A Summary of Feel-Good Productivity

Getting more done in less time is a big topic these days.

It’s called personal productivity.

There are many guides to help, like the GTD method, Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive, and the role of habits, among many others.

Photo by Mark Adriane on Unsplash

I discovered the world of productivity on YouTube when I started watching the videos by Ali Abdaal. Not only did he summarize well-renowned productivity literature but he also condensed different methods in a short, actionable format.

End of 2023 he published his first book Feel-Good Productivity. At first, the reviews I read were rather mixed, but I wanted to check it out myself and read it last month.

Here is what I’ve learned from the book.

Why does productivity have to feel good?

If we feel good, we are more creative problem-solvers. Hence, our productivity is higher. But what do we make feel good in our productive lives?

Ali Abdal identifies three important parts:

• Energize
• Getting started
• Rinse and repeat

The 3 Ps of energy: Energize

The core element of being productive is feeling energized. You can have the best methods at hand, but if you don’t have enough energy, you won’t get a lot of things done.

Energy is an interesting phenomenon: some actions bring us energy (even if they seem stressful at first) or even transfer us to a flow state and on the other hand some actions are literally draining our energy. Those energy-drainers often aren’t the most difficult or stressful tasks - they just contain task elements we don’t enjoy.

How can we transform an activity into one that makes us more energized?

According to Ali Abdal, we can count on the 3 Ps:

• Play
• Power
• People

Play

Play is a key to positive feelings and can also be a productivity booster.

Nobel Prize winner and physicist Richard Feynman has been an advocate of this philosophy. He became a professor at a young age but lost the joy of physics until he rediscovered it through play.

He thought back to what brought him to physics: Curiosity and play and started doing physics again “just for the fun of it”. For example, he analyzed the wobbling motion of a rotating dinner plate in the air - this gave him ideas in the field of quantum mechanics and became the basis of the discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize later on.

Play helps us reach a state of flow faster, or in the words of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans: flow is play for adults.

Ali Abdal shares 6 simple strategies on how you can incorporate play into your work to boost your productivity:

1. Choose your character: There are 8 different types of characters. When an activity is due, you can try to see it from your character’s point of view (an analogy from the world of video games) - this can make the activity more exciting. A character can be e.g. a collector, a creator, …
2. Embrace your curiosity: Curiosity and a thirst for adventure are qualities that diminish with age, but they shouldn’t! If you can stay curious, it can create more playfulness in your work.
3. The magic post-it note: Ask yourself: “How would this look like if it were fun?” To remind yourself to ask yourself this question, write it down on a post-it note.
4. Enjoy the Process, Not the Outcome: Enjoying the process is the fast track to reaching the flow state of effortless productivity.
5. Reframe your failures - they are a chance to learn.
6. Don’t be serious, be sincere: You shouldn’t take things too seriously, but sincerely - after all, nobody wants to play Monopoly with a dogged person.

Power

The word “power” can be misleading and has a slight negative touch to it as we tend to think of power games.

However, Ali Abdaal sees power as “personal empowerment”.

It is similar to our belief in our abilities. If we believe that we are good at something, we get better at it.

From the six suggested experiments I found the first and fifth ones particularly helpful:

1. The confidence switch: The idea is to slip into the role of a confident person. This makes you more confident in the situation.
2. The Social Model Method: Watching someone overcome a challenge can boost your confidence too.
3. The Shoshin Approach: Approach everything with curiosity, openness, and humility.
4. The protege effect: Older siblings perform better in IQ tests. This can be explained by the protege effect. By teaching others (e.g. younger siblings), we learn better ourselves than if we were just learning.
5. Own the process: Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation and also lasts longer. Ali Abdaal talks about Filet-O-Fish, who was fired from his job because he had automated his job (software testing) and had not worked for the last 5 years. The lesson from the story is that even if you can’t control your job 100%, you can control the process and your approach.
6. Own your mindset: Viktor Frankl is quoted here: a person’s ultimate freedom (which cannot be taken away from them) is their attitude towards issues (e.g. seeing something positive in everything).

People

People can bring us energy, or take energy away (energy vampires). The people we surround ourselves with therefore have a strong effect on our productivity.

The human is a social creature and we just work much better together.

1. The comrade mindset: When we feel comradery and connection (working in a team), our productivity is increased.
2. Find synchronicity with others.
3. Random acts of kindness: When we help others, this also leads to positive feelings for us - it can be very small things, such as sharing a coffee or letting someone go first.
4. Ask for help from others: Helping is good. It is also good for others - so we should ask others for help much more often! However, the requested help should not be seen as a transaction (if you do this, I’ll do that in return).
5. Overcommunicate the good: We should generally communicate more - especially positive things.
6. Overcommunicate the not-so-good: We should also address negative things openly, not as an embarrassment, but rather as a way to solve a problem or improve a mistake.

