- Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
Today we are discussing
a healthy approach to productivity
featuring none other than UnJaded Jade.
- Hi.
- Jade is a friend of mine.
You've just released this book,
The Only Study Guide You'll Ever Need,
which has become a number one Best Seller. Congratulations.
- Thank you.
- And Jade is also a fellow YouTuber.
We've been following one-
We started YouTube, like, kinda at the same time.
- Similar times.
- Like 2017 and we've been following, like, each of the
channels since.
And then for a few years, I was like, oh,
I really want to be her friend,
but I feel like it would be weird for me to message you
- Oh no, I felt the same. That was so cute that
you say that.
Oh my God, he commented on one of my videos a few years ago.
And I was like, no way, it's the Ali Abdaal.
- Anyway, let's talk about the healthy approach to
productivity.
- [Ali] So you've been researching this stuff
a lot recently in
preparation for writing and publishing your book.
Can you tell us a little bit about your book?
- Yes, oh my God, it's so surreal to see this in person.
So The Only Study Guide You'll Ever Need is
everything I wish I had been able to read
during secondary school.
So it's a combination of revision methods,
evidence-based techniques for studying,
productivity tips,
all these things that you don't really get taught in school
but are pretty essential to getting that information in your
head and being able to do well in exams.
But it's also kind of more holistic.
So it looks at things that affect you as a student,
like perfectionism, fear of failure, mental health,
and talking about my own experience.
Yeah.
- Yeah. It's pretty solid stuff.
I have a little quote that's in it.
- You do. He has, yeah.
- Talking about space repetition or
the forgetting curve or something like that.
The thing that I really like about it is that
there are other books that talk about studying,
like, Make it Stick is pretty good,
I've recommended it a lot.
But I think yours is the first of its kind that actually
talks about the holistic approach,
including the mental health type stuff.
You and I get a little bit of
flack on the internet for promoting "toxic productivity" and
all that,
- Which is a little bit baffling because I feel, like,
how would you define productivity?
- Okay. So I think how the internet
would probably define productivity is
anything where you get tangible output,
which is, you know, economic activity.
It's you studying, it's you putting in time
for a better grade, it's making more money.
That's often classically seen as productive,
but we want to redefine productivity, right?
- Absolutely.
- To us, productivity is just spending time well.
And that's something I dig into in this book that could be
spending time with friends, that can be self-care and
recharging.
If it's, you know, if it's spending time
well, even if that just means enjoying your life, then
that's also productive.
- Yeah, absolutely.
And so for me, I think of productivity as
doing more of the things that
matter to you. And so to me,
hanging out with friends or having dinner with friends or
playing board games,
or even these days playing Ratchet and Clank on the PS5,
I consider productive.
It's when I want to be doing something else,
but then I'm not doing that thing.
That is when it becomes unproductive
and that's when I start to feel a bit like a waste man.
- Yeah.
- So in the book, you have, like, a really interesting
approach to the productivity equation.
I want to know if you can tell us, like,
what is the UnJaded Jade productivity equation?
- Yes. So if you're not familiar,
the classic productivity equation is output over time.
So you're trying to produce the most output in the
smallest amount of time that you can, you know,
classically, in factories,
you're trying to make the most products.
But I think the way for you to be the most productive in
whatever activity you're doing is to add three Fs.
- Three Fs.
- Yeah, so you're kind of multiplying this
output by three things.
And in this video,
we're going to dig into those three things, right?
- Absolutely. So one of the three Fs.
- So our three Fs are focus,
like, deep focus, getting in the zone.
Forethought,
so how you plan your activity, and fun.
So enjoying what you're doing.
- Love it.
And so ultimately productivity equals output divided by
time, multiplied by focus,
multiplied by forethought and multiplied by fun.
And we're going to dig into strategies for
each of these three Fs,
the three most interesting components of the
productivity equation.
- [Ali] So let's start by talking about the first F,
which is focus.
Now, you've got a really good tip in the book,
which is sanctity of space. What is sanctity of space?
What's the deal with that?
- Okay. So the idea is that when you're doing activities,
you tend to do them in a certain place.
Like when you go to the kitchen,
your brain is thinking, "I'm going to cook
or I'm going to eat."
When you're on your bed,
you're thinking generally, "I'm going to go to sleep."
And so when I'm doing certain activities like studying,
or like writing this book,
I try and keep a sanctity over the space I'm doing it in.
So you kind of have a choice, right?
Like when you're at your desk,
you can make that a place where you scroll on your phone and
go on social media,
or you can try and commit to making it a place where you,
I don't know, you revise that chapter of biology or,
you know, you work on a project of some kind.
And this was really essential to me being able to finish
this book is I had a cafe where I would go to,
and whenever I was there, I wouldn't bring a friend.
I would just sit and write.
