BALANCE
(… and less of what doesn’t)
Doctor-turned-productivity-expert Ali Abdaal has spent years studying how to get more done. And, as he tells Natasha Lunn, what he found along the way changed his life
When Ali Abdaal was a newly qualified junior doctor, he was left to manage a hospital ward alone on Christmas Day. As a medical student, his strategy to get things done had always been simple: work harder. But in the hospital setting, with an emergency cardiac arrest and an ever-increasing list of patients to be seen, it no longer worked. He wasn’t sleeping, his mood suffered, his friendships were fading and he didn’t have much time for family. Even when he stayed on the ward until midnight, there were always more patients, and his to-do list would never get finished. Abdaal had an epiphany that Christmas Day, when he was so busy and stressed he dropped a tray of medical supplies and syringes flew across the floor. It was then he realised: he needed a new strategy for getting things done.
Abdaal watched videos, and read books, blogs and hundreds of articles about productivity to see where he was going wrong. Many gurus talked about the importance of ‘the hard slog’, but he started to doubt their advice. After all, he’d tried working harder and it made no difference. And so, he stopped believing the idea that success required suffering and started asking a new question: what makes hard work feel better? The answer he found is also the name of his new book: Feel-Good Productivity.
The crux of ‘feel-good productivity’ is that feeling good boosts our energy, reduces our stress and actually helps us to accomplish more. As Abdaal puts it: ‘Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.’ It’s something he started to realise when he discovered the theory of a professor called Barbara Fredrickson, which suggested that positive emotions change the way our brains operate.
‘When I started to let go of my obsessions with discipline and focus instead on making work feel good, my horrific shifts started to get easier,’ Abdaal says. Soon, his mood started to improve. He was less drained, and at the end of the day still had energy left to share practical insights about his new approach on his YouTube channel, finally deciding to take a break from medicine and pursue his passion for productivity as a career. Changing his approach to getting things done changed the direction of his life.
Below, Abdaal tells us how to begin creating better energy with our work…
The core message
When you stop thinking, ‘How do I get more done?’ and start thinking, ‘How do I make work feel a bit better?’ it changes everything. Because when work feels good, we’re not only more productive, but more creative, less stressed and we have more energy to give to