Get unstuck: Unblock

There are three main blockers to our productivity:

• Unclarity: If we don’t know what needs to be done, it is a breeding ground for procrastination.
• Fear: Fear can also be a blocker to productivity.
• Inertia: It is similar to Newton’s 1st Law of Motion - an object at rest remains at rest. We need to overcome this inertia to be productive.

Seek Clarity

Why is clarity so important for productivity?

In many cases, uncertainty or lack of clarity is a cause of procrastination. If you first have to think about what needs to be done, can prevent us from starting with a certain task.

Uncertainty follows a concrete path:

1. Overestimating the negative impact of a decision/action.
2. Hypervigilance: one pays particular attention to those signs that indicate stress and failure.
3. Non-recognition: you stop doing things that could lead to a stressful end.
4. Avoidance: Avoiding the decision/action.

There are multiple ways to overcome unclarity

1. Using Commander’s Intent: This type of strategy comes from the military. Additionally to the mission plan, soldiers are told the purpose of a mission. If a part of the plan goes wrong or unexpected events occur, the soldiers at least know what the goal of the mission is. This was one of the successful recipes for D-day.
2. The Five Why: This method was developed by Ono Taiichi - the father of the Toyota Production System. The method is based on 5 questions, exploring the root cause of a problem by asking “why” five successive times.
3. NICE Goals: This stands for Near-term (focus on the immediate steps), Input-based (the goals should be aligned with the process), Controllable (you should be able to control the goals yourself), and Energizing (integration of play, power & people).
4. The Crystal Ball Method: Envision yourself in the future and think of what could go wrong so you are prepared for possible setbacks.
5. Implementation Intentions: If you intend to do something, then it is likely that you will actually do it.
6. Time Blocking: As Parkinson’s Law says: “work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion”. Why not take advantage of this and allocate the work you have to do to certain time blocks?

Find Courage

One cause of procrastination can be fear. If we do not start doing something, we cannot fail to do it. However, the truth is that if we never start, we’ve already failed.

1. & 2. The Emotional Label and the Identity Label: Labels are powerful because they try to describe our identity. When we see ourselves as a runner, for example, it is part of our identity and helps us fight the fear of not performing well on the next training run. Even if we don’t feel good about it, we do it anyway as it is part of our identity.

2. The 10/10/10 Rule: This is simple but powerful. Just ask yourself what the consequences of failure would be in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, and 10 years. More often than not we can then recognize that failure isn’t such a big deal.

3. The Confidence Equation: Self-confidence = Perception of Ability - Perception of Standards.

4. Stop Spotlighting: You are much less at the center (of other people’s attention) than you think. If you make a mistake in front of a crowd, it is not such a big deal. Most of them will have forgotten it within minutes (if they even notice it).

5. (6) The Batman Effect: A helpful idea is to take on a different role in a situation in which you are afraid (e.g. before a presentation, performance, etc.). You should think in advance about which role you will slip into (this can be an invented persona or even a superhero). Visualize for yourself how the persona acts in different situations.

Get Started

To be productive and combat procrastination, it is inertia that makes life difficult for us. It’s usually only the beginning that’s hard - once you’ve started something, it’s much easier to keep going.

1. Reduce Environmental Friction: This one is well described in Atomic Habits. To increase the chances of starting something, it helps to make the barrier for good habits as small as possible.
2. Reduce Emotional Friction: This is similar to (1), but it is more about the mindset. Try to do “hard” things by starting a lighter version of these daunting tasks.
3. Define the Next Action Step: Concrete action plans are an advantage. They show us what the next step is that we can take immediately (cf. also Getting Things Done).
4. Track your progress: There are countless tools available to track your progress. But it doesn’t matter if you use pen and paper, or a more sophisticated software: tracking your progress can be a great motivator.
5. Find an Accountability Buddy: Commit to your goals and talk about them to someone else.
6. Forgive Yourself: You can’t be perfect all the time. We are human and sometimes just aren’t that productive. If that happens, forgive yourself!

Rinse and repeat: Sustain

Productivity is not a sprint - it is a marathon. Therefore, it is important to maintain productivity at a healthy level and not slip into burnout. There are different types of burnout:

• Overexertion: You have too many tasks on your plate.
• Depletion: You have too few real breaks.
• Misalignment: You don’t see the point of what you are doing or you don’t see any change in an outcome no matter how hard you try.

In “Sustain” Ali Abdaal shows strategies on how to sustain your productivity and reduce your risk of slipping into burnout: conserve, recharge & align.

