The Brutal Truth About Productivity and Why Discipline Is Overrated

Being productive for years on end is very, very difficult. You can have the perfect system, the best app, a color- coded calendar, but sooner or later it will all break. I have been obsessed with the art and science of productivity for 15 years. I've been making videos about this since 2017. I wrote a best-selling book about it. So in this video I want to tell you the whole brutal truth. First, why do you know exactly what to do, but still don't do it? Second, why almost none of the truly productive people are particularly disciplined. And third, why influencers like me have a financial interest in making this all look much more complicated

than it actually is. So, procrastination is when you know you want to do something. You probably know you should do it, but for some reason you don't. Ultimately, procrastination is not a time management problem. It's actually a problem of emotional regulation. We put things off to feel a little better now, but our future selves pay the price. This is from a seminal 2013 paper by Fushi Sirois and Tim Pichil, and I find it a very useful approach when we think about procrastination. It looks like this little diagram. I call it the " procrastination hump." If you've studied chemistry or biology, you know that this graph represents what is essentially the

activation energy. There is a task that needs to be done, but taking on it requires extra effort, often because it is boring or brings up unpleasant emotions that we don't want to feel. And because we don't want to waste that effort and energy, we stop and procrastinate on the things we know we should do. This often happens to me when I'm trying to do something that seems a little boring. I'm lucky that most of my work is very interesting. But, for example, when I need to sign documents for the tax office or check the work of someone on the team, I think: "Oh, this will take time to sit down and figure it out." Or even preparing a video for YouTube when I think, "Oh, I know this is going to take a lot of effort." Ah, I don't want to do this right now.

It's like in a work context. And as for my personal life, I often experience a huge barrier of procrastination when I need to force myself to go to the gym. Because the gym is hard, not much fun, and I think, "Oh, do I really need this?" And I find a bunch of reasons not to go to the gym, as you probably already understood. In my book, Productivity with Pleasure, I talk about the three main causes of procrastination and how to combat them. I sincerely apply this method in my own life when I experience difficulty or procrastination before a certain task. So, the first thing is clarity. Do I have a full understanding of what this task actually requires? Because if you don't know exactly what needs to be done, doubts arise: I don't know how

big a task this is. It could take 2 minutes, or it could take 20 minutes. Do I really have those 20 minutes? It can be a two-hour job if you have to sort through a bunch of things. So making sure you have a clear understanding of the specific next step you're procrastinating on is incredibly helpful. The next barrier that causes people to procrastinate is fear. It is usually some kind of fear-based emotion, such as the fear of boredom, discomfort, or the fear of exposing oneself to public scrutiny. This is what often happens when we procrastinate on long-term matters. I talk to many people who put off starting their first business for years or even decades. And often, after a few gentle questions, it turns out that the underlying fear is the fear

of making a mistake, the fear of looking foolish in the eyes of friends, family, or colleagues on LinkedIn. And finally, it's inertia. Sometimes, even if you fully understand the task, for example, I know exactly what to do to fill out my taxes, and there is no emotional implication, I'm just lazy. Then the last element remains-inertia, which simply needs to be overcome. And this is where I find the "2- minute rule" incredibly useful: you set a timer for 2 minutes and just start doing the thing for only those 2 minutes. And then, usually, once you've started, it becomes much easier to continue. But when you have something like a three-step system for combating procrastination, that itself can ironically become a form of procrastination.

Whenever I'm struggling with something and I know it's pretty difficult, I try to come up with some incredible productivity system so that I don't even have to put in any effort. In my business, for example, instead of sitting down and doing the hard work, like writing copy for a sales page, I think: AI is cool. Why don't I experiment with all these different AI tools to see if AI will do the work for me? And I end up going down a rabbit hole for hours, days, and weeks using these AI tools. And if I just sat down and did the work myself, typing on a keyboard, I would actually get a better result. And that's what I often discover when I'm already coming out of the AI rabbit hole. So that's something I would really advise you to keep in mind when you're

trying to build your own productivity system, which we'll talk about later in this video. Make sure that creating the productivity system itself doesn't create extra work for you that only distracts you from what you really want to do. So that's the first little tip that I hope you take away from this video: sometimes the system itself can be procrastination. The second is even more difficult, because it's not about how you work, but how much you try to do. By the way, if you're like me, you probably use your iPad for a lot of productivity tasks: notes, to-do lists, diagrams, sketches, or planning your week-you name it. And this is where the sponsor of this video-Paperlike-comes into play. When I buy a new iPad, the first thing I do is stick on a

