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

by Ali Abdaal

I now learned that the study had become the cornerstone of a wave of research exploring the way positive emotions affect many of our cognitive processes. It showed that when we’re in a positive mood, we tend to consider a broader range of actions, be more open to new experiences, and better integrate the information we receive. In other words, feeling good boosts our creativity – and our productivity.

Positive emotions are the fuel that drives the engine of human flourishing.

My method has three parts, each of which tackles a different aspect of feel-good productivity. Part 1 explains how to use the science of feel-good productivity to energise yourself. It introduces the three ‘energisers’ that underpin positive emotions – play, power and people – and explains how to integrate them into your daily life. Next, Part 2 examines how feel-good productivity can help us overcome procrastination. You’ll learn about the three ‘blockers’ that make us feel worse – uncertainty, fear and inertia – and how to overcome them. When you remove these blockers, you won’t just overcome procrastination – you’ll feel better too. Finally, in Part 3, we’ll explore how feel-good productivity can sustain us in the long term. We’ll delve into the three different types of burnout – overexertion burnout, depletion burnout and misalignment burnout. And I’ll explain how we can harness three simple ‘sustainers’ – conserve, recharge and align – to make us feel better not just for days and weeks, but for months and years.

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.

Choosing your ‘character’ doesn’t mean reinventing your personality overnight (nor pretending to be a goblin in front of your colleagues). Rather, it means identifying the type of play that most resonates with who you are, so you can choose a type of player to embody.

The Explorer likes to wander, discovering new places and things they’ve never seen, through hiking, road tripping and other adventures.

The Creator finds joy in making things, and can spend hours every day drawing, painting, making music, gardening and more.

The Joker endeavours to make people laugh, and may play by performing stand-up, doing improv, or just pulling a lot of pranks to make you smile.

The study showed that people were a whopping 30 per cent more likely to recall a fact they found interesting, rather than a fact they found boring.

In these moments, the stakes feel overwhelming. But there’s a way to lower them. The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’

This study shows that simply by becoming your own hype team you can dramatically impact your own productivity.

If they can, you can too. It’s a toolkit anyone can draw upon. Find people who are going through the same challenges as you and spend time with them – or find other ways to hear their stories. By immersing yourself in vicarious success, you’ll be building a powerful story in your own mind: that if they can, you can too.

you can take ownership of how you contribute to the process. You can find ways to streamline your tasks, identify potential quality issues before they become problems and offer suggestions for process improvements.

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. I continue to find these sync sessions incredibly helpful for staying energised. Even though we’re all working on different things, working in tandem with others has huge effects on my ability to focus, and helps me feel better too.

A Swedish proverb says: ‘A shared joy is a double joy; a shared sorrow is a half sorrow.’ When one person shares good news with another, both people are happy. And when one person shares something sad with another, the act of sharing takes some of the sadness away.

in a 2006 study, researchers videotaped seventy-nine couples who were dating to examine how they discussed good news and bad news with each other. It turns out that how participants responded to their partners’ good news was the strongest predictor of how long they’d stay together and how happy they were in those relationships.

If it isn’t a ‘hell yeah’, it’s not worth doing.

ask yourself a simple question. Every time you’re presented with a request for a few weeks’ time, think: ‘Would I be excited about this commitment if it was happening tomorrow? Or am I only thinking about saying “yes” to it because it’s easier to make it a problem for my future self?’

The most productive workers gave themselves an almost unbelievable amount of time off: a work-to-break ratio of fifty-two minutes of work to seventeen minutes of rest.

Intrinsic Motivation. ‘I’m doing this because I love the process as an end in itself.’ People who highly rated this statement have high intrinsic motivation.