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

by Ali Abdaal

Might you now see the game of life slightly differently? Suddenly, the stakes are lower. And suddenly, you can afford to play around a little. If your goal is to find a fulfilling career and your hypothesis is that a corporate role might be fulfilling, then your data collection process might be to sample careers through internships and job placements. With an experimental mindset, an internship that you end up hating wouldn’t be a ‘failure’ or a ‘waste of time’; it’d just be another data point to help you realise that that’s not what you want. 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.

Experimental mindset

Seriousness is overrated. If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, the first step is to approach your work with a sense of play. There are three ways you can incorporate the spirit of play into your life. First, approach things with a sense of adventure. When you step into the right ‘play personality’, every day abounds with opportunities to see life as a game, filled with surprises and side quests. Second, find the fun. Remember Mary Poppins: there’s an element of fun in every task, even if it isn’t always obvious. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun, and then build your projects around the answer. Third, lower the stakes. Failures are only failures when you think they are – and not every problem need be approached with such a straight face. So what would it mean to approach your work with less seriousness and more sincerity?

Chapter 1 summary

If you’re one of those people, I want you to start thinking differently about power. When McCord used the word, she meant a sense of personal empowerment: the sense that your job is in your control, your life is in your hands, and that decisions about your future are yours alone. This power isn’t something that we exert on others; it’s something we feel, the energy that makes us want to shout from the rooftops: ‘I can do it!’ 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.

About Personal Power

How does our level of self-confidence affect our performance?

that it’s not just our abilities that are important in human performance and wellbeing; it’s how we feel about our abilities. Self-efficacy was the term he coined to describe such feelings, referring to how much belief we have that we’re able to achieve our objectives.

Self efficacy

the higher our confidence in our own abilities – the higher our self-efficacy – the greater those abilities become.

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.

The power of affirmations

This study shows that simply by becoming your own hype team you can dramatically impact your own productivity. In the years since I read it, I’ve come up with a few specific ways you can do so. My favourite method involves what I call ‘flipping the confidence switch’; in other words, challenging yourself to behave as if you’re confident in your task, even if you’re not. The method is even more simple than it sounds. The next time you’re not feeling good enough to take a chance, simply ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this? What would it look like if I approached this task feeling confident that I could do it?’

Confidence in starting a task

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.

Before Starting a task

‘vicarious mastery experience’. This is when you witness or hear about someone else’s performance related to a task that you’re going to undertake yourself. You see other people’s examples, and it boosts your confidence.

Vicarious Mastery Experience

Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power. Why? Because the more we do something, the greater our sense of control. We learn. We level up our skills. Our confidence grows. And we empower ourselves.

Learning by doing

Shoshin refers to a state of mind in which we approach every task and situation with the curiosity, openness and humility of a beginner.

Shoshin

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.’

Owning your mindset

‘Power’ is a scary word, but it doesn’t have to be. When we say the second energiser is power, we don’t mean exerting control over others. Here, we simply mean feeling empowered to take your job, life and future into your own hands. There are three ways you can increase your sense of power, starting now. Begin with confidence. We think our confidence is fixed, but actually it’s extremely malleable. So why not try ‘flipping the confidence switch’ – and playing the role of someone who’s already filled with self-belief? Next, level up your skills. Ask yourself: if I were completely new to this task, what would this look like? And how can I start teaching others even though I’m not an expert yet? Finally, see what you can do to take ownership, even in moments when you don’t have as much control as you’d like. Remember, if you can’t choose what you work on, you can still choose how you work on it. The outcome isn’t always

Chapter 2 Summary

Take Leonardo Da Vinci. One contemporary who saw him painting The Last Supper wrote how ‘he would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticising the figures to himself.’

Procrastination

The unblock method encourages us to understand why we’re feeling bad about work in the first place.

The unblock method

This is a little like the sensation of procrastinating. Often, the reason we don’t make a start is because we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing in the first place – a mystifying fog has set in around us. I call it the fog of uncertainty.

Fog of uncertainty

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. It gets in the way of feeling good and gets in the way of getting things done.

Uncertainty Paralysis

You can apply this approach to almost any question. Take learning French. Ask yourself, what’s the purpose? Are you trying to understand complex nineteenth-century realist novels? Or are you just trying to survive your upcoming visit to Paris? Next, work through what implications that has for the process. How are you going to learn the language – are you going to use Duolingo or take language classes or just watch lots of 1950s French cinema?

Have a purpose for your goal

If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it.

