6 Habits to Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet

in this video we are discussing six key productivity habits now if you incorporate any of these and ideally multiple of these into your life it basically guarantees that your next year is going to be your best year ever hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali I'm a dror turn entrepreneur and the author of The New York Times bestseller Feelgood productivity which is about how to be more productive in a way that actually feels good and for the last 7 years on this channel I have been documenting my

journey from broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor to now running a seven figure business where I live a life that I absolutely love and my goal on this channel really is to share everything that I've learned and everything I'm continuing to learn along this journey of personal growth and development in the hope that you find some value from it and you can maybe work towards what I like to call the five FS of fun fulfillment flexibility freedom and finance so let's get into it all righty so habit number one that I have

gotten a lot of value out of is kind of ignoring the notion of annual goals and I always feel super excited when I set annual goals at the start of the year but there is an alternative method for goal setting that I've been been using on and off over the years partly in personal life partly in business life and when I think back to the goals that I've actually accomplished like the things that the meaningful things that I've done they've always been with this second method of goal setting rather than through annual goals and this

second method of goal setting is what I refer to as quarterly quests and the idea behind this is that instead of thinking about setting goals for the year you actually focus on setting goals for the next quarter I.E the next 90 days now this is a concept that the authors of the book The 12we Year talk about it's also um a concept in business worlds like the book get scalable by Ryan Dice and the book traction by junor Wickman there's a lot of goal setting methodologies that are focused on this sort of 90-day cycle and

so the whole idea behind setting quarterly quests is that when it comes to 90 days or 3 months or 12 weeks or how however you want to split it you're able to visualize that like on a single piece of paper you could write down the next 12 weeks but if you're trying to do annual goals it's like you know in my case I I'll set an annual goal in January and by by the time February or March rolls around either I've made progress towards it in and I've gotten new data in which case maybe the

goal has changed or I haven't made progress towards it and I'm like ah it's an annual goal I've got the whole year left and then you know six months8 months goes by and I never make any progress on it at all the idea behind quarterly quests is that every 90 days at the start of the quarter or at any point whenever you happen to be watching this video or whenever you happen to incorporate this habit into your life you focus on what are the three or four big things that I want to get done in

the next 90 days this is quarterly quests every single quarter I host a completely free alignment Workshop where we get together on a zoom call and set these quarterly quests so if you are subscribed to my newsletter you will hear about these I've been running them for the last year and people get a lot of value from them usually we have a few thousand people attending and we do that setting the quarterly quests together so you're very welcome to join if you would like to but of course this is also something that you can do

yourself more than about three or four quarterly quests means it's just too much too much stuff to be going on and generally I like to separate mine into two categories work and life and so I'll be thinking okay what are my quarterly Quests for work and what are my quarterly quests Quests for life sometimes there are certain projects that are going to take longer than 90 days to get done the idea behind those is that you would turn them into 90-day projects so for example when I was writing my book Feelgood productivity which is available

everywhere books are sold and also an audible where I narrate the Audi book so you can check it out if you haven't yet when I was writing Feelgood productivity I found that working in 90-day chunks was pretty effective because obviously writing a whole book is like a three-year process but if you break it down into the quarters it's like the quarterly Quest would be completing the first draft or completing the first draft of the first three or whatever and so if you want to make this year the best year of your life where you are

doing the things that are meaningful to you and ideally enjoying the journey along the way then I'd really recommend thinking in 90-day chunks when it comes to your goals rather than in annual chunks but then there's a problem right because the problem is even if you do set these quarterly quests these 90-day goals there is a danger that they go the same way that New Year's resolutions do I.E you set them at the start of the quarter and then you completely forget about them and that is where our next habit comes in so habit number

two is an absolute classic in the world of productivity it is the single habit that almost every productivity Enthusiast swears by it was popularized in 2001 by productivity Guru David Allen in his seminal work getting things done the art of stress-free productivity and that habit is drum roll please the weekly review I like to think of it as a weekly reset uh the idea is that once a week you are spending like 20 minutes reviewing how your previous week has gone and setting priorities for the next week this is a really simple thing to do

