Key Productivity Habits for Success

In this video, we are discussing six key productivity habits. Now, if you incorporate any of these, and ideally multiple of these into your life, it basically guarantees that your next year is going to be your best year ever. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Feel Good Productivity, which is about how to be more productive in a way that actually feels good. And for the last seven years on this channel, I have been documenting my journey from broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor to now running a seven figure business where I live a life that I absolutely love. And my goal on this channel really is to share everything that I've learned and everything I'm continuing to learn along this journey of personal growth and development in the hope that you find some value from it and you can maybe work towards what I like to call the five F's of fun, fulfillment, flexibility, freedom, and finance. So let's get into it. Alrighty, so habit number one that I have gotten a lot of value out of is kind of ignoring the notion of annual goals. And I always feel super excited when I set annual goals at the start of the year. But there is an alternative method for goal setting that I've been using on and off over the years, partly in personal life, partly in business life. And when I think back to the goals that I've actually accomplished, like the meaningful things that I've done, they've always been with this second method of goal setting rather than through annual goals. And this second method of goal setting is what I refer to as quarterly quests. And the idea behind this is that instead of thinking about setting goals for the year, you actually focus on setting goals for the next quarter, i.e. the next 90 days. Now, this is a concept that the authors of the book, The 12 Week Year talk about. It's also a concept in business worlds like the book Get Scalable by Ryan Dice and the book Traction by Juno Wickman. There's a lot of goal setting methodologies that are focused on this sort of 90 day cycle. And so the whole idea behind setting quarterly quests is that when it comes to 90 days or three months or 12 weeks or however you wanna split it, you're able to visualize that. Like on a single piece of paper, you could write down the next 12 weeks. But if you're trying to do annual goals, it's like... You know, in my case, I'll set an annual goal in January, and by the time February or March rolls around, either I've made progress towards it, and I've got new data, in which case maybe the goal has changed, or I haven't made progress towards it, and I'm like, ah, it's an annual goal, I've got the whole year left, and then, you know, six months, eight months goes by, and I never make any progress on it at all. The idea behind quarterly quests is that every 90 days at the start of the quarter, or at any point whenever you happen to be watching this video, or whenever you happen to incorporate this habit into your life, you focus on what are the three or four big things that I want to get done in the next 90 days. This is quarterly quests. Every single quarter, I host a completely free alignment workshop where we get together on a zoom call and set these quarterly quests. So if you are subscribed to my newsletter, you will hear about these. I've been running them for the last year, and people get a lot of value from them. Usually we have a few 1000 people attending and we do that setting the quarterly quests together. So you're very welcome to join if you would like to. But of course, this is also something that you can do yourself. More than about three or four quarterly quests means it's just too much, too much stuff to be going on. And generally I like to separate mine into two categories, work and life. And so I'll be thinking, okay, what are my quarterly quests for work? And what are my quarterly quests for life? Sometimes there are certain projects that are gonna take longer than 90 days to get done. The idea behind those is that you would turn them into 90 day projects. So for example, when I was writing my book, Feel Good Productivity, which is available everywhere books are sold and also on Audible where I narrate the audio books. So you can check it out if you haven't yet. When I was writing Feel Good Productivity, I found that working in 90 day chunks was pretty effective because obviously writing a whole book is like a three year process. But if you break it down into the quarters, it's like the quarterly quest would be completing the first draft or completing the first draft of the first three chapters or whatever. And so if you want to make this year the best year of your life where you are doing the things that are meaningful to you and ideally enjoying the journey along the way. And I'd really recommend thinking in 90 day chunks when it comes to your goals rather than in annual chunks. But then there's a problem, right? Because the problem is even if you do set these quarterly quests, these 90 day goals, there is a danger that they go the same way that New Year's resolutions do, i.e. you set them at the start of the quarter and then you completely forget about them. And that is where our next habit comes in. So habit number two is an absolute classic in the world of productivity. It is the single habit that almost every productivity enthusiast swears by. It was popularized in 2001 by productivity guru. David Allen in his seminal work, Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. And that habit is, drum roll please, the weekly review. I like to think of it as a weekly reset. The idea is that once a week, you are spending like 20 minutes reviewing how your previous week has gone and setting priorities for the next week. This is a really simple thing to do. It does not have to be an elaborate eight-hour routine. Just like 10, 15, 20 minutes reviewing how your last week has gone. And actually asking yourself, okay, what are my key priorities for the week ahead? Will do absolute wonders for your productivity and will really help you make meaningful progress towards the things that matter most to you. Can I request a cup of tea, please? That's the wife. The wife was actually sitting in the corner over here on her laptop, motivating me to film because I was feeling like, oh, I don't want to film this video. Anyway, as part of the weekly reset, it's generally good practice to look at your calendar for the previous week. and to celebrate some wins, to give yourself a pat on the back for the stuff that you did well. It is also a very good idea at that point. And one of the key things that we have within our weekly reset template is you ask yourself the question, what were my quarterly quests and how are they going? And this is a weekly checkpoint where you remind yourself, oh yeah, what were my quarterly quests? Sometimes I skip my weekly reset for like a week or two in a row because like life got in the way or I forgot or like, you know, the calendar event crashed with the Productivity Lab Workshop and so I didn't attend the weekly reset. And then it comes to week three and I look at my template and it's like. What were our quarterly quests again and how are they going? And I'm like, hmm, it's a good question. I've actually forgotten what goals I set for myself three weeks ago, what my quarterly quests were. And then I look at my little quarterly quests. I have that in a goalkeeper document, which I named my goalkeeper document because it's just kind of fun. Again, all of this stuff is stuff we do in this free quarterly alignment workshop. So if you attend one of those, you'll see the whole process in action. But then I'll look at that list. I'll be like, oh yeah, I totally was gonna do that thing, which I completely forgot about. And then it comes back on track. So the idea behind the weekly reset is that it is a checkpoint to be able to refer to your quarterly quests and see how are they going. And then based on how your quarterly quests are going or anything else that's happening in life, you define what are your top one, two and three priorities for the week ahead. If this is a habit that you haven't yet incorporated into your life, then I can hand on heart guarantee that if you do, it will change the game for you and help you make the next year the best year of your life. Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video, then you might like to check out Brilliant, who are very kindly sponsoring today's video. Brilliant is a wonderful platform where you learn by doing, not just by consuming, with thousands of interactive lessons in maths, data analysis, programming, and AI. I've been using Brilliant for the last five years now, and I absolutely love it. They've got a really good first principles approach to learning, which helps you build understanding from the ground up. And it's all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers. researchers and professionals from cool places like MIT, Caltech, Microsoft, Google, and many more. Brilliant helps you build your critical thinking skills through problem solving, not memorizing things. So while you're building real knowledge on specific topics, you're also becoming a better thinker. And Brilliant helps you build all of this real knowledge in just minutes a day, which is the absolute opposite of mindless scrolling. Their growing number of courses on programming are particularly good, and those can help you get familiar with languages like Python and start building programs on day one with their built-in drag and drop editor. If any of that sounds good, you can try out everything Brilliant has to offer for for free for a full 30 days by heading over to brilliant.org slash Ali Abdaal or scanning the QR code on the screen, or you can click on the link in the video description. And those links will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much Brilliant for sponsoring this video. Okay, let's say you've set those top three priorities for the week. What if you just forget about them? And that is where our next habit comes in. And habit number three is another absolute staple in the world of productivity that I hope you're doing already. But if you're not, that's okay. That's why we're here watching this video. It's a very, very easy habit to incorporate into your routine. It doesn't normally take more than about one or two minutes. And micro habit number three that you can incorporate from right now is what I call the morning manifesto. What is the morning manifesto? The morning manifesto is basically a two minute journaling prompt. First thing in the morning before you sit down to work, that asks you a few basic questions. Basic question number one is, what were our top three priorities for the week and how are they going? So you see the thing, like with the weekly reset, we asked what were our top three quarterly quests and how they're going. reminding ourselves about that thing that we decided to do a quarter ago. But then every single day, every single workday, we're asking ourselves, what were my top three priorities for the week? And how are they going? Now, this is a reminder every day. It's a checkpoint of like, A, if you haven't done your weekly reset for the week, you think about it. And I have this a lot when I skip my weekly resets because it was bad. But when I skip my weekly resets, I'll get to the morning manifesto. It'll ask me, what are my top three priorities for the week? And we're like, oh shit. Well, I didn't do my weekly reset this week, so I haven't actually set those. And then I'll think about it and I'll define my top three priorities for the week. And that is really, really helpful because when it comes to productivity, a big mistake that we all make is that we think it is about efficiency. It's about trying to do things a little bit more efficiently or a little bit faster or whatever. But that is not where the needle is moved. The needle is moved in the choice of what you are actually working on. It's in the choice of what direction you're going rather than in how fast you're getting there. And that's why we all have this problem where you can... you can feel as if you're being very efficient, but like you're not actually making meaningful progress towards the things that matter most to you. If your goal is like mine was when I had a day job to build some sort of business that makes enough money for you to be able to go part-time in your job or to build a business that gives you financial freedom, and you have a day job and you're on the grind and the hamster wheel of the day job, you can be really efficient in your day job, but you're not actually making any progress towards that dream over there that really matters to you. You're just focused on being efficient or being productive in your day job. And that is why when we do these things like quarterly quests, and we do the weekly reset and we think about our priorities, a lot of it is around, what do I actually want to work towards? Because I imagine if you're watching this channel, you're probably reasonably competent, you're probably very good looking, maybe you've got a job, you're probably reasonably okay at getting things done. And the problem that you might have is that you're just not working on the right things. If for example, when I had a day job, I did not set myself the goal of like building this business on the side, building the YouTube channel on the side. I mean, I was, I was a pretty reasonable doctor. I was pretty efficient, pretty productive. I got, I got decent grades in school. I quite enjoyed medicine. I would have just continued on that hamster wheel. And this thing of this Building this business on the side would have always been a pipe dream. That is the importance of goal selection rather than just goal efficiency. Oh, hello. Do you want to say hi? Thank you so much. Hi. How's it going? It's very good. Good luck. Thanks. Oh, she's so nice. Oh, by the way, quick thing. If you're watching this before the 4th of January 2025, then you might like to check out the completely free two-day productivity workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025. It is called Productivity Spark. And it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that I aim to help you reflect on 2024, figure out where your work and life are heading and set active goals and quarterly quests for 2025. It is completely free. You can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially. So coming back to our morning manifesto, we are asking ourselves, what were our weekly priorities again and how are they going? Again, just reminding ourselves that, oh yeah, we did decide what we wanted to do and are we actually doing the thing that we said we were going to do? Again, bit of a tangent, but a huge part of making the next year the best year of your life is simply in doing the things that you say you're going to do. If you actually did, if you think about this right now, if every single day you actually made an intention of what you wanted to do and you actually did it, man, doing that for 365 days, your life would be completely transformed. You would be unrecognizable a year from now. If every day you set an intention and you actually followed through on that intention, the point behind the morning manifesto. It's not going to help you follow through on the intention, but it helps you do that first step of setting that intention in