Paperlike protective film, which I've been using since literally 2018. Sure, Paperlike has improved a lot since 2018, but it really does make writing on the iPad feel like writing on paper. And I write on my iPad all the time. Because the problem with the iPad with regular glass is that when you use the Apple Pencil, it seems to slide, and writing on it is not very pleasant. But thanks to Paperlike's nano-dot technology, using the Apple Pencil really does feel like you're writing on paper. There is a slight friction, just like paper, so the hand sliding across the surface feels as if you are writing on paper. What's good about the latest version of Paperlike is that the previous Paperlike protective film

on the iPad made the image on the screen a little blurry. But thanks to the latest version of Paperlike, the iPad screen no longer has the noise it used to. They also have a new butterfly attachment system-a very smart and easy way to apply the Paperlike screen protector to your iPad. This system is reliable: there are no bubbles, no defects or distortions. Personally, I often even forget that I have the Paperlike film on my iPad, I'm just used to it. And it makes writing on the iPad a real pleasure. So, if you're someone who takes notes on your iPad, you should definitely try the Paperlike screen protector. Thank you Paperlike for sponsoring this

video and for being on my iPad since 2018. Now let's get back to the video. Right now, each of us has a huge list of things to do. And I will depict all our affairs in the form of little dots like these. If you pause the video right now, sit down, and make a list of all your to-dos, you'll probably write down at least a few pages. So, in a world where you're trying to focus on a million things at once, you end up looking something like this. This is a great diagram from Greg McKeon's book Essentialism. Back in 1997, here's what the late Steve Jobs said at Apple's WWDC conference. When you think about focusing, right? You think, "Well, focusing is saying yes." No.

Focusing means saying "no." Focusing means saying "no." And really, the whole idea of focus is to be able to say no to the vast majority of unimportant things so that you can say yes to the small number of things that really bring results. This is very difficult for many of us because we experience FOMO. We feel the fear of missing out. We know there are all these things we could do, and our dream life, our idealized hypothetical life, is where we manage to do all of these things. But every person who has achieved exceptional success in any area-whether it's financial freedom, a career, or a side job-has typically had to say yes to only a few things and no to almost everything else. So when I think about creating a productivity system or

teaching someone to be more efficient, the first step, going back to the procrastination example, involves clarity. What do you really want? What is your vision for your life and where do you think you are heading? What are your goals? What are your dreams? What areas of your life really need progress? And once we define that, it becomes much easier to take all the things we think are necessary and filter them: are they really getting me closer to the goal I want to achieve? This brings us to the question: " Okay, but how do we get this clarity?" The answer is quite simple: you need to ask yourself a series of questions for your diary. I've been making videos about this for years. We'll leave links to some of them below,

but I'll share my favorites. Number one: If I knew I wouldn't fail, what would I do? Number two: Even if I knew I was going to fail, what would I do anyway? Number three: If I had all the time and money in the world, but had to dedicate 40 hours a week to helping others, what would I do? Number four: If in 40 years I were to give a very inspiring TED talk that would get a standing ovation, what would I want to talk about? Number five: What would I want people to say about me at my funeral? Number six: What would I like to see written in my

obituary-the text that is written about you after you die? Number seven: If I continued down this path, where would I be in five years and do I want to be there? Number eight: If I chose a completely different path than the one I'm on now, where might I be in five years? Ninth: If I had chosen a completely different path than the one I'm on now, if I did n't care about money and what others thought of me, where would I end up? You can safely stop the video and take a screenshot; we'll also include a link to my free journaling hub, where I've collected all of my favorite journaling topics over the years. And if you prefer the paper version, we have created this completely free resource.