it does not have to be an elaborate 8 hour hour routine just like 10 15 20 minutes reviewing how your last week has gone and actually asking yourself okay what are my key priorities for the week ahead will do absolute wonders for your productivity and will really help you make meaningful progress towards the things that matter most to you can I request a cup of tea please yeah yes nice thanks yes ni that's the wife the wife was actually sitting in the corner over here on her laptop motivating me to film because I was feeling

like H I don't want to film this video anyway as part of the weekly reset it's generally good practice to look at your calendar for the previous week and to celebrate some wins to give yourself a pat on the back for the stuff that you did well it is also a very good idea at that point and one of the key things that we have within our weekly reset template is you ask yourself the question what were my quarterly quests and how are they going and this is a weekly checkpoint where you remind yourself oh

yeah what were my quarterly quests sometimes I skip my weekly reset for like I don't know a week or two in a row because like life got in the way or I forgot or like you know the calendar event clashed with the productivity lab workshop and so I didn't attend the weekly reset and then it comes to week three and I look at my template and it's like what were our quarterly quests again and how are they going and I'm like hm it's a good question I've actually forgotten what goals I set for myself 3

weeks ago what my quarterly quests were and then I look at my little quarterly quests I have that in a goalkeeper document which I name my goalkeeper document CU it's just kind of fun again all this stuff is stuff we do in this free quarterly alignment Workshop so if you attend one of those you'll see you'll see the whole process in action but then I'll look at that list I'll be like oh yeah I I totally was going to do that thing which I completely forgot about and then it comes back on track so the

idea behind the weekly reset is that it is a checkpoint to be able to refer to your quarterly quests and see how are they going and then based on how your quot quests are going or anything else that's happening in life you define what are your top one two and three priorities for the week ahead if this is a habit that you haven't yet incorporated into your life then I can handon heart guarantee that if you do it will change the game for you and help you make the next year the best year of your

life oh by the way if you are enjoying this video then you might like to check out brilliant who are very kindly sponsoring today's video brilliant is a wonderful platform where you learn by doing not just by consuming with thousands of interactive lessons in maths data analysis programming and AI I've been using brilliant for the last 5 years now and I absolutely love it they've got a really good first principles approach to learning which helps you build understanding from the ground up and it's all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers researchers and professionals from

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that sounds good you can try out everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 Days by heading over to brilliant.org Al abdal or scanning the QR code on the screen or you can click on the link in the video description and those links will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video okay let's say you've set those top three priorities for the week what if you just forget about them and that is where our next habit comes in and habit number three

is another absolute Staple in the world of productivity that I hope you're doing already but if you're not that's okay that's why we're here watching this video it's a very very easy Habit to incorporate into your routine it doesn't normally take more than about one or two minutes and micro habit number three that you can incorporate from right now is what I call the morning Manifesto what is the morning Manifesto the morning Manifesto is basically a 2-minute journaling prompt first thing in the morning before you sit down to work that asks you a few basic

questions basic question number one is what were our top three priorities for the week and how are they going so you see the thing like with the weekly reset we asked what were our top three quarterly quests and how they're going reminding ourselves about that thing that we decided to do a quarter ago but then every single day every single work day we're asking ourselves what were my top three priorities for the week and how are they going now this is a reminder every day it's a checkpoint of like a if you haven't done your

weekly reset for the week you think about it and I I have this a lot when I when I skip my weekly resets cuz it was bad but when I skip my weekly resets I'll get to the morning Manifesto It'll ask me what are my top three priorities for the week I'll be like oh well I didn't do my weekly reset this week so I haven't actually set those and then I'll think about it and I'll Define my top three priorities for the week and that is really really helpful because when it comes to productivity

a big mistake that we all make is that we think it is about efficiency it's about trying to do things a little bit more efficiently or a little bit faster or whatever but that is not where the needle is moved the needle is moved in the choice of what you are actually working on it's in the choice of what direction you're going rather than in how fast you're getting there and that's why we all have this problem where you can you can feel as if you're being very efficient but like you're not actually making meaningful

progress towards the things that matter most to you if your goal is like mine was when I had a day job to build some sort of business that makes enough money for you to be able to go part-time in your job or to build a business that gives you Financial Freedom and you have a day job and you're on the grind in the hamster wheel of the day job you can be really efficient in your day job but you're not actually making any progress towards that dream over there that really matters to you you're just