the first place. Without that intention, we just get into work, we get into following what's on the calendar, we get into the things we should do, we get into whatever the algorithm is feeding us when we're scrolling TikTok and Instagram. It becomes an unintentional, unexamined life where you're doing a lot of stuff, but you're not making progress towards what really matters to you. That is the point of a lot of these habits at the point of the morning manifesto. It's a point of having that two minute check-in in the morning where you're like, okay, what actually were my priorities? And like, what do I actually want to work on today? I don't recommend having it as an elaborate sort of series of prompts because the bigger, the longer it takes to do, the less likely you are to do it, at least in my case. And I suspect in your case as well. That's why for me, the bare minimum is what were my weekly priorities and how are they going? And then secondly, what is the most important thing I want to get done today? I phrased this as what is today's adventure going to be? Because by phrasing it as an adventure, it feels good. The whole stuff around feel-good productivity is if you can psy-op yourself into treating your work in the spirit of play, not being too serious about it, being more sincere about it, thinking of it as a quest that you're on, hence why the phrase quarterly quests. It's a bit more fun, a bit more nice and vibey than projects or like OKRs or like objectives or like quests because it feels good. Daily adventures. What is today's adventure going to be? And if for the next 365 days, each morning you were to actually ask yourself, what is today's adventure going to be? what is my most important task? And then you just stick it in your calendar, assuming you actually do the thing, even if you don't do the thing most of the time, but you do the thing some of the time, you are still gonna be completely unrecognizable a year from now. Alrighty, so at this point, we have done a lot of like intention setting. Now it comes to actually doing the stuff and that is where habit number four comes in. Okay, so for habit number four, I wanna tell you a little bit of a story of a time when I struggled with this, which was I think about two years ago when I was on the first draft of trying to write my book before it came out. And there was lots of stuff going on, lots of stuff going on in the business. And I knew that the most important thing I needed to work on and my quarterly quest and all that stuff was writing my book, making progress on my book, because I knew that was like an important but not urgent project that I really needed to move forward. And I was chatting to my CEO coach. I was like, oh man, you know, I'm just not, I haven't got the time. I'm not making the time. Like I'm not like doing the thing. And it was like, okay, step one is, do I have time on my calendar blocked out every single day where I'm working on the book? And initially the answer was no. And then it was like, okay, cool. I'll block out that time. But even when I was blocking out the time and my intention each morning was like, okay, I'm going to work on the book, I would end up like screwing around. I would end up being like, okay, I'm looking at the blank page. I can't be bothered. I was like, I'll make a cup of tea. Then I'll make a cup of coffee. Then I'll go to the bathroom because obviously, you know, coffee is a bit of a laxative. And so I would need to do whatever in the bathroom. Then I'd come back, make another coffee, look in the fridge. Before I'd know it, like so much time would have passed. And I'd go on Slack, reply to team messages. team members might be around. So I chat to them and then I go for a walk. And then before I knew it, I wasn't making any progress on the book at all. So the thing that he encouraged me to do was to make a Google sheet where every day I would just track how many minutes I spent working on the book in fully focused time. And then I just wrote that number on the spreadsheet. And the fact that I now wrote this number on the spreadsheet every day gave me profound insight into how unproductive I was being as it related to writing my book. And just the fact that I was now aware of what that number was meant that number went up and I was able to bang out the first draft of my book. And it ended up being pretty reasonable once all the edits and stuff happened along the way. That's it. When I was working on the book, I just logged how many minutes at a time I was focusing on the book for. This was transformational and has resulted in what I now call the focus log, which is a key habit. This is habit number four. It's an absolute key habit that I teach to all my students in my productivity lab and in my course, Life Operating System. And anytime I do talks and stuff when people, you know, everyone struggles to focus, right? And they're like, oh, have you got any tips for focus? The single biggest hack that I don't hear enough people- Talking about is creating a focus log. If you're interested in specific tips on how to make your own focus log, I have a whole three-part series on how to focus better. That will be linked somewhere down below. There's various ways of doing it. You can use like manual time tracking, automatic time tracking, Google Sheets, pen and paper. It really doesn't matter. The point is, if you actually just give yourself visibility on how many minutes you are focusing on the thing that's most important to you or on whatever is most important to you, that will profoundly influence your ability to actually do the thing. All righty, habit number five is unrelated to work. This is more about the social relationship side of things. And this is the standing order social events. I've been doing a lot of research into what makes people feel lonely, especially in middle age and stuff. And generally, once you get beyond university, like life becomes a lot less social than it once was. But one of the key strategies that I've read about be spoken to various social friends of mine who will do this and see implemented into my own life. In particular, back when I was living in London, I had this down to a T. now that I moved to Hong Kong, I still haven't yet set this up, but it's a key thing on the list for basically as soon as possible, is standing order social events. A standing order social event is something where once a week or every other week in your calendar, you have a social event that's just stuck in the calendar that happens at the same time in the same place every single time without fail. It could be something like a Sunday brunch. That is what I was doing weekly back when I lived in London. It could be a Tuesday evening. Inviting people over for board games or a Thursday evening inviting people over for dinner. And the idea is that you invite a bunch of people and whoever can make it rocks up and whoever can't make it, you know, they don't make it. But the point is that it happens on a weekly or biweekly cadence. And this is just an absolutely fantastic way of staying in touch with people, of making friends, of retaining friendships without having to do all of the annoying back and forth that once you're out of university. starts to happen where you have to having to coordinate a dozen different people's calendars. In my own life, I have two standing order social events right now, which is two date nights every week with my wife. And a big part of why I think our relationship is very strong is because we do these two date nights a week. They are in the calendar. There is a calendar invite. You know, if something comes up, we move them rather than delete them. And it ensures that there are at least two nights