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3.5 Years And It’s Finally Ready…

2023-12-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:54 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His own products discussed, Evidence-based framing, His medical past

On the launch of his book Feel-Good Productivity, Ali says the secret to productivity is joy, grounds it in the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, and walks through its three parts: Energize (play, power, people), Unblock (uncertainty, fear, inertia) and Sustain (three types of burnout).

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Feel-Good Productivity is out: the secret to productivity is joy

00:00:58 — Signing copies at Penguin Random House; the live annual planning workshop for book buyers

  • ★★ At the offices of Penguin Random House, his UK publisher, Ali has 500-plus copies of Feel-Good Productivity to sign, which are going to physical retailers around the UK. — 00:00:58 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali's live Feel-Good Productivity annual planning workshop on 6 January 2024 will bring together several thousand people from around the world for an annual review: reflecting on 2023 and planning 2024. — 00:01:27 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Anyone who gets a copy of Feel-Good Productivity before 30 December 2023 gets a ticket to Ali's annual planning workshop, which is exclusively for people who order the book by then. — 00:01:27 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:01:53 — How this book came about: burnout as a doctor in 2018 and the broaden and build theory

  • ★★★ Feel-Good Productivity came about because around 2018, working as a full-time doctor about 60 hours a week while building his business and channel, Ali felt overwhelmed and came home drained. — 00:01:56 · burnout, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ After a few months of feeling burnt out as a doctor, Ali had had enough and went down a rabbit hole on productivity, drawing on the psychology degree he did during his six years of medical school. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Ali explains the broaden and build theory behind feel-good productivity: positive emotions create a feeling of safety and security, which broadens our actions through creativity and builds cognitive and social resources. — 00:02:55 · feel-good productivity (concept), Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Negative emotions, Ali says, narrow our focus and options to fight, flight or freeze, which is no recipe for a healthy, happy, productive life if it happens too often. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Your most productive and creative times, Ali says, were probably not when grinding against a deadline without enough sleep but when you were feeling good and enjoying the work: when we have fun, productivity takes care of itself. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Part One of Feel-Good Productivity, Energize, covers three energisers that can be brought into any work, however boring, to make it more fun, enjoyable and energising. — 00:05:21 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), play, power, people

00:05:40 — Part 1, Energize: play, power and people

  • ★★ Ali names the three energisers as play, power and people, and calls play a really underrated productivity tactic. — 00:05:50 · play, power, people
  • ★★ Naval Ravikant (quoted): Naval Ravikant advises finding the thing that feels like play to you but looks like work to others, because there you have a huge competitive advantage. — 00:05:50 · Naval Ravikant
  • ★★ Not everything is play by default, Ali says, but changing how we approach our work to make it more playful can massively boost our productivity and improve the rest of our life. — 00:05:50 · play, power, people
  • ★★ The opening story of Feel-Good Productivity is Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist, who after World War II and his wife's death felt burnt out by physics and no longer enjoyed it. — 00:06:19 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Working out the equations of a wobbling plate just for fun got Richard Feynman's love of physics back, and those equations led to the theory that helped him win the Nobel Prize a few years later. (hedged) — 00:07:18 · play, power, people
  • ★★★ The book is called Feel-Good Productivity, Ali says, because we all want productivity that feels good, and feeling good is itself the path to productivity. — 00:07:47 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ Feel-Good Productivity contains 54 actionable experiments in total. — 00:08:16 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), experimental mindset
  • ★★★ Productivity is personal, Ali says, so nobody should take anyone's recommendation at face value: run experiments and see whether a piece of advice actually works for you. — 00:08:40 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ The power chapter of Feel-Good Productivity is about approaching work with a feeling of personal empowerment, drawing on studies of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. — 00:09:10 · play, power, people, identified motivation, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali says the energisers of play, power and people are not about a to-do list system or a Notion workspace but apply to everything we do, from a day job and side hustle to random admin. — 00:09:39 · play, power, people, Notion
  • ★★ Some people drain our energy and others energise us; Ali calls this relational energy, the energy you get from interactions with other people, the subject of the people chapter. — 00:10:08 · energisers and drainers
  • ★★★ If you struggle with productivity or procrastination in something, Ali says, very often it is because you are focused on yourself rather than on how your work could help someone else; we often do more for others than for ourselves. — 00:10:37
  • ★★ Humans thrive around other people rather than alone, Ali says, which is why he loves working in coffee shops and co-working spaces. — 00:11:06 · play, power, people
  • ★ If even one of the 18 experiments in Part One of Feel-Good Productivity works for a reader, Ali says, the book is worth its price and the reading time. — 00:11:37 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Feel-Good Productivity took Ali three and a half years, with three professional editors and two researchers; it is on Audible, and he narrated the audiobook himself. — 00:11:37 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Audible

00:12:21 — Part 2, Unblock: uncertainty, fear and inertia

  • ★★ Part Two of Feel-Good Productivity, Unblock, is about beating procrastination through its three blockers: uncertainty, fear and inertia. — 00:12:34 · Unblock method, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali calls clarity the antidote to procrastination: when you know exactly what you are trying to do, where you are going and how, it becomes far easier not to procrastinate or get distracted. — 00:12:34 · Unblock method
  • ★★★ Ali dislikes how today's self-help world focuses on discipline, grit, willpower, powering through and hustling harder. — 00:13:33
  • ★★ For most of us, Ali says, discipline is like always pushing a boulder uphill, while making work feel good and enjoying the process is like pushing it downhill. — 00:13:55

  • ★★★ Discipline is useful for getting started but not for sustaining something, Ali says; procrastination is generally a problem of getting started, and by inertia it is easier to keep going once begun. — 00:14:24

    “Discipline is useful for getting started with something, but it's not very good for trying to sustain something.”

00:14:53 — Part 3, Sustain: the three types of burnout

  • ★★ Most gains in health, relationships or work come from consistent effort compounded over time, Ali says, so making productivity sustainable is a ridiculously important part of a healthy, happy, productive life. — 00:14:53
  • ★★ Against overexertion burnout, which comes from simply trying to do too much, Ali advises taking things off your plate and taking breaks appropriately. — 00:15:22 · burnout
  • ★★★ Recording the audiobook, Ali found he applies the Energize and Unblock parts of his book well but still struggles to sustain: he enjoys his work so much that he easily burns himself out by doing too much. — 00:15:52 · burnout
  • ★★★ Part Three of Feel-Good Productivity, Sustain, covers three types of burnout: Conserve against overexertion burnout, Recharge against depletion burnout and Align against misalignment burnout. — 00:16:21 · burnout, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Being more productive and efficient is all well and good, Ali says, but if you work on the wrong things much of that productivity is wasted effort. — 00:16:50

00:17:18 — Formats, publishers and thanks to viewers

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Feel-Good Productivity is now available in the US and comes out worldwide on 28 December 2023. — video description · Feel-Good Productivity (book), United States
  • ★ Asked for a book on finance and business, Ali says he might write one at some point, but a major difficulty is making the advice timeless because things change a lot. (hedged) — creator comment

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Mentioned

Central: broaden and build theory · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · feel-good productivity (concept) · play, power, people

Also: People: Adele · Naval Ravikant · Richard Feynman

Projects: The Feel-Good Productivity Annual Planning Workshop

Organizations: Macmillan Publishers · Penguin UK

Concepts: burnout · experimental mindset · extrinsic motivation · identified motivation · Newton's first law of motion · relational energy · Unblock method

Products: Audible · Notion

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