ATHLLC1019886537

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00:01:34.680 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:41.280 | your life, money, and travel.

00:01:42.720 | I'm Chris Hutchins.

00:01:43.600 | I'm excited you're here today.

00:01:44.880 | So imagine this, you're a smart kid, your family prioritizes education, you study

00:01:49.760 | hard, and you decide you want to become a doctor.

00:01:51.720 | You ace your exams, you're admitted to one of the top medical schools in the

00:01:55.040 | world, you complete the program, and you start work.

00:01:57.720 | And then a few years later, you decide to leave it all behind to focus on something

00:02:01.560 | else.

00:02:02.000 | At first glance, many of you might think that's crazy, but it's exactly what my

00:02:05.920 | guest today, Ali Abdaal, did.

00:02:07.560 | He left the practice of medicine a few years ago to focus on his exploding and

00:02:11.880 | growing YouTube channel and the businesses that surround it, which now has more than

00:02:16.520 | 3 million subscribers.

00:02:17.800 | On it, he talks about everything from productivity, to study skills, to making

00:02:21.960 | an impact, and so much more.

00:02:24.160 | And if that's not enough, he hosts two podcasts, has two courses, a blog, and a

00:02:27.760 | newsletter.

00:02:28.400 | I've consumed so much of Ali's content that I'm such a huge fan of his work.

00:02:32.160 | So I'm really excited to talk about everything from how he got the courage to

00:02:36.120 | quit a successful career, to double down on his passion and build a business around

00:02:39.720 | it, a lesson I might need in the near future.

00:02:41.960 | I also want to spend a good part of the conversation digging into the strategies,

00:02:45.360 | the tools, the hacks he uses to live a happier, healthier, and more productive

00:02:49.440 | life.

00:02:49.840 | He's a true expert here.

00:02:51.640 | He's dialed in when it comes to productivity, reading efficiently, the tech

00:02:55.600 | and the tools he uses, and a lot more.

00:02:57.400 | This is going to be a really great conversation.

00:02:59.720 | There's probably going to be a lot more.

00:03:01.280 | So let's get started.

00:03:02.280 | Ali, welcome to the show and thanks for being here.

00:03:06.520 | Thank you so much for having me.

00:03:08.040 | That's an incredible intro.

00:03:09.520 | You've really done your homework.

00:03:10.560 | I'm just like, wow, that sounds really cool when you put it that way.

00:03:13.520 | I'm excited.

00:03:14.240 | So I want to start off and just talk about your passion for teaching.

00:03:17.200 | You said that being able to teach more through your YouTube channel, your

00:03:20.840 | podcast, your courses, and have an impact that way is a big reason you step back

00:03:25.360 | for medicine, but it must have been a tough decision.

00:03:28.560 | So what can you share about that process that might help anyone, myself included,

00:03:32.800 | figure out what it takes to step away and take a big bet on yourself?

00:03:37.280 | Yeah.

00:03:38.800 | Okay.

00:03:39.360 | So a few things come to mind in no particular order.

00:03:42.160 | Basically, I was always trying to figure out what the hell do I actually want to

00:03:45.640 | do with my life.

00:03:46.320 | And after a couple of years in medicine, after going through med school, I always

00:03:49.880 | kind of knew I wanted to have some level of streams of passive income, financial

00:03:54.000 | independence.

00:03:54.680 | I've discovered the fire movement through Tim Ferriss's interview with Mr.

00:03:58.520 | Money Mustache and got straight into that.

00:04:00.440 | I remember I was on my general practice placement when I discovered it.

00:04:03.440 | And I was just like, I need to get through my patients as soon as possible so I can

00:04:07.680 | just read more articles on Mr.

00:04:09.240 | Money Mustache.

00:04:09.840 | But ever since I discovered the four hour work week at the age of 17, just before

00:04:13.240 | going into med school, I knew that like medicine is cool, but it's not the only

00:04:16.720 | thing I want to be doing with my life.

00:04:18.240 | Seems a bit, you know, not very anti-fragile to just be reliant on a single

00:04:21.880 | source of income.

00:04:22.520 | So throughout my whole time in med school, I always kind of knew that I wanted to

00:04:26.520 | dabble with like, maybe making a startup, maybe being interested in tech, because I

00:04:30.760 | knew how to code and stuff and started a couple of businesses along the way.

00:04:33.720 | But really, like, as the YouTube channel started to become successful, and I

00:04:39.280 | really started to think, okay, what do I actually want to do with my life?

00:04:42.040 | There were a couple of exercises that I discovered on the internet and various

00:04:46.480 | blogs that I found useful.

00:04:47.840 | The first one was, I didn't have a name, but I'm calling it the gravestone

00:04:50.960 | technique, which is figuring out like, when you die, what do you want to be

00:04:54.720 | written on your gravestone?

00:04:55.960 | And for me, I thought about it.

00:04:58.720 | And I realized some combination of good father, good husband, and inspirational

00:05:03.680 | teacher.

00:05:04.240 | And I was like, Oh, that's interesting.

00:05:06.040 | I guess that is probably Yeah, you know, if I died, and people thought of me as an

00:05:10.000 | inspirational teacher, alongside being a good father and a good husband, you're my

00:05:13.000 | family, that would be a life well lived.

00:05:15.880 | And I was like, Okay, cool.

00:05:16.880 | And then there was this other exercise I tried that a friend of mine who's like

00:05:20.480 | this business coach ran past me when I was like, Hey, man, Simon, like, what do I

00:05:23.880 | do with my life?

00:05:24.400 | He was like, try this exercise.

00:05:25.600 | And it's called the ideal ordinary week, where you fast forward your Google

00:05:29.000 | calendar five years, you hope that you don't have any recurring events that are

00:05:32.280 | still there.

00:05:32.800 | And you basically block out what does your ideal ordinary week look like?

00:05:37.080 | And so it's like, where are your time for deep work?

00:05:39.480 | Where's lunch?

00:05:40.080 | Where's hanging out with friends?

00:05:41.040 | Where's playing squash?

00:05:41.840 | Where's video games?

00:05:42.560 | Where's reading?

00:05:43.520 | I went through that, and I looked at it, I was like, Oh, damn, there's not even a

00:05:46.960 | single half day here, where in my ideal ordinary week, I'm in a hospital treating

00:05:52.040 | patients.

00:05:52.520 | And so those two data points together, kind of made me think, if I could design a

00:05:57.280 | life, however, I wanted, in theory, would I choose to spend time in a hospital

00:06:02.160 | treating patients and saving lives?

00:06:04.040 | The answer was like, I think it's great for a lot of people, but it really wasn't

00:06:07.480 | for me.

00:06:07.880 | And I then looked back through my time in med school and being a doctor, and I

00:06:12.760 | realized that I much preferred teaching medical students than actually doing

00:06:17.000 | medicine.

00:06:17.480 | And on days where I would have medical students with me, those would be the

00:06:20.440 | great days, because I'd be like, yeah, we can learn stuff.

00:06:22.360 | Let's do shit together.

00:06:23.280 | And on days where I didn't, I'd be like, I guess I've got to deal with patients

00:06:25.920 | myself.

00:06:26.360 | Sounds really bad to say, but that gave me a big signal that maybe my quote

00:06:30.600 | calling, maybe the thing that I'm supposed to be doing is something to do with

00:06:33.760 | teaching rather than something to do with medicine.

00:06:35.560 | And so that was the I guess, the philosophy behind what led to me ultimately

00:06:41.040 | stepping back from the profession.

00:06:42.960 | So maybe one thing that an exercise that I just came up with thinking about your

00:06:46.640 | process is to look back at what you're doing and your job and what are the parts

00:06:50.000 | of it where you really get fulfilled?

00:06:51.280 | So for you, it was teaching within that role to younger students, like maybe

00:06:55.960 | there's something there.

00:06:56.920 | I interviewed Cal Newport last month, and he talked about trying to figure out the

00:07:00.920 | life you want, and then work backwards towards make it happen.

00:07:03.840 | He calls it lifestyle centric career planning.

00:07:06.520 | So is that something that you think came naturally?

00:07:09.880 | Or is that another version of this five year calendar?

00:07:13.640 | Yeah, I think it is.

00:07:15.200 | I was recently on a binge rereading of Cal's blog posts from like 2008 to 2012.

00:07:20.160 | I came across this kind of lifestyle centric career planning.

00:07:22.880 | And I was like, damn, this is basically what I did.

00:07:25.800 | I just didn't realize that Cal Newport had already said it about 10 years ago.

00:07:30.120 | And I should have just read his blog post because it would have saved me a lot of

00:07:32.080 | time. But I've now seen that play out in a lot of decisions I'm making with this

00:07:36.960 | business as well, instead of thinking, I've got this thing, what do I do with it?

00:07:40.480 | It's more like, okay, what is the actual lifestyle that I want?

00:07:42.760 | And how do I then reverse engineer the stuff that I'm doing today to optimize for

00:07:47.160 | that particular lifestyle?

00:07:48.040 | When it came to paying the bills, right, a lot of times I see people encourage

00:07:54.000 | others, maybe not themselves to say, Oh, take a bet on yourself now, take a bet on

00:07:57.280 | yourself now. And people often maybe default more towards waiting till their side

00:08:02.040 | business is so big that it's like an obvious decision.

00:08:04.600 | Is there a point where you think people should actually maybe wait a little longer

00:08:09.040 | or take the leap a little earlier?

00:08:10.400 | What have you kind of reflecting what you did think now?

00:08:13.240 | Yeah, so for me, I waited until the side business was like ridiculously huge before

00:08:18.960 | making the leap. But I was also in a career where after two years of working as a

00:08:22.800 | doctor, there's a very natural career break where a lot of people take time out.

00:08:26.560 | And then it makes a lot of sense to take time out at that point.

00:08:29.360 | Whereas I've got a bunch of friends who are in careers where it never makes sense to

00:08:32.840 | take time out because you're always going to be worried about the gap in the resume

00:08:35.640 | and stuff. And especially my friends in management consulting, it's always like, oh,

00:08:40.040 | the next promotion, the next round of bonuses is when I will do the thing.

00:08:43.280 | And they never end up doing the thing because it's not like a hard stop of like, two

00:08:47.120 | years later, you're out of a job.