a week where it's sort of like, we're, you know, quality time with one another rather than all of the other things getting in the way. One thing I'm going to incorporate into my own life in Hong Kong here as well is doing like a weekly or every other week, kind of people come over for dinner type situation. If you have these sorts of social rituals in your life already, like you go to church on a Sunday or you go to the mosque on a Friday and then you, you know, grab fried chicken with the boys afterwards, you know, whatever the situation might be, these sorts of regular social events seem to be what drive a lot of kind of relationship satisfaction and relationship health in the important relationships and friendships in your life. And then finally, habit number six to help make this the best year ever is. what I like to refer to as multi-modality multitasking. This is a bit of a mouthful. I'm sure there's a sexier way of like describing this thing. But basically, one question I get a lot when I do talks and things is usually from people with jobs, like you've got a nine to five or maybe like a nine to nine or whatever the job is, and you want to build the business or do the side hustle thing outside of the day job. But obviously, you've got a job, right? So it's like when you take into account the time you're at the job, commuting to the job, commuting from the job, trying to eat food, general life maintenance, especially if you have a family, especially if you have kids, my goodness. There are very few hours in the week left to be able to pursue your dream. And then you're like, well, am I just sort of stuck in this grind of the day job where I live to work and stuff? Or can I magically find time? Can I become more productive or more efficient so that I can find this magical time and be able to use that magical time on things related to building my dream, whatever the dream is. For some people, it's a business. For some people, it's a YouTube channel. For some people, it's writing a book. For some people, it's doing the art on the side. Whatever the dream might be, you need... time is the key currency, well, time, energy, and focus, but like time is the first one. Time is a key currency that you need to be able to make progress on your dream. So how do you create more time? Well, we all have the same 168 hours in the week. If you have a job, a huge chunk of them are already taken up with the job. If you have a family, if you have responsibilities, a huge chunk of those are already taken up. But a key thing that really, really helped me when I was building my business, when I was building my dream was multi-modality multitasking. What this basically means is doing two things at once. Doing two things at once creates time. What you don't wanna do is try and focus on two things at once. Like if you're doing focused work, it has to be on just one thing. There's all sorts of research about the idea of attention residue, about the idea about if you're trying to, I don't know, work on your book while also answering emails. That's not gonna work because that's the same modality. You're trying to do the same thing. Whereas multi-modality multitasking would be, for example, listening to an audio book while doing the laundry. It's like two different modalities. You're doing the multitasking, it's fine. or listening to a podcast or audiobook while you're on your commute to work. Now you can get a lot of the benefits of the knowledge that you're acquiring from whatever your dream is. In my case, it was listening to business books and business podcasts. You can do that while doing other things. You don't want to do that while spending time with your family because you want to be present with that. You don't want to try and do that while focusing on your work. But if you're doing stuff like driving or like walking or like doing the laundry or like doing the dishes, whatever the situation might be, you could always be listening to something while that is happening. I'm not saying you have to do this. I don't want the anti-toxic productivity people to come after me because, oh my god, he's promoting toxic. I'm not promoting toxic productivity here. What I'm saying is that if you have a dream and you're finding yourself without the time to focus on building that dream, you could actually create more time by doing multitasking in this sort of way. The way that I do this now is that my team and I have created an app called VoicePal, which is a ghostwriter in your pocket. Basically, I'll go for a walk and then I'll hit record on the app with my AirPods in and I will just speak things out loud. I'll just sort of... This is how I plan my videos, for example. I'll think, okay, cool. I'm doing a video about six habits to make next year the best year of your life. What are the sorts of things I wanna say in that video? And I will just be sort of walking around in like the local area or whatever. Actually this morning while I was planning this video, I went to do the groceries because my wife wanted some like organic carrots and milk and stuff. And she wanted to make a spaghetti bolognese, so I had to do the groceries. But on the way to the grocery store, I had my AirPods in. And while I was around the grocery store, I was just speaking out loud. It doesn't look weird because people just think you're on your phone or you're like speaking to someone, but I was planning this video while I was doing this trip to the grocery store. Because the idea is that you speak into the app, the app then asks sensible follow-up questions, and then it turns whatever you've said into a first draft that sounds exactly like you. Now based on these videos, I don't really read from a script, I mostly riff, but the fact that I was able to talk through the talking points for this video, and then use voice pal to turn it into a rough outline, that's an example of multi-modality multitasking. Most of us have some sort of writing that we have to do in some sort of capacity anyway, so like... You don't have to use this app. I think it's really good. We built it for exactly this purpose, so you should check it out. Link down below. It's available on Android, iOS. If you don't want to use the app, fine. Use whatever other software you want to use that can convert you speaking into a transcript, and then you take the transcript, you stick it into ChatGPT, and then you edit it on whatever editing software you want to use, like Notion or Google Docs, Microsoft Word, God forbid. But now with the advance of AI tools, if you are strapped for time and the thing that you need to do to build your dream or your work involves writing in some capacity, which almost everything does because lots of ideas are downstream of writing, you can do that. It makes so much sense to be able to use the power of your voice while you're doing other things to be able to do that work alongside. Again, for the record, I'm not saying that when you are spending time with your kids, you actually have your AirPods in and you're sort of trying to crank out your next email newsletter. That's obviously not the point. Point is, when you're taking a trip to the grocery store that would otherwise be dead time, or you're just sort of listening to music or whatever, you can use that time to be productive, to make progress on the things you want to make progress on. And if you enjoyed this video, firstly, thank you for watching. And secondly, you're going to enjoy that little playlist over here, which is a couple of videos on how to focus better, because that is probably knowing my audience, something that you might be potentially struggling with. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in that video. Bye-bye.

