How to Make 2024 The Best Year of Your Life

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If we haven’t yet before – Hey 👋 I’m Ali, a doctor-turned-entrepreneur and I’ve somehow become the world’s most followed productivity expert. Through my videos here on this channel, my podcast Deep Dive and writing, I share evidence-based strategies and tools to help you be more productive and build a life you love.

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⌚️Timestamps:
0:00 – Introduction
0:43 – The Wheel of Life
7:06 – 12 Month Celebration
14:00 – Ideal Week Method

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Hey friends welcome back to the channel so what does it mean to make a given year the best year of your life and I think it’s kind of three things firstly it’s that we are making progress towards the things that truly matter to us secondly that our life is broadly in

Balance so we’re not screwing up one area of our life for the sake of another and thirdly that we are while working towards the things that matter to us we are managing to enjoy ourselves and kind of enjoying every day on its own Merit rather than purely seeing it as a means

To an end and so in this video I want to go over three of my favorite me methods these are really simple methods you can apply them whenever whether it’s at the start of the year or the middle of the year or the end of the year like

Literally whenever and it will help you move more towards making sure that this coming year is the actual best year of your life in terms of meaningfulness and balance and enjoyability as well all right so method number one is a really simple reflection exercise called The

Wheel of Life and the idea here is that we want to split up life into a bunch of different components and then we rate our satisfaction with those different areas of life and so if you want to do this exercise you can do it on a piece

Of paper or you can do it on your phone I think a piece of paper is nice start by drawing a little circle that is your wheel and then you want to split it up into three segments and those three segments are for your work for your

Health and for your relationships so now you have a wheel with 3/3 now you want to split up each of the thirds into three segments each so at this point you’ve got a wheel with nine segments if you don’t want to do it on paper you

Don’t have to it on paper you can just literally write down these different categories that I’m about to give you and so those categories are within Health we have three things and that is body mind and soul or you can call it physical health mental health spiritual

Health but I kind of like body mind and soul because it sounds more cute under relationships we’ve got romance family and friends and then under work we have Mission money and growth and you can call Mission your career or job or whatever you want to call it but that’s

Kind of the main thing that you are doing for work okay so at this point we’ve split up life into these nine different components and the job now is that we want to rate on a scale from 0 to 10 how aligned we feel in each of

These different areas of our life and by aligned I mean my actions in the here and now are consistent with where I think I would like to be you can sort of think of this as how satisfied am I with this area of life I prefer to think of

It as alignment rather than satisfaction because like I don’t know you might be a three out of 10 in terms of satisfaction with money because you’re not yet a I don’t know millionaire in passive income or whatever the thing might be but you might be a 10 out of 10 in alignment

Because you are taking the actions necessary to get to where you want to be and so with this little diagram on screen I would encourage you to pause the video now genuinely please pause the video and just think about what would your rating out of 10 be for each of

These different areas of life and I guarantee that if you just pause this video and think about it you will come up with with some interesting insights into your life and this is genuinely a good use of your time while you’re watching Youtube right now and just

Pause the video and really think about this now these are the ratings that I gave myself when I did this exercise a few days ago and the cool thing is is that if you are doing this on pen and paper then you can shade in the Little

Wheel of life based on what your numbers are so if you got a 10 out of 10 you would fully shade in that particular segment of the wheel if you got a five you would half shade it in you get the idea and you end up with this sort of

FIFA esque radar chart of like these different aspects of your life which I think is pretty cool now once you’ve done that we’re going to add one one final category which I don’t put as part of the wheel I sort of put it off to the side or underneath the wheel if I’m

Doing it on pen and paper and that is the category for Joy how aligned do you feel with your actions in the hero now compared to where you want to be in terms of the amount of joy you are experiencing in your life and for me

Right now that is probably a six out of 10 now this is great because the whole point is to help make this next year the best year of our life and so in theory if we were able to get to a point where we were let’s say 10 out of 10 across

All these different areas that would mean that we are doing the things that are most meaningful to us and actually making progress towards them and we’re also in balance with all the different areas of our life because broadly these 10 roughly cover pretty much every area of life and hopefully we are also

Enjoying the journey along the way especially if we have a 10 out of 10 on the joy front too so this is pretty cool right it means we have now created a clear sense of where we are right now and then we can get a sense of where we

