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7 Things I Wish I Knew About Productivity Earlier

2023-11-01 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali · recording, 15:15 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, His medical past

In a Book Club episode on his friend Matthew Dicks's book Someday Is Today, Ali shares seven tips for achieving more: the parking lot practice, the minutes mindset, the lily pad method, horizon goals, the piano precedent, the 100-year-old plan and soft goals.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Someday Is Today and its author Matthew Dicks, his near-death experiences, and the Book Club episode

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks, author of Someday Is Today, has survived three near-death experiences, including a very bad car crash and being held at gunpoint at the age of 22. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ This Book Club episode, in Ali's ongoing series distilling highlights from his favourite books, gives seven actionable tips from Matthew Dicks's latest book, Someday Is Today. — 00:00:29 · Book Club
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks says that when he was sure he was going to die that day, at 22, he felt no fear, sadness or anger, only regret at having failed to do anything he wanted with his life. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ When Ali first started writing his book Feel-Good Productivity, he felt he had to do it in the right environment: a coffee shop, with a latte next to him and his headphones on. — 00:00:29 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:01:03 — Tip one, the parking lot practice: productivity is not pretty

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks's approach to the right working environment has changed the way Ali approaches his creative work. — 00:01:16

  • ★★★ One of Ali's favourite quotes from Someday Is Today is that productivity is not pretty: true productivity need not look like elaborate colourful notes or a pretty desk. — 00:01:16

    “productivity is not pretty”

  • ★★ In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks, early for a dentist appointment, sat at the side of the road in the parking lot with his laptop and wrote more of his novel instead of waiting in the car. — 00:01:45

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks points to World War I soldiers writing in journals in the trenches: the writers of the 1910s did not need Starbucks, smooth jazz and two-hour quiet blocks to get their work done. — 00:02:14
  • ★★★ Waiting for the right time or environment applies to eating healthily, going to the gym and building a business too, Ali says: the timing is never right, and those who act despite an imperfect environment are the ones who succeed. — 00:02:43
  • ★★ Ali's second tip, the minutes mindset: when we plan our day we tend to think in blocks of hours, and thinking in hours can make us waste quite a lot of time. — 00:02:43

00:02:58 — Tip two, the minutes mindset: use spare minutes instead of hours

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Meeting a would-be writer for breakfast at McDonald's who had not started her book and arrived seven minutes late, Matthew Dicks showed her the sentences he had written in those seven minutes. — 00:03:37 · McDonald's
  • ★★ After his near-death experiences, Matthew Dicks realised the value of time and did not want to end his life regretting not achieving what he wanted, so he tries to get the most out of every minute rather than every hour. — 00:03:37
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks says that in ten minutes a writer can reread the last three paragraphs written earlier that day and clean them up, or write five good new sentences. — 00:04:06
  • ★★★ Ali grew his YouTube channel while working full-time as a doctor for two years: between patients, in his lunch break or any break of a few minutes, he got out his phone and worked on a video. — 00:04:06
  • ★★ Using spare minutes does not mean never taking a break, Ali says: the final three chapters of his book Feel-Good Productivity are about the power of rest and relaxation to keep things sustainable. — 00:04:41 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali asks what you do in pockets of time: instead of waiting for the hour to start something, with three, five, seven or nine minutes left you could do something intentional, effective and enjoyable rather than scrolling. — 00:05:10
  • ★★ Ali uses his year at a glance spreadsheet every day to make the most of his time: a Google Sheet with the whole year laid out, which shows the calendar in a way calendar apps do not. — 00:05:10 · Google Sheets

00:05:25 — The free year at a glance spreadsheet

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks writes that the only real failure for any creator is to stop making stuff. — 00:05:40

00:05:50 — Tip three, the lily pad method: jump between the steps of a goal

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip, Matthew Dicks's lily pad method: rather than working towards a goal in sequence, recognise that you need not start at the beginning or finish at the end, and jump around. — 00:06:09
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks told someone who wanted to write a memoir but did not know where to start to write the moments she knew she wanted to include, even chapter 15, if that is what she could write that day. — 00:06:38
  • ★★★ Ali advises breaking a goal into tasks and treating them as lily pads: when a task overwhelms you or you lack the motivation or discipline for it, leapfrog to another and make progress there. — 00:07:07
  • ★★ Asked in an interview how he wrote so many books, Mo Gawdat told Ali he works on five or six books in parallel and each morning works on the project he feels most pulled to. — 00:07:36

