Being productive consistently over years is really really hard. You can have the absolute perfect system, the perfect app, the color-coded calendar, and at some point the whole system will break. Now, I've been obsessed with the art and science of productivity for like 15 years. I've been making videos about it since 2017. I wrote a best-selling book about it. And so, in this video, I would like to give you the brutally honest version. Firstly, why you know exactly what to do and still don't do it. Secondly,
why almost no one who's actually productive is particularly disciplined. And thirdly, why influencers like me are somewhat financially incentivized to make all of this productivity stuff look way more complicated than it actually is. So, Procrastination is when you know that you want to do something. You probably know that you should do the thing, but you are for some reason you are not actually doing the thing. Ultimately, procrastination isn't a time management problem. It is in fact an emotional regulation problem. We put the thing off to
feel a little bit better right now, but it's our future self that pays the price. That's from the seminal 2013 paper by Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl, and I find that to be a very helpful reframe when we're thinking about procrastination. It's sort of like this little diagram. I call this the hump of procrastination. If you've taken chemistry or biology, you'll know that this graph represents essentially what is activation [music] energy. There is a thing that you have to do, but in order to do the
thing, it feels like it takes a certain amount of additional effort, often because the thing might be boring or cuz there might be some uncomfortable emotions associated with the thing that we don't really want to experience. And so, because we don't want to put in this effort and energy into doing the thing, we end up stalled and procrastinating from the thing that we know we should do. For me, this often strikes when I'm trying to do something that feels a little bit boring. I am privileged
enough that most of what I do for work is [music] very very fun. But, for example, if it comes to having to sign documents that need my signature on it for taxes, or having to review one of my team members' work where I'm like, "Ah, it's going to take a while to sit down and review it." Or even sometimes preparing a YouTube video where I'm like, "Ah, I know this is going to be quite a lot of effort." "Ah, I can't be bothered to do this
right now." That's like in the work context. And then for me, in the personal life context as well, often I feel the hump of procrastination massively if I need to self-motivate myself to go to the gym. Cuz the gym feels hard, it's not that fun, and so I'm like, "Ah, can I really be bothered?" And then I find all sorts of reasons to not go to the gym, as you can probably tell. Now, in my book Feel Good Productivity, I talk about it sort of like
the three core [music] uh root causes of procrastination and how you can then specifically deal with them. And so, I apply this method genuinely in my own life whenever I'm struggling and procrastinating on a particular task. So, thing number one is clarity. Do I actually have full clarity about what the task actually requires? [music] Because if you don't really know what the thing is, then there's this whole thing around like, I don't know how big a task this is going to be. It could be a
2-minute job, it could be a 20-minute job. Do I really have 20 minutes? Could be a 2-hour job if I have to troll through some stuff. And so, making sure you get clear on what actually is the specific next action step that you're procrastinating from, that is insanely [music] helpful. The next blocker that causes people to procrastinate is fear. Usually, there's some sort of fear-based emotion, like either the fear of boredom, or the fear of discomfort, or the fear of putting yourself out there. This is
the one that often shows up for the long-term kind of things that we procrastinate from. I speak to so many people who've been procrastinating from starting their first business for like years to decades. And often, with enough gentle questioning, what comes out underneath it is that there is a fear of getting it wrong, fear of being seen as foolish by their friends and family and LinkedIn colleagues, or whatever the thing might be. And finally, we have inertia. Sometimes, even though you are very fully clear on
the task, for example, I might know exactly what I need to do to fill out my tax documents, and there's no underlying emotion, I just can't be bothered. Then, it's that final piece of inertia to just sort of get over the hump. And this is where I find the 2-minute rule to be insanely helpful, which is where you set the timer for 2 minutes and you just make a start on the thing for just 2 minutes. And then, usually, once you've gotten started, it's a lot
easier to keep going. But, when you have something like this, like a three-part system for dealing with procrastination, this itself can ironically become a form of procrastination. Anytime I'm struggling with something where I know it's kind of hard, I try and see, could I come up with an amazing productivity system so that I don't even have to put any effort into doing the thing. In my business, for example, instead of sitting down and doing the hard work of trying to figure out like copywriting for a