- Yeah, and you were able to write this book in
like six months or something like that.
- Eight months.
- Eight months, Walden University,
while also being a professional YouTuber.
That's pretty good going.
- Thank you.
But it's kind of, as we were saying, focus, right?
Like, it can be so hard to find when you've got so many
different elements of your life that you're juggling.
So I find, like, that intentionality,
like, "I am coming here to do one task," is really useful.
- Nice. So I'm going to start using sanctity space
in my life as well.
Especially when writing my book and doing stuff.
I feel like a cafe; a nice cafe,
same cafe every day; would be a good shout.
You also talk a lot about, like, the mental health side of
things when it comes to focus.
What's your take on that?
- Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day,
you can't really focus if your mind is not there and
not every day is going to be the best day of your life
mentally.
And so that's something I discuss in the book is how our
minds naturally fluctuate.
And you can put in routines to help look after your mental
health.
So I talk a lot about mindfulness,
things like yoga and meditation, which sound very hippy.
And, you know,
it's not like you're just gonna sit there and breathe,
and it's not going to do anything for you,
but habits like that,
or even journaling, self-care, are really important
for you to have to sustain focus.
- And one tip that I really liked that you gave is that,
like, for those of us who struggle to
kind of make time for ourselves,
what would you advise that people like me do to kind of
incorporate this sort of meditation mindfulness type stuff
into our lives?
- Oh, that's a good question.
So I think once you've decided that this is something you
want to do,
the way that you can make it tangible is time-blocking.
So looking at your life and your calendar and
actively putting it in your timetable.
You know, that at 7:00 AM when I wake up or 8:00 AM,
or whenever it is, that you're going to make 10 minutes to
write in a journal or 10 minutes to go on one of these
meditation apps and give it a go.
And that makes you more likely to commit to it.
- Yeah. This is something that I genuinely struggle with
where if I'm enjoying, like, work and
creating economic output so much, like,
that definition of productivity.
I often forget to take any time for myself and do something
that's non-work related in evenings.
So what I'm going to try and do is, like,
schedule something like a tennis lesson or something at five
or 6:00 PM to force me to leave work.
And then, like, scheduling the time for, like, playing
PlayStation or like, I don't know,
trying out meditation at some point in the evening.
We'll see if that works.
- And it's like you can't see the benefit of it right
there and then, right?
You know, when you're, like, playing on your PlayStation,
you're like, "Oh, maybe I could be doing something else that
feels more productive because it's going to create gain.
But in you doing these activities,
which are just relaxing and you're recharging you,
that is going to create a better you;
it's almost like an investment in you being able to do
classically productive tasks better.
- Yeah. I suppose it is.
And I guess we're also trying to not think of it as,
"I'm doing this for the sake of more economic output."
- That's true, that's true. Yeah.
- Which is a thing that I've struggled with is, like,
"Yeah, I guess, you know, the upside of meditation is
I can make a video about it."
(laughing)
- I guess it's just like looking after who you are,
but then who you are is doing, you know,
all of these other tasks too.
- Yeah, man.
Alright. So we've got the first F, which is focus,
and you've got a bunch of more tips in the book about it.
And you and I have tonnes of videos that are in channels about
how to focus as well.
- [Ali] What about the second F for forethought?
- Forethought, so it's a bit of a mouthful that one,
but the whole idea is planning and how essential that is.
Because so often we block out a time to sit and study,
but if you haven't planned what you're going to study or how
to study it effectively,
you might just end up kind of wasting time.
So you sit there and, you know,
you know you need to learn this information,
but you don't really know how to learn.
So there are some things I discuss in my book,
one of which is a framework to understand how we learn and
plan better revision techniques.
So the idea is that, you know, if you're sad,
when you're revising,
you can change it to the mnemonic, SAAD.
(laughing)
- Nice.
- Little bit, like, shoved in there, but memorable.
Yes, and this is all based off of, you know,
different research papers about what works for science of
memory and the S stands for spaced repetition,
which is something I think you've discussed in your channel
before.
If you look at the forgetting curve of human memory,
you can put it somewhere on screen.
When you are learning something,
you actually exponentially will forget that information
if you don't go over and review it.
And so the idea is, you know, you just review that
information at regular intervals.
You're more likely to retain it.
And then the second one is active recall.
So I think what's so, so hard and
what feels often productive for people is to spend more
time revising, but doing passive activities.
Like highlighting or rereading a textbook,
you know, you're just staring at information
so it feels like you're spending your time well,
when in reality,
giving it a bit of forethought to plan an active recall
revision technique
is what is going to give you the most benefit.
So the idea is you're pulling information out of your mind.
So, you know, if you're trying to recall a process
you actually going in and bringing it out of your head,
is you going over that information.
It's better than just reading it.
