The key ideas

Feel-Good Productivity

Ali Abdaal, 2023

A young doctor running a hospital ward on his own over Christmas realized that discipline was no longer saving him. That's how Ali Abdaal came to the idea that you first need to feel better, and getting more done will follow. The book shows where to find energy, why we put things off, and how not to burn out once the work finally gets going.

Who it is for

For anyone who works hard, keeps pushing themselves and still doesn't get the important things done. And for anyone who puts off important tasks and is tired of scolding themselves for it.

If you've ever felt underwater, you don't have to settle for staying afloat. You can learn how to swim.

The Christmas discipline couldn't save

Christmas, a British hospital. A young doctor, Ali Abdaal, is running a whole ward on his own: a patient's heart stops, and after that someone calls “Dr Ali!” every minute. For months he had coped in the only way he knew: by working even harder. He stopped getting enough sleep and almost vanished from the lives of the people close to him, but he still couldn't keep up. When a tray of syringes slipped out of his hands, he realized he couldn't go on like this.

Then he remembered his old tutor's words: if the treatment isn't working, question the diagnosis. And he questioned the rule that productivity gurus kept repeating: success requires suffering. In an experiment by the psychologist Alice Isen, people who were given a small bag of sweets before a hard puzzle solved it noticeably more often than the rest. A good mood changes the way we think and act.

That's how the approach Abdaal calls feel-good productivity was born. First you feel better, then you do more of what matters to you.

Ahead lie the three steps of his method: where to find energy, how to remove the obstacles that make us put things off, and how not to burn out. Let's start with a physicist who got bored with physics.

The plate that gave a physicist back his joy

In the late 1940s Richard Feynman, one of the brightest physicists of his generation, was a professor at Cornell and was doing almost no science. After his wife's death, work had become dull to him: whenever he sat down to think, all that came was tiredness. One day in the cafeteria a student was tossing a plate in the air, and Feynman noticed that the emblem on it wobbled faster than the plate itself spun. He started working out how the plate moved, just for the fun of it. To his colleagues he explained: “There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.”

From the plate he moved on to electrons in an atom, and from there to the theory called quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light interacts with the tiniest particles. According to Abdaal, this play eventually led Feynman to the Nobel Prize.

The author considers play the first source of energy and is convinced that adults are wrong to put it aside as something frivolous.

Abdaal himself, studying for exams after his shifts, stuck a note to his monitor: what would this look like if it were fun? The first answer was music, and he started studying dull biochemistry to the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings. Ask this question about a tedious task: maybe music, a joke, company or a reward at the end will help.

Stress gets in the way of play, so Abdaal, following the engineer Mark Rober, advises treating a failure not as a defeat but as data for the next attempt.

Read in Livria

About the author

Ali Abdaal is a British doctor and entrepreneur, and one of the best-known productivity bloggers in the world. He studied medicine at Cambridge. In 2021 he took a break from medicine to focus on his own business.

All books by this author: Ali Abdaal

Terms from the book

  • Procrastination
  • Cornell
  • Gollwitzer
  • White
  • Burnout
  • James
  • Sivers
  • Isen: Alice Isen, an American psychologist. She studied how a good mood affects thinking and creative problem-solving.
  • Feynman: Richard Feynman, an American physicist who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • Quantum electrodynamics: The branch of physics that deals with how light interacts with electrons and other charged particles.
  • Rober: Mark Rober, an American engineer who spent nine years at NASA and then worked at Apple. He now makes popular science videos on YouTube.
  • NICE: The book's scheme for goals, named after the first letters of English words: a goal should be Near-term, Input-based, Controllable and Energizing, meaning close at hand, about your own actions, up to you and a source of energy. It's the author's term, not a scientific one.
  • Tarantula: A large, hairy spider. The experiment the author describes used a Chilean rose-haired tarantula.
  • Spotlight effect: The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our slip-ups and our appearance. The effect was described by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues.
  • Batman: The superhero of comics and films, the wealthy Bruce Wayne, who fights criminals at night.
  • Xavier: Professor Charles Xavier, the mentor of the heroes in the X-Men films. The young Xavier is played by James McAvoy.
  • Pychyl: Tim Pychyl, a Canadian psychologist. He leads a research group on procrastination at Carleton University.
  • Carleton: Carleton University in Ottawa, the capital of Canada.
  • Wohl: Michael Wohl, a Canadian psychologist at Carleton University. He studied how self-forgiveness affects procrastination in students.
  • World Health Organization: The United Nations agency for health, WHO for short. In 2019 it clarified what counts as burnout.
  • NBA: The National Basketball Association, the main professional basketball league of the United States and Canada.
  • Adcock: Dr Adcock, a senior doctor in the emergency department where Abdaal worked early in his career.
  • Pacific Crest Trail: A hiking route about 4,260 kilometers long through the mountains of the western United States, from the Mexican border to the Canadian border.
  • Sheldon: Kennon Sheldon, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. He studies motivation and well-being.
  • Identified motivation: A kind of motivation where a task may be unpleasant, but a person does it because they truly value the goal it leads to.
  • Burnett: Bill Burnett, a designer who used to work at Apple. Together with Dave Evans he teaches a course at Stanford on how to design your life, and wrote a book on the same subject.

All terms

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