Tag Archives: ali abdaal

Spend your time where it matters

I’ve begun setting aside an hour every morning I’m not up early for work or placement working on the things that are important to me. I started doing this a week ago because I realised that I was just getting overwhelmed with my work for uni and wasn’t spending any time doing what I actually want to do. I set aside the first hour of the morning, before I start the urgent work which is my university study.

This concept came to me in one of Ali Abdaal’s email newsletters where he discussed this matrix.

It is so easy to get swept up in your ‘urgent work’ which seems to be ever expanding, I didn’t like that. The beauty of the urgent work is that it always gets done, as anyone who has done an assignment last minute knows.

This impelled me to sit down and figure out my “important, not urgent” tasks and start doing them at the start of every day. This is when I decided to write 50 blogs in 50 days, because writing is an area I want to improve in, and all that takes is practice. I do this every day I’m not at placement because sleep one of my highest priorities, and not worth compromising.

I feel it is so important that I spend my time where I truly want to and this was another way to do this.

Stress and Anxiety: Don’t Suffer Twice

This week, I listened to a great podcast about mindfulness and anxiety from Sam Harris and Tim Ferris. Whilst writing my weekly review I realised I experienced some stressful situations in the short, medium and long term which the podcast helped me control, with varying degrees of success. If you just want to see the techniques I use, jump to here

Short Term Stress

I had a very difficult exam (my final one for university!) which seemed to be designed to push you for time. I had roughly 30mins to go, with 30 marks unfinished (out of a 100 mark, 2hr exam), all long responses and I noticed myself getting frazzled and spending time thinking about how I was not going to finish, and flipping between questions.

After about 30 seconds of fueling the fire of anxiety, I identified my stress and thought, “it doesn’t matter how many questions I’ve got to go, I just need to keep powering through them and finish them the best I can,” and that’s exactly what I did. I put this ability to identify and put aside my stress down to my meditation, which I poorly adhere to but have still seen the benefits, this being one.

Medium Term Stress

My medium term stress was having a busy week ahead with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being full of work, and a lot of research to do. The way I managed this stress was ensuring I had a to do list of the essential pieces I needed to have finished, and just worked hard to get them finished by thursday so on the days I was working I was able to switch off afterwards so it still felt like I had a weekend; worked a charm.

Writing the tasks down and blocking out time in my calendar has been a great way to show me how much I really do need to get done because the worry about having a lot of work to do is always worse than the actual work.

Long Term Stress

My long term stress is more about the career I want to pursue, I am coming to the end of my degree and have several options but unsure which one to take. I’m still figuring out how best to approach this, but I currently have two heuristics:

  • Which path will be more fun to do
  • Which path has the most options afterwards

So far this led me to choose my degree (Exercise Physiology is more fun than Engineering) my jobs and the research projects I’ve been involved in as well. It is working out pretty well so far.

You can never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, so by choosing a path which has the most options and will be fun in the short term removes a lot of the stress around making significant live decisions. Tim Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is also really useful for life-altering decisions as well.

Strategies to Stress Less

It’s not that I don’t stress, I do, but I’ve really learned over the past few years how to better manage my stress so that it doesn’t distract me from what is important.

For short term, in the moment stress, like in an exam, you have to understand your stress, allowing it to be put away and ignored so you can deal with the problem at hand. Mindfulness Meditation (with Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app) has helped in identifying this stress, allowing you to not be consumed by it.

For medium term, stress about the coming days or weeks, writing a list and scheduling your time in a calendar helps to make you realise that the stressor is probably not as time consuming as it seems, and by blocking out time for it, Steve Jobs’ ‘Imaginary time’ comes in and with a pressing enough deadline, clearly set out in a calendar and a list, you can achieve almost anything. What happens when your tasks aren’t time bound is called Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so block off the time you need and have no more, trust me, you’ll finish it.

Finally long term stress. Making life decisions suck, you can never be sure of what result your decision will have, but there are ways to ensure you enjoy it. Choose something that you’ll enjoy doing, the worst thing that happens is you enjoy yourself, then do something else. Choose something which doesn’t close doors, or even opens them, nobody knows what they want to be doing in 5 or 10 years, so don’t limit yourself with your choices.

Finally, the main takeaway from this post should be that the object of your stress will never be as bad as what you think it will be, so don’t suffer twice by stressing about it. Just saying ‘don’t stress’ doesn’t help so I’ve given some thoughts on how I manage my stress so I’m not wasting my energy on my ruminations.

I’d love to know what you do to manage your stress and any techniques which have worked for you, leave a comment down below and get in touch if you’d like to chat through your stresses with me!

Get in touch to have a chat with me

Investing in Relationships

Over the past few years there has definitely been a significant increase in the productivity sphere of social media, with the rise of people like Ali Abdaal and Thomas Frank. They are very insightful and have many great tips on strategies to improve your output, but I’ve found this can lead to the pursuit of becoming a machine which churns out study or content for business or social media non stop for 16 hours a day. I love both their work but it can be easy to ignore their advice for achieving balance, which is certainly a trap I’ve fallen into.

In the pursuit of becoming a productivity machine it can be easy to forget to invest in your relationships. My girlfriend told me to have more emotions the other day, “it was like I was a robot” she said. This made me think about the balance in my life. In my mind I was meditating, studying a lot and generally being very productive. I felt like I was on top of everything, but I realised I wasnt devoting enough mental space to my relationships, and this showed in me not showing too much emotion, which certainly isn’t me.

