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Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus

2024-03-29 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 26:11 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His own products discussed, His own numbers, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

In the last video of his three-part focus series, Ali gives eleven tools in three groups: timing focus sessions (Forest, manual time tracking in a quest log, Toggl, Rize), fighting distraction (OneSec, Opal, grayscale, focus mode) and making work fun through play, power and people; manual time tracking and enjoyable work help him most.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Three kinds of focus tools

  • ★★ Ali sorts tools for staying focused into three groups: tools for timing focus sessions, tools against distractions, and tools that make work more fun. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali tells how in the late 1980s the student Francesco Cirillo, struggling to focus, set a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to 25 minutes and worked: the origin of the Pomodoro method. — 00:00:00 · Pomodoro technique

00:00:17 — Tool 1: Forest, a gamified Pomodoro timer

  • ★★ Ali thinks the most effective Pomodoro apps do more than time 25 minutes of work and five of rest, which a clock can do: they add some gamification. — 00:00:48 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★★ Ali's first focus tool is Forest, a phone app he used extensively at medical school: a virtual tree grows while a timer of, say, 25 minutes runs, and you are meant to focus and not check your phone. — 00:00:48
  • ★★ Ali first heard of Forest in his fourth year of medical school and thought it gimmicky, but found it fun: it timed his sessions, kept him off his phone, and he and his friends Katherine and Marcus messaged each other on WhatsApp about it. — 00:01:18

00:01:47 — Time wasted at work; tool 2: manual time tracking in a quest log

  • ★★ Ali cites Asana's yearly Anatomy of Work Index, a survey of around 10,000 knowledge workers: in the 2019 report workers spent two-thirds of their time on work coordination, 13% on strategic planning and 27% on the skilled work they were hired for. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ The most recent Anatomy of Work report, Ali says, finds on average 3.6 hours a week lost to unnecessary meetings and 62% of the workday lost to repetitive mundane tasks. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ The big challenge for focus, Ali says, is making sure we focus on important work that moves the needle rather than tedious admin tasks, which at best maintain where we already are. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ Ali logs his focused work in a document he calls his quest log; he started this version on 2 February after realising in January that he spent a lot of time on random things rather than what truly mattered to him. — 00:03:29
  • ★★★ Ali's manual time tracking: he puts on a long ambience video on YouTube, and when he loses focus checks how much time has elapsed and types into his quest log what he did and for how long. — 00:04:30
  • ★★ Ali calls tracking time in a Google Doc low-key, low-friction and free, with no app or payment needed; typing docs.new creates a new Google Doc. — 00:05:33 · Google Docs
  • ★★ A time log, Ali says, both tracks your time and gives you the feeling of making progress, one of the concepts of power he covers in chapter two of Feel-Good Productivity. — 00:06:02 · play, power, people, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali's team has used the time tracker Toggl for years; he only recently started trying it for this video, to compare it with the Google Doc he has always used. — 00:06:46 · Google Docs

00:06:58 — Tool 3: Toggl, and why manual time tracking helps

  • ★★★ If you are new to time tracking, Ali recommends starting with a YouTube video and a Google Doc rather than a timer app such as Toggl, since remembering to start and stop a timer may be a bit much. — 00:08:38 · Google Docs
  • ★★ Ali's three priority projects now are Productivity Lab, his new product, the Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator and his website; without tracking his time on them he could spend months on other things. — 00:09:07 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Manual time tracking, Ali says, lets you set an intention and be honest with yourself about where your time goes. — 00:09:07

00:09:58 — Tool 4: automatic time tracking with Rize

  • ★★ Ali is an investor in Rize, the automatic time tracker sponsoring this video: after using it for a few months in 2022 he asked to invest because he thinks it is really cool. — 00:10:05
  • ★★ Rize's automatic tracking of Ali's February: 21% of his time focusing, an average work week of 34 hours and work day of seven hours, 44% of his time in video calls and 12% writing. — 00:10:36
  • ★★★ For Ali it is manual time tracking, more than automatic apps like Rize, that moves the needle for focus; with whatever tool, he says, tracking your time is almost guaranteed to improve your focus. — 00:11:50

00:12:19 — Free seven-day focus crash course

00:12:47 — Tools against distraction: mindfulness, tool 5 OneSec, tool 6 Opal

  • ★★ Time tracking also helps against distraction, Ali finds: once he has said he will spend the next hour on his book, he feels guilty, as if lying to himself, if he then does other things. — 00:12:47
  • ★★ Ali cites a study in which college students given a single 30-minute mindfulness training felt more in control of their smartphone use and scored lower on a smartphone addiction scale. — 00:13:49
  • ★★ Ali's takeaway from the study: little doses of mindfulness can go a long way in avoiding distraction. — 00:13:49
  • ★★ Ali recommends OneSec, an app that asks you to take a deep breath before a distracting app such as Instagram opens; he finds five seconds a good delay for asking yourself whether you really want to use it. — 00:14:19 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali hears that the app blocker Opal is really good and robust: his team member Tintin has it block all distracting apps after 9 p.m., so he ends up going to bed on time. (hedged) — 00:14:58