Would like to be in terms of where we would like these numbers to go and whenever you have a sense of where you are now and where you want to be that is what creates what we call goals and part of making this year the best year of

Your life is to be able to then make progress ress towards those goals and this is already a really good start because a lot of people want to be more productive but they don’t even take an inventory of their life because they just think of productivity as being just

About work or just about hustle or grind or whatever but actually at least the way I think about it productivity is using our time in a way that’s intentional and effective and enjoyable and that is kind of the message of my book feel good productivity at this point it is worth highlighting or

Underlining or circling or whatever in each of these different areas in work and health and relationships what is the one that really stands out to you as needing some amount of work so for example for me in the relationships column I’ve given my friends category a

4 out of 10 because I just don’t see my friends very often and so that’s one that clearly for me needs some work and so I’d be cycling that within Health I’ve given my soul category of 4 out of 10 but I mean I’m not overly concerned

About that I am concerned about the body/ physical health being just a 5 out of 10 so I’m going to circle that because that’s something I want to actively work on and then on the work front I’m pretty blessed to be a 9 out of 10 on Mission and money but I’m only

A 7 out of 10 for growth and so I want to Circle that one because I feel like I could do with some more growth in my life but once you know how to do The Wheel of Life you can actually just do this whenever you you feel like your

Life is somewhat misaligned or you’re not really sure where you’re going or you feel a bit burnt out you feel a bit stressed it it literally takes 30 seconds to just bring up these different 9 to 10 categories and to just rate yourself out of 10 on each one and

That’s not to beat yourself up you’re not like oh my God I’m flagala myself because I only gave myself a three out of 10 this is a pure solid inventory of where you are in these different areas of life and then the great news is you can then start taking actions towards

Remedying certain of these areas now if you’ve been wondering why my money component on this Wheel of Life is a 9 out of 10 that is because a I’ve been running my business over for over s years now and B I have been investing my money throughout that time and if you

Interested in investing your money then you might like to check out trading 212 who are very kindly sponsoring this video trading 212 is a fantastic app that lets you invest in stocks and shares and funds in a very easy and commission free fashion and they’ve got a bunch of features which are super

Helpful which is why I personally use trading 212 to manage a portion of my portfolio so firstly they’ve got a really nice pies feature pies are really cool because what you can do is there’s people all around the world who are professionals or superint Investments

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Video description and if you use that link you will even get up to 00 in a totally free share so it’s free money you might as well sign up so thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this video so that now brings us on to Method

Number two and that is what I call the 12 Monon celebration and this is basically my preferred method for goal setting so setting goals is an important part of life there’s a bunch of studies that show that people who set goals uh perform better and are more productive

And feel happier with life than people who don’t there are also a bunch of studies that show that people who write their goals down are more likely to achieve them than people who either have the goals and don’t write them down or don’t have the goals at all and so the

12month celebration is just a very simple way of approaching goal setting and the exercise is simple in each of the Salient areas of your life ask yourself what would I like to be celebrating 12 months from now and really imagine this like imagine you sitting down having dinner with a friend

Of yours you guys are mutually kind of holding each other accountable and helping each other out and you’re celebrating together you’re really celebrating how much progress you’ve made in each of these different areas of your life now you can start with the three areas that you circled as being

The most Salient or you can do it as as I would recommend for all 10 different areas of your life especially if you’re doing this like at the start of the year as part of an annual planning thing you’re asking yourself 12 months from now in each of these different areas

What what would I like to be celebrating so for example for me in the physical health category because I’ve realized I’ve only rated it at 5 out of 10 I’m imagining I’m having dinner with let’s say my friend Godwin who’s pretty pretty jacked and we’re celebrating how much

Progress I’ve made in the last 12 months in my physical health what is like genuinely what is the thing that I would love to be celebrating 12 months from now and then I’ll come up with a few different candidate celebration options like you know a few a few different

Options for goals so I’d love to be celebrating having packed on loads of muscle I’d love to be celebrating getting more lean I’d love to be celebrating having consistently worked out let’s say three times a week for the last 12 months I’d love to be celebrating becoming more flexible in