00:08:48.840 | And now you have to reapply for the next round of residency, specialty training or

00:08:51.800 | whatever. So I kind of think I had it easy in that the decision was made for me in

00:08:55.560 | that a) the business became ridiculously successful and b) I already had this career

00:08:59.120 | gap that I was going to take.

00:09:00.160 | I think if I had my time again or if I were advising someone and they were young and

00:09:05.800 | actually I very much vibe with the Gary Vee approach of like when you're young and

00:09:09.360 | unencumbered, that's when taking risks, the whole asymmetrical upside thing that if

00:09:13.760 | you start a business and it pays off, you are then sorted for life.

00:09:17.160 | Whereas you lose out on an extra few tens of thousands of dollars worth of earnings.

00:09:22.080 | And unless you really, really, really need that money for you and your family to

00:09:24.960 | survive, I think being young and unencumbered is a great time to take risks.

00:09:29.680 | You knew you wanted to teach, right?

00:09:32.120 | You talked about how you got fulfillment from that.

00:09:33.880 | It's not clear to me that if you were thinking, what am I going to take a bet on?

00:09:37.360 | What is it going to be that you knew what it would become ultimately?

00:09:40.880 | Are there things you learned along the way that helped you figure out how to take,

00:09:45.120 | OK, I love teaching and turn that into I want a YouTube channel.

00:09:50.920 | I want here's what I actually want to teach about.

00:09:53.480 | You know, here are the different mediums, whether it's a newsletter, a blog.

00:09:56.400 | How do you go down that path?

00:09:58.200 | For me, it was there's this thing I was passionate about.

00:10:01.080 | I would say most of my friends almost all knew that one day I would be talking

00:10:05.520 | about optimization of life and travel and money and all this stuff.

00:10:08.760 | Everyone else knew that.

00:10:09.880 | But for me, I was like, maybe I should start a podcast.

00:10:12.200 | And at first, the podcast was actually going to be about parenting

00:10:15.120 | because I was about to have my first child.

00:10:17.400 | And I was like trying to dial in everything.

00:10:19.520 | And then slowly I was like, well, maybe I don't love the parenting thing

00:10:23.120 | as much as the broader topic.

00:10:25.120 | But it was not natural, right?

00:10:26.480 | Like 10 years ago, people probably could have better predicted

00:10:29.480 | I would be doing this than I could have done it myself.

00:10:31.560 | Yeah, I think it's kind of similar for me.

00:10:34.640 | It sort of felt like just one step in front of another.

00:10:36.960 | So when I was 18 years old

00:10:40.320 | and in the summer holidays just before going to med school,

00:10:43.640 | I had saved up about a thousand pounds, like twelve hundred dollars

00:10:47.960 | through private tutoring here and there for years and years to get a MacBook.

00:10:51.640 | I was like, I'm going to get a MacBook for the first time in my life.

00:10:53.600 | I'm going to join the Apple ecosystem.

00:10:55.160 | Apple products are super expensive, but now I can finally afford it.

00:10:57.520 | And instead of buying the base model MacBook Air from the Apple Store in 2012,

00:11:02.520 | I decided I was going to go on Craigslist and find one that was more specked out.

00:11:06.920 | I found some guy we met up at the station.

00:11:09.120 | He handed me this laptop.

00:11:10.120 | I forked over a thousand pounds in cash and turned out he'd actually sold me

00:11:14.200 | like a four year old defunct model of a MacBook Air.

00:11:17.280 | And because I was an idiot, I kind of took his word for it.

00:11:20.320 | I ignored all the red flags that were there.

00:11:22.480 | And I was like, oh, my God, I've lost all this money.

00:11:24.320 | I spent a month trying to get it back and trying to geolocate his tweets

00:11:27.160 | to see where is he, where can I serve him papers to take him

00:11:29.560 | to small claims court and like sue him and stuff.

00:11:32.120 | And eventually my mom was like, you know what, screw this guy.

00:11:34.520 | You're about to start university.

00:11:35.960 | And she just bought me a new MacBook.

00:11:37.320 | And she was like, just forget about this guy, which was very nice of her.

00:11:39.640 | But at that point, I opened up an Evernote document and I still got it

00:11:43.400 | from like August of 2012, where I said, OK, I need to make money.

00:11:46.640 | What are the things I'm good at and what are the things I enjoy doing?

00:11:49.760 | And on the list of things that I was good at, I put teaching.

00:11:52.240 | I put web design and I put I did well in med school admissions exams.

00:11:57.040 | And I was like, sick.

00:11:58.560 | How do I make a business that involves teaching web design

00:12:01.120 | and med school entrance exams?

00:12:02.520 | Huh. Why don't I make a business that teaches courses

00:12:05.360 | for med school entrance exams?

00:12:07.320 | And why don't I make a website

00:12:08.800 | that markets this nationally and undercut all the other competitors

00:12:11.920 | and make a website that just looks more pro than anyone else is on the market?

00:12:14.960 | Because I could do that.

00:12:16.640 | And that was how my first kind of successful business started

00:12:19.840 | when I was at university.

00:12:20.880 | And then really five years later, I'd sort of gotten a bit bored of that business.

00:12:24.640 | But I was reading a lot about SEO and content marketing.

00:12:28.640 | And I was like, content marketing is a thing.

00:12:31.000 | No one is really making high quality YouTube videos

00:12:33.400 | teaching medical school admissions.

00:12:35.920 | So if I make videos on YouTube teaching med school admissions

00:12:38.320 | and teaching people how to get a med school in the UK,

00:12:40.560 | maybe some of them will convert and buy my course or sign up to my email list.

00:12:43.440 | This sort of content marketing funnel thing

00:12:45.360 | that I had a very unsophisticated knowledge of at the time.

00:12:48.080 | And that was how the YouTube channel got started.

00:12:50.600 | So connecting the dots, looking back, it feels like, yes, of course,

00:12:53.720 | I was going to do something in teaching

00:12:54.720 | because I've been teaching from like the age of seven.

00:12:56.280 | My job when I was 13 involved private tutoring.

00:12:59.120 | I was always teaching medical students and people were always asking me

00:13:01.680 | to explain stuff, whether it was medical stuff or website stuff

00:13:05.200 | or like productivity stuff.

00:13:06.600 | But it was really just sort of putting one step in front of another

00:13:09.040 | and putting things together that ultimately led me to this point

00:13:11.880 | where I guess we're here trusting.

00:13:13.320 | But I mean, it wasn't an overnight success, right?

00:13:15.160 | You mentioned when you left your medical career,

00:13:18.000 | the channel had grown big enough that it was an easier decision.

00:13:22.040 | There are people who have successful followings.

00:13:24.160 | They start a YouTube channel.

00:13:25.160 | They start a podcast and overnight success.

00:13:27.520 | If I recall, you started with like zero followers, zero views, zero anything

00:13:32.680 | and had to build it up.

00:13:34.400 | How did you stay motivated?

00:13:35.760 | I know that's a grueling process.

00:13:38.600 | So, yeah, I started with zero followers.

00:13:40.120 | I think I had about 37 subscribers on YouTube just because I had a YouTube

00:13:43.320 | account from like 2008.

00:13:44.960 | So it's like 37 subscribers.

00:13:46.320 | Yes. The way I stayed motivated was.

00:13:48.760 | In general, I only set goals that are within my control.

00:13:52.880 | And so the goal that I set for my YouTube channel was like,

00:13:56.160 | I think this has potential.

00:13:57.600 | I think maybe this could go somewhere.

00:13:59.200 | But the only thing I'm going to think about is I just need to make one

00:14:02.600 | or two videos every week and I'm not going to care about the numbers.

00:14:05.600 | And maybe a year from now, if I can hit, I don't know,

00:14:09.600 | a few thousand subscribers, that would be incredible.

00:14:11.920 | I did a bit of market research.

00:14:13.840 | I was like, oh, there's that person over there who's making medical content.

00:14:16.640 | And I think I can make better videos than she can.

00:14:18.680 | And she's on 4000 subscribers.

00:14:19.880 | So maybe if things go really well, I can be on 4000 subscribers.

00:14:22.760 | But really, the goal was just one foot in front of the other.

00:14:25.360 | How do I just make sure I bang out a video or two every week?

00:14:27.920 | And by just staying true to that particular thing

00:14:32.320 | and not being overly wedded to outcomes that are outside of my control,

00:14:35.680 | like how many views are getting or how many subscribers or revenue?

00:14:38.880 | That's how I stayed motivated to do it.

00:14:41.560 | And along the way, just found ways to make it interesting for myself.

00:14:44.680 | Oh, I get to learn editing.

00:14:45.760 | I get to try this new transition and get to try this new thing.

00:14:47.960 | And let me try and explain this in a little bit of a different way.

00:14:50.280 | The goals that are within my control exclusively and finding a way

00:14:54.200 | to keep the process fun for myself.

00:14:56.280 | Did you ever find that a video maybe did well on a topic,

00:14:59.400 | but maybe you weren't that excited about that topic and have to balance

00:15:02.720 | like what's personally exciting to you, to what's working

00:15:06.800 | and growing for your business or your brand and have to pick?

00:15:09.920 | Yeah, so in the early days, that was not really a consideration

00:15:13.240 | because I didn't have any videos that did well.

00:15:15.160 | I was just like, cool, let's just keep going.

00:15:16.760 | Yeah, I mean, the videos are doing OK.

00:15:18.160 | People are viewing them. People are commenting.

00:15:19.720 | This is kind of nice.

00:15:21.080 | Even got recognized in the street one time and I was like, oh, my God, I've made it.

00:15:23.920 | That was when I had like 2000 subscribers.

00:15:25.480 | But it's been really more of a thing that I've had to figure out now

00:15:28.560 | because now we're at a point where the channel is five years old.

00:15:31.840 | I kind of know that if I do a video about personal finance,

00:15:34.720 | about like passive income, about how I make however many million a year,

00:15:38.160 | it's going to get loads of views.

00:15:40.040 | And I know I enjoy talking about those topics, but I often think to myself like,

00:15:43.600 | OK, if we took money out of the equation and if we took status out of the equation

00:15:47.800 | and if we took the sort of the need to accumulate more and more

00:15:50.760 | out of the equation completely, what would I be doing with my time?