- So that's spaced repetition, active recall,
we've got an A and a D, what do those stand for?
- Yes. So the third one is association.
So the idea is that when you're learning,
you tend to build it off of the foundation of things that
you already have in your head.
An example that I bring up,
which is not related to studying, is how I'm quite good at
remembering peoples' names.
And the way that I do this is whenever I meet someone and I
take their name,
I try and associate it instantly to something I know about
this name or this person or something it reminds me of.
So I'm kind of building it onto a prompt for myself.
So for example, if I meet someone called Charlotte,
I can think, "What does that name mean to me?
My neighbor's called Charlotte," you know?
And then whenever I see this person again,
I'm bringing back that foundational knowledge of my
neighbour, which was going to prompt me to remember that name
And any revision techniques that you're using,
which build off of associations,
are going to be more effective.
And lastly, the D is for desirable difficulty.
And this is the idea that you should be doing
revision practises, which are hard, which challenge you.
And if they're not feeling hard enough,
then you can put in more active recall,
or you can go to more application methods like testing.
And so this SAAD mnemonic is basically a set of questions
you can ask yourself when you come to revise,
just to make sure you're doing something,
which is actually effective.
- Nice. Yeah, that's pretty good.
I'm gonna start using this when I'm preparing for my
future medical exam.
(laughing)
We've got a couple of other things within forethought that
you talk about in the book that are kind of less study and
more, like, general life-y.
I wonder if you can talk about some of those.
- Yes. Something I've been doing for the last few years,
which really helps me juggle having a YouTube channel
alongside university, book writing, all of it is
this idea of having a monthly overview with goals.
These can be based off of, you know,
even your New Year's resolutions and making them more
tangible.
Then breaking that down to the weeks of the month
then breaking the goals down into what you want achieve then
your day to-do list and then
your to-do list for what you're going to do in that
activity.
Yes.
- Nice. That's pretty good.
The way I, like, I always feel like I really need to do
like a weekly review
and I just do it so rarely, but on the times I do it,
I always feel like, "Oh, I've got so much clarity."
It's such a useful thing to do, monthly reviews as well.
But yeah.
- It's just discipline, right? It's, like,
force yourself to do it.
- How do you bring yourself to do it?
- I think because the times in my life where I don't do it,
I feel really lost or just chaotic
and I feel like I'm constantly like on a treadmill trying to
catch up with life.
Like there's things I want to achieve
but I haven't put any frameworks down in my life to achieve
those things.
So it's kind of, you know,
like how you feel inspired to do New Year's resolutions on
January 1st.
You know, it was like (indistinct).
I have a similar feeling at the start of every month
because it's like, ooh, you know, it's a new one.
Like, why not?
You know, I said I wanted to achieve these things this year,
why not use this as a fresh start now to
do something about it?
- Oh, okay. That's very inspiring.
Well, we're sort of early August now,
so I might do a wave of monthly planning.
- Ooh! Yes. Go for it.
- Might as well.
And one thing you also talk about, which I
first heard from you on a video two years ago is the
Odyssey Plan.
What is the Odyssey Plan?
- Can I just say as well,
when Ali commented on my video about the Odyssey Plan,
it was just such a cute moment, I felt so honoured.
- Oh, I'm glad.
- So, yes, the idea of the Odyssey Plan is a way to plan
your future.
Kind of similar to vision boarding or defining what you want
to do with your life.
You write down,
if you were to continue with what you're doing right now,
what your life would look like in five years.
So if you're studying medicine,
the odds are that in five years,
you're going to be a junior doctor,
or you're going to be a doctor.
Maybe you're living in Cambridge,
if you studied in Cambridge.
And that's sort of where your life is going.
And then you imagine if you picked a slightly alternative
route, which is also achievable.
So maybe you study that other subject that you were
considering, or you pursued YouTube, which is,
you know, maybe an option.
I don't know why I'm using your life out here as an example
but I am.
And then you also write down if societal expectations didn't
matter, money didn't matter.
What would your life look like in five years?
What would you be doing?
How would you be spending your time?
And then you take a step back and you look at these life
Odysseys and you work out the elements of that final one
that you could bring into your life now to
make it feel more meaningful.
- Great stuff.
Yeah. I did this first in like December 2019,
when you first put out that video and talking about it,
and it just, like,
genuinely changed the trajectory of where my life
was going.
Just to spend a half an hour thinking and writing about
what these five-year plans look like.
I feel like it's time for a new one.
I haven't done it in awhile.
- Oh my God.
I feel like I need to do one too.
- Oh yeah, nice.
- Maybe tonight.
- Tonight, yeah.
Stick it in the calendar, something like that.
Awesome, and then that brings us to the final F,
which is fun.
- [Ali] It's something you and I love to talk about.
- We love fun. Come on, who doesn't?
