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So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Embark on a Side Quest

Feel-Good Productivity contains 54 experiments that you can conduct for yourself to see which ones add the most to your life and workflow. I'm not going to just regurgitate them all here, though; rather, I'll go in order, and go deeper into the ones I thought were the best and/or most impactful. Starting with side quests!

Curiosity's great for lots of things, on top of simply making our lives more enjoyable - it also helps us focus longer and remember things better. Building opportunities for adventure into your life can be a fantastic way to let in some more curiosity, so side quests (referring to optional missions in video games that don't necessarily affect the main story of the game, but are fun for the player) allow us to explore alternative pathways in our real lives too.

For Ali, it's leaving the office to spend a few hours in a local coffee shop, or playing around with new software that could help him with his current problem, for example. Myself, I love to explore local used bookstores, or allow myself to go down random YouTube rabbit holes, learning more about something I never even knew existed when I woke up that morning.

For you, it could be anything! So pick something! Take anything that's completely (or at least mostly) unrelated to your work or your to-do list and just spend some time exploring, adventuring, or wandering. You could even do extended side quests where you try a new local restaurant every week for a year, or something like that. Your only limit is your own fertile imagination.

#2: The Magic Post-It Note

Ali keeps a Post-it note on his computer monitor with the words: "What would this look like if it were fun?" I actually do something similar, except with dozens of phrases and questions that I keep in various places and make sure to review and remind myself of throughout the day.

You don't have to go that far, but Ali's Post-it note reminds him to find the fun in everything he's doing, and to lighten up a bit! Even if the task itself isn't inherently enjoyable. In his case, he either adds music, adds humor, does the task in a different way, or otherwise gets creative with it.

You don't even have to use the same question as Ali does, although I've adopted that one for myself too. Among the other questions I ask myself are, "What would this look like if it were easy?" There's also, "What if I'm overcomplicating this?" And, "What's the fastest, simplest thing I can do to get started?" Again, the only limit is your imagination, and when you ask yourself new questions, you also begin to think in new, more productive (and fulfilling) ways.

#3: Own the Process

The details of each and every task we perform may not always be up to us, but the process itself usually can be, and studies show that work satisfaction rises quickly as employees are granted (or claim) more autonomy over their work and take ownership of how they do things.

No matter what your job, career, or vocation, you can use this fact to your advantage by injecting your own personality and character into whatever it is that you do. If you're a salesperson, for example, the outcome you're going for is unlikely to change (selling your company's products/services), but you can control parts of the process by altering your sales script, if you have one, or delivering hand-written thank you notes to new customers, experimenting with a new lead generation channel, etc. Examples abound.

So the next time you're at work, try to come up with three ways you can take ownership of the process of what you do, thereby increasing your own job satisfaction, your results, and perhaps even your compensation too.

#4: Own Your Mindset

This next one involves taking ownership of your circumstances as well, by reframing your obligations into blessings. You can turn "I have to" into "I get to," and you'll be a lot happier for it!

In Ali's case, he made this mindset shift after being asked to stay late one night while working at the hospital to put an intravenous (IV) line into a patient. He was almost out the door at the end of his shift, and honestly kind of resented being asked to do this, until he realized that the patient was a woman who was twelve weeks pregnant and would likely be made to feel much better by having this done. It would help the baby too. So Ali turned "I have to" into "I get to," and realized that he was indeed blessed to be in a position to be knowledgeable enough to use his medical training to help this woman and her baby.

In my own case, I don't necessarily save lives and hook up life-giving IVs to pregnant women, but I do spend my entire day sharing the wisdom and knowledge trapped inside the greatest books ever written, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people every day to pick up a book. That's pretty damn special! I get to do that, and making that mindset shift is indeed quite powerful.

What about you? What do you get to do? Even if you're just not that excited about heading out for a run, think about all the people confined to hospital beds all over the world who would love nothing more than to head out for a run one more time. You get to do this. And that mindset shift is everything.

#5: Set Implementation Intentions

Implementation intentions take advantage of the fact that if you decide beforehand when and where you're going to do something, you're much more likely to do it. They're conditional statements, taking the form of "If X happens, then I will do Y," and they can be instrumental in helping you maintain consistency on your way to prodigious productivity!