00:15:28 — Tool 7: grayscale mode; every tool is an experiment

  • ★★ Social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram are designed to be as addictive and visually stimulating as possible, Ali says, by armies of developers, so we do not notice the features that keep us scrolling. — 00:15:28 · TikTok, Instagram
  • ★★★ Ali calls grayscale mode, which turns the phone black and white, a pretty effective way to fight social media distraction, since it makes scrolling Instagram and TikTok much less appealing. — 00:15:57 · Instagram, TikTok
  • ★★ On an iPhone, Ali explains, grayscale is under Settings, Accessibility, Display and Text Size, Colour Filters; an accessibility shortcut lets you toggle it on and off. — 00:16:27 · iPhone
  • ★ Ali does not routinely use grayscale mode, but Angus, the general manager of his business, uses it all the time. — 00:16:27 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★ Every productivity hack, tool or strategy is an experiment, Ali says, as he argues in Feel-Good Productivity: try them out and stick with what works for you. — 00:16:56 · experimental mindset, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Time tracking and making his work feel good are Ali's two major needle movers for focus; he uses OneSec when he feels he spends too much time on Instagram or TikTok. — 00:16:56 · Instagram, TikTok

00:17:24 — Tool 8: focus mode and notifications; focus is a solved problem

  • ★★★ Whenever he needs to focus Ali turns on focus mode on his phone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch, since any notification pulls you out of focus; on a Mac, holding Option and clicking the time turns it on. — 00:17:24 · Apple Watch
  • ★★ In focus mode only five people can message Ali: his girlfriend, mum, brother, sister-in-law and grandma; when focusing he keeps his phone in his pocket, face down, or throws it onto the sofa behind him. — 00:18:11 · Ali Abdaal's mother, Taimur Abdaal, Ali Abdaal's grandmother
  • ★★ Working in the British Library recently, Ali noticed that about 80% of the people there had their phones right in front of them, some propped up on a mug or phone holder. — 00:18:43
  • ★★ To the worry about a child's emergency, Ali answers: add your children's, their school's or the hospital's numbers as focus mode exceptions, and let calls, or two calls in a row, ring through. — 00:19:08
  • ★★ Whenever Ali polls his audience on their biggest productivity challenge, around 40% say they struggle to focus. — 00:19:37

  • ★★ Ali calls focus a solved problem: Nir Eyal's Indistractable and Cal Newport's Deep Work and A World Without Email cover it, and devices have focus modes built in. (overstated) — 00:20:04 · Cal Newport

    “Focus is a solved problem.”

  • ★★★ Some people have ADHD, Ali says, but not 40% of his audience: many struggle to focus because they skip sensible, obvious steps, such as not seeing notifications while trying to do deep work, a habit he sees in his team too. — 00:20:04 · deep work (concept)

00:20:58 — Making work fun; tool 9: play and background music

  • ★★ Making work feel good is the thesis of Ali's book: if we can make work fun we are far more likely to be focused, just as we do not struggle to focus on video games or a really good film. — 00:20:58 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali still struggles to focus on really boring work despite researching productivity for 15 years and writing a book on it; the single biggest needle mover for boring work, he says, is finding a way to make it a bit more fun. — 00:21:20
  • ★★ When struggling to focus, Ali suggests asking "What would this look like if it were fun?", a question he kept on a post-it note on his desk and has as his phone wallpaper. — 00:21:43 · play, power, people
  • ★★ Ali changes background music by task: Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter music when he really needs to focus, more upbeat music with lyrics for boring admin he just needs to get through. — 00:22:41 · The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter (book series)

00:23:03 — Tool 10: power and visible progress

  • ★★ Power, the second of Ali's three Ps, includes making your own progress visible, as World of Warcraft does with an experience bar that rises with each kill. — 00:23:10 · play, power, people, World of Warcraft

  • ★★★ Ali suggests asking what your equivalent of the writer's word count is: how you can make your progress more visible so that your work feels more fun. — 00:24:09 · play, power, people

    “what is my equivalent of the writer's word count?”

  • ★★ At medical school Ali worked with his friends, inviting them to his room or going to the local library together to co-work. — 00:24:09

00:24:10 — Tool 11: people and co-working; Productivity Lab; end of the series

  • ★★★ Productivity Lab, Ali's new online community for productivity enthusiasts, not yet launched, aims to help members double their productivity, focus and consistency, notably through daily Zoom co-working sessions. — 00:24:37 · Zoom
  • ★★ Since your friends may not share your interests, Ali advises creating a community of people interested in the same things, so that you can all work together, virtually or in real life. — 00:25:06
  • ★★ This video, Ali says, is the third of his three-part series on how to focus, after the five mistakes that ruin focus and five simple habits to try as experiments. — 00:25:36

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Focus mode · Forest · grayscale mode · play, power, people · Pomodoro technique · Productivity Lab · time tracking

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Ali Abdaal's mother · Angus (general manager) · Cal Newport · Francesco Cirillo · Gareth · Katherine · Marcus (friend, mentioned from 2017) · Nir Eyal · Taimur Abdaal · Tintin

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator · Sunday Snippets

Works: A World Without Email · Anatomy of Work Index · Deep Work (book) · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Harry Potter (book series) · Indistractable · The Lord of the Rings

Organizations: Asana · Instagram · TikTok

Concepts: deep work (concept) · experimental mindset · gamification · mindfulness

Places: British Library

Products: Apple Watch · Google Docs · iPhone · OneSec · Opal · Rize · Toggl · World of Warcraft · Zoom

Also centred on Forest: How I Manage my Time as a Doctor + YouTuber - 9 Time Management Tips

Also centred on Productivity Lab: 7 Mistakes to Avoid While Building Your First Business · A Week in My Life · Vlog · How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months

Also centred on time tracking: 6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet · How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System)

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