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Overview of the Skillshare Class

The Pilot, The Plane, The Engineer model of Productivity
About Scheduling and Calendars
Managing TO-DO lists
Projects and Areas of focus
Goals
Vision and purpose
Motivation - Inertia - Flow - Distraction Management
Pomodoro Technique
Course Correcting
Artificial Deadlines - Reitoff principle
GTD - Getting Things Done
Digital Productivity
Health and Wellbeing
Daily - Weekly - Annual Review

1. The Pilot, The Plane, and The Engineer

Pilot

The mindset needed to decide what course you can take in your life. The pilot phase of your day should take less than five percent of your time. You sit down and decide what’s important to you, prioritize accordingly, and chart a course for your plane to fly. There are different Horizons that a Pilot can plan for.

Horizons:

H0 - Ground Level tasks and actions: Deals with your everyday chores. E.g., Go for a walk, draw ten portraits, pay the bill, submit this assignment, etc.
H1 - Projects: A collection of tasks spread across different days with a definite end date. E.g., Inktober is a project; ink one drawing a day is a task.
H2 - Areas of Interest: These are items always in the back of your mind, things that you are interested in. They have no time limit attached. These are pursuits that last a lifetime. E.g., Cooking, Drawing, Photography.
H3 - Goals and Objectives: Represents tangible results that you might need to pursue and attain. E.g., Start a business, Marriage.
H4 - Five Year plan
H5 - Principles: These are your core values that guide you through your life. E.g., Honest work, Stay true to the passion.

Plane

It is the machine or mindset that gets the actual work done. It needs to take off, stay on course, and land. This phase should take up about 80% of your time. This is where you get the work done.

To fly the plane well, you need to hack the motivation myth, manage your distractions, understand what flow state is, and remind yourself it’s okay to fail, but it’s more important to come back to the BASELINE.

Engineer

The engineer mindset is the one that maintains your plane so that it can keep flying smoothly. It focuses on speed, efficiency, and organization. It should take only 2-6 percent of the available time. It also focuses on the tools available to make our plane and pilot more effective.

2. Scheduling and Calendars

To-do lists are a good way to follow up on your ground-level tasks. Your brain cannot possibly store all things you should do, and that’s where to-do lists come as an effective tool.

It’s important to remember that to-do lists are only here to make sure you don’t waste time thinking about what work you should do today or during your free time. Taking to-do lists as “might do” lists will help you keep your life planned as well as flexible at the same time.

Scheduling is important as it lets you keep control over the time you have. Follow the concept of Time Blocking. Use a calendar app that is synced across all your devices to mark your schedule. Rather than making a precise timetable, mark blocks of time in which you can do tasks of different categories. Follow a 1-3-5 pattern, i.e., one big task, 3 medium tasks, and five small tasks.

Philosophy of slow burn: Sustained effort spread over a large span of time to complete a big project gets more done than the HEAVY LIFT.

3. Managing TO-DO Lists

Approach To-Do lists differently. Time-sensitive To-Do lists must be followed as they are. But for slow-burn projects, use to-do lists that are always available to you, that you can pick and choose to do whenever you have time.

Three-level structure:

Stuff I need to get done today
Stuff I need to get done this week
Stuff I need to do (Might do list)

Ali’s approach: During daily highlight (in the pilot mode), decide the one thing that you need to get done absolutely. Another approach is “Eat the frog” or do the hardest thing of the day in the beginning. Get it done fast and move on to less taxing tasks.

4. Projects and Areas of Focus

A project is anything with more than one task associated with it. There will be many projects. Instead of thinking of doing a project, think about doing a task in the project. Tasks are immediately actionable and get you to do the work. E.g., YouTube is a project, filming classes one to five is a task.

Every single project should have an appropriate next action. It helps keep the slow burn on track.

Area of focus will be a collection of projects for each of the broader interests you have. E.g., Project: get a six-pack body will be under the health section, while start a YouTube channel will be under the business section of your areas of interest.

5. Goals

Goals are interesting, and there are three ways to look at them:

Objective Goals
Progress Goals
System Goals

Objective goals are the most widely followed goal concepts, but it is not a healthy idea to pursue. Objective goals tend to create the feeling of unwanted pressure and pull you into the dopamine cycle. E.g., Revenue targets, subscriber count.

Progress goals are goals that signify your progress in something. It is simply a question of whether you are progressing in that task or not. E.g., Adding more emails to your mailing list. Rather than going for a number, even the addition of just one shows that you are making progress.

System goals are even more efficient. They are objective in a way without the pressure of numbers, and they also show progress. An example of a system goal would be: I will visit the gym thrice a week.

A good marriage of system and progress goals can help you be the boss of your own time and get things done. The pilot will help you give the bird’s-eye view picture of all this and make sure that the things you get done are actually the things you really want to do.

James Clear on goals: Having a goal is fine, provided you use that goal to set your direction. Then you forget all about the goal.

Additional Resource: A blog

6. Vision and Purpose

The pilot must make sure that the productivity we are doing is useful in the bigger picture.

Meaning for life comes from having a responsibility towards something greater than ourselves.

Odyssey plan exercise:

In 5 years’ time, where would you be? Write in detail about the current path you are on.
In 5 years’ time, where would you be if you take a different path?
If money was not an issue, what would you do in the next five years?

