- [Ali] Hey, friends, welcome back
to another Day In The Life lockdown blog.
Today's job is, as usual,
to try and be as productive as possible
while also having a nice time along the way.
As usual, I wake up at 8:00 a.m. with my alarm
and as usual, it's an ongoing struggle
to negotiate myself out of bed.
I just lie there doing absolutely nothing
for half an hour, and then I remember
that I've got the iPad on my bedside table,
so I bust that out
and do my morning journaling practice on Notion.
At 9:00 a.m., a solid hour after waking up,
I finally manage to negotiate myself out of bed
and into the shower.
I weigh myself on the Wi-Fi enabled scales,
currently I'm 72.46 kilograms
with 16% body fat percentage, whatever that means.
And then, by 9:20, I'm out of the shower.
I make my morning cup of coffee
and pour some boiling water into this plastic thingy
that makes me some oats.
While I consume my morning sustenance,
I do more writing on Notion,
and then from 10:00 a.m. it's the somewhat weekly
team meeting with the A Team on Zoom.
So, for half an hour, Christian, Angus,
Elizabeth and I chat about what we're doing
in terms of videos, articles, podcasts,
and Skillshare classes for the next month or so.
At 10:30 I take advantage of my gastrocolic reflex
and sit on the toilet.
What was meant to be a five minute job
turns into half an hour
of watching covers of John Mayer songs
on YouTube on my phone, and then at 11:00,
as my legs are feeling dead, I remember
that I'm meant to be a productivity guru.
So I leave the bathroom and station myself on the sofa.
I practice a bit of "In the Blood" by John Mayer
on the guitar, and then procrastinate on my phone
for another 20 minutes, doing God only knows what.
By this time, it's 11:20 and so I decide
to stop being a complete waste man
and do something more useful with my life.
So, as usual, to mark my move from waste man
to productivity grease monkey,
I make some more coffee with the Chemex,
and then I sit on the sofa with my iPad Pro Magic Keyboard
which is my favorite casual writing set-up.
I ask Siri to play the Apple Music
Pure Country Radio Station on the HomePod,
and then from 11:30 to noon
I re-read one of my favorite books,
"Anything You Want,
"40 Lessons For A New Kind of Entrepreneur" by Derek Sivers.
We're planning a video for the book club series,
distilling the main insights from the book.
But it's proving to be a little bit tricky
because it's a collection of 40 short lessons.
So, instead as I'm re-reading it,
I think about which bits particularly resonated with me
the first few times that I read it,
and I try to figure out how I can present this
in a nice way on video.
At 12:05 I decide to take a break
but I'm still in the mood to do something useful
so I continue working through
Justin Guitar's music theory course.
We revisit chord triads I'm very familiar with on the piano
but I realize they're a thing
on the bottom three strings of the guitar as well,
which is a game changing insight.
I work at this for around an hour
and then at 1:00 p.m. I grab some lunch,
which today is halloumi with rice and peas
from The Fitness Kitchen.
While waiting for the Tupperware to warm in the microwave
I bust out some weird tricep exercises
with the resistance bands and pull-up bar.
I grab a cheek beverage of pear and barely water squash
and then, while eating,
I watch some more music theory lessons on Justin Guitar
because I'm kind of on a roll of inspiration
with the whole guitar thing.
And even though, obviously, motivation is a myth,
I think it's helpful to take advantage
of bursts of motivation when we do have it.
From 1:40 p.m. I spend half an hour
sorting out some general admin on the computer,
gearing up for the launch of Liberty Medics,
a new business that me and some friends have set up.
And then, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.,
I do some more productive procrastination on the guitar,
and spend a distressingly long amount of time
shooting a thumbnail for this vlog.
I look at the time, realize it's 3:00 p.m.
And realize that I haven't really done anything useful
for the past three hours.
Oh well, there goes my status as a productivity guru.
At 3:00 p.m. I make the final coffee of the day
to get me out of my slump and into a productive mood.
It's a bit dangerous having caffeine at 3:00 p.m.
because it stays in your body for ages
and it can reduce the quality of our sleep.
But it's fine today, because I've got a twilight shift
tomorrow at 4:00 p.m., so I can afford to stay up late
reading paranormal romance fiction
and have a lie-in tomorrow morning.
I spend some time setting up the overhead rig
to get a shot of the coffee from above.
Wanna get this overhead shot.
This is how I procrastinate these days
when I'm a vlog, right.
I set up these ridiculous shots
and it just makes everything take about four times longer
than it should, but, oh well, it's all good.
I also get a delivery of the Joby TelePod,
a fancy new tripod for my phone,
so I do a cheeky unboxing and play around with that
for a little bit.
Finally, at 3:25 p.m., it's time to get back to work.