Some examples of implementation intentions you can try include, "When I come home, I will immediately practice the guitar for 30 minutes." Or, "When I arrive at the office, I will immediately begin working on my highest-priority task." Or, "Before turning off the light when I go to sleep, I will list three things that I'm grateful for." Come up with your own implementation intentions that are relevant to you and your goals, and you'll make effortless progress toward them every time you follow through!

#6: Practice Time-Blocking

The best productivity tool isn't some app, or ancient breathing technique, or anything like that...it's your calendar. Time-blocking is the practice of adding non-negotiable tasks to your calendar, and committing to them as though they were an important appointment you had scheduled with someone else. Except in this case, you're the important person, and the unbreakable appointment is with yourself so that you can achieve what's truly important to you in life.

People are often strangely resistant to using a calendar, thinking it somehow restricts their freedom and introduces stifling rigidity into their day, but in reality, it does the opposite. As we've discussed before, discipline equals freedom. So take a look at what's most important to you - what you absolutely, categorically refuse to skip each week - and put it in your calendar. Then, crucially, keep this vitally important appointment with yourself no matter what.

In the book, Ali goes further and introduces three levels of time-blocking. The first being for individual tasks, the second level being time-blocking your entire day (exercise, family time, intense work, etc.), with the third level being time-blocking your ideal week. You can work up to this level, but at its core, it means scheduling everything that's most important to you first, and then scheduling everything else around that. I've been doing this personally for years and years and can't recommend the practice highly enough.

#7: Reduce Environmental Friction

Our environments have a profound impact on the choices we ultimately make, as every parent knows who has a child who always seems to get into trouble at school. When they discover who their child has been spending time with, well, suddenly everything starts to make sense.

The same is true for our physical environment, and as adults, we have the power to make changes to our environment that result in desirable behavior becoming easier to practice, and harmful behavior becoming harder to practice.

If you've decided that you want to read more books, for example, one of the simplest, most effective things you can do is to place a book or two that you want to read in an area you often frequent, such as your living room or on your desk.

If your books are hidden away in a box in the attic or something, your environment is automatically working against you, and it's very unlikely that you're going to go to the extra effort of digging them out and reading more.

The reverse is also true, and you can partially eliminate bad habits by making them harder to engage in. An example of this would be throwing out all your junk food, or removing the batteries from your TV remote. Within any environment you find yourself in, the path of least resistance is usually the one you will take, and so it's up to you to make the obvious choice the healthiest choice.

#8: Define the Next Action Step

This is one of the most helpful experiments in the entire book, at least for me. I've actually been doing this long before I read Feel-Good Productivity, and it's been a mainstay in my productivity armory. I use it when I'm creating my YouTube videos, I use it when I'm working on building my business, and yes, I even use it when I write these book breakdowns.

The stronger the resistance you feel to getting started on a major project, the smaller the next action step needs to be for you to manage that first step. It can be almost ludicrously small, too. For example, when I'm recording YouTube videos, the smallest step forward could be to go downstairs and turn on my studio lights. Or even just open the Google doc where I keep my video scripts. That's literally it.

Whenever you find yourself procrastinating on something, break it down into the smallest possible actions, and then simply take the first step. That's all you have to focus on right now - not the whole entire giant project looming over you.

Get out your guitar case; put your laptop on the desk and open it; put your gym clothes in your gym bag. Then, once you've done that, take the next smallest action. Before you know it, you'll have practiced for a half hour, written 1,000 words, and run 5 miles on the treadmill. For me, writing this paragraph was my very next action step! Guess what my next one is!

#9: Find an Accountability Partner

Finding an accountability partner helps us stick to our plans and goals by drawing on our sense of social obligation to overcome inertia. Ali puts the idea in a humorous way when he points out that it's a lot easier to skip a workout when going by yourself, than it would be if you had a friend waiting outside your door at 6PM irately looking at their watch!

I'm a big believer in the power of accountability partners, having organized my private community, The Competitive Advantage, around this very idea. Succeeding is a lot more fun when you do it with friends, and no one is self-made. Absolutely no one. We all need each other, and it can be an extraordinarily powerful motivator to have dozens of people all in one place, each rooting for your success.

