Moment 55 - This Method Will Boost Your Productivity: Ali Abdaal

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. This week I’m bringing back an episode from August last year with Ali Abdaal; a doctor, business entrepreneur, public speaker and all-round expert. It is important to resurface these ideas about productivity so that we can get the most out of our lives. This was an incredibly engaging conversation, as he tells me how he manages to squeeze every moment from his day. Ali mentions here that in order to do our tasks in the most efficient way, we should shift our mindset to think they are fun. This means that we become intrinsically motivated to complete them. One way in which we can do this is change ‘I have to…’ to ‘I get to…’. Shifting our mind to think that something is fun, will make us feel so much better about ourselves once the task is done. I also mentioned that when I have my own time to choose when I can be productive, I create time sensitive and task specific blocks in my mind. This helps to create a tick box mentality, and one which I can intertwine with what Ali says here. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/5r583D34Apb Ali - https://twitter.com/AliAbdaal?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://www.instagram.com/aliabdaal/?hl=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  You know, people talk about how they'll put on their to do list, clean house and it'll sit on a to do list and clean house. That's a

• 0:09Speaker 01

  That's a big thing.

• 0:10Steven Bartlett?

  And that'll sit on your to do list for like, I don't know, two weeks, whatever. But if you do, if you time block and write in your, this is what I do on the weekends because so Monday to Friday, my schedule is ran by the meetings and things I have to do. So I'm a slave to the calendar. Saturday and Sunday come around, I wake up, I'm like,

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  okay, I'm like, what the fuck? How does this thing work? Yeah, I'm like, it's empty. I've got loads of things I know I could be doing right now, but nothing, no one telling me what to do in a, in a, in a life of mine where I'm told what to do every five minutes. So I time block on the weekends, which means clean house would become at 11 till 12, I clean the kitchen. Cause then it's like time sensitive and like task specific.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:55Steven Bartlett?

  And that's, that's been an absolute game changer for me. And I also think in the era of working from home.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

  Where, you know, people are sat at home, they have a tasks they have to

• 1:07Speaker 01

  It's like, it's almost like we prep for this because like, this is literally like the, the three part structure of my book, which I've been like, I just having in my head for the last, last few weeks.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  Perfect.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Where like, step one is how do we beat the procrastination? How do we get started with doing the thing? And part two of the book is how do we sustain? How do we actually keep on going, doing the thing? And there's just, so in, in, in terms of mindset, the thing that I found that actually moves the needle is focusing on trying to make it fun. And I really, I really like that word fun. Like, I think there's something about the word fun that is so like childish, but also fully speaks to like fun basically means in intrinsic motivation, like something is sufficiently enjoyable that you do it for its own sake, rather than for the fact that you've got a sponsor helping you or you've got a deadline or things like that.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  There's one, there's one story in particular that I, I often come back to, and that's like,

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Sometime last year, I was, I was working at the hospital. It was pandemic season, et cetera, et cetera. And I'd gotten to the end of like a 13 hour long shift and I was just about to go home. And the nurse said to me, oh, Ali, can you put a cannula in this patient? Her like IV line is tissue and she needs fluids overnight. And my heart kind of sank. I was like, oh, no. Like if, if the nurse wasn't able to put the cannula in, that means there's a patient with difficult veins. It means it's going to be hot to put this in. And I sort of had this mindset of like, all right, then, fine. And sort of grudgingly took out the cannula and got all the equipment in a tray. And I like, as, as I was doing this, I, there was a, a patient in the bay next door where they were just like talking to a family member or something and saying, oh, you know, this hospital has been amazing.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Everyone is so nice and what a pleasure it is, you know, frigging love the NHS kind of vibes. And I realized that in that moment, I was not being like a good model internally for what I want the NHS to be and what I want a good doctor to be. And there's something that Seth Godin, uh, who, uh, who I've been following for a while says, which is that it's the difference between have to and get to. And so I was considering as like, oh, I have to put in this cannula. And I remembered that blog post I read from Seth Godin where he said, instead of thinking of have to, think of it as get to. And I realized, oh, I get to put in this cannula. I get to make a difference in this patient's lives and, and life and give her fluids overnight so that she's not going to dehydrate because of her morning sickness. And just that mindset shift immediately made me feel so much better about it.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, I get to do this. Who cares if I've been working for 13 hours? This is fun. This is privileged. This is cool. And I put it in and we had a nice chat and I felt really great about it afterwards. And now like, and so that's one of the mindset things that I just always come back to. If I'm finding myself not enjoying something and therefore my focus goes, I get distracted, I procrastinate. Instead of thinking I have to do this, I think I get to do this.