There are about 10 pages of topics for reflection, the links to which you will find below are completely free, so you can review, fill them out, and I guarantee that it will give you much more clarity that will help you become more productive. It takes a little time, right? If you don't understand where your life is headed, it becomes much harder to set goals and determine which areas of life are important, and therefore much easier to just reactively do little things that don't actually get you closer to your goal. So, if you take away one thing from this video, I think it's that you should at least get a general idea of where you want to go with your life. After all, it's not about doing more things, but about doing them less,

but better. It sounds a bit trite, but the direction you're moving in is more important than the speed of that movement, right? You can move very fast and do a lot of things, but if you find yourself going in the wrong direction, toward a life you don't really want, then what's the point of all that productivity? In fact, it would be one of the most unproductive things you could do. Just being over-productive, but in the wrong direction. So, here are three steps you can take after watching this video if you want to better understand where your life is headed. First, you can simply take a screenshot of these questions and, after watching the video, try to answer them yourself to see what comes out of it. Second, you can take these questions, feed them

into your favorite AI, and have it interview you to help figure out what to do with your life based on these topics. Or number three: we have a new productivity app called Superfocus, which has a clarity mode. So when you start working with him, he will literally interview you with these questions and ask you to share everything you think about where you want to go in life. And then he can turn that list of things you created into a series of goals that you can actually work on in the next 90 days. So, choose for yourself. All of these options are available to you. Now, at this point, people sometimes make one mistake: remember we talked about the small tasks that can throw off your focus?

Goal setting can also be a source of procrastination, because, for example, after a clarity exercise you realize, "Wow, I realized all these different things I want to do." So, these are all goals or dreams. I like to think of them as dreams, represented by these little green squares. Again, we have a problem with focus. If you had 15 different goals you were trying to achieve, it would be very difficult to work on them all at the same time. You can do literally anything you want, just not all at once. And this is where the idea of seasonal priorities comes in. So, once you have a rough idea of where you want to go in life and what your goals and dreams are, we boil it down to what I recommend calling a "season"-a roughly 90-day period of time. It

could be 90 days, 12 weeks, or 3 months, you get the idea. But the point is, you define this next season of your life and choose a minimum number of goals that you clearly want to achieve in the next 90 days. The division between work and personal life helps me, because we sleep about 8 hours a day, work about 8 hours a day, and another 8 hours are left for life. And in the context of work and personal life, I like to choose one main quest. So, for work: What one goal, if I achieved it in 90 days, would bring me closest to the life I want to live? And in life, what one thing, if it were the only thing I could do in the next 90 days, would have the biggest impact on my life? This helps you identify your main task, and

I usually don't mind setting two or three secondary tasks for each area of work and life, but the key here is Given that we can't do everything, it's physically impossible, we have to do what doctors do all the time, what surgeons do on the battlefield- triage the tasks. We need to figure out, for example, out of these 15 things, what is the most important thing to do right now? And what options two, three, and four will I be able to do once I complete option number one? This discipline- the ability to take a long to-do list and pick out the most important ones-is honestly one of the most important things that separates people who make significant progress from those who create a lot of fuss but make little progress. Once you have identified your priorities, the

next step is to put them on your calendar. I firmly believe that if you want something to get done, it should be reflected in your calendar. If it's not on your calendar, it probably won't get done. There is a great meta-analysis by these researchers, Peter Gollwitzer and Pascal Sheeran, based on 94 studies involving over 8,000 people on what they call " implementation intentions." Essentially, it's when you decide in advance exactly when and where you'll do something. And that has a big impact on whether you actually get the job done, which again shows the power of putting tasks on your calendar. You can use any calendar app or just pen and paper.

