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How to Change Your Life with Deep Work (My System)

2024-12-17 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 26:41 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali argues that deep work is how knowledge workers create value on any path to freedom (career, side hustle or business) and is also where fun and fulfilment come from, then lays out his four-step deep work system: schedule it, five minutes to align and organise, focus, five minutes to reflect and recharge with a focus log aiming at about four hours a day.

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: the philosophy of deep work and his four-step system

00:00:59 — Shallow work versus deep work; the freedom path and its three streams; create value

  • ★★ Cal Newport (quoted): Cal Newport defines shallow work as non-cognitively demanding, logistical tasks often done while distracted, which create little new value and are easy to replicate. — 00:00:59 · Cal Newport

  • ★★★ Cal Newport (quoted): Cal Newport defines deep work as professional activities done in distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit, creating new value, improving your skill and being hard to replicate. — 00:00:59 · Cal Newport, deep work (concept)

    “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit”

  • ★★ Ali stresses that deep work is hard and effortful: it does not feel easy. — 00:01:28 · deep work (concept)

  • ★★★ Ali describes the freedom path, from where you are to financial, time and location freedom, and three streams of work that can all lead there: career, side hustle and entrepreneur. — 00:01:58 · work optional
  • ★★ Ali says the career stream can get you to freedom, as it did for Apple CEO Tim Cook, who rose through IBM and Apple; it tends to be slower and less risky, and there is nothing wrong with it. — 00:02:56 · Apple
  • ★★ Ali says people often move from a career into a side hustle stream, and once it makes five to ten thousand a month, into the entrepreneur stream, which tends to be a faster but riskier path to freedom. — 00:03:25
  • ★ Ali says his channel will make more videos on the differences between the career, side hustle and entrepreneur streams. — 00:03:25
  • ★★★ Ali says that in all three streams the key to reaching freedom is to create value, because the only way to make money is to create value and find people willing to pay for it. — 00:03:54 · first law of making money

00:04:22 — Sponsor read for Circle

00:06:04 — What value is; deep work creates more value in less time; two people with five hours a week

  • ★★ Ali defines value as turning raw materials worth one dollar into output worth two; the output is only worth that if someone is willing to pay for it, so value is not subjective. — 00:07:02 · first law of making money
  • ★★ Ali says knowledge workers use their brains to turn pixels on a screen into more pixels to sell, as management consultants turn a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide into a presentation they charge a lot for. — 00:08:17
  • ★★★ Ali says that because knowledge workers create value with their brains, they need the skill of deep work: sitting still for an extended time doing cognitively demanding things. — 00:09:24 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says deep work and focus are like a muscle that can be trained and strengthened over time. — 00:09:24 · deep work (concept)

  • ★★★ Ali defines increased productivity as creating more value in less time, which deep work makes possible. — 00:09:24 · deep work (concept)

    “Increased productivity is creating more value in less time.”

  • ★★ Of two people with day jobs who each give a side hustle five hours a week, Ali says the one with a scheduled, distraction-free deep work routine creates far more value than the distracted one. (hypothetical) — 00:11:07 · deep work (concept)

  • ★★ Ali says a deep work system lets you create the value that gets you to freedom faster and more likely, whether you are in the career, side hustle or entrepreneur stream. — 00:12:16 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says freedom is the destination many aspire to, but fun and fulfilment, which he calls journey goals, are more underrated. — 00:12:16

00:12:42 — Freedom as a currency; fun and fulfilment as journey goals; deep work as the source of fulfilment

  • ★★ Ali says he is financially free and has time, location and financial freedom: he need not work another day in his life if he does not want to. — 00:12:42 · work optional

  • ★★★ Ali says freedom is a currency like money with no intrinsic value: it is only worth something when cashed in for fun, fulfilment and the other things that make life worth living. — 00:12:42

    “freedom is a currency kind of like money, and freedom itself has no intrinsic value”

  • ★★ Ali recommends finding fun and fulfilment on the way to freedom, since the destination is worthless on its own. — 00:13:11

  • ★★★ Ali says people who have achieved freedom still want to work and be useful, and when asked what work they want, they never say shallow work, only deep work. — 00:13:40 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★★ Ali says deep work is not only a means to financial freedom but also the way to get fun and fulfilment from your work, which too few people talk about. — 00:15:03 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says you feel far more fulfilled in the flow state, working on something hard at the edge of your limits, than when distracted by Instagram reels and emails. — 00:15:03

00:15:44 — Step one: schedule deep work; monastic, bimodal, rhythmic and journalistic; his own schedule