00:15:53.760 | What is the YouTube channel that I would want?

00:15:56.000 | And I always think, yeah, I still make YouTube videos

00:15:57.560 | because I like teaching and YouTube videos are teaching a scale

00:15:59.600 | and I get to learn and cool shit and teach it to people, which is nice.

00:16:03.520 | But do I really want a channel where all the only videos I make

00:16:06.600 | are about finance or crypto because that's currently doing well?

00:16:08.760 | No, I want a channel where I can hit record and talk about anything,

00:16:12.320 | whether it's, oh, my God, guys, check out Chris's podcast.

00:16:14.800 | It's sick. Or like, I just read this book.

00:16:16.280 | It's incredible. And here's a summary.

00:16:17.480 | Or here is why I use this pen pocket knife to unbox my parcels.

00:16:21.600 | In my mind, I'm thinking

00:16:23.240 | I want to have the YouTube channel that I wish Tim Ferriss would have

00:16:26.240 | where I would just lap up anything that he posts on YouTube

00:16:30.040 | and just be like, Tim, man, I just want you to make two videos a week

00:16:32.280 | where you talk about whatever's on your mind and I would just watch it.

00:16:34.440 | And I'm like, OK, let me have that kind of channel that I know I'd want to watch.

00:16:38.720 | Is that the future of where the channel is going?

00:16:41.480 | I think so. I think my dream is where the channel is.

00:16:45.680 | I can make videos about whatever I want.

00:16:47.880 | And the team that I've built around me takes care of everything else,

00:16:51.280 | like the money side of the equation, the figuring out the funnels,

00:16:54.560 | figuring out the products and figuring out a way

00:16:56.760 | to make this whole thing sustainable for the long term.

00:16:59.920 | So I don't know if this is going to be a topic that fits in line

00:17:02.560 | with that future channel or not, but a lot of the content you've made

00:17:05.840 | is about productivity, getting more done, optimizing your time.

00:17:08.840 | It's something I'm really passionate about.

00:17:10.920 | You have this great ultimate guide to productivity.

00:17:13.000 | I'll link it to the show notes.

00:17:14.160 | We don't need to cover everything, but I would love to run through

00:17:17.240 | some of the core components you think are important to someone just starting to say,

00:17:21.000 | OK, how do I really dial in my productivity?

00:17:23.600 | And we might go a little deeper on a few things along the way.

00:17:26.440 | Yeah, absolutely.

00:17:28.880 | Where do you start with someone saying, OK, is there an inventory

00:17:32.360 | someone should take?

00:17:33.000 | Like, what's the first step?

00:17:34.240 | Because some people might already be at the 201 level, the 101 level.

00:17:37.360 | Yeah. How do you get people in the door thinking about productivity?

00:17:40.400 | Yeah. So I've got a bunch of different disorganized thoughts about this.

00:17:43.960 | But actually, I did a podcast interview with my productivity

00:17:48.440 | coach or performance coach.

00:17:49.880 | His name is Chris Sparks earlier today, and he has a quiz on his website.

00:17:55.320 | It's completely free.

00:17:56.120 | It's called the performance assessment.

00:17:57.720 | It's on like forcing function dot com forward slash assessment.

00:18:00.720 | And that's a quiz that I took two years ago.

00:18:03.360 | And it's basically asks you questions like, do you have a vision for your life?

00:18:07.160 | And do you have goals?

00:18:08.040 | And do you look at those goals?

00:18:09.080 | And do you do weekly reviews?

00:18:10.200 | And in the morning, do you check your email first thing?

00:18:12.440 | Or do you have a hard stop?

00:18:14.360 | Do you have a bedtime routine?

00:18:15.360 | Do you have a morning routine?

00:18:16.640 | And based on the answers to those questions, it basically says, OK,

00:18:20.120 | here are all of the things you could be doing to increase your productivity.

00:18:23.200 | But start with this one.

00:18:24.840 | And it orders all of the evidence based productivity tips

00:18:28.440 | in order of how needle moving they actually are.

00:18:31.080 | And I think that quiz would be a I've been recommending it today

00:18:35.360 | to everyone on my team being like, guys, take this quiz because it's actually

00:18:37.400 | really good whenever I take it.

00:18:38.520 | It always helps me realize, oh, you know, I'm not doing weekly reviews.

00:18:41.600 | I should probably do a weekly review

00:18:42.680 | because it's a thing that is really, really helpful.

00:18:44.680 | That would be where I would start.

00:18:46.240 | And I kind of wish I made something like that.

00:18:48.280 | But in the meantime, I think that's the best resource that I can point people to.

00:18:51.240 | OK, obviously, I haven't taken this quiz.

00:18:53.640 | I probably will do it as soon as we wrap up.

00:18:55.280 | I'll put the link to the show notes.

00:18:56.520 | So I am quite comfortable right now, which is actually true almost every day.

00:19:02.000 | And that's thanks to Viori.

00:19:03.320 | And I'm excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

00:19:05.960 | They make performance apparel that's incredibly versatile.

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00:19:17.200 | Seriously, I am pretty sure it's more comfortable than whatever

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00:19:22.520 | in which case you already know what I mean.

00:19:24.320 | And it's not just for men.

00:19:26.120 | My wife is as obsessed with Viori as I am.

00:19:28.760 | My favorite is the Sunday Performance Joggers.

00:19:31.400 | I think I have three pairs, and they are probably the most comfortable pants

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00:19:36.160 | Their products can be used for just about any activity,

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00:19:43.920 | or their meta pants can even work for a night out.

00:19:46.480 | Honestly, I think Viori is an investment in your happiness.

00:19:50.000 | And for All The Hacks listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase,

00:19:54.080 | as well as free shipping and returns on U.S.

00:19:57.040 | orders over $75.

00:19:59.120 | So you should definitely check them out at AllTheHacks.com/viori

00:20:04.200 | or in the link in the show notes.

00:20:06.320 | Again, go to AllTheHacks.com/v-u-o-r-i

00:20:12.280 | and get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

00:20:18.080 | I wish I could say that I'm eating a fully balanced diet every day,

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00:21:29.080 | Let's run through a few aspects of productivity.

00:21:31.320 | I'll focus on ones that I'm most interested in is just not wasting time

00:21:34.560 | procrastinating, pushing things off, getting distracted.

00:21:38.000 | What are your suggestions there?

00:21:40.200 | I know this was an interview I was really excited to prepare for.

00:21:43.560 | Yet somehow, even though there was a hard start last night,

00:21:46.920 | I found myself going down a rabbit hole of something that was less time sensitive,

00:21:51.200 | but definitely interesting.

00:21:53.640 | Help me out. Hmm.

00:21:56.360 | Yeah, the whole thing about procrastination,

00:21:59.080 | I am in the process of writing three book chapters on this for my book,

00:22:02.760 | so I've had the whole procrastination thing in my mind

00:22:05.320 | and in my headspace for the last few weeks.

00:22:07.880 | Essentially, I think the first step is to.

00:22:11.720 | Appreciate the difference between procrastination and prioritization,

00:22:15.800 | because a lot of people will say that they don't have time to do something.

00:22:18.880 | I know that you aren't like that because you're in this optimization space.

00:22:21.760 | But when people say, oh, I don't have time to do X,

00:22:23.720 | I want to learn Japanese, but I don't have time.

00:22:25.320 | I always think if I'm in the mode of giving unsolicited advice

00:22:28.400 | or if they're asking me for advice, I'd be like, OK,

00:22:31.120 | do you not have time, like genuinely, or is it just not a priority?

00:22:34.520 | And people like, no, I don't feel like I have the time.

00:22:38.160 | I work full time. I've got kids. I've got to put them to bed.

00:22:40.560 | I'm like, OK, fair enough. You haven't got the time.

00:22:42.240 | Basically what that means is it's not a priority.

00:22:44.200 | Then I say something like, OK, if I gave you a million dollars

00:22:47.080 | every time you did 20 minutes of Japanese practice,

00:22:49.280 | would you do the 20 minutes of Japanese practice?

00:22:51.040 | And they're like, oh, hell yeah.

00:22:52.160 | And I'm like, OK, cool.

00:22:53.000 | So you're consciously deprioritizing Japanese

00:22:55.760 | because there are other more important things in your life.

00:22:57.520 | And that's totally fine.

00:22:58.560 | That doesn't mean you're procrastinating from this thing.

00:23:00.240 | So there's no need to beat yourself up about it.

00:23:01.840 | It just means it's not a priority in your life.

00:23:03.080 | And then people are like, OK, cool.

00:23:04.360 | But I have this thing that is a priority in my life.

00:23:06.320 | And then that takes us down an interesting conversation of like,

00:23:09.320 | how do we actually prioritize things that we say are a priority?

00:23:12.560 | I wonder if you like this as well.

00:23:14.280 | I feel like it's easy to give advice and then we just don't take our own advice.

00:23:17.200 | So when it comes to book writing, for example, literally last week,

00:23:20.280 | my editor and I had a call.

00:23:22.080 | She was like, how's progress on the book this week?

00:23:23.960 | And I was like, oh, you know, stuff came up.

00:23:26.400 | Oh, you know, this happened and that happened and this happened.

00:23:29.640 | She was like, OK. She was super nice about it.

00:23:31.840 | But she was like, you know, it sounds like this book

00:23:33.480 | is supposed to be a priority in your life. Is it actually?

00:23:35.680 | And I was like, yeah, it is.

00:23:36.840 | It definitely is. It's my number one priority.

00:23:38.840 | And she was like, OK, so then why aren't you prioritizing it?

00:23:41.200 | And I was like, damn, you're right, Rachel.

00:23:43.880 | And then we figured out strategies to help me prioritize that

00:23:46.760 | and actually make time for it.

00:23:48.160 | And happy to go over the strategies.

00:23:49.640 | But those have really helped in the last week.

00:23:51.200 | I've been able to make so much more progress than I did in the last month.

00:23:53.840 | Let's get into it.

00:23:55.040 | My biggest satisfaction when I get an email from a listener is

00:23:57.760 | I took all these notes of tactics listening to this episode.

00:24:01.040 | So let's get into all of them.

00:24:02.600 | Amazing. OK, so basically three part way to approach this equation.

00:24:07.800 | Essentially.

