Why You Should Listen To Your Lazy Self

Ali Abdaal -

Hey friends,

I've been lazy this week so I've convinced my assistant, Elizabeth to feature on my newsletter. If you're into it, you can subscribe to her newsletter here.


I’m a scheduling queen.

Seriously, I just love that fresh-new-project feeling, time-blocking, organising a calendar, or bullet journal with what my inspired self feels like imaging my life will start to look like. The issue is, I’m not always my inspired self.

Too often I’m my lazy self. I can’t stop scrolling. I cba to stick to things when that early excitement fades.

And so I’ve found most things I start, I completely just stop.

I don’t know why it took me so long to (accidentally) figure out, that if I was scheduling things for my lazy self, the chances of me failing came down to basically zero.

When inspired I could overwork and go ahead on my schedule.

When lazy I could to the bare minimum I scheduled.

And when particularly unproductive, I’m always always in the buffer-zone of ‘I probably have done too much at some point to not fall behind now’.

It’s amazing.

And it’s not just being generous with my scheduling time, I create whole systems of work that improve when I’m unproductive.

My creative work benefits from breakthroughs I get when in the shower or daydreaming in bed. (So I start this work, identify key problems, and just let it be).

My second brain benefits from drafts not being categorised, because even if I get around to it 6 months later, I’m much more likely to have a fresh perspective.

My study schedules are a combination of up-until-2am on a topic I love, and a weeks of not touching lecture notes because I’m not in the mood.

I’m working consistently, but on a longer time-scale, never stopping things that are important to me. Rather than coming up with some ridiculous ‘rigid and consistent’ plan, that I ultimately drop altogether.

I’d really recommend doing this more intentionally :)


Wishing you a great week,

Ali and Liz xx

My Favourite Things this Week

1 - TV - This week I've discovered the joy of drawing while watching TV. Continuing my journey to becoming a concept artist, I've found practising by drawing with the TV in the background has actually been super fun. I usually spin my apple pencil while watching TV anyway, so I might as well put it down on the screen and be productive with it. 

2 - Co-working - I've been hosting free coworking sessions on Zoom for the last few weeks. You just join and work simultaneously with everyone else. This weekend I experimented with 5h and 4h sessions, which were actually amazing. I made a breakthrough in my book, and this was probably because I gave myself the space to properly think about it, rather than squeezing in time between calls. If you'd like to join, you can sign up here for free.

Quote of the Week

"Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?"

From Anything You Want, Derek Sivers. Resurfaced using Readwise.

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