  • ★★★ A key philosophy of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity: building a productivity system is personal; rather than copying his or anyone's templates, experiment and tweak your own. — 00:16:28 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Step one of Ali's deep work system is scheduling it: he keeps a separate Google Calendar for his ideal week, blocking out what his ideal ordinary week looks like. — 00:16:55 · Trident calendar system, deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Cal Newport (quoted): In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport describes four ways of scheduling deep work: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic and journalistic. — 00:16:55 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Ali recommends reading Cal Newport's Deep Work. — 00:17:25 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Ali says the monastic approach, taking a whole week off for deep work like a writing retreat, is not feasible for most people most of the time, so he generally ignores it. — 00:18:06 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ On deadline for his book, Ali went to Bali to give a talk and stayed an extra week just to focus on the book. — 00:18:06 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali uses the rhythmic approach: the first four hours of every day go to deep work, usually videos, courses or books, the key way he adds value. — 00:18:35 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ As a doctor with an unpredictable on-call schedule, Ali took a journalistic approach, squeezing deep work into the middle of the day or an extra 20 minutes at lunch; after a week of nights, he went monastic on three days off. — 00:19:04 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ After his YouTube channel and business let him quit his job as a doctor, Ali tried every type of deep work and landed on rhythmic: deep work 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., lunch, the gym in theory from 2 to 3, then shallow work and meetings from 3 to 6. — 00:19:33 · deep work (concept)

00:20:03 — Steps two to four: align and organise, focus, reflect and recharge with the focus log; four hours a day

  • ★★★ Ali says people who struggle to focus, including his Part-Time YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab students, usually have not scheduled deep work into the calendar: it must be scheduled or it will not happen. — 00:20:03 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says he is releasing his life productivity system as a course at some point soon. — 00:20:32
  • ★★★ Step two of Ali's deep work system is five minutes to align and organise; aligning means deciding what he wants to accomplish in the session, since a goal is very useful. — 00:20:32 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says research on flow finds it very difficult to reach flow without a clear goal you are working towards. — 00:20:32
  • ★★ Organising, for Ali, means having water or coffee, all the materials he needs and a toilet break done beforehand, since getting up from the desk distracts him from deep work. — 00:21:07 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ In a startup routine, Ali puts on headphones or AirPods, or plays his study-with-me playlist on Spotify, which always gets him into the focus zone. — 00:21:07 · AirPods, Spotify
  • ★★ Ali says a startup routine eases you into focus past the activation energy barrier of sitting down to do the hard thing, which he still feels; setting a goal and small rituals ramp him up. — 00:21:37
  • ★★ Step three of Ali's deep work system is focus, often for about 50 minutes, but he focuses for however long it takes to start losing focus: sometimes 45 minutes, sometimes only 15 when tired. — 00:22:06 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Step four of Ali's deep work system is five minutes to reflect and recharge at the end of the session, where he keeps a focus log when he struggles to focus. — 00:22:35 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali says Cal Newport swears by the focus log, a record of time spent focused on deep work, in his book Deep Work. — 00:23:04 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ Ali says the one thing that will radically change your relationship to deep work is keeping track of how many minutes or hours you actually spend focusing each day. — 00:23:04 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ About nine months earlier Ali first taught his life productivity system course to Productivity Lab students, with templates and processes built in to help them keep a focus log. — 00:23:04
  • ★★ Ali says many Productivity Lab students reported that tracking their daily focus minutes showed them how little they focused and helped them increase it. — 00:23:36
  • ★★ Ali cites measurement as intervention, which Alex Hormozi talks about a lot: as people who weigh themselves daily tend to lose weight, knowing your focus number makes it improve. — 00:23:36 · Alex Hormozi
  • ★★ Ali says a focus log needs no fancy tool or template: a post-it, a notebook, an app or a Google Sheet, which is what he uses. — 00:24:05 · Google Sheets
  • ★★ Ali says the book Rest cites evidence and anecdotes that about four hours a day is the upper limit of how long humans can focus. — 00:24:34 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali's goal for the focus log is about four hours of focus a day, which he calls the upper limit. — 00:25:00
  • ★★ Although he controls his time, Ali does not manage four hours of focus a day, sometimes two-and-a-bit or three-and-a-bit; writing his book he got up to four, and that took the whole day. (hedged) — 00:25:00
  • ★ Peter Drucker (quoted): Ali quotes Peter Drucker: what gets measured gets managed and improved. — 00:25:30

00:25:59 — Build your own system and track the numbers; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali says without a deep work system he would be nowhere near his current level of financial freedom; his takeaways are to build your own deep work system and track the numbers to improve it. — 00:25:59 · deep work (concept), work optional

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: deep work (concept) · freedom path · time tracking

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Cal Newport · Peter Drucker · Tim Cook

Projects: Life Operating System · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Productivity Lab

Works: Deep Work (book) · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Rest

Organizations: Apple · IBM

Concepts: deep work scheduling philosophies · first law of making money · Flow state · ideal ordinary week · journey goals · measurement as intervention · shallow work · time freedom · Trident calendar system · upper limit · work optional

Places: Bali · Thailand

Products: AirPods · Google Calendar · Google Sheets · Keynote · Microsoft PowerPoint · Spotify

Also centred on time tracking: Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus · 6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet

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