Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

by Ali Abdaal

The short answer: feeling good. Positive emotions are bound up with a set of four hormones – endorphins, serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin – which are often labelled as the ‘feel-good hormones’. All of them allow us to accomplish more. Endorphins are often released during physical activity, stress or pain and bring about feelings of happiness and diminished discomfort – and elevated levels usually correlate with increased energy and motivation. Serotonin is connected to mood regulation, sleep, appetite and overall feelings of wellbeing; it underpins our sense of contentment and gives us the energy to tackle tasks efficiently. Dopamine, or the ‘reward’ hormone, is linked with motivation and pleasure and its release provides a satisfaction that allows us to focus for longer. And oxytocin, known as the ‘love’ hormone, is associated with social bonding, trust and relationship-building, which enhances our capacity to connect with others, boosts our mood and, in turn, impacts our productivity.

Hormones

Their question: Does success, as we’re often told, make us happier – or could it be the other way round? The study offered hard evidence that we tend to get happiness wrong. Individuals who frequently experience positive emotions aren’t just more sociable, optimistic and creative. They also accomplish more. These people bring an infectious energy to their environment, proving more likely to enjoy fulfilling relationships, get higher salaries and truly shine in their professional lives.

Play is our first energiser. Life is stressful. Play makes it fun. If we can integrate the spirit of play into our lives, we’ll feel better – and do more too.

those who took themselves off to a wider and more random assortment of places, whether taking a new route to work or trying a different coffee shop rather than sticking to their regular one – felt happier, more excited and more relaxed. Their conclusion: an adventurous life holds the key to unlocking positive emotions.

I decided to apply this idea to my own life. In a late-night burst of inspiration, I grabbed a Sharpie and a Post-it note and wrote nine simple words: What would this look like if it were fun?

Csikszentmihalyi argued that if we can learn to focus on the process, rather than the outcome, we’re substantially more likely to enjoy a task.

Studies on humans, though blessedly less nasty than the ones on animals, have found similar results. Children are more likely to play when they’re in a comfortable, non-threatening environment. And studies of adults in the workplace have found that the feeling of relaxation promotes playful behaviours, as well as promoting creativity and wellbeing.

These studies, and countless others, prove something that most of us instinctively know to be true: when we’re stressed, we’re less likely to be playful. And our creativity, productivity and wellbeing tend to suffer too.

Stress and creativity

Having worked at NASA for nine years, then at Apple as a project designer, before switching his focus to becoming a science educator on YouTube, Rober’s experiment proved what he’d already noticed in the world of work: that success isn’t down to how often you fail. It’s about how you frame your failures.

Reframing failure

If your goal is to build a successful business, then your data collection process might involve testing different business ideas, products or services. With an experimental mindset, a product launch that doesn’t meet expectations wouldn’t be a failure or a disaster; it’d just be another data point to help you refine your strategy and better understand your target market.

Others their fortuitous timing in launching just as the internet took off. But the most common explanation for Netflix’s success is more simple: culture. As Netflix was first getting off the ground,

Power is our second energiser; a crucial ingredient in feeling good and being productive. And best of all, it’s not something you seize from others – it’s something you create for yourself.

Feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we’re doing it, and helps us do it better.

Take the power of verbal persuasion. Bandura was fond of pointing out a simple truth about self-efficacy: that the things you say often become the things you believe. As such, the very act of hearing small positive interventions, like ‘You can do it!’ or ‘Nearly there!’, can have a remarkable effect on our self-confidence levels.

Next time you’re feeling like a task or project is particularly difficult, ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this?’ Just by asking yourself the question, you’ll visualise yourself confidently approaching the task at hand. The switch has been flipped.

Most of us have experienced vicarious mastery, even if we didn’t have the words for it. Picture this. You’re struggling with a big research project at work. You’re the only person working on the task and it feels daunting. After a few days of alarming unproductivity, you start to conclude it’s not only hard – it’s impossible. As you get more and more convinced that what you’re attempting is completely unachievable, you get further and further off target. Now imagine the same task, except this time, before starting the project, you saw someone else present their research project on a similar theme. The content of their presentation is entirely different to yours. But this time, you know that this kind of task isn’t impossible – you’ve just seen someone else pull it off. You’ve become more confident that the task can be mastered. Vicariously.

I’ve found that my sense of confidence increases substantially when I read books, listen to podcasts or watch videos with stories of people succeeding in the areas in which I want to feel more empowered.

When I was building my first online business, I spent a lot of time listening to the Indie Hackers podcast, which featured interviews with entrepreneurs who’d built incredible one-person online businesses from their bedrooms.