If you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Feel Good Productivity, which is about how to be more productive in a way that actually feels good. And for the last seven years on this channel, I have been documenting my journey from broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor to now running a seven figure business where I live a life that I absolutely love. And my goal on this channel really is to share everything that I've learned and everything I'm continuing to learn along this journey of personal growth and development in the hope that you find some value from it and you can maybe work towards what I like to call the five F's of fun, fulfillment, flexibility, freedom, and finance. So let's get into it.

Alrighty, so habit number one that I have gotten a lot of value out of is kind of ignoring the notion of annual goals. And I always feel super excited when I set annual goals at the start of the year. But there is an alternative method for goal setting that I've been using on and off over the years, partly in personal life, partly in business life. And when I think back to the goals that I've actually accomplished, like the meaningful things that I've done, they've always been with this second method of goal setting rather than through annual goals. And this second method of goal setting is what I refer to as quarterly quests.

And the idea behind this is that instead of thinking about setting goals for the year, you actually focus on setting goals for the next quarter, i.e. the next 90 days. Now, this is a concept that the authors of the book, The 12 Week Year talk about. It's also a concept in business worlds like the book Get Scalable by Ryan Dice and the book Traction by Juno Wickman.

There's a lot of goal setting methodologies that are focused on this sort of 90 day cycle. And so the whole idea behind setting quarterly quests is that when it comes to 90 days or three months or 12 weeks or however you wanna split it, you're able to visualize that. Like on a single piece of paper, you could write down the next 12 weeks. But if you're trying to do annual goals, it's like...

You know, in my case, I'll set an annual goal in January, and by the time February or March rolls around, either I've made progress towards it, and I've got new data, in which case maybe the goal has changed, or I haven't made progress towards it, and I'm like, ah, it's an annual goal, I've got the whole year left, and then, you know, six months, eight months goes by, and I never make any progress on it at all. The idea behind quarterly quests is that every 90 days at the start of the quarter, or at any point whenever you happen to be watching this video, or whenever you happen to incorporate this habit into your life, you focus on what are the three or four big things that I want to get done in the next 90 days. This is quarterly quests.

Every single quarter, I host a completely free alignment workshop where we get together on a zoom call and set these quarterly quests. So if you are subscribed to my newsletter, you will hear about these. I've been running them for the last year, and people get a lot of value from them.

Usually we have a few 1000 people attending and we do that setting the quarterly quests together. So you're very welcome to join if you would like to. But of course, this is also something that you can do yourself.

More than about three or four quarterly quests means it's just too much, too much stuff to be going on. And generally I like to separate mine into two categories, work and life. And so I'll be thinking, okay, what are my quarterly quests for work?

And what are my quarterly quests for life? Sometimes there are certain projects that are gonna take longer than 90 days to get done. The idea behind those is that you would turn them into 90 day projects. So for example, when I was writing my book, Feel Good Productivity, which is available everywhere books are sold and also on Audible where I narrate the audio books.

So you can check it out if you haven't yet. When I was writing Feel Good Productivity, I found that working in 90 day chunks was pretty effective because obviously writing a whole book is like a three year process. But if you break it down into the quarters, it's like the quarterly quest would be completing the first draft or completing the first draft of the first three chapters or whatever. And so if you want to make this year the best year of your life where you are doing the things that are meaningful to you and ideally enjoying the journey along the way.

And I'd really recommend thinking in 90 day chunks when it comes to your goals rather than in annual chunks. But then there's a problem, right? Because the problem is even if you do set these quarterly quests, these 90 day goals, there is a danger that they go the same way that New Year's resolutions do, i.e. you set them at the start of the quarter and then you completely forget about them. And that is where our next habit comes in.

So habit number two is an absolute classic in the world of productivity. It is the single habit that almost every productivity enthusiast swears by. It was popularized in 2001 by productivity guru. David Allen in his seminal work, Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. And that habit is, drum roll please, the weekly review.

I like to think of it as a weekly reset. The idea is that once a week, you are spending like 20 minutes reviewing how your previous week has gone and setting priorities for the next week. This is a really simple thing to do. It does not have to be an elaborate eight-hour routine. Just like 10, 15, 20 minutes reviewing how your last week has gone.

And actually asking yourself, okay, what are my key priorities for the week ahead? Will do absolute wonders for your productivity and will really help you make meaningful progress towards the things that matter most to you. Can I request a cup of tea, please?

That's the wife. The wife was actually sitting in the corner over here on her laptop, motivating me to film because I was feeling like, oh, I don't want to film this video. Anyway, as part of the weekly reset, it's generally good practice to look at your calendar for the previous week.

and to celebrate some wins, to give yourself a pat on the back for the stuff that you did well. It is also a very good idea at that point. And one of the key things that we have within our weekly reset template is you ask yourself the question, what were my quarterly quests and how are they going? And this is a weekly checkpoint where you remind yourself, oh yeah, what were my quarterly quests?

Sometimes I skip my weekly reset for like a week or two in a row because like life got in the way or I forgot or like, you know, the calendar event crashed with the Productivity Lab Workshop and so I didn't attend the weekly reset. And then it comes to week three and I look at my template and it's like. What were our quarterly quests again and how are they going?

And I'm like, hmm, it's a good question. I've actually forgotten what goals I set for myself three weeks ago, what my quarterly quests were. And then I look at my little quarterly quests. I have that in a goalkeeper document, which I named my goalkeeper document because it's just kind of fun. Again, all of this stuff is stuff we do in this free quarterly alignment workshop.