00:24:09.040 | Let's start with the problem.

00:24:10.200 | My opening gambit is going to be that procrastination

00:24:12.360 | is not a problem with doing the work.

00:24:14.240 | Procrastination is a problem with starting the work,

00:24:16.440 | because usually once you've gotten started with something,

00:24:18.920 | it's generally easy enough to keep on going.

00:24:20.960 | Newton's first law, the law of inertia.

00:24:23.040 | It takes energy to get the flywheel going.

00:24:25.000 | But once it's going, it's like, oh, you know, you're into the swing of things.

00:24:27.800 | You're enjoying the thing that you're doing.

00:24:28.960 | You're getting energy from it.

00:24:29.800 | And it's usually not so bad.

00:24:31.320 | Does that broadly vibe with your experience of procrastinating as well?

00:24:33.960 | Yeah, I think it's probably two part.

00:24:36.560 | It's hard to get started.

00:24:38.000 | And then it's hard to avoid the shiny objects that pop in front of you,

00:24:42.480 | like an email, some alert or something.

00:24:45.200 | So those those two are big for me. Yes, exactly.

00:24:48.240 | Yeah. So the way I think of them is I separate out procrastination,

00:24:51.280 | which is the getting started problem from distraction,

00:24:53.360 | which is the how do I focus once I've already gotten started?

00:24:56.000 | The distraction stuff is all fairly simple.

00:24:57.600 | It's like turn off notifications.

00:24:59.320 | Great hack I discovered the other day.

00:25:01.320 | Option and clicking on a Mac on your time in the corner

00:25:05.840 | automatically puts your Mac into do not disturb mode,

00:25:08.200 | which automatically silences all notifications,

00:25:11.040 | except the ones that you let through from a loved one or something like that.

00:25:13.920 | So I've been using that a lot this last week.

00:25:15.960 | And now I just don't see my notifications

00:25:17.880 | until I go to the toilet to take a break.

00:25:19.360 | I'm like, oh, hello.

00:25:20.760 | I'm so glad I missed all the notifications

00:25:22.280 | because they would have just completely taken me out of flow

00:25:24.160 | and got me very distracted.

00:25:25.760 | But just for the procrastination stuff, then we can talk about distraction in a sec.

00:25:29.520 | If we accept that procrastination is ultimately a problem with getting started,

00:25:33.560 | and that's the thing that we're trying to optimize for,

00:25:35.320 | it's like, OK, what are the barriers that stop us from getting started with something?

00:25:38.480 | I think broadly, there's three things there.

00:25:40.400 | And I call them I like to give things names in my mind.

00:25:42.680 | The fog of obscurity, the bridge of anxiety and the hump of inertia

00:25:48.160 | probably to come up with better names.

00:25:50.600 | I sort of have a bit of a diagram in my head.

00:25:52.080 | And the fog of obscurity is where, you know, you want to do a thing,

00:25:55.280 | but you actually don't know specifically what you need to do

00:25:58.280 | or when you're going to do it or where you're going to do it

00:26:00.800 | or how you're going to do it.

00:26:01.920 | And then you're just like, oh, you know, there's this thing.

00:26:03.920 | It's like, oh, I need to start that podcast.

00:26:05.720 | But if you don't know what that first step is or what the next step is,

00:26:08.160 | it's just so hard to even think about getting started

00:26:10.400 | because now there's this enormous like mental barrier

00:26:13.040 | that's stopping us from actually moving forward in this thing.

00:26:15.920 | And so the solution to that one is basically just make a very, very concrete plan.

00:26:18.880 | And what I like to do is separate the planning of a thing

00:26:21.680 | from the doing of a thing, because it's very easy to make a plan, right?

00:26:24.400 | If, for example, I need to work out,

00:26:26.360 | it's very easy for me to procrastinate when I don't have a plan.

00:26:29.080 | I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm working out.

00:26:30.880 | But if I was talking to someone right now and they were to be like, all right,

00:26:33.240 | what's your plan for the workout?

00:26:34.680 | I'd be like, I can make a plan. It's not that hard making a plan.

00:26:36.960 | You know what? I'll do it tonight, 7 p.m.

00:26:39.080 | Yeah, I'll go to the gym that's in my building and I'll do, you know,

00:26:42.960 | let me bring up Reddit fitness and find a workout plan.

00:26:45.880 | And it's taken me two minutes to make a plan.

00:26:48.520 | But now I'm far more likely to actually go and do the thing.

00:26:52.200 | I either work out because I've got a slot in my calendar for it.

00:26:54.760 | And I know what I'm doing.

00:26:56.000 | I think it's really just about those two things, finding a slot in the calendar

00:26:58.360 | and then actually knowing what to do.

00:27:00.560 | And that is broadly how you tackle the fog of obscurity.

00:27:03.760 | Are you with me so far? Any thoughts? Yeah, yeah.

00:27:05.600 | No, no, I'm here. Yes. Nice.

00:27:08.440 | And then there are other things we can do with this.

00:27:10.320 | If I'm coaching someone or this is the method that this chap Chris,

00:27:13.040 | this productivity coach that I had, but it was always like, OK,

00:27:15.720 | so for me at the time, I wanted to get good at art because I was thinking,

00:27:19.320 | you know what, I wanted to take some art lessons because why not?

00:27:21.600 | It was like, OK, what's the next step?

00:27:23.240 | I was like, OK, I guess find an art teacher.

00:27:25.960 | It was like, OK, how are you going to do that?

00:27:28.120 | I was like, OK, post on Instagram and be like, hey, anyone want to teach me art?

00:27:31.920 | And also, like, just do a Google search for art teachers in Cambridge.

00:27:35.000 | And I was like, cool, when are you going to do that?

00:27:37.240 | And I was like, shit, OK, I guess I've got a 15 minute slot

00:27:39.600 | in my calendar two hours from now.

00:27:41.440 | It was like, cool, put it in the calendar.

00:27:42.880 | And I was like, cool.

00:27:44.040 | And it was like, OK, now you've got a slot in your calendar.

00:27:46.720 | Fast forward this time next week.

00:27:49.080 | You and I are chatting and you have not found an art teacher.

00:27:51.640 | What are the top three reasons why you've not found an art teacher?

00:27:55.120 | And I was like, OK, maybe something came up and I was super busy.

00:27:59.280 | Maybe I looked on Google and I couldn't find anyone in the first two results.

00:28:02.320 | And so I gave up.

00:28:03.640 | Maybe no one replied to my Instagram thing.

00:28:05.640 | And it was like, OK, cool, that's fine.

00:28:07.160 | How might you mitigate against each of those risks?

00:28:09.400 | I was like, OK, maybe I mean, I can just like look at ten Google results

00:28:13.040 | rather than five.

00:28:13.640 | I can maybe post on Twitter as well, not Instagram.

00:28:15.480 | It's like you're coming up with strategies ahead of time,

00:28:18.520 | knowing that I am a dumbass and my brain is going to encourage me

00:28:22.960 | to procrastinate from this thing.

00:28:24.200 | But if I try and nudge myself in the direction of doing the thing

00:28:27.880 | that I know I want to do, I get art lessons.

00:28:29.880 | I'm far more likely to actually do the thing.

00:28:31.440 | And so just working through this loop a single time.

00:28:33.560 | The final question there is what is the action you can take right now

00:28:36.520 | that will almost guarantee that you'll actually do this thing

00:28:39.200 | when it comes to the time?

00:28:40.560 | I was like, OK, you know what?

00:28:42.000 | While I'm here, I'll just type out the message

00:28:43.800 | I'm going to post on my Instagram story.

00:28:45.120 | So I literally opened Apple Notes.

00:28:46.320 | I typed out, hey, guys, looking for an art teacher.

00:28:48.400 | Anyone want to teach me art over Zoom?

00:28:50.520 | And then when it came to two hours later, I just copied and pasted

00:28:53.560 | that onto Instagram, and now I found an art teacher.

00:28:55.920 | And just through that one action, I'd been procrastinating

00:28:58.240 | from taking art lessons for three years at that point.

00:29:00.520 | But all it took was a conversation with a guy who had paid a lot of money

00:29:04.560 | to ask me a basic question of what are you doing, when are you doing it?

00:29:08.040 | And just giving me this framework to think about decision making here.

00:29:12.520 | And I took art lessons for about six months, but it was super fun.

00:29:14.720 | That's amazing.

00:29:16.560 | OK, so that's getting past the first start.

00:29:18.640 | Yeah, I can't remember.

00:29:19.960 | So it was fog of obscurity, something and then a hump.

00:29:22.440 | Yeah, exactly. OK, cool.

00:29:23.840 | So fog of obscurity is the first one.

00:29:25.400 | You know, you've gotten over the fog of obscurity when the thing

00:29:28.080 | that you're trying to do,

00:29:28.960 | you've got it in the calendar and you know what you're doing.

00:29:31.000 | That's all you need.

00:29:31.840 | At that point, you have enough clarity on the task to be able to make progress on it.

00:29:34.760 | But if you don't have those two crucial points and everything else,

00:29:36.960 | it just kind of goes out the window.

00:29:37.920 | Basically, getting clarity on what you're doing and when you're doing it

00:29:40.160 | is like just the magical solution to that.

00:29:42.160 | And you don't need to pay a performance

00:29:43.800 | coach large amounts of money to encourage you to basically do that.

00:29:47.040 | The next one is what I like to call the bridge of anxiety.

00:29:50.680 | And this is where we appreciate that a lot of procrastination

00:29:55.400 | doesn't come from not having the time to do something.

00:29:57.880 | It comes from actually our emotions that get in our way.

00:30:00.640 | And there's a researcher called Tim Pitchell, who has a great book.

00:30:05.280 | I think it's called The Procrastination Puzzle, which is basically

00:30:08.280 | all about the emotional side of procrastination.

00:30:09.920 | And he researches this and talks about all the different

00:30:11.760 | emotional barriers that get in our way.

00:30:13.600 | The example I use a lot is people who procrastinate

00:30:15.800 | from starting a YouTube channel, for example.

00:30:17.960 | And it's like, yeah, I know that I've got my time slot

00:30:20.240 | and I know I just need to film this video

00:30:21.600 | because I've taken Ali Abdaal's course on YouTube or whatever.

00:30:23.640 | I know I just need to film the video.

