Feel-Good Productivity

Feel-Good Productivity offers a well-structured toolkit for crafting your own, joy-based, sustainable philosophy for work and life, rooted in 3 pillars and up to 54 science-backed experiments.

Behind the study Ali discovered lay a bigger idea: the broaden-and-build theory. It says that “positive emotions ‘broaden’ our awareness and ‘build’ our cognitive and social resources,” he writes. When you’re happy, you’ll consider more options — like using a thumbtack box to hold up a candle instead of nailing it directly to the wall. And over time, good feelings also provide a mental and emotional buffer for tough situations.

Good feelings aren’t a side effect — they’re the very thing that supplies us with energy, and it takes energy to do anything! Ali explains there are 3 ways to energize ourselves:

Play. Seriousness makes us tense, and when we are tense, we rarely do our best work. Power. This is about confidence, not control. We need to feel empowered to shape our lives and work. People. Nothing motivates us like the right people who naturally lift us up through their mere presence.

To implement these ideas, Ali suggests multiple experiments in each chapter. With play, for example, you could turn your work into a video-game like adventure or lower the stakes so you’ll have more fun. Confidence is a matter of mastering hard skills and taking responsibility for your situation. Finally, many of us already have the right people in our lives — we just need to offer and ask for help more often.

When your batteries are empty, go back to the 3 Ps: Bring some play, power, and people back into your life, and watch your energy return!

If you’ve ever had a day where you felt full of energy yet got nothing done, you know there’s more to work than vitality. Ali relates the story of someone who observed Leonardo Da Vinci while painting The Last Supper. “He would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself,” the contemporary noted. Procrastination always has a deeper, root cause. Ali believes the 3 most common ones are uncertainty, fear, and inertia. Luckily, they each have a remedy, too: Clarity. Figuring out what exactly you have to do often only takes a few simple questions, like “Why? How? What?” and “When?” Courage. Everyone is afraid sometimes, but we’re also all living proof that fear can be overcome. Get started. The most important part when you’re stuck is to literally do anything. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. To crack a tough nut at work, one solution…