sales page, for example, I'll think, AI is great. Why don't I experiment with all of these different AI tools to see if AI I do the work for me. And then, I end up down a rabbit hole for hours and hours and days and days using these AI tools. And ultimately, if I had just sat down to do the thing raw dog typing on the keyboard myself, I actually would have gotten to a better result. And that is often what I find myself doing once I've
gone through the AI rabbit hole. And so, this is something I would really keep in mind as you're trying to build your own productivity system, which is more of what we're going to talk about in this video. Make sure the creation of the productivity system itself is not then creating more work for you to do, for you to procrastinate from the thing that you actually want to do. So, that is the first little nugget that I hope you'll take away from this video, that sometimes the
system can actually be the procrastination. The second one is even trickier because it's not about how you're working, it's about how much stuff you're trying to do. By the way, if you're anything like me, you might be using an iPad for a lot of your productivity stuff, like notes or to-do lists or like diagrams or sketch notes or planning out your week, whatever the thing might be. And that is where the sponsor of this video comes in, which is Paperlike. Whenever I get a new iPad,
the very first thing I do on it is I put on a Paperlike screen protector that I've literally been using since 2018. Obviously, Paperlike has improved a lot since 2018, but it genuinely does make writing on an iPad feel like writing on paper. And I write on an iPad all the time. Because the problem with an iPad like bare glass is if you're using an Apple Pencil on it, the pencil sort of like slides around, and it's it's just not very pleasant to write on. But
with Paperlike's nano dots technology, like genuinely, it feels like you're writing on paper when you're using the Apple Pencil. And it feels like there's a little bit of friction just like paper, and so you and your hand like gliding across it also feels as if you're writing on paper. And what's nice about the latest version of Paperlike is that back in the day, Paperlike screen protector on the iPad would make your screen a little bit like fuzzy. But the latest version of the Paperlike makes the
iPad screen not have the noise that previous used to have. They also have a new butterfly application system, which is a very clever, very simple way of actually applying the Paperlike screen protector to your iPad. The system is foolproof, there's no bubbles, there's no like funky stuff or like misalignment going on. For me, I often even forget that I have the Paperlike on the iPad, I'm just so used to it now. And it makes writing on the iPad an absolute joy. So, if you're someone who
takes notes on an iPad, then you should definitely check out the Paperlike screen protector. So, thank you Paperlike for sponsoring this video and being on my iPad since like 2018. Let's now get back to the video. Right now, we all have this enormous list of stuff to do. And I'm going to represent all of the things we have to do as these little little blobs. If you pause the video right now and you sat down and made a list of all the things you have to
do, you'd probably take up like at least a few pages of stuff. Now, in a world where you are trying to focus on a million things all at once, you end up looking something like this. This is a lovely diagram from Greg McKeown's book Essentialism. Back in 1997, this is what the late Steve Jobs said at Apple's WWDC. >> When you think about focusing, right? You think, "Well, focusing is is saying yes." No. Focusing is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no. >> And really
the whole idea behind focus is being able to say no to the vast majority of unimportant things so that you can say yes to the small number of things that actually move the needle. This is very difficult for a lot of us to do because we feel the FOMO. We feel the fear of missing out. We know that there's all these things that we could do and [music] our dream life our like idealized hypothetical life is one where we're doing all of these things. But what
every person who's achieved outlier success in any particular area for you, whether that's wanting to be financially free or wanting a particular career or wanting a particular side hustle, if you want those sorts of things, it usually requires saying yes to a tiny number of things and saying no to pretty much everything else. And so generally when I'm thinking about building a productivity system or coaching someone on improving their productivity, the first step, again, bring bring us back to the procrastination example, involves clarity. What do
you actually want? What is the vision for your life that you think you're working towards? What are your goals? What are your dreams? What are the different areas of your life that we actually want to be making progress on? And once we've defined that, it becomes a lot easier to take all of these different things that we think we need to do and run them through the filter of is this actually needle moving and helping me get to the goal that I say that I want.
