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6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet

2024-12-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:00 · watch on YouTube

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

Ali gives six habits for a better year: quarterly quests instead of annual goals, a weekly reset, a two-minute morning manifesto, a focus log, standing order social events, and multi-modality multitasking such as planning videos by voice on walks.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introduction: six productivity habits for the best year yet

  • ★★ Looking back, Ali says the meaningful goals he has actually accomplished all came from setting 90-day goals rather than annual goals. — 00:00:29

00:00:45 — Habit 1: ignore annual goals and set quarterly quests

  • ★★★ Ali's first habit is to ignore annual goals and set goals for the next quarter, the next 90 days, which he calls quarterly quests. — 00:01:15
  • ★★ Ali says goal setting in 90-day cycles is a concept of The 12 Week Year and of the business books Get Scalable by Ryan Deiss and Traction by Gino Wickman. — 00:01:15
  • ★★ Ali says you can see the next 12 weeks on one sheet of paper, whereas an annual goal set in January either changes with new data by February or March or gets put off for months because the whole year is left. — 00:01:36
  • ★★ Ali says more than about three or four quarterly quests is too much. — 00:02:22
  • ★★ Every quarter Ali hosts a free alignment workshop on Zoom to set quarterly quests, announced in his newsletter; he has run them for the last year, usually with a few thousand people attending. — 00:02:22 · Zoom
  • ★★ Ali splits his quarterly quests into work and life, and turns projects that take longer than 90 days into 90-day projects. — 00:02:51
  • ★★ When writing his book Feel-Good Productivity, Ali found working in 90-day chunks pretty effective. — 00:02:51 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★ Ali calls writing a whole book about a three-year process; broken into quarters, one quarterly quest could be completing the first draft, or the first draft of the first three chapters. — 00:03:20 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:03:49 — Habit 2: the weekly review, or weekly reset

  • ★★ Ali says the weekly review was popularised in 2001 by David Allen in Getting Things Done. — 00:03:49 · weekly review
  • ★★★ Ali's second habit is a weekly review, which he calls a weekly reset: just 10 to 20 minutes reviewing how the last week went and asking what your key priorities are for the week ahead. — 00:04:25 · weekly review
  • ★★ In the weekly reset Ali advises looking at the previous week's calendar to celebrate wins, and his template asks what your quarterly quests were and how they are going. — 00:04:49 · weekly review
  • ★★ When Ali skips his weekly reset for a week or two, he forgets his quarterly quests until he looks them up in what he calls his goalkeeper document. — 00:05:18 · weekly review
  • ★★ Based on the quarterly quests, Ali's weekly reset ends by defining your top one, two and three priorities for the week ahead. — 00:06:02 · weekly review

00:06:13 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

00:07:29 — Habit 3: the morning manifesto

  • ★★★ Ali's third habit is the morning manifesto: a two-minute journaling prompt first thing in the morning, before you sit down to work, that asks a few basic questions. — 00:07:31

  • ★★★ Ali says a big mistake is to think productivity is about efficiency: the needle moves in the choice of what you work on, the direction you go rather than how fast. — 00:08:29

    “The needle is moved in the choice of what you are actually working on.”

  • ★★ Ali says that as a reasonably efficient doctor who enjoyed medicine, without setting the goal of building a business and YouTube channel on the side he would have stayed on the hamster wheel; he calls this goal selection rather than goal efficiency. — 00:09:28

  • ★★ Ali says a huge part of making the next year your best is simply doing the things you say you are going to do. — 00:10:11
  • ★★ The morning manifesto does not make you follow through, Ali says, but it sets the intention; without one you follow the calendar, the shoulds and the social media algorithm into an unintentional, unexamined life. — 00:10:43
  • ★★ Ali keeps the morning manifesto short, since longer prompts are less likely to get done: what were my weekly priorities and how are they going, and what is the most important thing to get done today. — 00:11:12
  • ★★ Ali phrases the day's main task as "what is today's adventure going to be" because it feels good: treating work as play and as a quest is why he says quarterly quests rather than projects or OKRs. — 00:11:42 · daily adventure, feel-good productivity (concept)

00:12:24 — Habit 4: focus logs, from tracking minutes on the first draft of his book