Mobile I’d love to be celebrating having played Sports once or twice a week every week for the last 12 months so these are all different options but celebrating all of these is probably a bit much and so for each of these different categories once you’ve thought about

Like what would I love to be celebrating what I’d encourage you to do is to really boil it down to okay cool I would like to be celebrating all these 5 10 different different things but if I had to boil it down to just one thing and I

Could only celebrate one thing what would that one thing be because generally having a single goal to work towards helps the brain focus it helps the entire kind of physiology and our habits and everything just move in that One Direction whereas if I was trying to

Build more muscle and also get lean and also play sports and also be more flexible it’s like there’s a lot of it it becomes very overwhelming and very complicated very quickly and I’m all about Simplicity here so starting with what is the one goal what is the one

Thing you would like to be celebrating and so for me in the physical health front I realized that the one thing I would love to be celebrating is to reduce my reduce the amount of my visceral abdominal fat that I have done a couple of Dexter scans recently I

Found that I’ve got quite a lot of fat around the belly thanks to my poor genetics and poor diet and visceral adapost tissue is the thing that correlates with all these negative Health outcomes like cardiovascular disease and stroke and all the bad stuff and so if I can get that number down if

I can reduce the amount of fat in my belly thanks to my poor diet and my poor genetics and that would be a great thing worth celebrating and then all the other stuff like getting more muscle and becoming more mobile and like playing sports all of that kind of stuff is the

Cherry on top it’s the bonus and so you can do this 12 month celebration thing with the different areas of your life and that then creates goals now a couple of extra points when it comes to the 12mon Celebration one line that I really like adding to the end of any goal that

I set it’s actually a trick I got from my friend dicki Bush who is a fellow internet entrepreneur and that is whenever you set a goal just add a few words to the end of that goal which is while enjoying every step along the way so if we use this health example again

You know my well month celebration is to reduce my visceral adpost issues to I.E become more lean but I would add the phrase while enjoying every step along the way and that means that instead of just thinking of it as this goal that I’m fixated on that I’m going to kind of

Grind to get towards it just helps my mind think in a little bit more of a light Feelgood productivity kind of way a little bit more of an adventurous way of like how do I get lean but while also enjoying every step along the way and

Then tip number two for the 12 month celebration is please write this down somewhere so I have a Google doc that I use with my CEO coach his name is Eric and we look at the Google Doc every every quarter and we’ve written down what are my goals for each of the

Different areas of my life and then every quarter every 3 months we’ll figure out okay cool for each of these different areas what can what can we make tangible progress on in the next 90 days and this is super helpful because if you think about these goals and you

Make them in your mind but you don’t write them down and then you don’t look at that document ever again then it just means you’re going to forget what goals you set at the start of the year and this is a big part of why people struggle with New Year’s resolutions CU

They set all these goals they have all these like great intentions but then they don’t have any sort of system for reviewing the go goals reflecting on it measuring their action and measuring their traction towards that particular goal and so if you’re doing this exercise and I’d really recommend you do

If you do care about making this year the best year of your life write the goal down somewhere put it in a Google doc bookmark it put it on your chrome bookmark bar whatever the thing might be just make it super easy to remind yourself about what your goals are and

This is why things like weekly reviews and monthly reviews and quarterly reviews and all this sort of stuff like reviewing our life is such a big part of anyone’s productivity system at least if they know anything about productivity and then the final tip I would recommend for the 12 month month celebration is

Bit of an optional extra but this is quite helpful when you’ve decided what you’d like to be celebrating 12 months from now with each of these different areas ask yourself why why is that particular thing important to you and it’s useful to have the why also in that

Document where you have written down your goals because again you can just remind yourself about why this thing was important to you and so for me the why behind this visceral adapost thing is and this is what I’ve written down in my document because visceral adapost issue

Is the major thing that’s going to lead to me dying early of cardiovascular and cerebral vascular disease it’s a significant priority to get that number down and to keep it down building more muscle is mostly a vanity thing but reducing my abdominal fat is genuinely a health thing so I’ve written down for

Myself exactly why that particular goal is important to me and that’s not to say you can’t change these goals later in the year but at least if you have it written down and you have a clear why behind it it means that you’re more likely to stay on that path that you