Our SuperFocus app has this built in: you can take your goals and literally drag them onto your calendar to make sure you're actually making time for them. Of course, none of this matters until it's tested by your real week and real life, but here's what the math of this process looks like. We have 168 hours each week, right? 7 *24. We sleep about 56 hours, spend about 12 hours on the toilet, so you have about 100 hours of free time left. Of these 100 hours, approximately 50 can be called work, and the other 50 can be called life. So, every week we have approximately 50 hours for work and 50 hours for our personal lives. The main thing is that these priorities you just identified are the most important tasks for you at this stage of life. They should be

reflected in your weekly calendar. For example, one of my priorities right now is to regain the function of my left hand, as I broke it a few months ago. So for this to work, I need to add gym workouts and physical therapy to my calendar every week. Another priority of mine is to get back to shooting videos for YouTube. So I have to make sure there is time in the schedule for the filming process. My second priority in life is organizing weekly meetings with friends. So I've already blocked out every Wednesday night on my calendar for these kinds of meetings. By the way, today is Wednesday, and at six o'clock in the evening I'm going to play

pickleball with the boys. Then we'll go to Flatiron Burger to eat a burger. So the bottom line is that you take your goals and priorities and make sure they are reflected in your weekly calendar. Let's say you put all this on the calendar, but the problem arises: what if there is a conflict of interest? What to do if life makes its own adjustments? What if something happens that prevents you from doing what theoretically planned to do? We use the calendar in a way that doesn't get hung up on 100% completion of absolutely everything that's written on it. I try to aim for 70-80 %. If I complete 80% of the tasks on my calendar, I know I'm moving much faster than if I didn't use it at all. Of course,

sometimes unforeseen situations arise in life, but the advantage of transferring goals to a calendar is that if something repeats itself every week, it becomes a regular thing that needs to be there. If this occurs spontaneously, then it is completely normal. You always have next week. When you start managing your time based on goals, priorities, and a calendar, you may encounter a problem when a certain task appears on your schedule again and again every day or every week. And you continue to systematically ignore this matter. If you notice that you systematically ignore what you put on your calendar, simply don't do it, or something else always comes up that takes priority, that's completely normal. This is just a very useful signal for us to stop and

rethink everything. Is this really a priority? Because if it were a priority, you would be doing it. So, if you're not doing this, then something is wrong here, right? You claim that this is a priority, but you are not doing this. This is usually where we return to our topic of procrastination. Is it a matter of clarity? Are you afraid? Or maybe in inertia? I had this problem when I was writing my first book, Feel Good Productivity, which became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, but I had a really hard time writing it. A lot of things were happening in my business. I just quit my job as a doctor. My YouTube channel has been growing rapidly.

This was during the pandemic. The team was growing. Business was developing. A huge number of events were constantly taking place. And I kept telling my writing coach, " Dude, I still need to make time to write the book. I just need to find the time to write this book." And at one point she said to me, "Ali, you keep saying that this book is your top priority right now, but you have n't made a single step forward in the last month and you keep making excuses. So what's going on? Is it still really important to you to write this book? And I thought: " Damn." It was very helpful to face this fact because it made me realize: at that particular period, the book was not really the most important priority. I kept saying that it was, but my behavior indicated

that my YouTube channel was more important and the business tasks we were working on were a higher priority. And the book was somewhere third or fourth on the list of priorities. And that helped me a lot, because once I became honest with myself that this was n't really my top priority, I had to ask myself, "Okay, do I still want to do this?" » I still wanted to do it. So I said to myself, "Okay, this method I'm trying to implement -dedicating 2 hours a day to a book-is just never going to work." So I decided to clear my schedule for a whole week and do an intensive dedicated only to the book. This is what helped me write the first draft, which then needed a lot of revisions. Now let's move on to the third key principle of productivity. We

have clarity, we have focus, and the third principle is accountability. Even with the best of intentions, you can have a perfect list of goals. You can plan your time and your calendar turns into a beautiful Tetris-style mosaic of all the things to do, and it works in theory, and even some days in practice, but eventually you'll give up on the thing. At some point, there will be a discrepancy between what you say you want and what you actually do. And getting back to implementing the plan is a real challenge. There are a few different ways to do this. It usually helps a lot when there is someone or something reminding you that your actions are deviating from the goal. Like my writing coach asking, "Hey, buddy, what's up?" This often gives us the same