So all of this begs the question of like, "Okay, how do you get this clarity?" Essentially the easy answer to this is you just ask yourself a bunch of different journaling prompts. So I've made videos about this over the years, we'll link some of them down below, but I'll give you some of my favorites. Number one, if I knew I couldn't fail, what would I like to do? >> [music] >> Number two, even if I knew I would fail, what would I like to do anyway?
Number three, if I had all the time and money in the world, but I had to use 40 hours a week to be of service to other people in some kind of way, what would I do? Number four, if I was giving a TED Talk 40 years from now, >> [music] >> and it's super inspiring, and the audience is giving it a standing ovation, what would I like to have talked about 40 years from now? Number five, what do I want people to say about me
at my funeral? Number six, what do I want written about myself in my obituary, the thing that they write about you when you're dead? Number seven, if I continued on this exact path that I'm currently on, where would I end up five years from now, and is that where I want to end up? Number eight, if I took a completely different path to what I'm doing right now, where might I end up five years from now? Number nine, if I took a completely different path from
where I am now, and I did not care about money, and I did not care about what other people thought of me, where might I end up? Feel free to pause and screenshot the video, and we'll also link to my completely free journaling hub, where I've got all my favorite journaling prompts that I've collected over the years. And if you would like a more paper-based version of doing this, we've actually created this completely [music] free resource. There's like 10 pages worth of journaling prompts in here,
and it'll be linked down below completely for free, so you can check it out, fill it out, and I guarantee it'll give you way more clarity that will help you become more productive. This >> [music] >> takes some time to figure out, right? Like if you don't have a sense of where your life is going, then it becomes a lot harder to set goals, and to decide what areas of your life are important, and therefore it becomes a lot easier to just reactively do the small
little things that are not actually moving you to [music] your goal. And so, if there's one thing you take away from this video, if you don't yet have at least a snapshot of clarity over where you think you want your life to go, I think that is very much worth doing, because it's not really about doing more stuff, it is about doing less stuff, but better. Uh which sounds a little trite, but it is it's much more about the direction that you're going, than it is
about how fast you're going in that direction, right? Cuz [music] you could be moving super fast and doing all these things, but if you find that you're moving in the wrong direction towards a life that you don't actually want, what was the point of being productive? In fact, that would be one of the most unproductive things you could do. Just like be super productive, but in the wrong direction. All right, so here are three possible actions you could take as a result of watching this video
if you would like more clarity about where your life is going. Number one, you could just screenshot these journaling prompts and then once you're finished with watching this video, you could just try and answer them for yourself and you can see what comes up. Number two, you could take these prompts, put them into your favorite AI and you could ask the AI to interview you to help you figure out what to do with your life based on these prompts. Or number three, we have a new
productivity app called Superfocus that has like a clarity mode and so when you get started with that, it'll like literally interview you on these questions and it'll ask you to brain dump where you think you want your life to go and then it will be able to basically take this list of things that you've created and turn it into a series of goals that you can actually make progress on in the next 90 days. So, take your pick. All of these are options for you. Now,
at this point, one mistake that people sometimes make is, you know how we we talked about these little tasks that kind of can derail your focus? Um goal setting can be equally a source of procrastination because if, for example, you do the clarity exercise and you realize, "Oh, wow, I've realized all of these different things I want to do." So, these are all goals or dreams. I like to think of them as dreams, uh represented by these little green squares. Again, we have the problem of
focus. If you had 15 different goals that you were trying to work towards, it would be very difficult to work towards them all at the same time. You can do literally everything you want, you just can't do it all at once. And so, this is where the idea of seasonal priorities comes in. So, once you have a sense of where roughly you want your life to go and what your goals and dreams are, at that point we bring things down to what I recommend is about
a 90-day chunk that we will call a season. It could be 90 days, it could be 12 weeks, it could be 3 months, you get the idea. But the idea is that you define this next season of your life and you pick a tiny number of goals that you explicitly want to move forward over the next 90 days. For me, I find it helpful to split things up into work and life because we sleep for about 8 hours a day, we work for about 8 hours