focused on being efficient or being productive in your day job and that is why when we do these things like quarterly quests and we do the weekly reset and we think about priorities a lot of it is around what do I actually want to work towards cuz I imagine if you're watching this channel you're probably reasonably competent you're probably very good-look maybe you've got a job you're probably reasonably okay at getting things done and the problem that you might have is that you're just not working on the right things if for example when I had

a day job I did not set myself the goal of like building this business on the side building the YouTube channel on the side I mean I was I was a pretty reasonable doctor I was pretty efficient pretty productive I got I got decent grades in school I quite enjoyed medicine I would have just continued on that hamster wheel and this thing of this build building this business on the side would have always been a pipe dream that is the importance of goal selection rather than just goal efficiency oh hello do you want to say

do you want to do you want to say hi thank you so much hi how's it going it's very good good luck thanks oh she so nice oh by the way quick thing if you are watching this before the 4th of January 2025 then you might like to check out the completely free 2day productivity Workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025 it is called productivity Spark and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that I aim

to help you reflect on 2024 figure out where your work and life are heading and set active goals and quarterly Quests for 2025 it is completely free you can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially so coming back to our morning Manifesto we are asking ourselves what were our weekly priorities again and how are they going again just reminding ourselves that oh yeah we did decide what we wanted to do and are we actually doing the thing that we said we were going to do again bit

of a tangent but a huge part of making the next year the best year of your life is simply in doing the things that you say you're going to do if you actually did if you think about this right now if every single day you actually made an intention of what you wanted to do and you actually did it man doing that for 365 days your life would be completely transformed you would be unrecognizable a year from now if every day you set an intention and you actually followed through on that intention the point behind

the morning Manifesto It's not going to help you follow through on the intention but it helps you do that first step of setting that intention in the first place without that intention we just get into work we get into following what's on the calendar we get into the things we should do we get into whatever the algorithm is feeding us when we're scrolling Tik Tok and Instagram it becomes an unintentional unexamined life where you're doing a lot of stuff but you're not making progress towards what really matters to you that is the point of a

lot of these habits the point of the morning Manifesto It's the point of having that two-minute check-in in the morning where you're like okay what what actually were my priorities and like what do I actually want to work on today I don't recommend having it as an elaborate sort of series of prompts because the the big the longer it takes to do the less likely you are to do it at least in my case and I suspect in your case as well that's why for me the bare minimum is what were my weekly priorities and

how are they going and then secondly what is the most important thing I want to get done today I phrase this as what is today's adventure going to be because by phrasing it as an adventure it feels good the whole stuff around Feelgood productivity is if you can scop yourself into treating your work in the spirit of play not being too serious about it being more sincere about it thinking of it as a quest that you're on hence why the phrase quarterly Quest it's a bit more fun a bit more nice and viy than projects

or like okrs or like objectives I like quests because it feels good daily Adventures what is today's adventure going to be and if for the next 365 days each morning you were to actually ask yourself what is today's adventure going to be what is my most important task and then you just stick it in your calendar assuming you actually do the thing even if you don't do the thing most of the time but you do the thing some of the time you're still going to be completely unrecognizable a year from now all righty so at

this point we have done a lot of like intention setting now it comes to actually doing the stuff and that is where habit number four comes in okay so for habit number four I want to tell you a little bit of a story of a time when I struggled with this which was I think about two years ago when I was on the first draft of trying to write my book before it came out and there was lots of stuff going on lots of stuff going on in the business and I knew that the most

important thing I needed to work on and my courtly Quest and all that stuff was writing my book making progress on my book because I knew that was like an important but not urgent project that I really needed to move forward and I was chatting to my CEO coach and I was like oh man you know I'm just not I haven't got the time I'm not making the time like I'm not like doing the thing and it was like okay Step One is do I have time on my calendar blocked out every single day where

