Item — HN Reader

I've enjoyed Ali Abdaal's new book he just launched. A couple similar points really stood out along these lines even if they sounds pretty common sense.

Treat your priorities like any investment. Keep a wish list of all the things you want to do, but the second column is just the current things you are actually investing time in. You know there can only be 1-3 things in that column.

Have 3 things (quests) you do each day. One short task you can complete each day in each of these three categories: Work, Health, Relationships. Not 1, not 5. These 3. They can be as simple as "Relationship: call Grandma". IMO, doesn't even have to be a successful call. At least you made the attempt at the task. That means it's done and you made progress.

3 comments

Is it worth buying? I've stopped being a fan since his channel turned into a content and money machine but he's definitely had some useful videos.

That's a tough but great question. I spend a lot of money on books very loosely. It's one of the areas of my life where I don't really think about a budget. I just want to consume more and more if I can. And I leverage my local library, local bookstore and Amazon to the hilt.

I don't remember who said it but I take the advice of "if there's even a single thing in the book that you make note of, it was worth buying". And there's a lot more than a single thing. I actually skimmed through the book a second time and jotted down notes from each chapter I want to dig deeper in (e.g. another author mentioned, a research paper, one of the exercises).

So for sure I think it's worth buying.

I remember hearing a similar thing from a guy that was sitting in for Tim Ferris on the podcast. He said in anything you read, try to take away one important thing.

I've been listening to the audiobook and have enjoyed it a great deal thus far (about 1/4 in). Helped me think about work in a new / fun way that has helped me start of the year right.

I find "Work" to be a bit of an odd inclusion here. Presumably most people have a job and necessarily complete many work tasks each day?

Ah, great call out. So these probably shouldn't be thought of as your todo list or jira backlog for the day. They're more like optional "side quests" (another term from the book) that you could also just not do and nothing bad will happen, but if you did them you'll move your work/relationships/health in a positive direction. Like the difference between:

Relationship with my kid => task: feed them; side quest: ask if they want to make a fort after dinner.

Career => task: get the 3 devops tickets my boss told me to fix today; site quest: buy a new book on training LLMs

If you don't get these daily quests done, child protective services won't show up tomorrow and you won't get fired. :)

Yes but there has to be 1 MIT (most important task) for work

Your comment made me read the intro. Good book, I read a lot of self help books and this seems to be a quality one.

Easy to read, dynamic but not story dense. I'll keep reading it. Thank you for recommending it.