Hey friends,

Quick thing before we start – We’ve just opened enrolment for our next cohort of students for Productivity Lab, where we kick off our 12-week Life Productivity System programme on 7th July. If you’d like to join a community of ambitious entrepreneurs, creators and professionals to help double your productivity, you can find out more here.

Anyway, we’re officially halfway through the year, and yesterday, I hosted a free Quarterly Alignment Workshop for my audience. We had around 3,000 people from all around the world attending the live Zoom session, where we reflected on our last 90 days, and set goals (“Quarterly Quests”) for our next 90 days.

Here’s a link to the free template we shared with attendees: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1616n-jX0tPjtcYRbRPmd9Qs-qFFF1SY9dCxmbgBUm9I/template/preview?pli=1

If you’ve yet to do your own Quarterly Reflection, you might like to check out the template, and see if it helps you with yours.

For me personally, there were 3 major wins from the last 90 days, here are some notes:

1. I’ve felt like I really have my health routines dialled in. I’ve got my personal trainer routine, nutrition and food deliveries on autopilot, sleep tracking and casual optimisation and daily walks. Important because I’ve had the goal of getting into the best shape of my life for some time now, but now I have a system that doesn’t require any management and I feel confident I’ll live longer and happier.
2. We have a lot more clarity about what to do with the business going forward: Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Productivity Lab, and Content Team (eg, Ali Abdaal media). Important because the long term vision of a portfolio of businesses that do NOT rely on me for growth and development is becoming more real… and this is the first big step.
3. Our system for filming YT videos feels a lot smoother and like a “lighter lift”. Important because the ability to create high-quality, consistent videos that is sustainable is both the lifeblood of the business and where I want to be spending more of my time.

In terms of challenges, one of the big ones was not making the time to do important things like learning more stuff, and of course, making more videos. I’m getting much better at saying no to stuff that doesn’t move the needle, and thus creating open space in the calendar to do things like read a book (which fills the creativity well), or go for a walk, or sit around doing nothing. Definitely still a work in progress.

When reflecting on my relationships, I realised that I’d want to see groups of friends more often than I currently do. So one of my Quarterly Quests is to set up a “Supper Club” of sorts, where on the same day each week, I host people at my house for dinner. This would be a standing invite, where whoever’s free is welcome to rock up on the day.

I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff recently about how to make and maintain friendships as an adult, and one of the tips that often comes up is to create these ‘social rituals’ of sorts. Trying to get people organised and calendars to line up is a total nightmare for individually organising events, but setting up a standing social event with an open-ish invite policy seems to be a high ROI move. I’ll give it a go and report back 🙂

One of my other Quarterly Quests is to write the proposal for my second book. Now that Feel-Good Productivity’s been out for 6 months, I’m feeling the itch to get back into writing mode and tackle a new(ish) subject…

And the third is to continue my “get into the best shape of my life” health journey, this time by focusing on reducing my body fat while ideally retaining muscle mass. My method for doing this is going to be to continue to eat (broadly) healthily, but on top of that, to increase my daily step count to 15,000.

Fun fact: 10 minutes of walking is around 1,000 steps. So 15k steps is 150 minutes of walking, or 2.5 hours. Easy enough – start the morning with a 1h walk in the local park, take any meetings as walking meetings, and use the treadmill under my standing desk to walk whenever I’m at the computer.

With those, it should be relatively easy to hit that goal, and in fact since trying this out over the past week, my daily average step count has shot up from around 8000 per day, to 15,500 per day. Just gotta keep that up for the the next few months (and ideally, the rest of my life), because walking is awesome, and doing meetings while walking is way more fun than doing them while sitting at my desk.

So given that you’re reading this email as the year’s drawing to its halfway point, I’ll pose the question to you: What were your biggest wins from the last 90 days, and what are your Quarterly Quests for the next 90? Feel free to use my template if that would help, or if you’ve got your own method, that’s great too. And if you’d like some accountability in getting this done, please do hit reply to this email and let me know your answers to those questions.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

❤️ My Favourite Things this Week

📕 Book – Your Time Your Way by Carl Pullein – I’m a sucker for productivity & time management books, and this one’s no exception. I’ve been following Carl’s stuff on YouTube for a few years, and love his clear and simple approach to time management.

📗 Book – Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success – This has been my night-time reading on Kindle for the past few weeks. It’s great. Even though on the surface it might seem like a “boring business book”, it’s not at all boring, and tells some really compelling stories about the Steve Jobs era of Apple (1997 – 2012). It’s good stuff, especially if you run (or work in) a business where you sometimes get the feeling of “I think we might be overcomplicating things…”

🎥 Video – Why Sh*t Life Syndrome is Holding You Back – Fantastic video from my friend and mentor Alok “Dr K” Kanojia, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who makes incredible videos about mental health and personal development.

🎙Podcast – I recently featured on the Billion Dollar Creator podcast, in conversation with Nathan Barry (founder and CEO of ConvertKit, a $100m+ software company). If you’re a creator looking to scale your business, you might like the episode – I’ve had lots of messages from friends saying how much value they got out of the episode.