So if you attend one of those, you'll see the whole process in action. But then I'll look at that list. I'll be like, oh yeah, I totally was gonna do that thing, which I completely forgot about.

And then it comes back on track. So the idea behind the weekly reset is that it is a checkpoint to be able to refer to your quarterly quests and see how are they going. And then based on how your quarterly quests are going or anything else that's happening in life, you define what are your top one, two and three priorities for the week ahead.

If this is a habit that you haven't yet incorporated into your life, then I can hand on heart guarantee that if you do, it will change the game for you and help you make the next year the best year of your life. Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video, then you might like to check out Brilliant, who are very kindly sponsoring today's video. Brilliant is a wonderful platform where you learn by doing, not just by consuming, with thousands of interactive lessons in maths, data analysis, programming, and AI. I've been using Brilliant for the last five years now, and I absolutely love it.

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And Brilliant helps you build all of this real knowledge in just minutes a day, which is the absolute opposite of mindless scrolling. Their growing number of courses on programming are particularly good, and those can help you get familiar with languages like Python and start building programs on day one with their built-in drag and drop editor. If any of that sounds good, you can try out everything Brilliant has to offer for for free for a full 30 days by heading over to brilliant.org slash Ali Abdaal or scanning the QR code on the screen, or you can click on the link in the video description.

And those links will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much Brilliant for sponsoring this video. Okay, let's say you've set those top three priorities for the week. What if you just forget about them?

And that is where our next habit comes in. And habit number three is another absolute staple in the world of productivity that I hope you're doing already. But if you're not, that's okay.

That's why we're here watching this video. It's a very, very easy habit to incorporate into your routine. It doesn't normally take more than about one or two minutes. And micro habit number three that you can incorporate from right now is what I call the morning manifesto. What is the morning manifesto?

The morning manifesto is basically a two minute journaling prompt. First thing in the morning before you sit down to work, that asks you a few basic questions. Basic question number one is, what were our top three priorities for the week and how are they going? So you see the thing, like with the weekly reset, we asked what were our top three quarterly quests and how they're going.

reminding ourselves about that thing that we decided to do a quarter ago. But then every single day, every single workday, we're asking ourselves, what were my top three priorities for the week? And how are they going?

Now, this is a reminder every day. It's a checkpoint of like, A, if you haven't done your weekly reset for the week, you think about it. And I have this a lot when I skip my weekly resets because it was bad.

But when I skip my weekly resets, I'll get to the morning manifesto. It'll ask me, what are my top three priorities for the week? And we're like, oh shit.

Well, I didn't do my weekly reset this week, so I haven't actually set those. And then I'll think about it and I'll define my top three priorities for the week. And that is really, really helpful because when it comes to productivity, a big mistake that we all make is that we think it is about efficiency.

It's about trying to do things a little bit more efficiently or a little bit faster or whatever. But that is not where the needle is moved. The needle is moved in the choice of what you are actually working on. It's in the choice of what direction you're going rather than in how fast you're getting there.

And that's why we all have this problem where you can... you can feel as if you're being very efficient, but like you're not actually making meaningful progress towards the things that matter most to you. If your goal is like mine was when I had a day job to build some sort of business that makes enough money for you to be able to go part-time in your job or to build a business that gives you financial freedom, and you have a day job and you're on the grind and the hamster wheel of the day job, you can be really efficient in your day job, but you're not actually making any progress towards that dream over there that really matters to you. You're just focused on being efficient or being productive in your day job.

And that is why when we do these things like quarterly quests, and we do the weekly reset and we think about our priorities, a lot of it is around, what do I actually want to work towards? Because I imagine if you're watching this channel, you're probably reasonably competent, you're probably very good looking, maybe you've got a job, you're probably reasonably okay at getting things done. And the problem that you might have is that you're just not working on the right things.

If for example, when I had a day job, I did not set myself the goal of like building this business on the side, building the YouTube channel on the side. I mean, I was, I was a pretty reasonable doctor. I was pretty efficient, pretty productive. I got, I got decent grades in school.

I quite enjoyed medicine. I would have just continued on that hamster wheel. And this thing of this Building this business on the side would have always been a pipe dream.

That is the importance of goal selection rather than just goal efficiency. Oh, hello. Do you want to say hi? Thank you so much.

Hi. How's it going? It's very good.

Good luck. Thanks. Oh, she's so nice. Oh, by the way, quick thing. If you're watching this before the 4th of January 2025, then you might like to check out the completely free two-day productivity workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025. It is called Productivity Spark.

And it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that I aim to help you reflect on 2024, figure out where your work and life are heading and set active goals and quarterly quests for 2025. It is completely free. You can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially. So coming back to our morning manifesto, we are asking ourselves, what were our weekly priorities again and how are they going? Again, just reminding ourselves that, oh yeah, we did decide what we wanted to do and are we actually doing the thing that we said we were going to do?

Again, bit of a tangent, but a huge part of making the next year the best year of your life is simply in doing the things that you say you're going to do. If you actually did, if you think about this right now, if every single day you actually made an intention of what you wanted to do and you actually did it, man, doing that for 365 days, your life would be completely transformed. You would be unrecognizable a year from now. If every day you set an intention and you actually followed through on that intention, the point behind the morning manifesto.

It's not going to help you follow through on the intention, but it helps you do that first step of setting that intention in the first place. Without that intention, we just get into work, we get into following what's on the calendar, we get into the things we should do, we get into whatever the algorithm is feeding us when we're scrolling TikTok and Instagram. It becomes an unintentional, unexamined life where you're doing a lot of stuff, but you're not making progress towards what really matters to you. That is the point of a lot of these habits at the point of the morning manifesto.

