence says goals close in time work better than distant ones. — 00:05:20
  • ★★ For someone who has never built a business, Ali says the proximal goal of making $100 a month is far more helpful than a goal of a million-dollar business. — 00:05:49
  • ★ For his book, Ali has been doing a lot of research on goals, reading a ton of papers. — 00:05:49 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali recommends intrinsic goals, such as making connections with people or growing your skills, which are within your control and give more autonomy, power and competence than external goal posts outside your control. — 00:06:28

00:06:49 — Myth seven: you can do everything

  • ★★ To-do lists never end, Ali says, citing Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, which he calls really good: embrace our finitude, since we will die without time to do all the things. — 00:06:57
  • ★★ Ali advises strategically deciding what to be mediocre at: he has decided he will never be good at replying to WhatsApp messages and emails. — 00:07:27
  • ★★ Accepting that you cannot do everything, Ali says, lets you pick the three things you want to do today and safely ignore the rest. — 00:07:27
  • ★★★ Ali says that whenever he tells himself he does not have time, he is lying to himself and taking autonomy, control and power away from himself. — 00:07:56

00:07:59 — Myth eight: you don't have time

  • ★★ Ali could make time for regular singing lessons, he says, but with his book, videos and podcasts they are not a priority right now. — 00:08:25
  • ★★ Ali advises saying "it's not a priority right now" instead of "I don't have time": the higher-autonomy wording makes you feel more self-determined and in control of your life. — 00:08:54
  • ★★ Productivity is about doing more only to an extent, Ali says; it is more about doing more of the right things. — 00:09:23

00:09:40 — Myth nine: productivity is about doing more

  • ★★★ Ali's productivity equation: meaningful output divided by time, multiplied by fun; the output must be meaningful, since driving fast in the wrong direction is pointless. — 00:09:53
  • ★★ Ali puts fun into his productivity equation because he thinks that trying to enjoy what you do and the journey is a massive multiplier on your productivity. — 00:09:53

00:10:22 — Skillshare sponsor read

  • ★★ Ali often tells himself he cannot get anything done in the 23 minutes before a meeting and scrolls Twitter, but says he could use those minutes more intentionally. — 00:11:20 · Twitter

00:11:23 — Myth ten: you need large amounts of time to do good work

  • ★ Ali recommends Matthew Dicks's Someday Is Today as super inspiring, for boosting productivity and for improving your life in general. — 00:11:50
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks, a full-time teacher with kids who has written ten-plus books, writes in random moments of the day: if someone is seven minutes late to a meeting, he writes seven sentences. — 00:11:50
  • ★★★ Ali broadly agrees with Matthew Dicks that you make the time in little pockets: waiting for three free hours and a coffee in a nice environment means never getting anything done. — 00:12:41
  • ★ Scrolling Twitter is fine if done intentionally, Ali says: he asks himself whether he really wants to, and when he opened it only from muscle memory he closes it. — 00:13:11 · Twitter

00:13:35 — Myth eleven: your environment has to be perfect

  • ★★ Desk accessories such as a candle or a fake plant help a bit, Ali says, but are not requirements: they are what the Stoics would call preferred indifferents. — 00:13:39 · stoicism
  • ★★ The fewer requirements you have in mind for what you need to be productive, Ali says, the more likely you are to achieve what you want; people have worked productively in ascetic environments since the dawn of time. — 00:14:16

00:14:46 — Myth twelve: the small stuff doesn't matter, and typing speed

  • ★★ Against productivity books that say only the big picture matters, Ali says small micro-adjustments such as typing speed and keyboard shortcuts do actually help. — 00:14:46 · keyboard navigation
  • ★★ Ali has trained his typing speed to about 150 words per minute, which he says makes everything he does on a computer twice as fast as for someone typing 75. — 00:15:08
  • ★★ Reducing the time between having a thought and it happening on the computer reduces friction for everything, Ali says; his mum takes about ten times as long to do the same things. — 00:15:08 · friction, Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ As a junior doctor, Ali typed up detailed notes while patients waited for blood results, while three colleagues at his level who typed slowly stayed about an hour after work to type theirs. — 00:15:56
  • ★★ Training your typing speed is not that hard, Ali says, and it bleeds into every area of life: even if it does not move the needle for your productivity, going home half an hour early is nice. — 00:16:25

00:16:47 — Myth thirteen: reading too many books is useless; sign-off

  • ★★ If you read no books at all, Ali says, reading will immeasurably improve your life; successful people credit their success to reading books. — 00:16:54
  • ★★ Ali reads about 100 books a year, and people tell him he cannot get value from them by listening at 3x speed or skimming. — 00:16:54
  • ★★ Reading for exploration after becoming interested in world history, Ali is listening to Sapiens and has read Fred Kaplan's The Bomb, on the history of the nuclear bomb. — 00:17:43
  • ★★ For exploration, Ali listens at three times speed: finishing a book in four hours leaves him with knowledge, background context and the big picture, even without the names and dates. — 00:18:12
  • ★★★ When reading for exploitation, such as a business book to grow his business, Ali says it makes more sense to read a few and apply their insights than to read 500 and apply none. — 00:18:12
  • ★★★ Whether reading many books is useful depends on what you read them for, Ali says: reading for exploration, or reading for exploitation and insight. — 00:18:47

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Answering a viewer who says the video misdefines intrinsic and extrinsic goals, the channel replies that intrinsic goals and intrinsic motivation are different things that confusingly share a term. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: hustle culture · productivity equation · reading for exploration and exploitation

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Fred Kaplan · Grace Beverley · Matthew Dicks · Oliver Burkeman

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Four Thousand Weeks · Sapiens · Someday Is Today · The Bomb · Working Hard, Hardly Working

Organizations: Twitter

Concepts: choose to be satisfied · deep work (concept) · friction · keyboard navigation · Mental health · passive income · preferred indifferents · SMART goals · stoicism

Also centred on productivity equation: My Simple Productivity System - The Equation · How to Make Productivity Healthier

← Previous: 6 life lessons in under 60 seconds #shorts · Next → The Diderot Effect #shorts