Indie hackers podcast

Zen is a branch of Buddhism that emphasises the practice of meditation as a means to spiritual enlightenment. Zen encourages individuals to look inward and discover their own path to understanding the nature of reality. It was, according to Jackson, integral to every success he ever had.

One Zen concept that came up time and again in Jackson’s coaching practices was the Japanese word shoshin, which roughly translates as ‘beginner’s mind’. Shoshin refers to a state of mind in which we approach every task and situation with the curiosity, openness and humility of a beginner.

The protégé effect hints at another way we can boost the number of learning experiences in our lives. As the philosopher Seneca said, Qui docet discit – ‘He who teaches learns’. And once you understand the power of the protégé effect, it becomes surprisingly easy to take on the role of ‘teacher’ in almost any role.

the psychologist Edward Deci became intrigued by a simple question. What motivates people to do hard things?

Edward Deci

They encouraged readers to see motivation falling on a spectrum, with ‘extrinsic’ at one end and ‘intrinsic’ at the other. Intrinsic motivation comes from the inside: driven by self-fulfilment, curiosity and a genuine desire to learn. Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside: driven by pay-rises, material rewards and social approval. But these forms of motivation were not equal. According to self-determination theory, intrinsic motivation is substantially more powerful than extrinsic motivation. Lasting motivation comes from within.

As the authors put it: ‘Increasing the salience of choice led to a sense of self-inflation … a sense of being positively different, bigger, and stronger than others’. Simply switching their mindset from ‘have to’ to ‘choose to’ they boosted their sense of control, power and, in turn, what they were capable of.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War Two, put it beautifully: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

Years later, Eno would reflect on the importance of that unique musical community in launching his career. He noticed that all the most innovative and ground-breaking musicians of his time were not working in isolation; they were part of a larger scene of artists, producers and fans who were all pushing each other to explore new sounds and ideas. Eno had discovered the genius of the collective scene. Or, as he called it, scenius.

How can we build this sense of scenius into our day-to-day lives? The answer begins with a subtle shift: reappraising what we mean by teamwork. When someone says the word ‘teamwork’, we tend to imagine a set of behaviours – splitting up work fairly, or maybe helping someone out when they get stuck. That’s part of it, certainly. But there’s another way of understanding teamwork: less as something to do, and more as a way of thinking.

Competitor mindset Comrade mindset ‘You win, I lose’ ‘You win, I win’ ‘My success’ ‘Our success’ ‘I rise by outdoing others’ ‘We rise by lifting others’

The implications are simple: if we want to harness the feel-good effects of people, try to find people with whom to work in sync – even if you aren’t actively collaborating on the same task. In the course of writing this book, I often attended the London Writers’ Salon, which runs a free, remote co-working group called Writers’ Hour. Every weekday, four times a day, a few hundred writers (and some non-writers) assemble on a Zoom video call. The facilitator spends five minutes sharing a motivational message and asking participants to post in the online chat what their intention for their writing session is going to be. Then, for fifty minutes, everyone minimises their Zoom window, and works away at their computer.

Feelgood effects of working with people

Luks realised that the ‘helper’s high’ wasn’t just a feeling. It was a powerful tool for growth, social change and, I would add, feel-good productivity. It’s the second way we can use the feel-good effects of other people to do more of what matters to us.

This concept is today known as the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. It suggests that when we ask someone for help, it’s likely to make them think better of us. It’s the flipside of the transformative effects of helping others: we can ask others to help us, which will help them feel better, too.

So how can we learn to ask for help – in a way that warms people to us, rather than alienates them? Well, there are a few ways. First, we need to get over our reluctance to ask. The easiest way to do this is by simply adopting a maxim: people are more eager to help than you think.

Suppose your flatmate returns home one day and tells you that they’ve been offered a job that they’ve been working hard for. Here are how these four different responses would look like:

One of the strangest videos I’ve ever seen is called ‘How bad do you want it?’ It’s been viewed almost 50 million times.

As the young man gasps for air, the old man says, ‘When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.’

If you’re procrastinating, the video says, it’s because you’re not motivated enough. And if you just had enough motivation, if only you wanted to succeed as badly as you wanted to breathe, it would happen.

The trouble with the motivation method is very simple. There are plenty of us who genuinely do want to do the things we struggle with. We feel like we’ve got enough motivation, but there are barriers that get in our way

So when motivation fails, where do we turn? When not obsessing over whether you truly are motivated, much advice turns to another principle: discipline. Put simply, discipline is when we do stuff that we don’t feel like doing. It’s the opposite of motivation; it’s taking action despite how unmotivated you are. If you’re trying to go for a jog, a motivated response would be: ‘I feel like going for a run, because I want to win the marathon more than I want to rest today.’ A disciplined response would be: ‘I’m going for a run regardless of how I feel about it.’ This is the Nike school of getting things done – ‘Just do it.’