00:30:25.440 | But you're in the time slot and there's something that's stopping you,

00:30:27.960 | something that's holding you back

00:30:29.040 | from doing this thing which you claim to want, crucially.

00:30:31.040 | And it's like, what's going on there?

00:30:33.280 | And there's this thing in the world of meditational mindfulness

00:30:37.120 | called the RAIN method. Have you come across this?

00:30:39.120 | No. So the RAIN method, Tara Brock talks about this quite a lot.

00:30:43.440 | I think it was invented like 20 years ago by some other meditation practitioner.

00:30:46.440 | Basically, the idea is that any time an emotion is getting in our way,

00:30:50.240 | we want to follow the RAIN method.

00:30:51.320 | So R-A-I-N. So R is recognize.

00:30:54.400 | So recognize that what the feeling is, it's getting in the way.

00:30:57.720 | In the case of I'm struggling to start my YouTube channel,

00:31:00.000 | I'm struggling to post that video.

00:31:01.400 | It's probably some kind of fear or rather some kind of anxiety,

00:31:04.520 | because I'm going to cite Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart,

00:31:07.200 | which defines fear as when there is a threat to your survival right now

00:31:11.000 | and anxiety as there is a potential threat to your survival

00:31:14.960 | at some point in the future, maybe.

00:31:17.320 | And so no one ever procrastinates from running away from a lion,

00:31:20.160 | but we procrastinate from public speaking.

00:31:22.320 | We procrastinate from starting the podcast, from writing a blog,

00:31:24.640 | from putting ourselves out there in some way because we perceive

00:31:27.000 | that there is a potential threat to our survival, i.e.

00:31:30.120 | our social status within our group at some point, maybe in the future.

00:31:33.360 | And just recognizing that as a thing that like, yeah,

00:31:35.960 | I don't want this video to go out

00:31:37.280 | because I'm afraid of what people will think of me. OK, cool.

00:31:39.840 | We've recognized the emotion that's getting in our way.

00:31:42.560 | Then we have A for allow, which is basically that that's totally fine.

00:31:47.000 | I don't need to moralize.

00:31:48.160 | I don't need to beat myself up for having this emotion.

00:31:50.440 | But yeah, I have a fear that people are going to look down on me

00:31:53.000 | if I start a TikTok page, because I feel that people are going to judge me.

00:31:56.400 | And I feel that that's going to be really bad

00:31:57.760 | for my social standing in my group, and that's totally OK. I'm human.

00:32:00.320 | Then we have I, which is investigate, which is like getting curious.

00:32:04.880 | Huh? I wonder where this feeling is coming from.

00:32:06.680 | Why do I feel like if I started a YouTube channel or if I started a podcast

00:32:10.440 | or if I started talking about airline point

00:32:12.520 | hacking on a podcast that suddenly it would be a bad thing?

00:32:15.720 | Oh, I wonder what's going on there.

00:32:17.160 | And that's where you just take a few minutes to explore your feelings

00:32:19.760 | around that thing.

00:32:20.400 | And then N stands for either nurture or non-identification,

00:32:24.760 | depending on who you ask.

00:32:25.800 | And basically what that means is just this appreciation

00:32:27.920 | in the world of meditation and mindfulness that we are not our feelings.

00:32:31.680 | Just because I have the feeling of fear does not mean I am that thing

00:32:36.040 | and does not mean necessarily that I need to let that hold me back.

00:32:38.800 | And this idea that the way you feel about something

00:32:41.640 | actually doesn't really have any bearing on whether you do the thing or not.

00:32:45.080 | I might not feel like going to work in the morning, but I'm going to go to work.

00:32:47.680 | Anyway, I might not feel like brushing my teeth

00:32:49.880 | because I can't be bothered, but I'm going to brush my teeth anyway.

00:32:52.120 | Similarly, just because I feel the fear of starting my podcast

00:32:55.600 | and talking about airline point hacking,

00:32:57.480 | that doesn't necessarily mean like I have to identify with that.

00:32:59.640 | I can choose to act in spite of that fear.

00:33:01.440 | And so that's where we kind of go a little bit emotional

00:33:03.920 | and a little bit like trying to figure out.

00:33:06.400 | And I've got a bunch of more specific things, but I think that's the general

00:33:09.760 | kind of rain method for dealing with any kind of emotion that gets in our way.

00:33:13.040 | OK, I'm practically thinking about a few ways that I would have used this.

00:33:17.400 | I feel like the one place where I get stuck is like, oh, I'm trying to get

00:33:20.640 | a specific person to come on the show.

00:33:22.320 | And what's the email say? When do I send it?

00:33:24.560 | And then I end up just sending the thing that I drafted like two weeks ago.

00:33:28.200 | And now I'm just like, I just waited two weeks to do the thing

00:33:30.240 | I was already going to do because it's not writing it.

00:33:32.320 | I've even written the email.

00:33:33.440 | It's like trying to figure out, is there a more optimal way to do something?

00:33:36.800 | Maybe I can find a friend who knows the person and that would be better.

00:33:39.600 | So I should hold off.

00:33:40.560 | But I don't think even doing it precludes you from finding another path

00:33:44.120 | if it doesn't work.

00:33:44.840 | So yeah, I just need to like zone in on why I'm not doing it.

00:33:48.840 | No, exactly. Yeah, I think that's interesting.

00:33:50.920 | There's another point here.

00:33:51.960 | Again, it's fresh in my mind because me and Chris were talking about this.

00:33:54.640 | So Chris, this productivity coach who I interviewed is a professional poker player.

00:33:57.920 | And we were talking about kind of lessons

00:34:00.960 | he's learned from the world of poker that apply to life.

00:34:03.200 | And there's a concept that apparently people who play poker use,

00:34:05.960 | which is the idea of expected value, which you and some listeners

00:34:09.160 | might be familiar with, basically the magnitude of the outcome you want,

00:34:12.240 | like how good is this thing?

00:34:13.560 | Will this thing make me $100?

00:34:14.880 | Cool. And then multiplied by the probability of the thing happening.

00:34:18.320 | So if I've got a 50% chance of making $100, the expected value

00:34:21.880 | of every time I flip the coin is $50, for example.

00:34:25.480 | And expected value poker players shorten to EV

00:34:29.200 | because people like these sorts of acronyms.

00:34:31.440 | And whenever poker players are making decisions, they're like, oh,

00:34:34.040 | it's either a plus EV or a minus EV decision.

00:34:37.120 | That is the expected value positive or is it negative?

00:34:39.440 | And what they mean there is that if I did this decision every time,

00:34:42.400 | would I expect to come out on top or would I expect to not come out on top?

00:34:46.160 | Now, in the case of you're sending an email,

00:34:49.120 | that sounds like a pretty plus EV decision, because if you were to send 100 emails,

00:34:52.520 | maybe a handful of people replied to you.

00:34:56.640 | But it's not like there's any real downside.

00:34:58.680 | And so rather than being wedded to the specific outcome of this decision

00:35:02.560 | that I really want this person, how do I reach out to them?

00:35:05.560 | I remember the email you sent me.

00:35:06.920 | You were like, yeah, I was kind of procrastinating a bit.

00:35:08.640 | I was kind of thinking we might have it in, but then I thought I'd just email you.

00:35:10.920 | I just owned the feeling in the email.

00:35:14.000 | Yeah, I love it because I have that same feeling.

00:35:17.080 | I'm always like, oh, maybe I couldn't possibly just cold email someone.

00:35:20.240 | I've got to find some kind of way of like DMing them on Twitter in some way

00:35:23.520 | and getting them to follow me.

00:35:24.400 | And it's just all plus EV.

00:35:25.960 | Like it's just sending a cold email is always a plus EV decision

00:35:28.880 | because there's literally no downside to it.

00:35:30.640 | And chances are, if someone didn't respond to the email,

00:35:32.920 | they either didn't want to talk to you or didn't see it.

00:35:35.200 | So if you reach out to them through some other channel,

00:35:37.560 | if they didn't see it, maybe it'll work.

00:35:39.640 | If they don't want to talk to you, they probably won't respond there either.

00:35:41.680 | So I don't know.

00:35:43.360 | I'm I'm I'm coaching myself through this conversation.

00:35:46.240 | OK, let's hit the last one.

00:35:48.040 | The last one is the hump of inertia.

00:35:49.640 | And that is this recognition that like for whatever we're struggling with,

00:35:52.880 | whatever we're struggling to get started with,

00:35:54.480 | there's always a little bit of a push of energy

00:35:56.360 | that we need to get started with the thing.

00:35:58.400 | Now, the question is, like, how do we get there?

00:36:00.800 | Once we've got the clarity on the thing, once we've tried to figure out

00:36:03.440 | what our emotions are getting in the way at some points,

00:36:05.760 | some stuff is just kind of boring and you just kind of have to do it.

00:36:08.120 | So like, how do you nudge yourself to just get started?

00:36:10.160 | At this point, some people would say that motivation is a thing.

00:36:13.400 | You've got to motivate yourself to do it.

00:36:14.680 | You've got to really want it.

00:36:15.840 | You've got to want it so much that you can't breathe or whatever.

00:36:18.160 | These motivational videos say, and that's fine.

00:36:20.560 | But there's a great book by Jeff Hayden called The Motivation Myth,

00:36:23.360 | which basically argues that motivation is a bit of a myth.

00:36:25.920 | Like we don't summon up the motivation magically to do a thing.

00:36:29.560 | We do the thing.

00:36:30.560 | And by seeing a small success, that then helps us

00:36:33.960 | summon the motivation to continue to do the thing.

00:36:36.720 | And so really, motivation doesn't lead to action.

00:36:38.800 | Action leads to motivation.

00:36:40.560 | And so understanding that, I think, was a big unlock for me that like, really,

00:36:44.080 | just because I don't feel like doing something

00:36:46.520 | doesn't actually stop me from doing the thing.

00:36:48.360 | And therefore, I can just do it.

00:36:50.520 | And sometimes that works where I just tell myself that

00:36:54.200 | I could just get out of bed right now, even though I don't feel like it.

00:36:56.960 | That's like the motivation approach.

00:36:58.840 | And you've got like the discipline approach, the willpower approach,

00:37:01.080 | the David Goggins approach.