You don't have to join a special community to get the benefit of greater accountability in your life, though. It can be very simple and straightforward, and the first step is to find someone who has similar goals as you do. They're more likely to know the specific pains and challenges you'll face along the path, and they'll also be more uniquely suited to help you overcome them.

Second, define your "accountability culture." Ali's advice here is as follows:

Third, hammer out the actual process with your accountability buddy. How are they going to hold you accountable? What specifically are they going to do, and when? What will the day-to-day (or month-to-month) process actually look like?

#10: The Energy Investment Portfolio

The first step toward managing your time is to figure out where it's going in the first place, and the first step toward resisting overcommitment is to figure out where your energy is going now. It's a limited resource, and by maintaining an "energy investment portfolio" you can start to manage it more effectively.

Creating an energy investment portfolio involves making two lists: List A is a list of all your dreams, hopes, and ambitions. This list is more future-oriented, containing items that you'd like to get to at some point, but that aren't necessarily a pressing priority right now. Say, writing a book, or founding a nonprofit. List B is where you take stock of where you're investing your energy currently, which, for Ali means this week.

The former list can be as long as you want, but the latter should ideally be limited to around five or so. Honestly, if you have even less time than most people because of child-rearing responsibilities, etc., you can keep it to just one!

For myself, List B would include things like reading books, working out, publishing YouTube videos, etc. List A would have things like spending the winter in Greece, following along on tour with Lamb of God or As I Lay Dying, etc. They're things I'd absolutely love to do at some point, but because my time and energy is limited, they're just not a priority right now.

For this Action Step, build an energy investment portfolio yourself around what's most important to you at this stage of your life, and do exactly what the term implies: invest resources in these activities; prioritize them, and ruthlessly eliminate anything else that's not going to result in a meaningful return on your investment. Everyone has limits to their time and energy. An energy investment portfolio can help you visualize that truth, and build an incredible life around it.

#11: The Odyssey Plan

Long before Tim Ferriss came along, there was Bill Burnett, a lecturer at Stanford University and the author of Designing Your Life, a book which features a revelatory exercise called the "odyssey plan."

The very simple question Bill asks in that book is, "What do you want your life to look like in five years' time?" Pretty run-of-the-mill question, sure! But the magic shows up in the way he asks you to think about your answer.

Burnett invited readers and students to answer the question in three different ways, which I'll ask you to do here in this Action Step:

• Your Current Path: “What will my life look like five years from now if I continue on the same path?"

• Your Alternative Path: “What will my life look like five years from now if I took a completely different path?"

• Your Radical Path: “What will my life look like in five years if I took a completely different path, one where money, social obligations, and what people would think, were irrelevant?"

Now those are much more interesting questions! So? What do you think? The point isn't to set your next five years in stone, irrevocably committing to one (and only one) course of action no matter what. It's merely to get you thinking of the possibilities. Because as they like to say nowadays...you can just do stuff!

#12: The Wheel of Life

The whole point of the wheel of life (pictured below) is to define success for ourselves. You can substitute other segments for the originals, but in the book, the wheel is divided into three sections, which are again divided into three parts.

There are three sections for Health (Body, Mind, and Soul), three for Work (Mission, Money, and Growth), and three for Relationships (Family, Romance, and Friends). Then what you do is you rate how aligned you feel in each area of your life. Are you living in accordance with your biggest priorities and highest values right now? Next, color or fill in that segment accordingly.

The question Ali recommends asking in this case is, "To what extent do I feel like my current actions are aligned with my personal priorities?" Having this visually laid out for you makes it a lot easier to see, at a glance, if there are any obvious areas where you can make some necessary corrections.

#13: The 12-Month Celebration

The 12-month celebration takes the self-knowledge you've acquired from the wheel of life and brings it into your day-to-day.

The extremely simple explanation here is that this exercise involves imagining you're having dinner with a close friend 12 months from now, and you're telling them about all of the astounding progress you've made in the last 12 months.

How did you do it? What concrete steps did you take in the last 12 months that made it all possible? What do you want to be able to tell your (hopefully not hypothetical) friend 12 months from now during dinner?

What this does is make the insights you've gained from the previous exercise more concrete, and it gives you more clarity on what you actually need to do. If, 12 months from now you've lost 45lbs., scaled your business to six figures, and gone on six dates with people you might wish to someday marry, how did you make it all happen? What were the steps?

