The Transformative Power of Clarity

Hey friends,

Do you ever find yourself offering a friend some really great advice, but then completely fail to take notice of it yourself? I’m totally guilty of this. So, here’s some of my own advice from a previous issue that I definitely needed to take notice of this week!

In Getting Things Done, David Allen teaches us a simple 5-step system for… getting things done. It goes: (1) Capture, (2) Clarify, (3) Organise, (4) Reflect, (5) Engage.

This week I began to really appreciate that the secret to beating procrastination lies in the second step – Clarify.

Often, when we’re repeatedly procrastinating from doing something, it’s because we don’t have enough clarity about the thing.

We might write “Physiology Revision” or “Website Redesign” on our to-do list. But when it comes to sitting down to work, we see the list, and our brain says Nope!

It’s saying ‘nope’ because there’s just not enough clarity. What the hell does ‘Physiology Revision’ mean? We’re unlikely to revise the entirety of the field in one sitting, but we write it on our todo lists as if we’re going to.

And when we see things like ‘Website Redesign’, our brain conjures up the mountain of work that would involve, and we continue to procrastinate from it.

David Allen’s excellent advice is that we should break our to-do lists into Projects and Tasks. A Project is anything that requires more than one Task, and has some sort of (ideal or enforced) deadline for its completion.

“Physiology Revision” and “Website Redesign” are therefore Projects. And the Tasks within them might be “Do 20 practice questions on respiratory physiology” or “Plan website navigation”.

The point is that every Project should have a defined Next Action. And if we find ourselves procrastinating from a particular task repeatedly, often what we need is more clarity. Once we’ve broken the project down into smaller tasks, we realise that it’s not that bad and get cracking.

Or alternatively, we realise we’re still procrastinating from it, in which case we figure out what emotional response we have to the task that’s stopping us from doing it. But that’s a topic for another time.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

🧑‍💻 Every Aspiring Creator Needs a Website 

Sharing Sunday Snippets means I often get messages from people who want to become creators. But they’re often struggling with a fear of putting themselves out there online. My advice is simple: start small. You don’t have to immediately launch a YouTube channel – try creating a website first.

If I hadn’t started blogging on my website, I’m not sure I would’ve ever started my YouTube channel, or grown it to 5M subscribers, or built a business around it, or been able to quit my job as a doctor. All the incredible things that have happened in my life in the last 8 years, I can trace back to that single decision to start that website.

It took me hours of coding and tinkering to create my first website, but that’s thankfully a thing of the past. With Hostinger, the world’s fastest growing website hosting service, you can generate a page in seconds You don’t need any coding knowledge – you can easily edit your webpages using simple drag-and-drop features. There’s also a bunch of other AI tools to help you start writing, generate images for your posts, and even automate your SEO – it’s game changing.

So if you’re interested in creating your own domain and sharing content on your own personal website visit Hostinger and use the code ALIABDAAL for an extra 10% off. Who knows where the content creation journey could take you!

Thanks to Hostinger for sponsoring this issue of Sunday Snippets 🙏

🎬 My New Videos

😓I started a new business. It did not go well… – It’s super important to me that I’m always honest with you guys when things don’t go well. Here’s a break down of one of my biggest failures…

🌴A week in my life: vlog – Here’s a cheeky vlog for you from our team trip in Turkey.

 ✍️ Quote of the Week

“Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.”

From How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Resurfaced using Readwise.