Splitting life: Physical Health | Mental Health | Relationships | Material Health

Optimize for all these domains: 1st level of vision After that, think hard for further levels of vision

7. Motivation - Inertia - Flow - Distraction Management

Motivation isn’t necessary to get things done.

Motivation Myth by James Hayden: We do something, we get success, which leads to motivation to do other things. Action - Motivation - Action

Struggle for motivation: Long-term benefits but short-term pain - brain tries to minimize short-term pain

If we enjoy what we’re doing, we don’t need the motivation to do it
Two aspects: Control Action or Control Outcome
Action: Make the action more pleasurable/fun, e.g., Adding music to study routine, gamifying your gym workout by tracking weights
Action: Make the consequences of inaction more painful, e.g., Putting money on the line
Outcome: Shorten the feedback loop, e.g., Did I finish three head portraits today?
Outcome: Make the outcome clearer, e.g., Watching drawings of masters

Overcoming Inertia:

Inertia is our resistance to start doing work.

Some rules to get things going:

2 Minute Rule: If something takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it now. (David Allen) (Helps to remove random crap out of our way)
5 Minute Rule: Do a thing for 5 minutes, every day. Once you commit yourself to do a task for only 5 minutes, you end up doing it for more than five minutes. (For beating procrastination)
Environment Design: This is basically setting up your tools beforehand. If you’re going to write something, make sure your table is kept clean and pen and paper are kept aside way before so that you don’t lose focus searching for the things you need.

The intent should be there to get anything done. Cultivating intent is the discipline you have to strive for.

Achieving Flow

The flow state is the ideal state we must aim for while working on a task. It’s the sweet spot between challenge and ability that lets you do the work without being aware of it.

7 Techniques to Achieve Flow:

Manage external distractions
Manage internal distractions
One task at a time
Setting up mental cues: Setting up an environment to signal your brain this is serious work
Select challenges, not impossible tasks
Work at your biological time
Make the work fun by adding music to it

Distraction Management

One of the hardest things to do while in the plane stage is to avoid distractions. These are the things that shift your focus from the task at hand. In the olden days, it used to be the birds chirping, “oh look what a wonderful day this is.” That sort of distraction is nonexistent in our modern lives. What we have now are electronic distractions.

Ways by which you can manage distractions:

Shorten the feedback loop and make it more important to us
Stack your cell phones and other gadgets while you are working. (Increase friction to gain access to your distractions) Rearrange apps on your phone. Use Black and White mode. Use Do Not Disturb
Leverage artificial deadlines, so that you are not affected by the Parkinson’s effect
Reitoff principle: for some reason if you don’t feel like doing work, simply write that day off and chill out. You shouldn’t have any regret while writing off a day. It is a skill to make the choice between writing off a day and simply losing the day

8. Pomodoro Technique

Work for 25 minutes and take a 5-minute break.

9. Course Correcting

It is only natural that our attention wavers off. It is okay. You just have to course-correct and refocus during instances such as that. Never drop your day calling it a lost cause because you missed a task.

10. Artificial Deadlines - Reitoff Principle

To land your plan safely and get it done:

Leverage artificial deadlines to offset Parkinson’s law. Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”

E.g., Ali finishing a Skillshare course overnight with his friend

Peter Thiel’s idea of thinking about your five-year plan and reframing it in such a way that you can get it done in six months.

Reitoff principle: For some reason, if you don’t feel like doing work, simply write that day off and chill out. You shouldn’t have any regret while writing off a day. It is a skill to make the choice between writing off a day and simply losing the day.

11. GTD - Getting Things Done

We want to be effective at everything we do.

Horizontal organization: Across all the things we are involved in, we need to get them all fairly tidy - Work/Life/Home/Kids

Vertical Organization: Efficiently organized in each of your projects as well

Five-step process:

Capture: Any idea that you have, write it down.
Clarify: Make sure you define the next actionable step for that thought. Procrastination comes from having no clarity regarding what you need to do.
Organize: We want to put stuff where it needs to go. Use metadata and priorities. The important job of the engineer.
Reflect: Reviews
Engage: Do the work.

The mind is for having ideas, not storing them.

12. Digital Productivity

The following is an excellent resource to get you started with improving your digital processes and life style. Digital Productivity Coach

13. Health and Wellbeing

Your health is one important aspect when it comes to leading a productive life. Your body is your ultimate tool. So make sure you do what is necessary to keep yourself fit. Try to plan your sleep.

Tips for sleeping on time:

Reduce blue light exposure
Use blackout curtains in the bedroom to make it dark
Never ever take phones to your bed. If you can’t fall asleep, read a book.

Useful resource: Pick Up Limes

14. Daily - Weekly - Annual Review

Daily Review

To review your day is to go through all the things you did during the day and make sense of it. You can look for where you felt and did great and where you were bitter. Reflect on what decisions you could have made better and think of changes that you could make tomorrow.

Weekly Review

Note down the summary of your week and check any tasks you had set. Review your projects and wishlists.

In the book “Getting Things Done,” the following ideas are discussed:

Get clear
Get current
Get creative

During the weekly review, you can check and manage all your emails. Collect loose papers and materials and assign them spaces.

Also, read Ali’s Guide to using Spaced Repetition using Anki and Lesson on Stoicism by Ali Abdaal

Zettel Garden🪴

Explorer

Ali Abdaal's Take on Productivity (old)