accountability we need to adjust our actions and get back on track. So, it's a method of accountability through other people. The second method of accountability is the systemic method. For example, in our Superfocus app, we literally built an accountability coach. He keeps track of your goals, how you spend your time, and literally makes remarks if he sees something, for example: " Hey, Ali, you're not doing the physiotherapy exercises that I said were very important." And it gives you that much- needed boost. If you don't want to use Superfocus, you can always try connecting different apps to ChatGPT and setting up a nightly routine or something similar for notifications. There are many ways to do this. But if you try to achieve accountability on

your own-this is the third method-then that's called discipline. When you don't need an accountability partner, you don't need a coach, a personal trainer, or an app telling you what to do. You're just somehow magically disciplined and able to do what needs to be done without thinking too long. I'm not particularly disciplined. Most people I know aren't particularly disciplined. Even the billionaire entrepreneurs I'm friends with aren't very disciplined. Mostly, when you rely on discipline, you count on becoming your own controller. Everything becomes much easier when you have a community, ideally of people, as well as tools and

systems to help you stick to what you've set out to do. That's the whole point of responsibility. We said at the very beginning that almost none of the productive people I know consider themselves to be truly disciplined. So, in reality, things work differently. Take, for example, this study by Gail Matthews of Dominican University. There was a group of students who had goals but didn't write them down. And there was another group of students who wrote down their goals, shared them with a friend, and sent him weekly progress reports. The first group achieved 43% of their goals, and the second achieved 76%. I don't know about you, but if I could increase my chances of success by 30% just by writing down goals and having a partner

to report to, I would definitely do it. Here's an interesting study from 2017 where scientists observed a group of students trying to achieve their goals. It turned out that the strength of their resistance to temptation had no effect on whether they actually achieved their goals. Instead, success depended on how rarely they encountered temptations at all. That is, disciplined people simply arranged their lives in a way that required less discipline. It's important to understand: having responsibility or discipline doesn't

mean that work won't stop being hard. Any action to achieve ambitious goals requires effort. And it's not just about money. Of course, trying to make a lot of money is an ambitious goal, and it's hard. Otherwise, everyone would do it. But even trying to have a healthy body is hard, otherwise everyone would be doing it. Even building strong relationships is hard, otherwise everyone would have it. Even keeping in touch with friends after university is difficult, because if it were easy, there would n't be an epidemic of loneliness. All of this is difficult, so regardless of the accountability or discipline involved, it brings me immense relief to realize that everything is actually

difficult. Alex Hormozi has a catchy phrase: "The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, because it's fertilized with [__]." Often for me and for the students we teach at our business academy who are newbies and trying to start their first business, the moment it gets tough is exactly when we start looking for alternatives. We think back to the list of 15 dreams we had and start thinking, "Oh my God, maybe this isn't something we should be doing." "Maybe I should do something else." To achieve results in any endeavor, you need to do it long enough for the success graph to start to grow in your favor. But many people give up

at various stages, before even seeing results, because it seems hard, and they think everything should be easy. But, strangely enough, if you talk to anyone who is truly successful in any area of life, few of them will say that it was easy, effortless, or that they didn't have to sacrifice anything. So almost any path can lead you to your goal, the main thing is not to stop. So, there is clarity, there is focus, there is accountability, and really the foundation of all of this is consistency. In fact, the ability to decide what you want, focus on it, adjust course if you deviate, and do it long enough to see results. When I first started on YouTube, it took me 52 videos to get 1,000 subscribers. I talk to some of our students who say, "Oh, this

YouTube just doesn't work for me." And I answer: "Great." "How many videos have you made already?" And they: " Four". And I say: " Okay, do another 50, and then we'll talk." After all, everything takes time. So, we talked about a lot of systems: clarity, focus, accountability, consistency. Maybe you want to use Superfocus, maybe not, maybe you want to create your own system. For me, no matter what the system looks like, performance is about are you doing the right things and are you doing them correctly? And, in fact, do you have any idea of where you're going based on that very understanding of clarity? And are you taking step by step to move in that direction? To me, that's what success is, regardless of whether your system is based

on Google Suite, Apple Suite, pen and paper, bullet journal, Superfocus, or just ChatGPT. That is, whatever your system is, as long as it helps you understand what you want and actually move in that direction, I don't care what it looks like. So, if you're frustrated that your productivity system doesn't look like your favorite influencer's, don't worry about it. Because I want to admit: people like me have a financial interest in making this all seem much more complicated than it actually is. You know, I'm kind of a productivity influencer, so to speak? I literally get paid to make my productivity system look too complicated because I make videos about it.