a day, and then we have life for about 8 hours a day. And then within the context of work and life, I like to choose a single main quest. So, for work, what is the single goal that if accomplished in the next 90 days would most move me towards the life I want to live? And in life, what is the one thing that if that was the only thing I managed to do in the next 90 days would have the most impact on my life? This
helps you set a main quest, and then usually I'm okay with setting two or three side quests for each area of work and life, but really the key here is prioritization. Given that we cannot do everything, it's physically impossible to do everything, we have to do what doctors do all the time, what surgeons on the battlefield do, and triage. We have to figure out like of these 15 things, what is the one most important thing to do right now? And then what are options two, three,
and four that I might get to once I've completed option number one? This discipline of being able to take a long list of things and prioritize them into what are the essential few is honestly one of the biggest things that separates the people that make a lot of progress from the people that have a lot of movement but make very little progress. Once you've defined your priorities, then the next step is to put them in the calendar. I have I'm a strong believer in that if
you want something to get done, it has to essentially be reflected in your calendar. If it's not in your calendar, then it's probably not going to get done. Now, there is a lovely meta-analysis by these guys Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, which is made of 94 studies with over 8,000 people on what they call implementation intentions. Basically, where you decide in advance exactly when and where you'll do something. And this has a significant impact on you actually doing the thing, which is again just speaks to
the power of putting it in your calendar. You can use whatever calendar app you want, you can use pen and paper. We have this built into SuperFocus, our app, where you can take your goals and you can literally drag them into the calendar and make sure you you're actually making the time for them. Now, obviously none of this stuff matters until it survives contact with your actual week and your actual life, but this is how the maths behind it works. Every week we have 168 hours,
right? 7 * 24. We're asleep for about 56 of those hours, and we're on the toilet for about 12 of those hours, and so you really have 100 hours to play with. Now, of those 100 hours, roughly 50-ish of them we can label work, and the other 50-ish we can label life. So, each week we have 50 hours to play with for work-related things, give or take, and we have 50 hours to play with for life-related things. And the key thing is that these priorities that
you've just defined are the most important things for you to work towards for your next season of life. Those have to be reflected in your weekly calendar. For example, for me, one of my priorities for this season is to, you know, regain use of my left arm because I broke my arm a few few months ago. And so, in order for that to work, I need to make sure I've got in gym sessions, physio sessions into my calendar every single week. Another priority is for me
to get back into filming YouTube videos. And so, I've got to make sure we've got YouTube video filming stuff. My second priority in life is that I want to organize like a weekly boys night. And so, I've made sure that every Wednesday evening is already just blocked out in my calendar for boys night. Well, literally it's a Wednesday today and at 6:00 p.m. I'm going to play pickleball with the boys. Then we're going out to Flatiron Burger to have a burger. And so, it's basically you
you take the goals and priorities that you've got and you make sure they're reflected in your weekly calendar. Now, assuming you've got all this stuff in your calendar, you then run into the problem that what if you have conflict? What if life gets in the way? What if something comes up that overwrites the thing that you had theoretically planned to do? And so, the way that we use the calendar is that we don't want to be wedded to 100% like every single thing in my calendar
is everything every single thing that I follow. I like to aim for 70 to 80%. If I can do 80% of the things that are actually in my calendar, then I know I'm like way further ahead than I would be [music] if I just wasn't using the calendar at all. And of course, sometimes things pop up in real life, but the benefit of translating your goals into a weekly calendar is that if something is coming up every week, well, then it's a regular thing and it
should be in the weekly calendar. If it's coming up ad hoc, then it's fine. You've always got next week. Now, when you start managing your time based on your goals, your priorities and what's in your calendar, you might then start to run into the problem where you've got something in your calendar and it keeps on showing up every day or every week and [music] you keep on systematically ignoring the thing. If you find yourself systematically ignoring the stuff that is in your calendar and just not
