B. Feel-Good Productivity

Author: Ali Abdaal URL: https://a.co/d/hj71LGc Created time: February 3, 2024

Synopsis Feel-Good Productivity is a framework for shaping the way you view work, life, and fun. It emphasizes happiness as the key to success, not the other way around. It is broken into 3 parts. The first explores 3 energizers play, power, and people. The second highlights blockers: uncertainty, fear, and inertia. The third examines 3 sustainers: conserve, recharge, and align to overcome the three types of burnout: overexertion, depletion, and misalignment. Each part proposes 6 simple experiments to put these insights into action.

🔋 Part 1: Energizers

1. Play: If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, the first step is to approach your work with a sense of play
   1. Approach things with a sense of adventure
   2. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun
   3. Lower the stakes
2. Power: feeling empowered to take your job, life and future into your own hands
   1. Try ‘flipping the confidence switch’ – and playing the role of someone who’s already filled with self-belief
   2. Level up your skills. Ask yourself: if I were completely new to this task, what would this look like? And how can I start teaching others even though I’m not an expert yet?
   3. Take ownership, even in moments when you don’t have as much control as you’d like. Remember, if you can’t choose what you work on, you can still choose how you work on it
3. People: Life is more fun with friends around
   1. Try treating the people you’re working with as comrades rather than competitors
   2. Try asking: what can I do to brighten someone else’s day?
   3. When you think you’ve communicated too much, you probably haven’t communicated enough

⏹️ Part 2: Blockers

1. Seek Clarity: the unblock method is about establishing what’s really blocking your good mood – and finding a way to eliminate it
   1. To gain clarity about what you’re actually doing. That involves asking ‘why?’ and then using this to figure out your ‘how’. Next, ask ‘what?’.
   2. What you need are goals that feel NICE (near-term, input-based, controllable and energising)
   3. Use implementation intentions – where your common daily habits become triggers for the things you intend to work on
2. Find Courage
   1. The solution isn’t to get rid of fear, though – instead, it’s to develop the courage to face up to it
   2. That courage comes from three sources. The first is to understand your fear. Ask yourself: why have I not started on that task or project yet? What am I afraid of? Where does this fear come from?
   3. The second is to reduce your fear. Our fears are often blown out of proportion. Ask yourself these questions to prevent yourself from catastrophising: will this matter in 10 minutes? Will this matter in 10 weeks? Will this matter in 10 years?
   4. The third is to overcome your fear. If you’re scared of what other people think, remind yourself that most people are not, in fact, thinking about you. We’re a self-conscious species, but we’re not usually a judgemental one.
3. Get Started: The best antidote to doing nothing is simply to do something
   1. Look for the frictions in your life: what obstacles are preventing you making a start? And how can you get rid of them?
   2. Define your next step and track your progress
   3. The final step is the kindest: creating systems that can help you support yourself long-term. Above all, cut yourself some slack and celebrate the small wins.

🌱 Part 3: Sustainers

1. Conserve: If you can make yourself feel better, you won’t just achieve more – you’ll last longer, too
   1. Our first kind of burnout arises from overexertion. The solution: do less.
   2. There are three ways to do less in practice. The first is to stop yourself from overcommitting.
   3. The second way is to resist distraction.
   4. The third way is to find moments in your working day to do nothing
2. Recharge: Our second kind of burnout relates to rest time. Depletion burnouts result from not giving yourself enough time or space to truly recharge.
   1. The solution: understand how to rest in a way that energises you. The best way to rest is all about feeling CALM: Competent, Autonomous, Liberated and Mellow.
   2. A second solution is to spend time in and with nature.
   3. Not all rest needs to be so strategic, however. Sometimes, the most energising thing you can do is to do nothing at all. By doing less today, you’ll feel better tomorrow.
3. Align: Misalignment burnouts arise when we spend time on goals that don’t match up with our sense of self.
   1. Overcoming misalignment is a lifelong task; one that requires us to continually work out what really matters to us, and change our behaviour accordingly. T
   2. Look to your long-term future.
   3. Think about your medium-term future. Then ask yourself: what does that 12-month celebration mean for my actions this week?
   4. Last, you should be ready to think about your short-term future. Because the good news is, you can take a step to alignment right now.