It's a point of having that two minute check-in in the morning where you're like, okay, what actually were my priorities? And like, what do I actually want to work on today? I don't recommend having it as an elaborate sort of series of prompts because the bigger, the longer it takes to do, the less likely you are to do it, at least in my case.

And I suspect in your case as well. That's why for me, the bare minimum is what were my weekly priorities and how are they going? And then secondly, what is the most important thing I want to get done today?

I phrased this as what is today's adventure going to be? Because by phrasing it as an adventure, it feels good. The whole stuff around feel-good productivity is if you can psy-op yourself into treating your work in the spirit of play, not being too serious about it, being more sincere about it, thinking of it as a quest that you're on, hence why the phrase quarterly quests.

It's a bit more fun, a bit more nice and vibey than projects or like OKRs or like objectives or like quests because it feels good. Daily adventures. What is today's adventure going to be? And if for the next 365 days, each morning you were to actually ask yourself, what is today's adventure going to be?

what is my most important task? And then you just stick it in your calendar, assuming you actually do the thing, even if you don't do the thing most of the time, but you do the thing some of the time, you are still gonna be completely unrecognizable a year from now. Alrighty, so at this point, we have done a lot of like intention setting. Now it comes to actually doing the stuff and that is where habit number four comes in.

Okay, so for habit number four, I wanna tell you a little bit of a story of a time when I struggled with this, which was I think about two years ago when I was on the first draft of trying to write my book before it came out. And there was lots of stuff going on, lots of stuff going on in the business. And I knew that the most important thing I needed to work on and my quarterly quest and all that stuff was writing my book, making progress on my book, because I knew that was like an important but not urgent project that I really needed to move forward. And I was chatting to my CEO coach.

I was like, oh man, you know, I'm just not, I haven't got the time. I'm not making the time. Like I'm not like doing the thing.

And it was like, okay, step one is, do I have time on my calendar blocked out every single day where I'm working on the book? And initially the answer was no. And then it was like, okay, cool.

I'll block out that time. But even when I was blocking out the time and my intention each morning was like, okay, I'm going to work on the book, I would end up like screwing around. I would end up being like, okay, I'm looking at the blank page. I can't be bothered.

I was like, I'll make a cup of tea. Then I'll make a cup of coffee. Then I'll go to the bathroom because obviously, you know, coffee is a bit of a laxative.

And so I would need to do whatever in the bathroom. Then I'd come back, make another coffee, look in the fridge. Before I'd know it, like so much time would have passed. And I'd go on Slack, reply to team messages.

team members might be around. So I chat to them and then I go for a walk. And then before I knew it, I wasn't making any progress on the book at all. So the thing that he encouraged me to do was to make a Google sheet where every day I would just track how many minutes I spent working on the book in fully focused time. And then I just wrote that number on the spreadsheet.

And the fact that I now wrote this number on the spreadsheet every day gave me profound insight into how unproductive I was being as it related to writing my book. And just the fact that I was now aware of what that number was meant that number went up and I was able to bang out the first draft of my book. And it ended up being pretty reasonable once all the edits and stuff happened along the way.

That's it. When I was working on the book, I just logged how many minutes at a time I was focusing on the book for. This was transformational and has resulted in what I now call the focus log, which is a key habit. This is habit number four. It's an absolute key habit that I teach to all my students in my productivity lab and in my course, Life Operating System.

And anytime I do talks and stuff when people, you know, everyone struggles to focus, right? And they're like, oh, have you got any tips for focus? The single biggest hack that I don't hear enough people- Talking about is creating a focus log. If you're interested in specific tips on how to make your own focus log, I have a whole three-part series on how to focus better.

That will be linked somewhere down below. There's various ways of doing it. You can use like manual time tracking, automatic time tracking, Google Sheets, pen and paper.

It really doesn't matter. The point is, if you actually just give yourself visibility on how many minutes you are focusing on the thing that's most important to you or on whatever is most important to you, that will profoundly influence your ability to actually do the thing. All righty, habit number five is unrelated to work. This is more about the social relationship side of things.

And this is the standing order social events. I've been doing a lot of research into what makes people feel lonely, especially in middle age and stuff. And generally, once you get beyond university, like life becomes a lot less social than it once was. But one of the key strategies that I've read about be spoken to various social friends of mine who will do this and see implemented into my own life. In particular, back when I was living in London, I had this down to a T.

now that I moved to Hong Kong, I still haven't yet set this up, but it's a key thing on the list for basically as soon as possible, is standing order social events. A standing order social event is something where once a week or every other week in your calendar, you have a social event that's just stuck in the calendar that happens at the same time in the same place every single time without fail. It could be something like a Sunday brunch. That is what I was doing weekly back when I lived in London.

It could be a Tuesday evening. Inviting people over for board games or a Thursday evening inviting people over for dinner. And the idea is that you invite a bunch of people and whoever can make it rocks up and whoever can't make it, you know, they don't make it. But the point is that it happens on a weekly or biweekly cadence.

And this is just an absolutely fantastic way of staying in touch with people, of making friends, of retaining friendships without having to do all of the annoying back and forth that once you're out of university. starts to happen where you have to having to coordinate a dozen different people's calendars. In my own life, I have two standing order social events right now, which is two date nights every week with my wife. And a big part of why I think our relationship is very strong is because we do these two date nights a week.

They are in the calendar. There is a calendar invite. You know, if something comes up, we move them rather than delete them. And it ensures that there are at least two nights a week where it's sort of like, we're, you know, quality time with one another rather than all of the other things getting in the way. One thing I'm going to incorporate into my own life in Hong Kong here as well is doing like a weekly or every other week, kind of people come over for dinner type situation.