Thousands of feet below, on the forested slopes of Yosemite Valley, his friends watched on in agony. Nothing attached him to El Capitan, the 3,000-foot rock wall that he was attempting to scale. But he couldn’t go back, not now. The only option was to keep climbing.

It isn’t lack of talent or inspiration that’s holding you back. It’s fear.

Getting to know our fears is the first step towards overcoming them.

it’s the act of putting your feelings into words, which forces you to identify and get to know the sensations you’re experiencing. It works in two ways. First, it increases our self-awareness. By naming and acknowledging our fears, we cultivate a deeper self-awareness that helps us better understand our emotional patterns. Second, it reduces our rumination. Cyclical thoughts about our fears can make us even more convinced the fear is justified. When we label our emotions, we become better able to process and release them – and so escape the cyclical thoughts that make us put things off.

Affective Labeling

So how can we get into the habit of naming our fears – and so learning to process them? One method involves asking yourself a few questions. When you’re procrastinating, say to yourself, ‘What am I afraid of?’ Our core vulnerabilities and insecurities are often at the heart of procrastination. To work through them, we have to first identify them.

Habit of naming our fears

When you catch yourself catastrophising in this way, try to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. With the right toolkit, we can come to realise things aren’t as bad as they seem – and so the fear becomes less intense. The scientific name for this process is ‘cognitive reappraisal’: changing the interpretation of a situation so that we feel better emotionally. The main goal of cognitive reappraisal is to shift our perspective on an event, thought or feeling, allowing us to experience a more positive emotional response. A simple way to put cognitive reappraisal into practice is to remind yourself that the thing you’re feeling so bad about probably won’t matter that much in the future. You can do this by asking yourself the following three questions, which add up to what I call the 10/10/10 rule.

Cognitive Appraisal

One of the most common forces that drives our procrastination is the fear of being seen. Whether it’s giving a presentation, sharing a new video we made with strangers on the internet, or going to a party where we might not know everyone, fear of being seen or ‘found out’ for who we truly are can keep us from growing outside our comfort zone.

Fear of being seen

We’re highly attuned to what others think of us. This makes sense – as social creatures, our amygdala is always on the hunt for threats to our status. But this means that we spend our lives believing a spotlight is always trained on us, and that everyone around is constantly looking at us, analysing our behaviours, and passing judgement on our worth as human beings.

Spotlight Effect

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

when they begin painting, by sticking with it, they’ll continue to gain competence over time. They generally have autonomy over what they’re painting and how they’re painting it. It’s likely detached from their day-to-day work, and so hobbyist painters experience the feeling of liberation. And it’s generally a mellowing, relaxed activity.

If your CALM project involves painting or drawing, you could join a local art class or Meetup group where you can share your progress. If you’re passionate about writing, you could become part of a writing group or attend workshops, where you can grow together as writers. Whatever your project, when you build a community around your project you harness the recharging power of people.

time in nature triggers a physiological response

Nature replenishes our cognitive abilities and boosts our energy.

So basking in the glory of the natural world is our second way to recharge properly. Nature replenishes our cognitive abilities and boosts our energy. Nature makes us feel good. We need a way to integrate it into our rest.

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.

When we think about death, we get a clearer view of life.

Values affirmations make our most abstract ideals real. And they boost our confidence along the way.

First, identify an area of your life where your actions feel particularly unfulfilling. The results of your eulogy method, odyssey plan and wheel of life exercises might have helped with this. 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?

Second, come up with your hypothesis. We’re thinking like scientists here, and that means adopting an experimental mindset. All scientific experiments have an ‘independent variable’, the one thing you change to see what effect it could have. If you were to change one – just one – independent variable in your life, what would it be? And what effect do you think it would have on your situation? This is your hypothesis. Our demotivated lawyer’s hypothesis might be: ‘Adjusting my working hours will lead to a better balance between work and personal fulfilment.’ Our stressed-out student’s hypothesis might be: ‘Switching to a course that aligns with my personal interests and values will lead to greater satisfaction and motivation in my academic life.’ Step three is the most crucial: execute. Make a change. And as you do so, see what effect it has on your situation – and your sense of alignment.

But as you do, keep track of the effects. Try keeping a log or journal of your experiences, noting any challenges, successes or insights that you gain along the way. By conducting these experiments, you give yourself the opportunity to explore an alternative path – without having to commit to it in the long term. Not yet, anyway. 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.

These days, I know that productivity isn’t about discipline; it’s about doing more of what makes you feel happier, less stressed, more energised. And I know that the only way to escape procrastination and burnout is to find the joy in your situation – even if you’ve just dropped 136 vials of medicinal goo all over your clothes.