doing it or something else always seems to come up and takes priority over the thing, that's totally fine. It's just a very useful data point for us to reflect and rethink. Is this thing really a priority? Because if it was a priority, you'd be doing it. And so, if you're not doing it, then clearly something is going on, right? You claim it's a priority, but you're not doing the thing. Usually this is where we go back to our thing about the procrastination. Is it clarity? Is
it fear? Or is it inertia? I had this problem when I was writing my first book, Feel Good Productivity, which became a New York Times and Sunday Times best-seller, but I really struggled to write the book. I had all sorts of things going on in the business. I just quit my job as a doctor. The YouTube channel was blowing up. It was the pandemic. The team was growing. The business was growing. There was like loads of stuff happening all the time. And I would keep on
saying to my writing coach that like, "Oh man, I still need to make time for writing the book. I just need to make time for writing the book." And at one point she said to me, she was like, "Ali, you keep on telling me that this book is your most important priority right now, but you haven't made any progress on it in the last month and you keep on like making excuses. So, what's going on? Do you still actually care about writing this book?" And I
was like, "Damn." Uh it was very useful to be confronted with that fact because it made me realize that in that specific season, the book was not in fact the most important priority. I kept on saying it was, but the way I was behaving was that my YouTube channel was more important, the business things we were doing were more important, and book was like third or fourth on the priority list. And so, that was really helpful for me because once I was honest with myself that
this is not in fact my most important priority, then I had to ask myself, "Okay, do I still want to do it?" I did still want to do it. So, then I was like, "Okay, well, the current method that I'm trying to put in of like 2 hours a day into my book is just never going to work." And so, instead, I decided I was going to clear the calendar for a whole week and just do one week intensive on the book. And that was what
helped me get out the first draft, which then required loads and loads and loads of refinement. Now, this brings us to third key principle of productivity. We've got clarity, we have focus, and the third one is accountability. So, with the best will in the world, you might have perfect little list of goals. You might be time blocking and then your calendar looks like a nice mosaic Tetris of like all of the things, and it works in theory, and it works for a couple of days, but
then at some point you will stop doing the thing. At some point there will be deviation from the thing you say you want and what you're actually doing. And then sort of getting back on track is the challenge. Now, there's a couple of different ways of doing this. Generally, when you have someone or something that is reminding you that your actions are deviating from your stated goal, that is really helpful. Like my writing coach telling me that like, "Hey man, what's going on?" That often gives
us the accountability that we need to then re-align our actions and get back on track. So, this is the other people method of accountability. Method number two for accountability is the system method of accountability. So, for example, within our app Superfocus, we literally have an accountability coach built in. It looks at your goals, it looks at how you're spending your time, and then it like literally calls you out if, for example, it sees that like, "Hey Ali, you're not doing the physio sessions that you said
were super important to you." And that gives you that little nudge as well. If you don't want to use Superfocus, you can always like try and connect different apps to like ChatGPT and run like a routine overnight or something to to flag these. Like there's all sorts of ways of doing it. But, if you're trying to do accountability by yourself, which is method number three, that is where they call it discipline. Where you don't need an accountability buddy, you don't need a coach, you don't need
a personal trainer, you don't need a an app uh telling you what to do. You're just somehow magically disciplined and you're able to just do the thing without thinking too hard about it. I'm not particularly disciplined. Most people I know are not particularly disciplined. Even the zillionaire entrepreneurs that I've met with are not particularly disciplined. Mostly, if you're relying on discipline, you're relying on yourself to be your own accountability buddy. It just becomes a lot easier if you have a community, ideally of people, but also
of tools and systems, that can help you essentially stay aligned to the thing that you said you wanted. So, that's the thing about accountability. Now, we said right at the beginning that almost nobody I know who's productive feels like they're actually disciplined. So, here's what's going on instead. Take a look at this study, for example, from Gail Matthews at Dominican University. There was a group of students who had goals but did not write them down. And then there was another group of students that wrote their