Decided for yourself was was going to be important to you by the way all of this reflection and planning and stuff can be a little bit heavy if you’re doing it on your own so you don’t have to do it on your own because I’m in fact hosting a

Completely free live online workshop on the 6th of of January 2024 and that is available exclusively for the for the very kind people who have pre-ordered a copy of my upcoming book Feelgood productivity so if you order a copy of the book before the 30th of December

2023 and you send us your receipt then you will get completely free access to this workshop on January the 6th where I’ll be taking you through these and a bunch of other exercises that I found super helpful that are very evidence-based that will help you reflect on what 2023 was like and help

You set tangible goals and plans for 2024 so that hopefully we can help make 2024 the best year of your life so there’s going to be more Det down in the video description if you are interested in attending this completely free live online event exclusively for the lovely

People who have very kindly pre-ordered a copy of my book and then we come to Method number three and this is where the rubber meets the road like you know with the reflection and goal setting and stuff we have kind of charted a course

For where we want to go and now we need a system to ensure that we actually make the time in the space to get there and now there’s loads of different productivity systems for this I have a whole course that’s coming out soon that’s going to be about my field of

Productivity system you can read about strategies in the book as well but one really needle moving strategy I want to share in this video is something that’s called the ideal week method and this has been one of the most game-changing time management techniques I’ve ever used and basically the idea is that you

Open up a blank Google Calendar and you call it your ideal Week calendar and you start off by blocking off the absolute Essentials in your life in terms of like when do you want to wake up so for example let’s say every day I want to

Wake up at 7:00 a.m. I would put that into a block in the calendar let’s say I want to sleep at 10 p.m. i’ put that into a block in the calendar I’d be putting all these different blocks into my calendar and then that shows me how

Much time do I have left to play with so now you know those goalss that we’ve just set in terms of the 12- month celebration in terms of these different areas of our life our job when doing the ideal week is we want to try and find

Time or not try we want to find time in our calendar every week to actually make time and to to take action on these specific things so let’s say in the friends category I wanted to see my friends more often my 12- month celebration might be that I’m

Celebrating the fact that I saw my friends for a group dinner at least once a week in my ideal Week calendar I therefore need to have a block at least once a week for a group dinner with friends and that’s the point of the ideal week it’s like your ideal ordinary

Week it’s you know if things are going according to plan roughly where are you spending your time and what are you blocking at time to do similarly on the health front my 12 month celebration is losing is becoming more lean and that means I need to have half an hour of day

Blocked into my ideal week for exercise every morning or every evening or whatever the thing might be and if you realize that you don’t actually have time for a particular thing because you’re busy with other areas of your life that’s totally okay but that means you can change your goal you can change

The 12 month celebration to reflect the time that you actually have one of the other big things that derails people is trying to be too perfectionistic and trying to do too much trying to say Hey you know I want to set this goal and this goal and this goal and this goal

And then you look at your calendar and you realize you actually just physically don’t have the time because you have a job or two or you have kids to look after or you have to commute to school or whatever the thing might be the thing I love about the ideal weak method is

That it forces us to get clarity on what is actually important to us what is the time that we have for the things that we have to do and then what’s the time that we can use on the things that we actually want to do and mostly you’ll

Probably realize that this is less time than you thought you had which is is great because it means you can start doing fewer things and you can cross some things off your 12mon celebration list maybe it’s not a goal you want to work on for this year that’s totally

Okay maybe you can work on it next year instead or when you have a little bit more time freed up in your life now if you enjoyed this video and you want to take a deeper dive into this stuff then you’re going to absolutely love my live free online Workshop which is being

Hosted on January the 6th 2024 and that’s going to be a few hours where I take you through these exercise live over Zoom calls we’ll actually do the exercises and I’ll elaborate on them a little bit more so that we can set you up for 2024 to be the best tier of your

Life and that is exclusively available for the very nice people who have pre-ordered my book so you can pre-order my book with the link down below and then you send us send us your receipt and we’ll make sure you get a ticket to the event and if you enjoyed this video

And you want to know more about my specific methods for time management you’re going to love this video which is the Trident method for time management it includes a few more details about the ideal week along with my time management process for the whole year and also

Day-to-day so you’re going to find that super helpful thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next video bye-bye