This isn’t a long one, nor a guide at how to be more in touch with your emotions, this is simply a reminder that relationships are arguably the most important thing in life, and producing more content or studying more won’t improve them. It’s important to take some time off, spend uninterrupted time with your friends or significant other, being vulnerable with them, and be willing to divulge as much emotion as you recieve.

Friendships are inevitable with enough time, but they are fast tracked or cemented when you are both vulnerable with each other, when you are willing to listen to their issues but also lay out your own. this is something I’m definitely not putting enough time towards, and am going to focus more on in the future.

Being Remarkable

If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it?

Seth Godin

I want to be remarkable, and I am sure that I will be. My girlfriend always laughs at me when I say this, or when I say “I want to change the world,” but I do, and more importantly, I will. How I plan on doing this, I’m not sure yet, it is looking like it will be in the realm of health and medicine, but who knows, that may very well change. For Me this is a constant struggle, I feel like I should know what to do, and what I want to do with my life, but I couldn’t be further from that.

I sat down on a rainy afternoon to do a fear-setting task as designed by Tim Ferriss. The task is designed to help you overcome your fears and act on whatever life change or decision it is you want to make. I sat down, drew out the matrix on an A3 piece of paper and couldn’t think what action it was I wanted to check. Pondering fruitlessly I looked back through my notes where I write in any ideas I have and stumbled upon some notes I took from the ‘Not Overthinking’ podcast by Ali & Taimur Abdaal on Vision (I’d definitely recommend it)

This led me to Seth Godin’s blog when in his ‘Top 100’ posts I found, how to be remarkable, 10 tips on how to be great, perfect for my problem. One of the tips to ask yourself was the one at the start of the post; “If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it.” Unfortunately I didn’t (and don’t) know what it would be I would be putting on a T-shirt, but it helped reinforce I had to do something, because I wasn’t going to wake up one day and be remarkable. I know my goal, but the path is unclear; which doesn’t mean there isn’t a path. I suppose that’s how it is for everyone. No (well, not many) 21 year old knows exactly what they want from life, nor should we, but you have to expose yourself to as many situations where new opportunities can present, and seize them when they do.

Tim Ferriss’ blog about fear setting opens with

Action may not bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Benjamin Disraeli (British PM from the 1800’s)

Currently in my life, I’m cruising, I’ve got a few stable jobs, uni is going well and there is little risk (an issue i’ve talked about previously). With no risks, opportunity has no chance to present herself. On Not Overthinking they often speak about the internet as a means to ‘get yourself out of your village’ which is a metaphor for increasing your surface area to opportunity outside of your immediate connections. So in the absence of a clear path, I’m going to use that as a starting point. The internet is a gateway for a world of opportunity, so if you’re in a similar position to me, I suggest its your starting point too.

Committing to Passive Income

Just finished watching Ali Abdaal’s video on youtube about his salary as a doctor and youtuber and it has really triggered me off to really start committing some time to developing some sources of passive income. A pact I made to myself years ago as a teenager was that my ‘day job’ was never going to by my sole source of income, because as Ali mentioned, you are then choosing to be doing what you do and are never forced to do it, leading to you enjoying it a lot more.

I have delved into the world of content creation previously, I’ve created viral Tik Tok videos for March On, a charity focusing on spinal cord injuries (@march_on_aus). More recently I’ve also started a podcast by myself essentially for my other work, Running Science, a running store in Sydney (runningscience.com.au/podcast) . The goal of the podcast is to make running more accessible to the general public, as well as making it seem more inclusive than it does currently in Australia.

My biggest goal in life is to get people healthier, by exercising more. I want to do this through research but also health promotion. My dream ‘day job’ is to work with the UN or WHO to increase physical activity on a global scale. How I plan to achieve this is by doing a PhD and being an excellent researcher. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want this to be my primary source of income so what do I do? Currently I’m doing a lot of 1:1, Time:money work and I want to move away from that.

Below I’m going to list my ideas and how I can start actioning them:

  • EP Network – A friend from Uni and I saw a deficiency in how well known exercise physiologists are, so we decided to create a youtube channel to a) inform the world about what we do through educational videos, and b) help inform individuals about how easy exercise can be and how significant the benefits are.
    • ACTION: Currently we have been writing down scripts in Lockdown with evidence, as soon as we are out we have to start bulk filming these base video’s.
  • Instagram Page – I have previously been against using my personal instagram page for promotion, but I’m using it less for communicating with friends and more for just putting pretty pictures up currently. This is an opportunity to start growing and audience and building a personal brand which is incredibly important.
    • ACTION: slowly start sharing more and more of my own content on there, from the podcast, March On instagram and EP Network.
  • Writing – Writing is a passion of mine, I really enjoy it and love the idea of writing, I’m beginning to practise it more and more and hopefully get better and better. This could lead to me writing a book one day, continuing to write blog posts about my life and my work, and how that can provide value to people.
    • ACTION: Write consistent blog posts (1 per week), research how to spread blog posts and how this can grow.

This has been a good piece to write, I find by writing this in a public domain, I’m more likely to take these actions seriously and use them more going forward. I’m going to stick to these and see where it can take me.