00:37:02.200 | If you're not doing it at that point, you're just soft.

00:37:03.920 | You just got to use the willpower.

00:37:05.440 | You've got to use grit, determination, discipline to push through and do the thing.

00:37:08.520 | That's fine as well. That works.

00:37:09.640 | The thing that I personally like to do is I like to tell myself,

00:37:13.000 | I'm just going to do the thing for two minutes

00:37:15.360 | and then I'm going to stop doing the thing.

00:37:16.960 | I've got a couple of songs on my Spotify playlist,

00:37:18.760 | which are like two minutes long, like instrumental songs.

00:37:20.800 | And I'll just like put on one of the songs.

00:37:22.440 | I mean, I'm just going to do this thing until the end of the song.

00:37:24.200 | And usually the song ends, the next one plays on shuffle.

00:37:26.440 | And I don't even realize that I've just continued doing the thing.

00:37:28.720 | Occasionally I just do it for two minutes and then I stop.

00:37:30.720 | And I think, cool, that's fine. It's not my day.

00:37:32.520 | I say 90% of the time, as long as I can just talk myself into doing it

00:37:35.560 | for two minutes, then I'm unlikely to stop doing it

00:37:39.120 | because once I've gotten to the swing of things, it's a lot easier to get started.

00:37:41.720 | And I guess my final point on this is if all else fails,

00:37:46.120 | something that will never fail is actually putting money on the line.

00:37:49.600 | My friend Thomas Frank is this huge YouTuber, two and a half million subscribers.

00:37:53.000 | The way he motivated himself to publish videos in the early days of his channel

00:37:56.920 | when no one was watching was an app called Beeminder,

00:37:59.720 | which is an automatic thing where it like connects to your YouTube RSS feed.

00:38:04.120 | And if you don't publish a video every week, it will take $30

00:38:07.600 | out of your debit card or out of your bank account just completely automatically.

00:38:10.640 | And that was how he made himself accountable.

00:38:12.840 | He's like, well, I've got to publish a video every week.

00:38:14.360 | Otherwise, I'm losing $30.

00:38:16.200 | Now, depending on who you are, $30 might not seem like enough money,

00:38:19.400 | but it needs to be enough money to sting.

00:38:21.520 | So one thing that I've actually tried in the past is giving my housemate

00:38:25.840 | £1,000 and saying, if I don't do this thing, you get to keep the £1,000.

00:38:29.960 | And that has just worked magically for me to do absolutely anything.

00:38:33.560 | I don't like using it all the time.

00:38:34.760 | I'd much rather use all these other nicer methods.

00:38:37.000 | But that is a fail safe.

00:38:38.400 | If I'm ever really struggling to do a thing that I know I have to do,

00:38:41.000 | like write £1,000, transfer the money, and they can always give it back to me

00:38:44.320 | once I've done the thing.

00:38:45.600 | I love that one.

00:38:46.480 | And it probably depends on the circumstance.

00:38:48.200 | I was running today with our daughter in a stroller, which, by the way,

00:38:52.360 | for anyone who doesn't have kids, once you start running with a child,

00:38:55.400 | you're like, I'm now a horrible runner.

00:38:57.160 | I've taken like 10 steps back because I'm now pushing this stroller

00:39:01.240 | and I just can't run as fast.

00:39:03.320 | I use the Goggins approach, which is like,

00:39:05.080 | am I really going to tell myself that I can't just make it

00:39:07.640 | to the end of this neighborhood?

00:39:09.640 | Like, I really can't do that.

00:39:11.000 | That works really well.

00:39:11.840 | But I don't think that works as well when you're like sitting down at your desk

00:39:14.960 | to complete a task.

00:39:16.160 | So having all the tools is probably pretty helpful. Yeah.

00:39:18.600 | Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

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00:40:25.400 | That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y.com today.

00:40:29.320 | Must be 21 plus, not available in all locations.

00:40:32.680 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:40:37.960 | Your support is what keeps this show going to get all of the URLs, codes,

00:40:43.320 | deals and discounts from our partners.

00:40:45.520 | You can go to all the hacks.com/deals.

00:40:49.120 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

00:40:52.200 | You mentioned a few apps in the conversation.

00:40:54.680 | You mentioned you put notes in Apple Notes.

00:40:56.400 | You mentioned this Beeminder.

00:40:57.640 | I'm curious, right before we started, I was just doing some quick

00:41:00.720 | last minute research, went to Twitter.

00:41:02.280 | You posted this 24 apps that you use.

00:41:04.280 | I don't need to go through all 24, but I'm curious

00:41:07.800 | how you process information and where you put it.

00:41:11.000 | What is the main stack for processing email or a new newsletter

00:41:16.360 | or something you find that you want to read later?

00:41:18.560 | Because I find that a lot of the distraction that comes is like,

00:41:21.600 | Oh, there's a thing I want to read it.

00:41:22.880 | Oh, this thing popped up.

00:41:24.320 | How do I stay on top of it all?

00:41:26.440 | Nice.

00:41:26.840 | So the app that I used to use until about three months ago was Instapaper.

00:41:31.120 | Unsurprisingly, it's great.

00:41:32.320 | Anytime I'd see a link, I'd either share it to Instapaper or right click,

00:41:35.400 | save to Instapaper or open the article in Chrome and just save to Instapaper

00:41:39.000 | and just forget about it.

00:41:40.440 | Installing that app was just freaking game changing because I was also getting

00:41:43.520 | so distracted down these rabbit holes of these interesting articles.

00:41:46.000 | But then I'd save them to Instapaper and I'd just go through them

00:41:48.840 | when I was like on a train or on a bus or on the toilet or something like that.

00:41:52.200 | And the nice thing is, as I would follow links, you can click on a link

00:41:55.080 | and you can just save that link to Instapaper as well.

00:41:57.440 | So as I go through binge reading someone's blog, I'd be saving all these articles.

00:42:01.320 | And I've got this whole list of articles

00:42:02.600 | and it gets rid of the ads and it formats it really nicely.

00:42:04.840 | Recently, I've started using an app called Reader by the guys who make Readwise.

00:42:08.680 | I'm not sure if you're familiar with that.

00:42:10.280 | I'm not. So Readwise is sick.

00:42:12.280 | Readwise.io/ali for extended trial and affiliate link.

00:42:15.080 | Readwise is basically an app that connects to your Kindle account

00:42:18.760 | and imports everything you've ever highlighted.

00:42:21.240 | And every day it sends you an email with five of your highlights.

00:42:23.560 | And that's kind of cool.

00:42:25.480 | It means you can revisit stuff that you've highlighted in books on Kindle.

00:42:28.000 | But they've also now got this feature where they import all of your highlights

00:42:32.440 | from Instapaper and from Pocket and from these other read it later type apps.

00:42:35.640 | So every morning, if you want, you can subscribe to the email

00:42:38.680 | where you get a digest of five random things

00:42:41.320 | you've highlighted at some point in a previous life.

00:42:43.160 | And often I'll see things that are highlighted

00:42:45.400 | five years ago when I read this book.

00:42:46.920 | And surprisingly, this highlight came to me at a reasonable time.

00:42:49.760 | And that helps me keep ideas that I've highlighted in the past fresh on top of mind.

00:42:54.200 | But the guys who make Readwise, I'm kind of mates with them.

00:42:57.280 | We kind of became internet friends.

00:42:58.840 | And I had one of them on the podcast.

00:42:59.880 | We became internet friends through me just loving the app.

00:43:02.920 | And they've built this new app called Reader, which is in beta.

00:43:06.800 | And it's coming out like either August or September.

00:43:09.240 | And it's basically like Superhuman, but for articles and PDFs

00:43:12.840 | and things that you want to read.

00:43:14.200 | And it's amazing. So this Reader app in beta.

00:43:16.440 | I've got the test flight version on iOS is currently how I consume everything.

00:43:20.280 | I just save everything to it. It's great.

00:43:22.120 | It's got like a Chrome highlighter.

00:43:23.440 | It means that any time I'm reading anything,

00:43:25.280 | whether it's a PDF or a blog post or an article or tweet thread,

00:43:27.520 | just go straight into Reader.

00:43:28.880 | And it means I can deal with it at a later date rather than it

00:43:31.400 | distracting me from whatever I'm doing in the moment.

00:43:33.520 | Superhuman 4 is like a sucker hook for me, right?

00:43:37.560 | For anyone not listening, I think I've talked about Superhuman in the past.

00:43:40.280 | I looked at my email and I had all these invitations.

00:43:42.800 | So Superhuman is this replacement email interface for Gmail.

00:43:46.200 | You schedule a call to get to know the product before you sign up

00:43:49.160 | because it costs, I think, about $20 a month.

00:43:51.720 | All the hacks.com/superhuman affiliate link on my site

00:43:54.680 | for a free trial.

00:43:56.760 | But I never did it because I never wanted to take the plunge

00:43:59.160 | because I was like, really, I'm going to pay for email like this is crazy.

00:44:01.680 | And then finally, I was like, OK, I'm just going to try it

00:44:03.840 | because I do a lot of email.

00:44:05.640 | And there was one feature I needed and Gmail didn't have it.

00:44:09.160 | And the feature, which is probably not important to that many people,

00:44:12.320 | is I was wanted to look at emails I'd gotten from listeners

00:44:15.600 | and people and see all the other emails they've sent.

00:44:18.360 | And Gmail has this feature, but it doesn't work if you have aliases.

00:44:21.840 | So for my Gmail, I send from my personal email, my work email, all this stuff.

00:44:26.400 | Gmail only works if that email came to or from the core Gmail account.

00:44:31.000 | And Superhuman did the other thing.

00:44:32.800 | And so what I wanted to be able to do is know if we've talked about something

00:44:35.880 | in the past and all that.

00:44:37.320 | So I was like, I'm going to try it out.

00:44:39.520 | And now it's like magical, right?

00:44:42.560 | Like setting up different snippets to auto send things.

00:44:45.000 | It's just like change to everything.

00:44:46.600 | So when you say this is like Superhuman for this, I'm like, where's the link?

00:44:49.840 | I want to install it. I'm going to pay for it. It's great. What else?

00:44:52.280 | Yeah, I can hook you up with beta access if you'd like.

00:44:54.640 | I can do an email intro to the guys. I think you'd really like it.

