This post is part 2 of a series of posts, discussing some lessons in my 3-week long exploration of Skillshare courses. The summary of the lessons learnt can be found here.

Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber who creates content to ‘help people lead happier, healthier and more productive lives with the overall aim of helping people do more of what matters to them.’ He is a medical doctor who has during the course of his studying and work, built a YouTube channel of over 1.5 million subscribers, created a series of online channels, and writes a weekly email newsletter and a blog.

He is the most recent productivity content creator I have followed, and I have been extremely impressed with his ability to manage and succeed at so many pursuits, including managing his career as a medical doctor, and running his multiple businesses. I adopted some of his practices, which led to an improvement of my management of studying, volunteering and professional work.

His course Productivity for Creators - Starting a Successful Side-Hustle has a rather self-explanatory title. It focuses on tactics to get one started on their side hustle, and where to find the time to work on it. Following are 3 of my greatest takeaways from the course.

  1. Lesson 1: Do what you want by managing friction
  2. Lesson 2: Be mindful in your downtime
  3. Lesson 3: Change your identity to act
  4. How this course changed me
  5. Resources

Lesson 1: Do what you want by managing friction

“…anything that we can do to reduce the friction of doing stuff is going to massively improve our own productivity.”

In everything we do, there is some “activation energy” to perform that task, and to continue. This can apply to both good and bad habits we may be trying to build or kick. The idea here is to reduce the activation energy of the good habits we want to continue. On the flip side, we can increase the friction of bad habits we are trying to kick.

Some examples where friction can apply are:

  • Accessing social media only on your laptop or desktop, so that we can’t access it on our phones whenever we have a spare bit of attention.
  • Having your needed apps and programs set up with shortcuts so they are easy to access.
  • Having your exercise clothes and equipment laid out, so that going for a workout is easier.

Lesson 2: Be mindful in your downtime

…if there’s nothing to do, I would sit on the computer at work or I would sit on my phone and I will just plan out video ideas, or write scripts for my videos, or write blog posts because those were the side projects I was working on at the time. It’s really about intentionally using that downtime.

What is a productivity course without the idea of using your free time productively. The main idea here is about consciously recognising that we have these pockets of free time. “I have no time” ceases to be a credible reason for why we are not engaging in what we want.

Some examples of how I have applied this:

  • Listening to podcasts and watching videos during downtime.
  • Having a specific Notion page set up on my phone, so that I can quickly jot down ideas.

Notion is an upcoming note-taking app that I use to manage my personal task tracking and ideas. It has immense flexibility in how content can be organised.

Lesson 3: Change your identity to act

The most foreign idea to me is the concept of adopting an identity, to fit what we are pursuing. We then act to stay consistent with the identity we have adopted.

….when I was learning how to code, when I was doing web design as a side hustle, it was initially hard for me to get this identity that I am a Web Designer, I am a Developer. But as soon as I adopted that identity, then suddenly my learning accelerated and I was able to actually make money from the thing because then I felt okay with offering my web design services on freelance websites.

I am currently working on applying this idea, since it appears to be a longer-term impact strategy.

How this course changed me

  • I started time blocking (which is another strategy found in the course) again, to start progress towards some large projects at work.
  • I am working towards more conscious decision making on how I spend my time and energy.
  • It made me start this website.

Resources

  1. The Skillshare course
  2. His YouTube channel
  3. His personal website