While the motivation method advised us to make ourselves feel like doing the thing, and the discipline method advised us to ignore how we feel and do it anyway, the unblock method encourages us to understand why we’re feeling bad about work in the first place – and tackle the issue head on.

This is a well-studied phenomenon; one that scientists call ‘uncertainty paralysis’. It happens when we become overwhelmed by the unknowns or the complexity of a situation, leading to an inability to act. This paralysis prevents us from making progress on tasks, projects or decisions.

low tolerance of uncertainty tend to view uncertain situations as threatening and anxiety-provoking, leading them to put things off – particularly on tasks involving any ambiguity. Why? Well, according to a review on the relationship between anxiety and uncertainty, there are a handful of processes that reinforce the loop between uncertainty, anxiety and paralysis.

The main way uncertainty drives procrastination is by creating ambiguity over our ultimate purpose. If we don’t know why we’re embarking on any given project, it’s near impossible to get on with actually doing it.

When I applied the concept of commander’s intent, I realised it was because I was getting the purpose – the big ‘why’ – completely wrong. I didn’t actually want washboard abs. My real goal was to maintain a healthy and balanced physique and lifestyle. Yes, there was some aesthetic motivation – but it paled into insignificance compared to the desire to be healthy, fit and strong.

What’s the ultimate purpose? Are you trying to make an extra few hundred dollars a month to be able to go on holiday? Or are you aiming for a multimillion-dollar exit so you can retire early? Or are you building something you think will help people and change lives? Now think about what that means for your next steps. Do you really need to quit your job altogether, or just carve out a few hours in the evenings? Would it be best to rush headlong into creating the business, or do you need to develop your skills first?

My twist on Toyoda’s method is to use the five whys not only to explain mistakes, but to determine whether a task is worth doing in the first place. Whenever somebody in my team suggests we embark on a new project, I ask ‘why’ five times. The first time, the answer usually relates to completing a short-term objective. But if it is really worth doing, all that why-ing should lead you back to your ultimate purpose, as laid out in your commander’s intent. If it doesn’t, you probably shouldn’t bother.

But goal-setting can be tricky. Of course, everyone can agree that goals are important. The trouble is, nobody can agree on what form they should take.

All these acronyms have something in common. First, they emphasise the importance of every goal being clear and quantifiable. Whether they’re ‘specific’ or ‘explicit’, your goals are supposed to be easily tracked and checked. Second, they’re very focused on outcomes: the function of words like ‘measurable’ and ‘observable’ is that you can tell, objectively, when you’ve reached the desired end-state. So it would be a pity if it turned out that highly trackable, outcome-oriented goal-setting was ineffective. If sometimes, goals of this kind turned out to be an obstacle to productivity, rather than the key to it. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what a new wave of research seems to indicate. Studies have found that although specific, challenging goals can increase performance for certain types of people and tasks, they can also have unintended negative consequences. I

It’s based on what I call NICE goals. Near-term: Near-term goals ensure that we’re concentrating on the immediate steps we need to take along our journey. They help us avoid being overwhelmed by the bigger picture. I find that a daily or weekly objective is the most helpful time horizon. Input-based: Input-based goals emphasise the process, rather than some distant, abstract end-goal. Whereas an output-based goal would home in on the end result – ‘Lose 5kg by the end of the year’, ‘Hit the bestseller list with my book’ – an input-based goal would focus on what we can do in the here and now – ‘Go for a ten-minute walk everyday’, ‘Write 100 words each morning for my novel’. Controllable: We want to focus on goals that are within our control. ‘Spend eight hours a day on my novel’ probably isn’t something you can actually do, since many external factors would have to come together for such an input to be possible. Setting a more genuinely controllable goal (like allocating twenty minutes per day to the task) is far more realistic. Energising: We’ve already discussed plenty of principles and strategies for making our projects, tasks and chores more energising. Is there a way to integrate play, power and people into the goals you set yourself?

NICE method

Imagine it’s one week later, and you haven’t actually started the task you intended to. What are the top three reasons why you didn’t get to it? What can you do to help mitigate the risk of those top three reasons derailing you? Who can you ask for help in sticking to this commitment? What action can you take right now that will help increase the odds that you’ll actually do the task? This method works for almost any goal that we might struggle to attain. Because the one thing you can be certain of is that some plans won’t go according to plan. So you need to plan for that too.

As General Eisenhower said, ‘No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.’