00:44:56.880 | That would be great.

00:44:57.840 | Are there other apps like that that have kind of changed your productivity

00:45:01.000 | stack make you operate more efficiently that are not the obvious?

00:45:04.840 | Yeah, I mean, I've tried dozens, if not hundreds over the years.

00:45:08.680 | Part of being a productivity YouTuber is there is an incentive for me

00:45:11.560 | to try out every app on the market and maybe decide if I want to use it.

00:45:14.720 | We use Notion for organizing basically everything in our business,

00:45:18.240 | all of our content production for YouTube videos and for podcasts

00:45:21.520 | and for Twitter threads and for everything.

00:45:23.280 | I've recently started using Miro, M-I-R-O,

00:45:26.120 | which is this interactive whiteboarding software.

00:45:28.640 | Just gives you a blank canvas where you can put poster notes.

00:45:30.880 | And that's really useful

00:45:32.120 | for like brainstorming and whiteboarding ideas for my book

00:45:34.400 | or for courses that we're working.

00:45:35.560 | Honestly, like I haven't tried like dozens of these apps.

00:45:37.640 | I just tend to default to Apple Notes.

00:45:39.280 | If I want to write something down, it goes into Apple Notes

00:45:41.200 | and I don't think too hard about it.

00:45:43.680 | So you use anything for task management?

00:45:45.920 | Yeah, I use Todoist, but it's kind of annoying.

00:45:49.240 | And so we're moving to Notion

00:45:50.960 | because I delegate a lot of things to my assistant times two.

00:45:54.320 | So Todoist is kind of annoying for that.

00:45:56.680 | So we're actually switching to Notion for task management.

00:45:58.920 | So I use Notion for a lot, right?

00:46:00.480 | I have one Notion that's everything related to all the hacks.

00:46:02.880 | I have another Notion that's everything for our family.

00:46:05.160 | Like we're planning a trip.

00:46:06.800 | Where do we put the notes for it?

00:46:07.960 | Where do I log the flights?

00:46:08.960 | What are we looking at, you know, for our daughter?

00:46:10.760 | What is the baby registry?

00:46:11.960 | What do we need to go by?

00:46:13.040 | What is the schedule of doctor's appointments?

00:46:15.120 | All this stuff.

00:46:16.240 | So I'm a huge fan, but I find that getting information in and out of it

00:46:20.200 | is more like a project than like a quick, "Oh, I got to do this thing."

00:46:24.040 | Throwing it into Notion isn't the easiest.

00:46:27.200 | So how do you make that easy or is it just it's not easy,

00:46:30.800 | but it makes your life better, so you do it?

00:46:32.800 | Yeah, so I think my favorite task manager for iOS is Things 3.

00:46:36.320 | It's just so nice.

00:46:38.240 | The only problem is that it just doesn't work if you delegate things

00:46:40.400 | or if you have a team.

00:46:41.120 | But if I was purely solo, Things 3 all the way.

00:46:43.600 | Doist is a good cross-platform alternative.

00:46:46.080 | It's free. It's on iOS, it's on Android, it's on Windows, etc.

00:46:48.920 | And it's delegation.

00:46:50.160 | Honestly, I think everyone should have a part-time personal assistant.

00:46:53.480 | And that's an absolutely life-changing productivity hack.

00:46:56.280 | So I do not have one.

00:46:57.480 | And I've struggled in the past.

00:46:59.320 | Five years ago, I tried.

00:47:01.440 | What kinds of things do you have this person do?

00:47:03.720 | And do you ever get too caught up in, "I want to make sure that they're doing them

00:47:07.840 | the exact way I would do them."

00:47:08.840 | And then it ends up taking more time?

00:47:10.360 | Yeah, basically everything that I don't want to do myself.

00:47:14.080 | So a lot of emails.

00:47:15.320 | So my assistant, Dan, is remote, but he's based in the UK.

00:47:18.760 | So we've met in real life, which I think is really useful.

00:47:20.960 | A lot of people try and hire a VA in the Philippines for $5 an hour

00:47:24.760 | and then they're surprised when it doesn't work.

00:47:26.480 | But if you have the ability to hire someone

00:47:28.200 | that you can potentially work with in real life some of the time,

00:47:31.080 | or at least meet in person, it's just really nice.

00:47:34.480 | But anyway, Dan basically goes through all my emails.

00:47:36.680 | He deals with all my scheduling, things like scheduling this podcast, for example.

00:47:40.840 | I have basically outsourced the management of my calendar to Dan.

00:47:44.400 | So he deals with it.

00:47:46.000 | And it means that as emails come in and stuff,

00:47:48.040 | I'm actually not the first person to see an email.

00:47:50.080 | I'll see the superhuman notification on my phone.

00:47:51.680 | And if it's something like really interesting or really urgent,

00:47:53.480 | then I'll reply to it there and then.

00:47:54.760 | So yes, scheduling and emails is a big one.

00:47:56.800 | But just beyond that, there's a lot of random admin tasks in life.

00:48:00.480 | Like, for example, I knew I wanted to get a cleaner for the house.

00:48:03.600 | Kind of a bit of a first world problem.

00:48:05.800 | But like, I don't want to be the one calling up random cleaning

00:48:09.000 | agencies in London and trying to find a cleaner who can like be there

00:48:11.840 | at the same time that I want and do some of the ironing and change the sheets.

00:48:15.520 | So I just said, Hey, Dan, can you find me a cleaner for the house?

00:48:17.800 | Basically, if they can come in on a weekday morning

00:48:19.600 | and do all the things, including ironing, that's what I want.

00:48:22.120 | And it was like, cool, I'll call around.

00:48:23.440 | I'll ring a few agencies.

00:48:24.320 | And he found someone and we've got a cleaner.

00:48:25.880 | Things like I remember when I first got an assistant,

00:48:28.040 | I was just sort of playing around to be like, huh,

00:48:29.880 | what are all the things I could delegate?

00:48:31.920 | I was like, you know, I wanted to learn how to play the ukulele.

00:48:34.040 | Her name was Elizabeth at the time.

00:48:35.600 | I said, Hey, Elizabeth, can you find me a ukulele for under like 200 pounds

00:48:39.640 | and just find some reviews and just order it?

00:48:41.800 | And she was like, cool.

00:48:43.200 | The next day, a ukulele arrived at my house.

00:48:44.880 | I'd been procrastinating from, again, playing the ukulele for like two years

00:48:47.560 | because all it would have taken was for me to sit down and spend five minutes

00:48:50.160 | searching on the Internet for what's the best ukulele for a certain budget.

00:48:52.880 | But it's in a way so much easier to be able to say that to an assistant

00:48:56.400 | or to a voice note that you can then send to an assistant.

00:48:58.840 | Right now, Dan is hunting for a new property that we're moving into.

00:49:02.080 | We're trying to move studio spaces,

00:49:04.280 | ringing up estate agents and dealing with booking viewings and arranging viewings.

00:49:07.760 | Dan is doing all of that.

00:49:08.880 | And he's just getting them to send us WhatsApp videos

00:49:10.760 | so that I can spend my time doing things that I actually want to be doing,

00:49:12.920 | like talking to you on this podcast or like making videos or like writing

00:49:15.680 | or things other than dealing with the hours and hours

00:49:18.440 | a bad minute takes to book viewings for a property in a market

00:49:21.320 | where properties are moving fast.

00:49:22.840 | So almost anything within reason can be outsourced to an assistant.

00:49:25.800 | Have you done a blog post

00:49:26.760 | or a video on how to use an assistant and all the tasks you could use for them?

00:49:29.720 | No, we're working on it.

00:49:31.400 | I have this course idea in my mind that we've sort of fleshed out.

00:49:33.960 | It's going to be called something like the life changing

00:49:35.760 | magic of a personal assistant.

00:49:37.320 | And I want to make videos and blog posts and tweets

00:49:39.520 | and all of this stuff about it at some point soon.

00:49:41.640 | And for someone who hasn't gone down the path of how much this could cost,

00:49:45.960 | you mentioned you could go to the Philippines.

00:49:48.120 | It's super cheap.

00:49:48.960 | You don't need someone full time, right?

00:49:50.480 | This is something you can start at a pretty low cost.

00:49:52.760 | Yeah. Add a lot of scale.

00:49:53.960 | Yeah. I've been telling all my friends four hours a week

00:49:55.800 | will completely change your life.

00:49:57.160 | And if you can find someone local here in the UK, 15 pounds an hour.

00:50:00.480 | So that's like 20 dollars an hour for four hours.

00:50:03.200 | That's like 80 dollars a week.

00:50:04.960 | And people are always like, oh, that's like 320 dollars a month.

00:50:08.440 | That's so expensive.

00:50:09.680 | OK, this is not for students who are broke.

00:50:11.360 | It's for people who have real jobs.

00:50:12.760 | It's like a what's your actual hourly rate?

00:50:15.480 | Like you're doing the whole Naval thing of like,

00:50:17.200 | what is your actual hourly rate?

00:50:18.560 | Should you really be the one to do this thing that you don't want to do?

00:50:20.960 | But also the other way of thinking of it is like if you could free up

00:50:23.960 | four hours of your time to, for example, spend with your family,

00:50:26.720 | how much would that be worth to you over the long term?

00:50:29.040 | It's like, OK, probably worth more than 20 dollars. Great.

00:50:31.120 | So now that gives you an idea of how much it would potentially be worth

00:50:35.280 | hiring an assistant for.

00:50:36.880 | I'm so bullish on the part time personal assistant thing.

00:50:38.840 | I think it's great.

00:50:39.960 | I got this email from someone this morning.

00:50:41.920 | I'm going to butcher the name, but Lee Aaron.

00:50:44.400 | And they were like, hey, can you do an episode on family life?

00:50:46.840 | I know you've talked about it a little, but time.

00:50:48.600 | How do I maximize my time?

00:50:50.000 | So this is a great example to the Aaron who wrote in

00:50:52.600 | something to consider to buy back some time.

00:50:54.960 | And I'm a big fan of buying time, like to the extent that you can find

00:50:58.080 | a person to do a thing that you don't want to do

00:51:00.280 | or not that you don't want to do.

00:51:01.640 | I used to love cooking before kids.