The only thing left to do once you've arrived at these answers is to take immediate, meaningful action in the real world so that, in 12 months, you have an absolutely incredible story to tell over dinner!

#14: The Three Alignment Quests

I'm more than a little bit strange in that I literally have a 100-year plan for my life - on top of a 10-year plan, a 5-year plan, a yearly plan, a monthly plan, etc. What can I say? I'm a list-maker. I make lists! But for most people, short-term targets feel much easier to reach than long-term ones, and I'm definitely one of them!

Enter: Alignment Quests. What you do is that, each morning, you choose three actions for today that will move you that much closer to where you want to be a year from now. That's it.

They'll feel much more achievable than some distant goal to "run a marathon next year" or something, which isn't exactly a project you can "complete" today. You can go for a run today, though. You can do some marathon research on a running forum today, though. You get the idea.

What Ali does is take one thing from each of the three areas of health, work, and relationships, and chooses to focus on those for the day. For him, it could be: go to the gym, make progress on writing his book, and call his grandma.

For you, it could be: buy healthy food at the grocery store, talk to your boss about what you'd have to do to get a raise, and ask one person out on a date. Your 10-year plan could be to get married, for example, but you can't achieve that goal in a single day. I mean, you could...but again, you know what I mean!

Breaking these larger core values into actionable steps helps you actually do something to start living them. Immediately.

#15: Conduct Alignment Experiments

Lastly, we're going to get you thinking like a productivity scientist and get you dreaming up hypotheses and experiments to help you turn your ideal life into a material reality. Test! Test! Test! Run experiments! Follow the data!

In Ali's words, "alignment experiments" can help you test theories about what might bring you closer to alignment in your day-to-day decision-making. The process involves three steps.

First, you're going to identify an area of your life that you want to improve, whether that be your work, health, relationships, or something else. Follow your greatest dissatisfaction, and let it determine the area in which you want to make meaningful, intentional progress first before you tackle anything else.

Second, start thinking like a scientist and develop a hypothesis, a guess about what one thing - one independent variable - that, if you changed or altered it in some way, would make the greatest possible improvement in that problem area. What effect do you think it would have on your current situation? Could taking on more responsibility at work lead to a faster promotion? What about taking an additional certification? Or speaking up more often in meetings?

Third, and most crucially, you study the results and keep track of the effects. Take action on your hypothesis and see what difference, if any, it makes to your situation. Does it make things better or worse? Is it showing signs of being likely to work? What might you have to change about your approach for next time?

What's also important here is not trying to change everything all at once. Radical forward movement can seem like a good idea, but if you make dozens of changes to every area of your life at once, it makes it extremely difficult to see what's actually working, and what may be working against you. Or what's simply not making any meaningful difference at all.

The scientific process never ends, by the way, and it's the same with your journey toward alignment. You can make all the 5-year plans you want, but as you keep moving forward through time, you'll notice that more of the path will be revealed, and brand new avenues for experimentation, exploration, and discovery will become available to you.

Ali Abdaal is a doctor, entrepreneur, amateur magician, and the world's most-followed productivity expert, who became intrigued by the science of productivity while juggling the demands of medical training at Cambridge University with building his business.

While working as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service, Ali started to document his journey towards living a healthier, happier, more productive life online. In the years since, Ali’s evidence-based videos, podcasts and articles about the human mind have reached hundreds of millions of people all around the world. 

In 2021, Ali took a break from his medical practice to focus full-time on his work popularizing the science of human flourishing and high performance. Here in his first book, he reveals everything he has learnt from a decade studying the secrets of feeling better and achieving more.

Additional Resources:

Ali-Abdaal.com | Main Website

Ali Abdaal on YouTube | Main Channel

Feel-Good Productivity.com | Official Website

Part-Time YouTuber Academy | Online Course

This Book on Amazon:

Feel-Good Productivity, by Ali Abdaal

If You Liked This Book:

10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Do Hard Things, by Steve Magness

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Million Dollar Habits, by Brian Tracy

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

The Essential Wooden, by John Wooden and Steve Jamison

The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation, by Michael Matthews

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