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5 Productive Things I Do Instead of Mindless Scrolling

2024-05-28 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:38 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Relationships and personal life (also: Productivity and time, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own products discussed, His medical past, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present, Family

Ali suggests five productive uses of spare time instead of scrolling: send a thank-you message to someone you are grateful to, do a 20-minute weekly reflection, keep a personal CRM of friends, record a podcast with a friend (or a video diary), and tidy your space for a few minutes; journaling closes the list.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Productivity as using time intentionally, effectively and enjoyably; five experiments for spare time

  • ★★ Ali says it is easy to think of productivity as only work-related, but he defines productivity as using our time in a way that is intentional, effective and enjoyable. — 00:00:00 · feel-good productivity (concept)

    “productivity is about using our time in a way that's intentional, effective, and enjoyable”

  • ★★ Ali offers five experiments for spare time when you want to be productive without working; he finds them needle-moving for his own energy levels, leaving him refreshed and recharged. — 00:00:25

00:00:47 — 1. Send a message to someone you love

  • ★★ At his talks and events Ali has people type out a message of gratitude to someone on WhatsApp or iMessage and then invites them to send it; about 80% of the room do. — 00:01:23 · WhatsApp
  • ★★ Ali says no one at his events has ever received a negative response to such a message of gratitude; sometimes the friend replies on the spot that the message brought them to tears. — 00:01:52
  • ★★★ Instead of scrolling when you are bored, Ali recommends taking two or three minutes to go through your contacts and send someone a nice thank-you message. — 00:01:52
  • ★ Ali recently turned 30 and had a birthday party; he hopes one of these days to write small handwritten thank-you notes for the gifts people gave him. (hedged) — 00:01:52
  • ★★ Ali does the weekly reflection every week with members of Productivity Lab, his community for people who want to double their productivity, in a facilitated session. — 00:02:38

00:02:45 — 2. Weekly reflection

  • ★★★ Ali's second productive use of spare time is a weekly reflection: spend 20 minutes reflecting on how your last week went and making a little plan for the following week. — 00:03:07 · weekly review
  • ★★ The first part of Ali's weekly reflection, "align", asks what your annual goals and quarterly quests are and how they are going. — 00:03:07 · weekly review
  • ★★ Following the feel-good productivity idea that work which feels good makes productivity take care of itself, Ali calls his quarterly goals quarterly quests, because it makes them a little more fun. — 00:03:38 · feel-good productivity (concept), Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ In the weekly reflection Ali spends three minutes going through the previous week's calendar for the good and great things to celebrate, since it is easy for overachievers to keep marching on and forget to celebrate wins. — 00:04:06
  • ★★ The weekly reflection then asks what last week's (week of 20 May 2024) challenges were, in what ways you did not act in line with your intentions, and what you would like to change next week (week of 3 June 2024). — 00:04:35
  • ★★ The "organise" step of Ali's weekly reflection looks two weeks ahead to see whether anything needs scheduling in the calendar or adding to the to-do list, for life as well as work. — 00:04:35
  • ★★ The final weekly reflection question asks for the top three outcomes for the coming week and puts them in the calendar, because, Ali says, if it is not in the calendar it is unlikely to get done. — 00:05:04
  • ★★ Ali says spending 20 minutes on a weekend or a Friday reflecting on your week and planning the next is far more productive for work, life, health and relationships than 20 minutes scrolling Instagram. — 00:05:37 · Instagram

00:05:52 — Headspace sponsor read

  • ★★ A friend in his forties, a married entrepreneur with children, told Ali, who was asking older friends for life advice on turning 30, that the older you get the harder it is to maintain strong friendships, because everyone's life gets busy. — 00:07:05

00:07:14 — 3. A personal CRM

  • ★★ Ali says the idea of a business CRM, and of the electronic patient records he used when working as a doctor, can also be applied to our personal lives. — 00:08:42
  • ★★ A personal CRM, Ali says, is software or a system to keep track of the people you want to stay in touch with, such as their birthdays; its other use is taking notes on your friends. — 00:09:45
  • ★★ In 2021, during the pandemic, Ali created an Apple Notes folder called People, with a note for each friend he caught up with: the date and what they talked about. — 00:09:45
  • ★ One note in Ali's People folder is for his friend Danny Lowney (as heard), who runs a company called 16th (as heard) and whom he sees every six to nine months. — 00:10:12
  • ★ Ali invested in the new company his friend Danny Lowney (as heard) was starting and raising investment for. — 00:10:12