Conserve

The main reason for burnout is not the amount of work we have on our plate. It’s more about how we feel about it. A feeling of burnout arises when we take on too many commitments (overcommitment).

1. The Energy Investment Portfolio: This strategy is about where you invest your energy. A healthy portfolio should consist of two different types of investments: there are long-term investments (these are our dreams) and short-term investments (going to the gym, a certain project, …). We can have as many elements as our creativity allows as long-term investments. However, we should only have as many short-term investments as we can realistically manage (less than 10).
2. The Power of No: Before you commit to an appointment, a project, etc. you should carry out a thought experiment: would you also say yes to it if the appointment were tomorrow The background to this experiment is: that it is often easier to say yes to something in 6 weeks when the calendar is still almost empty. But as the day gets closer, the calendar gradually fills up with our everyday things and when the day comes, we often question our decision.
3. Add Friction to the things you want to avoid doing (cf. Atomic Habits).
4. Correct Course: Small changes in your daily activities can offset your long-term goals a lot in the long run. To avoid this, frequently correct your course (short-term investments).
5. Schedule Your Breaks: Breaks are important. Ali Abdaal shares his experiences from his time as a doctor: even in the emergency room, there was a rule that everyone had to take a break after 4 hours - no one was allowed to work through. If you don’t have any breaks, you lose focus and the risk of making mistakes increases.
6. Embrace Energizing Distractions: Distractions aren’t always bad. Some of them can even improve your productivity in the long run - especially if they help you restore energy (like e.g. a short conversation at the coffee machine).

Recharge

If we don’t recharge ourselves, we run the risk of gradually slipping into exhaustion. How effective our resting is depends on how we rest. Social media doomscrolling is not really resting.

In Feel-Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal suggests that we rest in a CALM way:

• Competence: We build our competence (we get better at something like painting, writing, singing, …)
• Autonomy: We are self-determined and can control what we do.
• Liberty and freedom: We have the freedom in which direction we develop and how long we pursue the activity.
• Mellow: The activity is friendly or takes place in a friendly environment.

But there are days when even such CALM activities are too much. Then it is perfectly fine to rest “mindlessly” (Netflix, …).

In Experiment 1 & 2, Ali distinguishes between hobbies and projects that we can use to recharge our batteries.

1. CALM Hobbies: Your hobbies should be CALM and without too much competition.
2. CALM Projects: Similar to your hobbies, also your private projects should be CALM to help you replenish your energy.
3. Bring in Nature: Nature has a positive effect on us. It doesn’t have to be an hour-long hike, often just a few minutes of nature sounds or a pleasant atmosphere with indoor plants or pictures of nature is enough.
4. Take a walk: Regaining energy can be as easy as that. Going for a walk helps you sort your thoughts, calm down and re-energize.
5. Let Your Mind Wander: On days when you have a very low energy level, it can also be good to simply let your mind wander.
6. The Reitoff Principle: There are simply days (or rather evenings) that we should write off and is not too hard on ourselves to do so. They help us to rebuild our energy reserves.

Align

One type of burnout is the “misalignment” burnout. This is triggered when you don’t act authentically or don’t see any real meaning in your work.

In the chapter “Align”, Ali Abdaal shares six strategies for realigning:

1. The Eulogy Method: This now may sound strange, but the goal of this strategy is to imagine your funeral. Think of what the people present are talking about. How would you like to be remembered?
2. The Odyssey Plan: This strategy stems from Designing Your Life and is about creating multiple 5-year plans for how your life can or should look in the next years. It is a great technique I’ve also implemented personally - if you are interested in a deep dive, check out this article.
3. The Wheel of Life: The Wheel of Life represents life in 9 areas (body, mind, soul, mission, money, growth, family, romance, and friends). In each area, you should ask yourself how “aligned” you are between where you currently are and where you would like to be.
4. The 12-Month Celebration: You should set goals for all areas of your life, which you then discuss with your best friend in a 12-month celebration.
5. The Three Alignment Quests: The key element here is proximate goals - they make you perform better, so you should prefer them over long-term ones. Choose three actions you want to do early in the day that help you achieve your goals within the next year.
6. Alignment Experiments: These experiments involve three steps: (i) choose an area where you want to improve and then (ii) develop a hypothesis - a single thing you want to change and that has an effect on your life. In step (iii) execute your plan and study the results.

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That’s it.

This has been my in-depth summary of the book Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal.

To me, the book was a great read - 54 strategies to improve your productivity and feel good doing so.

Which strategies you implement, depends on your personal taste, but I can highly encourage you to try some of them out and approach them like a true productivity scientist.