goals down, shared them with a friend, and then shared weekly progress reports with that friend. For the first group, they hit 43% of their goals, but the second group hit 76% of their goals. Now, I don't know about you, but if I could improve my odds of goal achievement by like 30% just by writing them down and having a little bit of an accountability buddy, I would probably do that. Now, this is a fun study from 2017, where they got a bunch of students and they
studied them as they were trying to achieve their goals. Now, what they found was that how hard the students resisted temptation had absolutely no relationship with whether they actually hit their goals. Instead, the thing that predicted their success was actually how few temptations they actually ran into in the first place. I eat the disciplined people had mostly just arranged their lives to need a lot less discipline. Now crucially, whether you have this accountability or if you're lucky enough to have this discipline, that doesn't mean the
work is going to stop feeling hard. Doing anything to achieve any kind of ambitious goals. And it doesn't even have to be in terms of money. Obviously, trying to make loads of money is an ambitious goal and it's hard. Otherwise, everyone would do it. But even trying to have a healthy body is hard, otherwise everyone would do it. Even trying to have a thriving relationship is hard, otherwise everyone would do it. Even trying to keep in touch with your friends once you've graduated university is hard
because if it wasn't there wouldn't be a loneliness epidemic. All of these things are hard and so whether you have accountability or discipline, I find it enormously liberating to know that everything is hard. Alex Hormozi has a lovely phrase, "The grass is greener on the other side of the fence because it [music] is fertilized by shit." Often for me and for the students we coach in our lifestyle business academy who are like beginners trying to start their first business, at the point where something gets hard
is often the time where we start looking at alternatives. We start thinking back to the list of 15 dreams that we had and we start thinking, "Man, maybe it's not the right thing to do. Maybe I should be doing something else instead." To achieve results in in anything, you kind of have to do it for a long enough time for the hockey stick to start like going in your favor. But what a lot of people do is that they quit at various different points before [music]
they even start to see the results because it feels hard and they and they think it should feel easy. But like shock horror, if you speak to any of these people who are actually successful in any domain of life, very few of them say that the thing felt easy or the thing felt effortless or they didn't have to make any sacrifices at all. So almost any vehicle can take you there, it's just a matter of not quitting. So yeah, there's clarity, there's focus, there's accountability and
then really like in a way the the foundation that underlies all of this is consistency. Actually just being able to decide what you want, focus on it, correct course if you're deviating from it and doing it for long enough to actually see the results. When I first started on YouTube, it took me 52 videos to get 1,000 subscribers. I speak to some of our students who are like, "Ah, this YouTube thing just isn't working for me." And I'm like, "Great. How many videos have you got?"
And they're like, "Four." And I'm like, "Okay, make another 50 and then we'll talk about it." Like, things just take time. Now, we've talked about a lot of systems clarity focus accountability consistency. Maybe you want to use Superfocus, maybe you don't, maybe you want to build your own system. For me, regardless of what the system looks like around it, productivity is about, are you doing the right things and are you doing those things right? And like, essentially, like, do you do you have some sense of
like what direction you're going based on the whole clarity piece? And then, are you taking one small step after another to move in that direction? To me, that counts as success and whether you have a system that is based on the Google Suite or the Apple Suite or pen and paper or the bullet journal or using Superfocus or just using ChatGPT. Like, whatever your system is, as long as it's helping you figure out what you want and then actually move in that direction, I'm very agnostic
about like what the productivity system might look like. Um and so, if you're feeling bad that your productivity system doesn't look like your favorite influencer's productivity system, don't worry about it cuz then I want to make a confession about how people like me are somewhat financially incentivized to make all of this stuff feel much more complicated than it actually is. You know, I'm a productivity influencer, shall we say? It literally pays for me to have to look like I have an overly elaborate productivity system because
I get to make videos about it. I'm financially incentivized to try out every new app that comes out. And so, of course, I try out every new app that comes out. I'm financially incentivized to try and keep on the cutting edge of AI and try out all these different AI tools. But, for most people watching this, do you make a living out of teaching people how to be productive and out, you know, making making apps and stuff? If not, you probably don't need to try and
