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

by Ali Abdaal

Self-forgiveness allowed students to let go of post-procrastination guilt and shame.

You can focus on the small losses. Or you can celebrate the small wins.

Procrastination isn’t something we can always control. Forgiving ourselves is something we can. You can focus on the small losses. Or you can celebrate the small wins. By accepting and forgiving our inevitable tendency to procrastinate – and celebrating the little victories instead – we can begin to conquer its hold over us.

burnout isn’t just a thing that happens to overworked people in stressful jobs. It can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful, enjoyable or manageable. When you’re burned out, you feel overwhelmed and undermotivated. You feel like you can’t keep up the pace, no matter how hard you try.

crucially, it isn’t related to the number of hours you’re working – it’s about how you feel.

Conserve your energy. Do less, so that you can unlock more.

we’re suffering from a simple problem – overcommitment. It is the first way we set ourselves on the path to overexertion: we say yes to things in the present, but in the long term, they’re going to grind us down. It’s easy to see why. Overcommitting is simply too easy. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be resisted.

The energy investment portfolio is crucial in resisting the seductive logic of overcommitment. We tend to think we can do everything. It’s a myth. Sustainable productivity means recognising the limitations on our time. Everybody has them.

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

Opportunity costs reflect the fact that every ‘yes’ we say is a ‘no’ to whatever else we could’ve been doing with that time and energy instead.

the ‘six-week trap’. The trap is when you look at your calendar six weeks from now, see all the blank space and think, ‘I could totally say yes to this.’

If you wouldn’t say yes to something happening tomorrow, you shouldn’t say yes to it in a month or more.

– the highest performers were those who occasionally switched between tasks, but didn’t go overboard.

‘switching costs’. These are the cognitive and temporal resources expended during the transition between tasks.

So the goal is to spend most of our time focused on just one task – but not beat ourselves up if we occasionally lose concentration. But how?

When it comes to fending off distraction, we can invert this logic, creating obstacles that stand between you and the tasks you don’t want to divert your attention. Think of it as adding friction.

In fact, the most productive people tend to be those who get a little distracted – but don’t allow it to derail their productivity. For the rest of us, this might not be so easy.

So in the final minute of many guided meditations and meditation classes, they often say something like, ‘If you haven’t managed to get deep into the practice, that’s ok. Don’t worry. You can simply begin again.’ A minute of focus is better than nothing. I often recite the mantra ‘Begin again’ when I find myself getting distracted. It’s a powerful reminder. Don’t fail with abandon. Regardless of how you’ve done – or how you think you’ve done – you can always return to what matters.

So the last step to conserve your energy is even simpler than the first two: find moments in your working day to do nothing. And embrace them.

The first way we can embrace the redemptive power of breaking is devilishly simple: schedule time into your calendar to do nothing. And schedule more of it than you think.

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

The greatest cause of burnout isn’t exhaustion. It’s low mood. If you can make yourself feel better, you won’t just achieve more – you’ll last longer, too.

The first is to stop yourself from overcommitting.

The second way is to resist distraction.

The third way is to find moments in your working day to do nothing.

In the last chapter, we talked about the tendency to burn ourselves out through overexertion, bringing down our mood by doing too much and not taking enough breaks at work. The solution, we learned, was to conserve our energy more effectively. But we can also burn ourselves out in our time away from work. Doomscrolling, binge-watching TV shows, mindlessly checking emails or WhatsApp notifications – these are the ways we sabotage our feel-good emotions during our downtime.

First, creative activities unlock our sense of competence.

Second, creative activities play to our feelings of autonomy.

Third, creative activities give us a feeling of liberty.

And finally, creative activities help us mellow.

Unlike an open-ended hobby, a project has a definite beginning and end. Projects can be particularly useful in building our sense of competence and autonomy as they give us a feeling of accomplishment when we reach our end goal.

In particular, there’s a region of the brain called the ‘default mode network’ (DMN) that governs the strange places our absent minds go to. The DMN helps us to recall memories, to daydream and to imagine the future. And it becomes more active the less engaged we are with mentally draining tasks. The problem with modern life is that we’re not very good at giving ourselves the time and space to activate our DMN. If anything, mind-wandering gets a bad reputation, often being equated with wasting time.

Even scheduling time for mind-wandering involves doing something. You’re still in productivity mode; it’s just that your productivity is going to be activated by doing as little as possible.

The Reitoff principle is the idea that we should grant ourselves permission to write off a day and intentionally step away from achieving anything.

The best way to rest is all about feeling calm.

A second solution is to spend time in and with nature.

Sometimes, the most energising thing you can do is to do nothing at all.

Misalignment burnout arises from the negative feelings that arise when our goals don’t match up to our sense of self.

When it comes to aligning your actions with your values, it can be helpful to think about the long term.

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

Think about the very end of your life. And use it to reappraise what matters in the here and now.

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.

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.

At the heart of the exercise was a simple question: what do you want your life to look like in five years’ time? Nothing particularly profound there, I thought; anyone who has ever had a middle-of-the-road job interview has thought about that one. But Burnett’s design mindset offers an unusual way to answer the question. He invites you to reflect on: Your Current Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you continued down your current path. Your Alternative Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you took a completely different path. Your Radical Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you took a completely different path, where money, social obligations and what people would think, were irrelevant.

The answer comes from a simple method that scientists call ‘values affirmation interventions’, a scientific term for identifying your core personal values right now, and continually reflecting on them. In the last section, we sketched out some idealised life plans. With these values affirmations, we can turn them into a set of concrete ideas about what we plan to do over the next year.

So the final ingredient in alignment involves a mindset shift: from thinking about our values at the level of lifetimes and years, to thinking about our values at the level of daily choices.

Well, it helps overcome the distance between where we are now and where we want to be.

By focusing on the immediate, short-term steps – rather than on the whole year ahead – you turn living your values into something immediate. And achievable.

First, identify an area of your life where your actions feel particularly unfulfilling.

Second, come up with your hypothesis.