The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 55 - This Method Will Boost Your Productivity: Ali Abdaal

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

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

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. 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 that's a big thing and it'll 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 and you're 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 okay i'm like what the fuck how does this thing work this life 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 life of mine where i'm told what to do every five minutes um so i time block on the weekends which means clean house would become at 11 till 12 i clean the kitchen because then it's like time sensitive and like task specific yeah and that's that's been an absolute game changer for me and i also think in the era of working from home yeah where you know people are sat at home they have a tasks

they have to can oh 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 just having in my head for the last last few weeks 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 uh there's just uh 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 um there's one there's one story in particular that i i i often come back to and that's like 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 tissueed 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 hard 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 as I was doing this, there was 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. Everyone is so nice. And what a pleasure it is, you know, freaking 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, 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, I realized, oh, I get to put in this cannula, I get to make a difference in this patient's lives 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. 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, 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