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

by Ali Abdaal

Remember Dr Adcock. Even if you’re in the business of saving lives, breaks aren’t a special treat. They’re an absolute necessity.

When I first encountered Nhat Hanh’s teachings, it made me realise that not all distractions are created equal. Sure, some distractions stop you achieving the thing you want to – Twitter notifications, urgent administrative emails and so on. But some distractions can bring positive energy into our lives, forcing us to pause, reflect and take things at a more reasonable pace.

The resulting stresses contribute to what I call depletion burnout. It comes from not giving yourself enough time or space to truly rejuvenate.

This difference between what we do automatically when we’re feeling drained and what would actually rejuvenate us shows that the ways we rest are rarely restful. And it raises a question: how can we break the doomscroll/binge-watch/takeaway cycle – and start engaging in activities that actually make us feel good? It sounds obvious, yet we don’t always use our breaks or our time off doing things that make us feel good – these are the things that truly recharge our energy, helping us avoid burnout.

Next, continually remind yourself that the hobby should be enjoyed for the process, rather than any kind of high-stakes goal. As you paint, play or build, remind yourself that this is an arena in which quality doesn’t matter. So allow yourself to make mistakes, experiment, and grow at your own pace. Your primary goal is not to become an expert or a master. It’s to enjoy and to recharge.

If you want to properly recharge, you need to maintain areas of your life in which personal advancement doesn’t feature at all.

One group had rooms with windows overlooking a serene grove of leafy trees. The other faced a cold, lifeless brick wall. Roger Ulrich, who was just embarking on his career as an assistant professor researching environmental aesthetics, was interested in what effect this difference had. To his surprise, he found that the patients whose windows faced the greenery were healing on average a whole day faster, requiring significantly less pain medication and experiencing fewer complications than their counterparts staring at the wall. So began Ulrich’s lifelong fascination with the impact of nature on the healing process.

Roger Ulrich / Nature's role in the healing process

‘The real gauge of friendship is how clean your house needs to be before they can come over.’ These reflections are all gleaned from one of my favourite pages on the internet, the Reddit forum r/Showerthoughts. It’s a space for people to post the most profound and weird thoughts that come to them during their daily ablutions.

Sheldon is a titanic figure in a recent wave of research into human motivation. At the turn of the millennium, many people thought that the great questions about motivation had been resolved. As we learned in Part 1, since the 1970s scientists had been aware of the two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Professor Kennon Sheldon / Motivation Expert

Misalignment burnout arises from the negative feelings that arise when our goals don’t match up to our sense of self. We feel worse – and so achieve less – because we’re not acting authentically. In these moments, our behaviour is driven by external forces – rather than by a deeper alignment between who we are and what we’re doing. This alignment is something that only intrinsic and identified motivation can offer. The solution? To work out what really matters to you – and align your behaviour with it.

In fact, Penn was a student at Stanford Business School taking a famous course, ‘Lives of Consequence’. The professor, Rod Kramer, routinely assigns his students to write their own obituaries as though they have lived an ideal life – the best they can imagine – to its end. ‘The goal of this course is to change the way you think about your life and its possible impact on the world,’ the description reads. For many, including Penn, this was transformative. ‘This caused me to pause and ask, am I allocating enough time to the people I love? Or am I overly caught up in the career rat race?’ she later wrote. Reflecting on death shed light on how to live. I’ve often used a similar approach myself. I call it the ‘eulogy method’. My iteration involves focusing not on your obituary, but on your funeral. Simply ask yourself: ‘What would I feel good about someone saying in my eulogy?’

This method helps us get at the question of ‘What do I value?’ from other people’s perspective. At your funeral, even your co-workers would be unlikely to say, ‘He helped us close lots of million-dollar deals.’ They’d talk about how you were as a person – your relationships, your character, your hobbies. And they’d talk about the positive impact you had on the world, not how much money you made for your employer. Now apply what you’ve learned to your life today. What does the life you want people to remember in a few decades mean for the life you should build now? So having started in this cheerful place, let’s bring things a little closer to home.

Thinking about the long-term horizon is great for figuring out what we value in the abstract. But it might feel a little nebulous. After all, if you’re in your twenties or thirties then your eulogy in (hopefully) half a century’s time might seem distant. How do you turn these abstract life plans into a coherent strategy for how to live over the next, say, year?

Below are the ones that Dr Lillicrap recommended as a starting point, although you could also come up with your own. We’ve got three for Health (Body, Mind and Soul); three for Work (Mission, Money, Growth) and three for Relationships (Family, Romance, Friends). Next, you rate how aligned you feel in each area of your life. Ask yourself: ‘To what extent do I feel like my current actions are aligned with my personal values?’

Look back over the values that you identified in the wheel of life. Now, write down what you’d want to tell your best friend about your progress in each of them.

There, the focus was on how everything goes wrong. Here, the focus is on how everything goes right. Ask yourself: ‘If I was to make the 12-month celebration a reality, what would I need to do over the next year to get there? And what is the first action step: joining that gym down the road? Polishing up my CV? Putting a weekly chat with my mum in the diary?

But with the right tools, we can subtly shift ourselves back towards the things that matter the most, and in turn sustain our productivity (and enrich our lives) for longer.

But even without those exercises, you may feel a sense of misalignment in one or more areas of your life, whether your job, or your relationships, or your hobbies. Think about it – is there anywhere you feel things aren’t going well?

These little experiments involve recognising that the journey to alignment is not one with a clear end-goal. It’s a never-ending process. As we navigate the laboratory of our lives, we must be willing to embrace experimentation – and to learn as we go.

At the time, I was getting all the basic tactics wrong. Instead of viewing productivity in terms of what made me feel good, I was viewing it in terms of discipline: how much pressure I could pile on myself to just do more. Instead of trying to integrate play, power and people into every ward round, I was catastrophising about my sense of boredom, powerlessness and loneliness. And instead of trying to find the joy in that looming manual evacuation, I spent hours ruminating about how horrible it was going to be. (And, to be fair, it was indeed horrible.)

But my real error wasn’t with my productivity tactics. It was with my overall strategy. I believed that if I simply learned every productivity hack and read every internet blog, I would achieve what I yearned for. It was exactly the opposite of the approach that I needed: to learn to think like a productivity scientist.

Transforming your work from a drain on your resources to a source of energy.