If you have these sorts of social rituals in your life already, like you go to church on a Sunday or you go to the mosque on a Friday and then you, you know, grab fried chicken with the boys afterwards, you know, whatever the situation might be, these sorts of regular social events seem to be what drive a lot of kind of relationship satisfaction and relationship health in the important relationships and friendships in your life. And then finally, habit number six to help make this the best year ever is. what I like to refer to as multi-modality multitasking. This is a bit of a mouthful. I'm sure there's a sexier way of like describing this thing.

But basically, one question I get a lot when I do talks and things is usually from people with jobs, like you've got a nine to five or maybe like a nine to nine or whatever the job is, and you want to build the business or do the side hustle thing outside of the day job. But obviously, you've got a job, right? So it's like when you take into account the time you're at the job, commuting to the job, commuting from the job, trying to eat food, general life maintenance, especially if you have a family, especially if you have kids, my goodness.

There are very few hours in the week left to be able to pursue your dream. And then you're like, well, am I just sort of stuck in this grind of the day job where I live to work and stuff? Or can I magically find time? Can I become more productive or more efficient so that I can find this magical time and be able to use that magical time on things related to building my dream, whatever the dream is. For some people, it's a business.

For some people, it's a YouTube channel. For some people, it's writing a book. For some people, it's doing the art on the side.

Whatever the dream might be, you need... time is the key currency, well, time, energy, and focus, but like time is the first one. Time is a key currency that you need to be able to make progress on your dream. So how do you create more time? Well, we all have the same 168 hours in the week.

If you have a job, a huge chunk of them are already taken up with the job. If you have a family, if you have responsibilities, a huge chunk of those are already taken up. But a key thing that really, really helped me when I was building my business, when I was building my dream was multi-modality multitasking.

What this basically means is doing two things at once. Doing two things at once creates time. What you don't wanna do is try and focus on two things at once.

Like if you're doing focused work, it has to be on just one thing. There's all sorts of research about the idea of attention residue, about the idea about if you're trying to, I don't know, work on your book while also answering emails. That's not gonna work because that's the same modality. You're trying to do the same thing.

Whereas multi-modality multitasking would be, for example, listening to an audio book while doing the laundry. It's like two different modalities. You're doing the multitasking, it's fine. or listening to a podcast or audiobook while you're on your commute to work.

Now you can get a lot of the benefits of the knowledge that you're acquiring from whatever your dream is. In my case, it was listening to business books and business podcasts. You can do that while doing other things. You don't want to do that while spending time with your family because you want to be present with that. You don't want to try and do that while focusing on your work.

But if you're doing stuff like driving or like walking or like doing the laundry or like doing the dishes, whatever the situation might be, you could always be listening to something while that is happening. I'm not saying you have to do this. I don't want the anti-toxic productivity people to come after me because, oh my god, he's promoting toxic. I'm not promoting toxic productivity here. What I'm saying is that if you have a dream and you're finding yourself without the time to focus on building that dream, you could actually create more time by doing multitasking in this sort of way.

The way that I do this now is that my team and I have created an app called VoicePal, which is a ghostwriter in your pocket. Basically, I'll go for a walk and then I'll hit record on the app with my AirPods in and I will just speak things out loud. I'll just sort of...

This is how I plan my videos, for example. I'll think, okay, cool. I'm doing a video about six habits to make next year the best year of your life. What are the sorts of things I wanna say in that video? And I will just be sort of walking around in like the local area or whatever.

Actually this morning while I was planning this video, I went to do the groceries because my wife wanted some like organic carrots and milk and stuff. And she wanted to make a spaghetti bolognese, so I had to do the groceries. But on the way to the grocery store, I had my AirPods in.

And while I was around the grocery store, I was just speaking out loud. It doesn't look weird because people just think you're on your phone or you're like speaking to someone, but I was planning this video while I was doing this trip to the grocery store. Because the idea is that you speak into the app, the app then asks sensible follow-up questions, and then it turns whatever you've said into a first draft that sounds exactly like you. Now based on these videos, I don't really read from a script, I mostly riff, but the fact that I was able to talk through the talking points for this video, and then use voice pal to turn it into a rough outline, that's an example of multi-modality multitasking. Most of us have some sort of writing that we have to do in some sort of capacity anyway, so like...

You don't have to use this app. I think it's really good. We built it for exactly this purpose, so you should check it out.

Link down below. It's available on Android, iOS. If you don't want to use the app, fine.

Use whatever other software you want to use that can convert you speaking into a transcript, and then you take the transcript, you stick it into ChatGPT, and then you edit it on whatever editing software you want to use, like Notion or Google Docs, Microsoft Word, God forbid. But now with the advance of AI tools, if you are strapped for time and the thing that you need to do to build your dream or your work involves writing in some capacity, which almost everything does because lots of ideas are downstream of writing, you can do that. It makes so much sense to be able to use the power of your voice while you're doing other things to be able to do that work alongside.

Again, for the record, I'm not saying that when you are spending time with your kids, you actually have your AirPods in and you're sort of trying to crank out your next email newsletter. That's obviously not the point. Point is, when you're taking a trip to the grocery store that would otherwise be dead time, or you're just sort of listening to music or whatever, you can use that time to be productive, to make progress on the things you want to make progress on. And if you enjoyed this video, firstly, thank you for watching. And secondly, you're going to enjoy that little playlist over here, which is a couple of videos on how to focus better, because that is probably knowing my audience, something that you might be potentially struggling with.

So thank you for watching and I'll see you in that video. Bye-bye.

Transcript for:Key Productivity Habits for Success

Transcript for:
Key Productivity Habits for Success