I'm working on the book and initially the answer was no and then I was like okay cool I'll block out that time but even when I was blocking out the time and my intention each morning was like okay I'm going to work on the book I would end up like screwing around I would end up being like okay I'm looking at the blank page uh can't be bothered I was like um I'll make a cup of tea then I'll make a cup of coffee then I'll go to the bathroom because obviously you know coffee is

a bit of a laxative and so I would need to do a whatever in the bathroom then I'll come back make another coffee look in the fridge and before I know it like so much time would have passed then I go on slack reply to team messages some team members might be around so I chat to them and then I go for a walk and then before I knew it I wasn't making any progress on the book at all so the thing that he encouraged me to do was to make a Google sheet where every

day I would just track how many minutes I spent working on the book in fully focused time and then I just wrote that number on the spreadsheet and the fact that I now wrote this number on the spreadsheet every day gave me profound insight into how unproductive I was being as it related to writing my book and just the fact that I was now aware of what that number was meant that number went up and I was able to bang out the first draft of my book and it ended up being pretty reasonable once all

the edits and stuff happened along the way that's it when I was working on the book I just logged how many minutes at a time I was focusing on the book for this was transformational and has resulted in what I now call the focus log which is a key habit this is habit number four it's absolute key habit that I teach to all my students in my productivity lab and in my course life operating system and anytime I do talks and stuff when people you know every everyone struggles to focus right and have you have

you got any tips for Focus the single biggest hack that I don't don't hear enough people talking about is creating a focus log if you're interested in specific tips on how to make your own Focus log I have a whole three-part series on how to focus better that will be linked somewhere down below there's various ways of doing it you can use like manual time tracking automatic automatic time tracking Google Sheets pen and paper it really doesn't matter the point is if you actually just give yourself visibility on how many minutes you are focusing on

the thing that's most important to you or on whatever is most important to you that will profoundly influence your ability to actually do the thing all righty habit number five is related to work this is more about the social relationship side of things and this is the standing order social events I've been doing a lot of research into what makes people feel lonely especially in middle age and stuff and generally once you get Beyond University like life becomes a lot less social than it once was but one of the key strategies that I've a read

about be spoken to various social friends of mine who will do this and see implemented into my own life in particular back when I was living in London I had this down to a tea now that I moved to Hong Kong I still haven't yet set this up but it's a key thing on the list for basically as soon as possible is standing order social events a standing order social event is something where once a week or every other week in your calendar you have a social event that's just stuck in the calendar that happens

at the same time in the same place every single time without fail it could be something like a Sunday brunch that is what I was doing weekly back when I lived in London it could be a Tuesday evening inviting people over for board games or a Thursday evening inviting people over for Dino and the idea is that you invite a bunch of people and whoever can make it rocks up and whoever can't make it you know they don't make make it but the point is that it happens on a weekly or bi-weekly Cadence and this

is just an absolutely fantastic way of staying in touch with people of making friends of retaining friendships without having to do all of the Annoying back and forth that once once you're out of University starts to happen where you have having to coordinate a dozen different people's calendars in my own life I have two standing order social events right now which is two date nights every week with my wife and a big part of why I think our relationship is very strong is because we do these two date nights a week they are in the

calendar there is a calendar invite you know if something comes up we move them rather than delete them and it ensures that there are at least two nights a week where it's sort of like we're you know quality time with one another rather than all of the other things getting in the way one thing I'm going to incorporate into my own life in Hong Kong here as well is doing like a weekly or every other week kind of people come over for dinner type situation if you have these sorts of social rituals in your life

already like you go to church on a Sunday or you go to the mosque on a Friday and then you you know grab fried chicken with the boys afterwards you know what whatever the situation might be these sorts of regular social events seem to be what drive a lot of kind of relationship satisfaction and relationship Health in the important relationships and friendships in your life and then finally habit number six to help make this the best year ever is what I like to refer to as multimodality multitasking this is a bit of a mouthful I'm

sure there's a sexier way of like describing this thing but basically one question I get a lot when I do talks and things is usually from people with jobs like you've got a 9 to5 or maybe like a 9 to9 or whatever the job is and you want to build the business or do the side hustle thing outside of the day job but obviously you you've got a job right so it's like when you've take into account the time you're at the job commuting to the job commuting from the job trying to eat food General