I switch my desk over to standing mode
which annoyingly involves fiddling around
with my studio lighting set-up,
and I switch over to my colorful keyboard
which is a nicer typing experience
than the Apple Magic Keyboard.
From half past three, I spend an hour
writing more stuff for some upcoming videos
and I have some more chats with my team
about our upcoming content.
I look through our video ideas database on Notion
to see if there's anything that we can move
from idea to reality.
At 4:50, energized from this hour of standing
and typing away, I decide I'm going to continue
my daily challenge of writing a thousand words per day.
I move over to the sofa with the iPad,
which seems to be my dedicated writing device,
and fully intend to bash out some more writing,
but I make the mistake of browsing Twitter
and then fall down a rabbit hole
of reading articles and watching videos
related to the Black Lives Matter protests.
I tweet briefly about it, re-tweet a few things
and wonder if there's anything more I could be doing
with my platform to help.
Next thing I know, it's 6:15 p.m.
and I've been depressed about this stuff for the past hour.
I decide to get back to #productivity
for whatever that's worth.
Today's the first day
of a 30 day singing class that I'm taking online.
So I watch the introductory video
and then I record a video for the first project,
which involves sharing my story, musical background,
and talking about my favorite genres of music.
Then I sing a bit of "Country Roads"
by John Denver as an introductory video.
Initially I cringe a bit inside
at having to talk about this stuff on video
to this random group of strangers,
which I don't normally do.
But then I think, you know what?
Screw it, I've paid for this class
and I want to improve my singing
so I'm gonna take it seriously,
and I'm gonna do all of the exercises
that the coach assigns each day.
By 7:30, I've recorded my intro monologue and song,
and so I eat some chicken takeaway
while doing a quick edit on Final Cut Pro
and uploading it on YouTube as an unlisted video
to share with the class.
By 7:50 dinner's done and so I wash the dishes
and then procrastinate on the piano until 8:15.
At this point I decide to do
a final burst of work for the day
to get my word count up to a thousand words.
This takes me a solid 50 minutes
as I write about luck, serendipity,
and how to maximize it.
Off the back of a discussion that I had
with my friend Bobby Seagull
during a YouTube livestream earlier in the week.
Through this, I end up revisiting an episode
of the Farnam Street Podcast that I heard in October 2019
and took a few notes on at the time.
Revisiting this episode makes me stumble across
some pretty cool ideas that I'd forgotten,
which is one of the nice things about note taking.
I don't trust my dumb-ass brain
to actually remember anything
and so I like to take notes on the stuff that I read,
watch, and listen to, but I like to take those notes
in a way that I will stumble across them again.
Because otherwise, I might not even remember
that they exist.
I finish this writing stuff by 10 past nine
and then I decide to do a final few #productive things
as a bit of a wind-down.
First I make myself a cup of caffeine free chamomile tea
and then I sit down to work through an online course
on Brilliant, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
Brilliant is an amazing platform for online courses
in maths, science, and computer science,
and I'm working my way through
their computer science series these days.
Trying to build a more legit understanding of the field.
I quite like working through these courses
because they have a lot of interactive elements
and challenges along the way,
which helps exercise my mind in a nice, guided fashion.
If you also think that learning is quite fun
and you wanna join me
in taking some of these courses on Brilliant,
head over to brilliant.org/Ali
and the first 200 people to visit that link
will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
Anyway, at 9:40 I move over to the piano
to continue practicing learning how to read sheet music.
I sort of have this new rule for myself
that I have to be productive before 10:00 p.m.
But after 10:00 p.m. I'm not allowed to do
anything explicitly productive unless I really feel like it.
And so, I intend to do only around 20 minutes
of piano practice, but I get quite absorbed by it,
and trying to play stuff from "Lord of the Rings" soundtrack
and "Phantom of the Opera",
and then I just end up screwing around a little bit.
It's not particularly productive
because it's not really deliberate practice,
but oh well, it's fun, and this is my wind down time
for the night, so it's all good.
At 10:30 I get up off the piano
and think about whether I want to get an early night in bed
but I find that I'm still pretty hyped
and I've got some energy left to expend,
so I find some more articles to read
and take notes on from the stuff
that I added to my Resonance Calendar last year.
People sometimes ask when I make the time to relax,
but to be honest, I find this sort of stuff quite fun,
it's just really kinda fun taking notes
from random articles that you read once upon a time.
And it's quite relaxing anyway,
so it doesn't really feel like work.
Finally, at 11:00 p.m.,
I sense my concentration beginning to wane
and so I upload the vlog footage to Google Drive,
get ready for bed, type out my daily reflection
on the iPad, and then read a bit more on my Kindle
before calling it a night.
Here is a playlist of more Day In The Life videos,
thanks for watching, stay safe,
and I will see you in the next one, goodnight.