I am financially incentivized to try every new app that comes out. So, of course, I test every new app that comes out. I am financially motivated to be on the cutting edge of AI advancements and to try out all these different AI tools. But do you make a living teaching people productivity or building apps like most of those watching this? If not, then you probably don't need to try to keep up with every new thing that comes out. There's a catchy phrase in business that we often tell our students: simple things scale, complex things fail. In a business context, this means that the simpler your business is and the more streamlined and understandable your processes are, the easier it is

to scale your business. The same goes for your productivity system, because to some extent you already run the business. This is a business called "You ". If you have a job, you already run a business, you just have one client -your employer. You already run your own business. So if the system that runs your business, i.e. your personal productivity, is too complex, it just means more things to maintain, more applications, APIs, and connections to keep track of. And then you make the mistake I've made my whole life: you create such a fancy productivity system that you end up never doing the work itself. So, if you have a simple system for deciding what you want, making sure you do it, and then course correcting if you get off track, then

honestly, the simpler the better. This brings us to what I think is one of the key points in this video: anything you just set up is bound to break at some point, most likely within a few days. By the way, there is a great study from Carleton University where they observed 119 students preparing for exams. One of the findings was that it seems that if you can forgive yourself for procrastinating, it actually reduces your tendency to procrastinate. Whereas if you berate yourself for procrastinating, it only makes the situation worse. When it comes to productivity, the most productive people aren't the ones who never make mistakes. These are the ones who get back up when they fail. It's a bit like a gym. Why am I not pumped? I'm not

pumped because I have periods of stability in the gym, then I quit, then I don't come back for a long time, then I have a period of stability again, then I quit again. While I think the reason I'm quite productive and have a pretty good business is because even when things go wrong, I stop doing the thing and stop maintaining the system, there's an idea in the meditation world called " starting over." No matter what happened in the past, you can always just decide to start over. Yes, you have n't been maintaining your productivity system, you haven't been using your calendar for the past few weeks. Who cares? Start again from today.

Yes, you weren't.this is advice to yourself. Yes, you haven't been to the gym in the last 2 months. Who cares? Start today. Just do 10 push-ups, or five, or whatever-the main thing is that you can start again and not let the negative streak turn into a self-destructive spiral, like, I'm a failure, I'm a terrible person, then everything will be fine. We just keep making progress step by step. Ultimately, creating a productivity system and sticking to it long-term completely changed my life. The reason I got into productivity was because as a medical student, I realized that I wanted to start my own business because I didn't want to be tied to a job that I might not like. But I faced a 24-hour problem: there are only 24 hours in a day. And if

I wanted to, say, do well at Cambridge Medical School, have a social life, and also try to build a side business, I needed to find ways to dramatically increase my productivity so I could manage to do these three pretty big things at the same time. This required a good goal-setting system, identifying what I really wanted, and finding the most effective way to get there. I have a video about teaching methods. That's why I became interested in learning techniques. I made a video about this back in 2018. I have found the most effective ways to maximize my exam scores. And all this was not just for a reason, but because I wanted to free up time to build my first business, which would lead me to financial freedom. And

sometimes I see people on the internet complaining, saying, "Oh, if you become more productive, it just allows your employer to make more money." And of course, maybe for some it is, but for me, being more productive and learning efficiency in university was literally my ticket to financial freedom. I wanted the freedom to live on my own terms. This is a 0.001% result, and you won't achieve it without a reliable way to first understand what you want, and second, make sure you're focused on it. Now , if you're still not sure whether the problem is the goal itself or the fact that you're not doing anything to achieve it, watch this video here, which is for ambitious people who are feeling a little lazy. It contains a simple matrix to

determine exactly which of these problems you may be facing.