00:08:35 — Tip four, the horizon habit: horizon goals instead of SMART goals

  • ★★ The problem with SMART goals, Ali says, is that they are often set on things outside our control, such as a million subscribers for a new YouTube channel, which can be very demotivating. — 00:08:53
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip, Matthew Dicks's horizon goals: goals are only a destination and do not help us get there, so a horizon goal takes the pressure off and sets a general, vague direction on the horizon. — 00:08:53
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks sets the horizon goal of being a storyteller, which leaves him free to teach storytelling, consult on it or bring it into advertising, as he has done for car commercials. — 00:09:22
  • ★★ If your horizon goal is to be a musician, Ali says, think of other ways into that dream besides a band: songwriting, DJing or radio presenting. — 00:09:22

  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Ali's fifth tip, the piano precedent, rests on a quote from Someday Is Today: five-year plans invite the universe to drop a piano on you. — 00:10:12

    “five year plans are inviting the universe to drop a piano on you”

  • ★★★ If you meticulously plan out your life, Ali says, something will inevitably ruin your plans; yet planning still matters, because making a plan is generally quite helpful. — 00:10:12

00:10:20 — Tip five, the piano precedent: five-year plans, plans and fate

  • ★★ When people come to Ali for life advice and he asks what they actually want, they often have no vision of where they want to go, like the line from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland that any road will get you there. — 00:10:41
  • ★★ Ali likes a graph, he thinks from Derren Brown's Happy, with plans on one axis and fate on the other: life runs between the two, and having some plan keeps you from being buffeted by the winds of fate. (hedged) — 00:11:06 · stoicism

00:11:31 — Tip six, the 100-year-old plan: advice from your older self

  • ★★★ Ali's sixth tip, Matthew Dicks's 100-year-old plan: at a crossroads in life, imagine your 100-year-old self and ask what advice it would give you right now. — 00:11:31
  • ★★ When Matthew Dicks's son asks him to play tag while he is writing, his 100-year-old self always says to go and play, because a day will come when the boy no longer wants to play with him. — 00:12:00
  • ★★ Alex Hormozi (quoted): Alex Hormozi journals by holding a coaching session with his future self, aged 85, and asking him for advice on what to do now. — 00:12:00 · first in: 2023-09-29, Change Your Life by Journalling in 2026
  • ★★ The more short-term we think about our life and our decisions, Ali says, the more we decide by what is urgent rather than what is actually important. — 00:12:30
  • ★★ Ali still really struggles with this: far too often, choosing between friends and work, he picks work because it is fun and he has deadlines. — 00:12:30

00:12:59 — Tip seven, the purposeful approach: soft goals and what productivity is for

  • ★★★ Ali wants to make the most of his time not for its own sake or to maximise economic output, but because it frees him to spend his time on the things that truly matter to him. — 00:13:22
  • ★★ Ali's seventh tip: Matthew Dicks favours soft goals, things that are not productive by standard definitions but are intentional and meaningful to us. — 00:13:22
  • ★★ Matthew Dicks (quoted): Matthew Dicks told a client whose horizon goal was to watch the 50 greatest movies of all time, and who felt it was not productive, that it sounded incredibly productive because it was her dream. — 00:14:26

00:14:50 — Pointer to his video on 107 productivity books and sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali loved reading Someday Is Today; its author Matthew Dicks is a good friend of his. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 100-year-old plan · horizon goals · lily pad method · Matthew Dicks · Someday Is Today

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Derren Brown · Lewis Carroll · Mo Gawdat

Projects: Book Club

Works: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

Organizations: McDonald's · Starbucks

Concepts: SMART goals · soft goals · stoicism · year at a glance

Products: Notion

Also centred on Matthew Dicks: Why We Should Use Our Time More Intentionally #shorts

Also centred on Someday Is Today: My Top 5 Books On Entrepreneurship 📚 #shorts · Why We Should Use Our Time More Intentionally #shorts · 15 Incredible Books to Read in 2026

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