  • ★★ Keeping a friend's news in a simple note lets Ali ask about it next time they speak, so his friend feels he is thoughtful: the personal CRM lets him systemise being thoughtful. — 00:10:46

    “I can sort of systemize being thoughtful”

  • ★★ To people who find a personal CRM weird and say you should just remember, Ali replies that few people know all their co-workers' children's names; he has all his team members' children's names written down. — 00:11:14

  • ★★★ When you are bored, Ali suggests creating or updating a personal CRM to keep in touch with people, which can be a super simple thing. — 00:11:14
  • ★★ On his friend's advice Ali has recently started using Dex, an app that imports the phone contacts you choose, lets you set how often to stay in touch and add notes, and reminds you to reach out; he calls it very helpful. — 00:11:54
  • ★★ One of the things Ali is most glad he has done is starting a podcast, Not Overthinking, with his brother in 2019; it is small and niche, and they do not publicise or monetise it. — 00:12:33 · Not Overthinking, Taimur Abdaal

00:12:47 — 4. Record a podcast with a friend

  • ★★ For the first three of its five years Ali and his brother recorded their podcast Not Overthinking every single week, in person or over Zoom, with no agenda; for the last two years they have been a bit inconsistent. — 00:13:03 · Not Overthinking, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ Ali suggests as an experiment recording a podcast with a friend or family member, even a single episode, with low friction, such as the voice memos app on your phone. — 00:13:03
  • ★★ For recording a podcast remotely Ali calls Riverside a great, fantastic platform; it is how his team records all its podcasts remotely. — 00:13:52
  • ★ Ali is an investor in the podcast recording platform Riverside. — 00:13:52
  • ★★ The day before filming, Ali was about to record a podcast with Cal Newport, who was half an hour late because of a talk, so Ali recorded a casual podcast chat with Kaylin (as heard), one of his new team members, who was in the house. — 00:13:52 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Ali says the podcast format really encourages people to open up: being interviewed makes it much easier to expand on your thoughts. — 00:14:19
  • ★ On their podcast Ali and his brother go much deeper on non-personal topics than when they are just chatting by themselves. — 00:14:45 · Taimur Abdaal, Not Overthinking
  • ★★ Even if a recorded chat with a friend or team member is never published and stays in his Apple Photos or as an unlisted YouTube video, Ali says sitting down to record a podcast deepens the connection between them. — 00:14:45
  • ★★ Without a friend to record a podcast with, Ali suggests recording a private video diary of yourself on your phone's selfie camera. — 00:15:27
  • ★★ Ali says being recorded, in a podcast or a video diary, works as a memory and helps deepen your connection with yourself and with your friends. — 00:16:02
  • ★ When Ali is interviewed on a podcast he often comes out with really good wisdom that he could not have come up with typing at his computer. — 00:16:02
  • ★★ Researching his book Feel-Good Productivity, Ali found a lot about how the environment shapes how we think, feel and act and how productive we are. — 00:16:02 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:16:24 — 5. Curate your space

  • ★★ When the space around him is a mess, Ali says, it adds a level of "ugh" to sitting down to work, read, call his grandmother or play video games. — 00:16:46
  • ★ Ali says playing video games can be very productive if you do it intentionally. — 00:16:46
  • ★★★ One of the most productive things Ali can do with a few minutes of spare time, instead of starting a new work task or scrolling social media, is to take three to ten minutes to tidy his space. — 00:17:13
  • ★★ Tidying for a few minutes every few days makes your spaces less cluttered, and a less cluttered space, Ali says, gives a less cluttered and chaotic mind. — 00:17:52
  • ★★ Ali's last productive use of time is journaling: doing any one of his ten journaling prompts for a few minutes, on paper or in a notes app, will, he guarantees, help you discover new insights about yourself. — 00:17:52

00:18:10 — Journaling, with a pointer to his journaling prompts video

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: personal CRM · weekly review

Also: People: Cal Newport · Danny Lowney · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Not Overthinking · Productivity Lab

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Facebook · Instagram

Concepts: feel-good productivity (concept) · quarterly quest

Products: Apple Notes · Dex · iMessage · Riverside · WhatsApp

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