- Exactly, so, what do we talk about?
(laughing)
- Oh, reframing subjects. (indistinct)
Cool.
- So when it comes to fun,
one thing you talk about in the book is how,
like, specifically to studying;
how do we essentially talk ourselves into enjoying the stuff
that we're doing, even if it's not, like, "fun,"
like, on the surface?
- Yes.
Okay, so I think so much of what we view as fun
is the narrative we're telling ourselves about something.
Because if you say I hate maths,
then every single time you go to a maths lesson,
that's still in your head. You know, you hate maths;
you're not going to enjoy this new thing you're being
taught.
So I think part of it is, noticing firstly,
what you're telling yourself about the things you don't
like,
and then reframing it based off of you as a person and what
you do like to find something of value in that subject.
Yeah. So again, you can do this through journaling,
you can talk to friends about it,
but every subject has something brilliant about it.
You have to convince yourself sometimes,
but I find as soon as you can find a reason for it to be
fun, then you can convince yourself of it and
make it more bearable.
- Yeah, like,
there's another technique that I used a lot at university,
which is for stuff where I couldn't figure out a way to make
it fun.
The way I would make it fun is by thinking about how I would
teach it to someone else because I was super into teaching
and I'd always teach students in the years below.
- Yeah, and you have to make it interesting
when you're teaching.
- Exactly, you've got to make it interesting and
turning it into, like, setting mnemonics or, like, weird
references or things like that.
And even if something is really, really dry, like I dunno,
virology or something, although,
you know, it's kind of relevant these days;
even if it's really boring and just have to memorise a table
of stuff,
figuring out, like, interesting mnemonics and ways to teach
it to someone else just automatically makes anything
we do a lot more fun.
So that was kind of specific to studying but
I think like the way you approach writing the book is
really interesting. I wonder if you could talk about
how you made that fun and sort of the goal thing.
- Yeah. God. Me and Ali were having a really good chat
about this because writing a book
when you've already got a platform is kind of terrifying.
I think you've sort of-
you're scared of the expectations that people have of you,
the pressure for it to perform numerically,
all these things like Best Seller list,
which I shouldn't even care that much about, you know,
you should just write the book for the fun of the process.
And I really had to change my goal in order for it to be fun
because I would come and sit down to write
and every single time I'd be thinking about the end point.
I'd be thinking about the reviews, the, you know,
that every single word I type right now has to be a
best-selling word and that kind of pressure is crippling.
So instead, focusing on why I'm writing it for me,
just finishing it;
trying to find enjoyment in every single time
I finally wrote a sentence, which is good,
that made it just a lot more achievable and enjoyable.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Like, I really need to take this advice on board when I'm
doing my writing or anything else where I feel like
if I start taking it too seriously,
it just sucks all the fun out of it.
Whereas when I treat it more like a game and, like,
this is supposed to be fun.
In fact, I have a post-it note on my monitor,
my old monitor, called, "This is supposed to be fun."
I just kind of look at it and remind myself, oh yeah!
- Like, why are you stressing?
- Yeah, it's all good. This is all a game.
It's not the end of the world.
If a book doesn't do well, you know,
what matters is writing something that you're proud of and
yeah, getting it out and it's genuinely very good.
It looks very pretty.
You should check out the book.
Links to the books and everything else in the
video description.
- It became a Best Seller.
Which is, you know, why, like, what? You know?
And that truly was not the goal.
When I finished writing this,
I didn't care how it did numerically because I was proud of
myself for getting it out.
This was the message I wanted to put in it.
So yeah. So just write the book, Ali, I'm sure it will-
(laughing)
- It's going to happen one day.
Alright, so that was our take on the
healthy approach to productivity.
We've got this equation, which incorporates, yes,
productivity involves output over time.
That's kind of the boring bit, but the fun stuff is the fun,
the focus, and the forethought.
And you can read all about those things in Jade's book.
So links to Amazon, Waterstones, everything,
et cetera in the video description.
Everyone subscribe to Jade's channel as well.
It's great, I've been following it
for the last few years and, yeah,
Odyssey plans to have genuinely helped change the way that I
am living my life. So thank you for that.
- I'm so glad.
- And yeah, anything else you'd like to end with?
- Not really. This is just an honour.
Random point,
but I've been watching Ali's channel for years and I
had a vision of what this place looked like in my head.
It's actually much smaller in person.
- It's really small, yeah.
- This is a productive space.
Like, you have milked every corner of the space.
- Yeah, you know, that junior doctor salary
before the YouTube money started rolling in.
(laughing)
But yeah. One day we'll upgrade to a proper studio.
Otherwise, it's pretty nice.
- It's amazing. Love it.
- Yeah. Thanks for being on the channel.
- Everyone thanks for watching and
we'll see you in the next video.