00:51:03.920 | Cooking was like in lieu of sitting on the couch, doing nothing.

00:51:06.960 | And that trade off was good.

00:51:08.200 | Now, cooking might be in lieu of spending time with your kids

00:51:11.560 | or working or doing these other things because you just have less time.

00:51:15.160 | So it's not that I don't like it.

00:51:16.920 | It's that I now have different priorities

00:51:18.720 | because there are more things on my plate.

00:51:20.520 | And so whatever's at the bottom of that list, I find that we often

00:51:24.120 | are doing those things, even though we might not actually prioritize them

00:51:28.280 | because they have to happen.

00:51:29.320 | But to the extent you can hire someone to cook or to clean

00:51:32.040 | or to do whatever task it is on your list.

00:51:35.240 | It sounds like I need to test out one of these services.

00:51:37.760 | Yeah, it's a it's a great experiment.

00:51:39.560 | I keep procrastinating.

00:51:40.680 | I got to get something very clear of what I'm going to do next.

00:51:43.040 | So Chris, the next question I would ask you is when are you going to find a VA?

00:51:47.000 | So this is a great segue.

00:51:49.000 | But before I want to hit one thing and then I want to jump to what

00:51:52.360 | I think will be a great way to answer this.

00:51:54.480 | You mentioned you read a lot.

00:51:55.920 | You save notes from Kindle.

00:51:57.080 | You find them all over the place.

00:51:58.560 | I've seen that you write a bunch about reading effectively and efficiently.

00:52:01.040 | And so I want to wrap up the productivity thing with what you're doing there,

00:52:04.120 | because I have a lot of books.

00:52:05.880 | I enjoy reading them, but I don't think I'm doing it right.

00:52:08.560 | And I know that sounds so ridiculous.

00:52:10.320 | Like I know how to read the words on the page, but I feel like

00:52:13.200 | if you've written posts and made videos about reading effectively and efficiently,

00:52:16.840 | I'm confident that there's a way I can do it better.

00:52:19.480 | Hmm. So do you read on physical book or Kindle or what's your jam?

00:52:23.960 | To be honest, I a lot of times get the e-book,

00:52:26.200 | but I sometimes really prefer the physical book, but I could do both.

00:52:29.360 | I'm not like wedded to one or the other, but I am not good at audio books,

00:52:33.280 | despite being great at podcasts.

00:52:35.440 | I don't know.

00:52:36.040 | I feel like whenever I'm listening to an audio book, sometimes I get distracted.

00:52:40.400 | And then I realize, oh, I missed the last five minutes.

00:52:43.520 | And if I try to not be distracted and I just like lie in bed to listen,

00:52:46.960 | then I find that, you know, I might fall asleep or something.

00:52:49.160 | Yeah, I know what you mean.

00:52:50.640 | Another question I would ask, and maybe you can answer

00:52:52.160 | like what your listeners would be thinking about this is like,

00:52:54.400 | why do you want to read more effectively?

00:52:57.240 | Like, what's the point?

00:52:58.120 | Retention, I read a lot of things and I learn these fascinating things,

00:53:02.640 | especially when I'm reading books that people I'm interviewing have written.

00:53:05.160 | I want to remember those things, not just for five minutes,

00:53:08.240 | not just for the day I want to process them.

00:53:10.520 | And then to the extent they're a way to read faster or more efficiently,

00:53:15.880 | they're kind of like efficiently, maybe effectively.

00:53:17.640 | It's like effectively, I retain the information efficiently.

00:53:19.720 | It just happens faster.

00:53:21.560 | Yeah, sure. Have you come across building a second brain?

00:53:23.560 | So I'm going back and forth with Tiago,

00:53:26.360 | who will come on the show a little later this year.

00:53:28.960 | I took his course in like 2019, 2020, something like that.

00:53:32.640 | And that introduced me to a lot of ideas around retention of stuff

00:53:37.200 | and taking information and doing useful things with it.

00:53:40.240 | It's a fairly expensive course, but the book covers all of the things

00:53:43.000 | and the book is, you know, the price of a book.

00:53:44.640 | But broadly, I think the easy hack, we're all about hacks here

00:53:47.680 | for remembering stuff is to basically use Readwise.

00:53:51.880 | I have yet to find an app that is better than Readwise at this,

00:53:54.520 | which if you're highlighting things on Kindle, it automatically files them.

00:53:58.360 | It also has like an app where you can literally scan the text of a book

00:54:02.200 | as you're reading it, if you want a thing, and it will OCR

00:54:05.240 | recognize the characters and will recognize what book it's from

00:54:09.200 | and will just categorize it automatically.

00:54:11.680 | And then just by virtue of reading that email every day of like five highlights,

00:54:15.440 | five things that have resonated enough with you for you to want to highlight.

00:54:18.160 | I found that to be genuinely the single biggest thing

00:54:20.760 | that has changed the game in terms of my retention of ideas.

00:54:24.000 | And people was like, oh, you know, when you're on podcasts,

00:54:26.640 | how are you able to cite all these sources and these books and quotes and stuff?

00:54:29.480 | So I was like, look at the Readwise email once in a while.

00:54:32.640 | And it just kind of resurfaces the quotes.

00:54:34.560 | That's like, I think, the basic level that does most of the good stuff.

00:54:37.600 | To make sure I got that, if you scan the page of a physical book,

00:54:41.120 | look, I mean, Apple now has this live text, right?

00:54:44.240 | You could just copy and paste the text, but this actually knows what book it is

00:54:47.360 | and will actually store that information also.

00:54:49.400 | There may be an intermediate step where it connects to your Amazon account

00:54:53.080 | and it therefore knows what book you own.

00:54:54.880 | And sometimes you have to like type in the name of the title or something.

00:54:57.760 | But yeah, it's pretty magical when it works.

00:55:00.120 | There is an intermediate step when that particular thing doesn't work.

00:55:02.240 | So that would be how I'd do the whole retention thing broadly.

00:55:05.360 | The actual way of retaining anything is to find a way

00:55:07.920 | to use that information in your day to day life,

00:55:10.000 | maybe to create a piece of content or something or other based around that.

00:55:13.640 | So if a book really, really resonated with me, I've got loads of highlights for it.

00:55:17.440 | I will try and write a book summary or write like a tweet thread summary

00:55:21.080 | of a book or make a video about the book or interview the author of the book

00:55:24.400 | and talk to them about the book.

00:55:25.840 | Just some kind of output that creates this tangible thing,

00:55:29.760 | which is a reason to actually bother retaining the stuff,

00:55:32.960 | because it's all well and good saying, I really want to remember what's in this book.

00:55:36.200 | But if I'm not creating anything from it, it's going to be hard

00:55:40.400 | beyond looking at my Readwise email every day.

00:55:42.320 | So for me, it's easy because I do videos about books

00:55:44.360 | and that helps me remember a lot of the things.

00:55:46.520 | Readwise also synchronizes to Notion.

00:55:48.160 | And so I've got a Notion page that has literally everything

00:55:50.160 | I've ever highlighted in my life on Kindle or Instapaper or Reader or Pocket

00:55:53.480 | or any other app I've used to read books or read articles.

00:55:55.720 | And so if I ever need ideas for videos, I'll just look through my highlights

00:55:59.160 | and be like, cool, that's a cool idea.

00:56:00.560 | That's from that book. All right, cool.

00:56:02.120 | Let's piece things together and turn it into a video.

00:56:05.080 | Nick Gray was on the show a couple weeks ago and talked about Friends newsletter.

00:56:09.120 | So I'd say if you need a way to take the interesting content you're consuming,

00:56:12.920 | I can promise you that most people, at least I do from your newsletter,

00:56:16.560 | find interesting.

00:56:17.360 | Oh, here's this app I checked out. Here's this book I read.

00:56:19.480 | Here's this thing I found.

00:56:20.840 | And so he proposed that everyone start a Friends newsletter.

00:56:23.680 | That's just, you know, send your friends an email,

00:56:25.200 | whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly.

00:56:26.960 | And I feel like that would be a great place to put this stuff and reinforce it,

00:56:30.280 | which will help you remember it.

00:56:31.320 | So there's one tip from that episode. Nice.

00:56:34.360 | OK, I always try to wrap these conversations up

00:56:37.200 | where I ask everyone I interview to pick a city they know well,

00:56:41.160 | maybe London for you, and give people a suggestion of where to go for a meal,

00:56:45.080 | have a drink, something unusual to do that isn't the obvious.

00:56:47.800 | Nice. So I would actually go for Cambridge.

00:56:51.560 | So I spent nine years in Cambridge, which is just an hour north of London.

00:56:54.680 | That's where I went to university, where I worked as a doctor

00:56:56.520 | and where I spent a year of pandemic trying to grow my YouTube channel.

00:56:59.000 | The nice thing to do in Cambridge is go punting.

00:57:00.960 | You get these little boats, you sort of get this rod

00:57:03.240 | and you sort of pull yourself along the river with a rod.

00:57:05.440 | And it's super nice when the weather is good.

00:57:07.480 | And then there's this cafe called Fitzbillies,

00:57:09.480 | which does a really good afternoon tea.

00:57:11.880 | You can have tea with scones and jam and clotted cream.

00:57:15.040 | And it's a very nice British type thing.

00:57:17.560 | And you like punt along the river

00:57:19.120 | and then you have your tea and scones in Fitzbillies.

00:57:21.200 | And it's a great vibe. Fantastic day out with the family.

00:57:24.760 | That's exactly what I'm looking for.

00:57:26.600 | Last thing, where should people find everything you're working on online?

00:57:30.000 | Yeah, so probably my website, Ali Abdaal.com or my YouTube channel.

00:57:32.760 | If you just search Ali Abdaal or Ali or something on YouTube, it'll come up.

00:57:36.400 | Awesome. I'll link to all that.

00:57:38.080 | And we got a lot of links from this episode in the show notes.

00:57:40.080 | Thank you so much for being here.

00:57:42.080 | Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

00:57:43.440 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

00:57:47.160 | Thank you so much for listening.

00:57:48.920 | If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple

00:57:52.240 | Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it.

00:57:55.240 | And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me or just want to say hi,

00:57:59.240 | I'm Chris at AllTheHacks.com or @Hutchins on Twitter.

00:58:03.360 | That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.

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