  • ★★ About two years earlier, writing the first draft of his book, Ali blocked out time each day but kept procrastinating with tea, coffee, the bathroom, the fridge and Slack messages. — 00:13:00 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Slack
  • ★★ Ali's CEO coach encouraged him to make a Google Sheet tracking how many minutes he spent on the book each day. — 00:13:00 · Google Sheets, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Writing down his daily minutes of focused work on the book showed Ali how unproductive he had been; once he was aware of the number it went up, and he finished the first draft. — 00:13:45 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali calls the focus log the single biggest focus hack that too few people talk about; he teaches it to all his students in Productivity Lab and in his course Life Operating System. — 00:14:14
  • ★ Ali says a focus log can be kept by manual or automatic time tracking, in Google Sheets or with pen and paper. — 00:14:14 · Google Sheets

00:14:43 — Habit 5: standing order social events

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth habit is the focus log: giving yourself visibility on how many minutes you focus on what matters most profoundly influences your ability to do it. — 00:14:43
  • ★★ Ali had standing order social events down to a T in London, where he hosted a weekly Sunday brunch, but has not yet set them up since moving to Hong Kong. — 00:14:43 · London
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth habit is standing order social events: a social event fixed in the calendar once a week or every other week, at the same time and place every time, such as a Sunday brunch. — 00:15:26
  • ★★ Ali calls standing order social events a fantastic way to stay in touch, make friends and keep friendships without coordinating a dozen people's calendars after university. — 00:15:57
  • ★★ Ali and his wife have two date nights every week, with a calendar invite; he thinks they are a big part of why their relationship is very strong. — 00:15:57
  • ★★ Ali plans to start a weekly or fortnightly dinner with people coming over in Hong Kong. — 00:16:27

00:16:56 — Habit 6: multi-modality multitasking and planning videos by voice with VoicePal

  • ★★ For people with a job and a family, Ali says, time is the key currency needed to make progress on a dream. — 00:17:28
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth habit is multi-modality multitasking: doing two things at once creates time, but focused work must be on one thing only. — 00:18:13
  • ★★ Citing research on attention residue, Ali says working on your book while answering emails does not work because both use the same modality. — 00:18:13
  • ★★ Ali gives listening to an audiobook while doing the laundry, or to a podcast or audiobook on the commute, as multi-modality multitasking. — 00:18:54
  • ★★ While building his business, Ali listened to business books and business podcasts while doing other things. — 00:18:54
  • ★★ Ali advises against listening while spending time with your family, where you should be present, or while focusing on your work. — 00:18:54
  • ★★ Ali says he is not promoting toxic productivity: multitasking this way is for people who have a dream but lack the time to build it. — 00:19:24
  • ★★ Ali now does this with VoicePal, the app he and his team created, which he calls a ghostwriter in your pocket. — 00:19:24
  • ★★ Ali plans his videos on walks, speaking his ideas out loud into VoicePal with his AirPods in. — 00:19:53 · AirPods
  • ★★ In VoicePal you speak into the app, it asks sensible follow-up questions, and it turns what you said into a first draft that sounds like you. — 00:20:23
  • ★★ Ali does not read his videos from a script but mostly riffs; he talked through this video's points and used VoicePal to turn them into a rough outline. — 00:20:23
  • ★★ Without VoicePal, Ali suggests any speech-to-transcript software, then pasting the transcript into ChatGPT and editing it in Notion, Google Docs or Microsoft Word. — 00:20:52 · Notion, Google Docs
  • ★★ Ali says a trip to the grocery store that would otherwise be dead time can be used to make progress on what you want to make progress on. — 00:21:22

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: morning manifesto · multi-modality multitasking · quarterly quest · standing order social event · time tracking · VoicePal · weekly review

Also: People: David Allen · Eric Partaker · Gino Wickman · Izzy Sealey · Ryan Deiss

Projects: Life Operating System · Productivity Lab

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Get Scalable · Getting Things Done · The 12 Week Year · Traction (book)

Concepts: attention residue · daily adventure · feel-good productivity (concept)

Places: Hong Kong · London

Products: AirPods · ChatGPT · Google Docs · Google Sheets · Microsoft Word · Notion · Slack · Zoom

Also centred on quarterly quest: A Week in My Life · Vlog

Also centred on time tracking: Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus · How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System)

Also centred on VoicePal: VoicePal, a Ghost Writer in Your Pocket 👻✍️ · VoicePal - a ghostwriter in your pocket 👻 · Your Pocket-Sized Idea Partner 👻 · How to Build a Business Part-Time

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