keep on the cutting edge about like everything that's going on. And there's a nice phrase in business that applies to this that we often often say to us our students, which is, simple scales, complex fails. >> [music] >> In the context of a business, that means the simpler your business can be and the more streamlined and simple your operations can be, the easier [music] it is to scale your business. It's the same thing with your own productivity system cuz in a way, you already run a
business. You happens to be the business of you. If you have a job, you're already run a business, you just happen to have one client, and that is your employer. You're already running your own business. And so, if the system underneath running your own business, i.e., your personal productivity, is super complex, it just means there is more stuff to maintain, more apps and APIs and MCP connections to keep track of, and then you make the mistake that I've made throughout my life, which is you end
up with a productivity system that is so elaborate that you never end up actually doing the work. So, if you have a simple system for deciding what you want and then making sure you're doing it, and then sort of correcting course if you veer off of direction, then like the Honestly, the simpler the better. This brings us to, I think, one of the key points in this video, which is that everything you have just set up is definitely going to fall over at some point, probably
in the next couple of days. In fact, there is a lovely study from Carlton University where they had 119 students who were preparing for their exams. And one of the conclusions from that was that it seems that if you are able to forgive yourself for procrastinating, that actually reduces your procrastination. Whereas, if you beat yourself up for procrastinating, that actually makes procrastination worse. When it comes to productivity, the people who are the most productive are not the ones who never fail. They're the ones who get
back up again when they do fail. But, it's sort of like the gym. Why am I not jacked? >> [music] >> I'm not jacked because I have periods of consistency at the gym, and then I fall off, and then I stay fallen off bloody ages, and then I have another period of consistency, and then I fall off again. Whereas, I think the reason I'm pretty productive and have a reasonable business is because even when things get derailed and I stop not doing the thing and I
stop maintaining the system, there's this idea in the world of meditation that they call begin again. That whatever happened in the past, you can always simply choose to begin again. Sure, you've not maintained your productivity system, you've not used your calendar in the last couple of weeks. Who cares? Start Start again from today. Sure, you've not been you know, this is advice to myself. Yeah, you've not been to the gym in the last 2 months. Who gives a Start today. Just do 10 push-ups or five
push-ups or whatever the thing might be, as long as you're just able to begin again and not allow a negative streak to continue into this like doom spiral of like I suck, I'm terrible as a person, then we're good. We just keep on making progress one step at a time. Ultimately, building a productivity system and like sticking to it over the long term has completely and utterly transformed my life. The reason I got into productivity was because when I was a medical student, I realized I
wanted to build a side business because I didn't want to be chained to a job that I might not enjoy. But what I ran into was the 24 hours a day problem, that there are only 24 hours in the day, and if I wanted to like do well at Cambridge Medical School and also have a social life, and then also try and build a side business, I needed to find ways to drastically improve my productivity so I could do [music] these kind of like three somewhat
big goals all at the same time. What that required was like having a good system for goal setting, deciding what I actually wanted figuring out the most efficient way to get there. I've got videos about study techniques. This is why I got into study techniques. Made videos about it back in like 2018. I found the most efficient ways to like maximize my marks in the exam. And all this stuff wasn't for the sake of it, it was because I wanted to free up my time so
that I could build my first business that would get me to financial freedom. And so sometimes I see people on the internet complaining that like, "Oh, if you're more productive, well, that just lets your employer make more money." And like sure, um that might be true for some people, but like for me, being more productive and learning how to be productive at university literally was my ticket to financial [music] freedom. I wanted to have the freedom life on my own terms. And that is like a
top 0.001% outcome, and you don't get that without having a really solid way to first figure out what you want, and B, just make sure you're focusing on it. Now at this point, if you are still unsure whether your problem is the goal itself or the fact that you're not acting on it, then check out this video right over here, which is aimed at people who are ambitious but feel they might be a little bit lazy. And this involves a simple matrix to work out exactly
which one of those problems you might be struggling with.