Life maintenance especially if you have a family especially if you have kids my goodness there are very few hours in the week left to be able to pursue your dream and then you're like well am I just sort of stuck in this grind of the day job where I live to work and stuff or can I can I magically find time can I become more productive or more efficient so that I can find this magical time and be able to use that magical time on things related to building my dream whatever ever the dream is

for some people it's a business for some people it's a YouTube channel for some people it's writing a book for some people it's doing their art on the side whatever the dream might be you need time is the key currency well time energy and focus but like time is the first one time time is a key currency that you need to be able to make progress on your dream so how do you create more time well we all have the same 168 hours in the week if you have a job a huge chunk of them

are already taken up with the job if you have a family if you have responsibilities a huge chunk of those are already taken up but a key thing that really really helped me when I was building my business when I was building my dream was multimodality multitasking what this basically means is doing two things at once uh doing two things at once creates time what you don't want to do is try and focus on two things at once like if you're doing focused work it has to be on just one thing there's all sort of

research about the idea of attention residue about the idea about if you're trying to I don't know work on your book while also answering emails that's not going to work because that's the same modality you're trying to do the same thing whereas multimodality multitasking would be for example listening to an audiobook while doing the laundry it's like two different modalities you're doing the multitasking it's fine or listening to a podcast or audiobook while you're on your commute to work now you can get a lot of the benefits of the knowledge that you're acquiring from whatever

your dream is in my case it was listening to business books and business podcasts you can do that while doing other things you don't want to do that while spending time with your family because you want to be present with that you don't want to try and do that while focusing on your work but if you're doing stuff like driving or like walking or like doing the laundry or like doing the dishes whatever the situation might be you could always be listening to something while that is happening I'm not saying you have to do this

I don't want the antitoxic productivity people to come after me because oh my God he's promoting toxic I'm not promoting toxic productivity here what I'm saying is that if you have a dream and you're finding yourself without the time to focus on building that dream you could actually create more time by doing multitasking in this sort of way the way that I do this now is that my team and I have created an app called voice pal which is a ghost writer in your pocket basically I'll go for a walk and then I'll hit record

on the app with my airpods in and I will just speak things out loud I'll just sort of this is how I plan my videos for example I'll think okay cool I'm doing a video about six habits to make next year the best year of your life what are the sorts of things I want to say in that video and I will just be sort of walking around in like the local area or whatever actually this morning while I was planning this video I went to do the groceries cuz my wife wanted some like organic

carrots and milk and stuff and she wanted to make a spaghetti bologna so I had to do the groceries but on the way to the grocery store I had my airpods in and while I was around the grocery store I was just speaking out loud it doesn't look weird because people just think you're on your phone or you like speaking to someone but I was planning this video while I was doing this trip to the grocery store cuz the idea is that you speak into the app the app then asks sensible follow-up questions and then

it turns whatever You' said into a first draft that sounds exactly like you now based on these videos I don't really read from a script I mostly riff but the fact that I was able to talk through the talking points for this video and then use voice pal to turn it into a rough outline that's an example of multimodality multitasking most of us have some sort of writing that we have to do in some sort of capacity anyway so like you don't have to use this app I think it's really good we built it for

exactly this purpose so you should check it out link down below it's available on Android and iOS if you don't want to use the app fine use whatever other software you want to use that can convert you speaking into a transcript and then you take the transcript you stick it into chat GPT and then you edit it on whatever editing software you want to use like notion or Google Docs Microsoft Word God forbid but now with the advance of AI tools if you are strapped for time and the thing that you need to do to

build your dream or your work involves writing in some capacity which almost everything does because lots of ideas are Downstream of writing it makes so much sense to be able to use the power of your voice while you're doing other things to be able to do that work work alongside again for the record I'm not saying that when you are spending time with your kids you actually have your airpods in and you are sort of trying to crank out your next email newsletter that's obviously not the point point is when you're taking a trip to

the grocery store that would otherwise be dead time or you're just s of listening to music or whatever you can use that time to be productive to make progress on the things you want to make progress on and if you enjoyed this video firstly thank you for watching and secondly you're going to enjoy that little playlist over here which is a couple of videos on how to focus better because that is probably knowing my audience something that you might be potentially struggling with so thank you for watching and I'll I'll see you in that video

bye-bye