Ali Abdaal's Complete Productivity System

DEEP DIVE

Ali splits his system into 6 separate categories: coordinate, communicate, consume, capture, and create.

1. Coordinate

Ali starts off with these 3 apps in the coordination section: A calendar, project manager, and file management app. Now, everyone is different when it comes to the right productivity app for them. But, if you are wondering, these are the apps Ali uses coordination: Fantastical, Google Drive, and Todoist (personal)/Notion (work). Interestingly, he also uses a physical analogue productivity planner when the digital life gets overwhelming (which you can get here).

2. Communicate

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time responding to online messages. Luckily, Ali put me on to a great all in one messaging app called texts.com. Sadly there is a pretty long waitlist, but this is the app he uses for personal messaging. Texts.com brings together all your messages into one, including Slack, iMessages, Instagram DM’s, and many more. Ali also uses Slack, as mentioned above, to communicate with his team for work purposes, along with Loom. Discord is also Ali’s choice for his free community for subscribers over on YouTube. And last but certainly not least: Superhuman. A premium email app that comes in at a hefty $30.00 a month (which I am sadly not able to afford).

3. Consume

By consume Ali does not mean doom scrolling on TikTok. He believes there are productive and intentional ways to consume useful information. One of which are podcast, which he uses Castro as his podcast listening app. When it comes to (kind of annoying) PDF’s, Ali uses an app called PDF Expert. Now Ali also uses a lot of reading apps (and I need to go to bed), so here they are: Kindle, iBooks, Instapaper, Shortform, and Audible.

4. Capture

Automatic Capture:

Being able to automatically capture stuff is great for a productivity system. Lower the friction the better. Ali uses an app called Readwise to automatically capture highlighted information from books that goes right into Notion.

Manual Capture:

For manual capture Ali uses the most underrated notes app (in my opinion ig): Apple Notes. Particularly for projects and useful personal information. Along with a digital journaling app called Day One, and if your into lifting weights, he uses an app called Strong to track work out data.

5. Create

As you can probably already tell, Ali is a pretty creative guy. But simply, his apps to get his creative projects done consist of only Notion, Google Docs, and Apple Notes. Notion for video related work, Google Docs for his book (Feel Good Productivity), and Apple notes for quick capturing ideas.

Conclusion

Ali Abdaal has a very complex system to suite his busy lifestyle (as you can probably tell from the amount of apps this man uses). But while it isn’t simple, it works for him, which at the end of the day is what matters most. So by no means do you need to go out and use all these apps. Figure out works for you in your system. Hope you enjoyed.

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