Ali Abdaal, whom I’ve written about several times before, is a physician in the UK. Starting back when he was still in medical school, he’s been posting YouTube videos on how he studies and organizes his life. If you’re into productivity hacking, he’s definitely worth following.
He’s just posted a video on how he uses Notion to organize his YouTube activities. That doesn’t sound too exciting until you discover that he makes more from his Youtube videos than he does as a doctor. Although he describes his YouTube and other activities as a “side hustle,” a case could be made that medicine is the real side hustle and that he’s primarily a YouTuber. He’s currently aiming at posting 3 videos a week and has a support team to edit the videos and perform other vaguely administrative chores.
He’s a “Junior Doctor,” which in U.S. terms is something like an intern or resident. That means he’s always busy at the hospital and has to be as efficient as possible in his video endeavors. The current video describes the process he uses and how it’s all mediated by Notion.
Watching the video, I was struck, as I was with his previous videos, how everything he does with Notion could be done just as well with Org-mode. One of his big wins with Notion is the use of a template to organize and track a new video. As soon as I saw that I immediately thought of how I use yasnippet to do the same thing in Org-mode. If you’re an Org user and watch his video, you’ll be immediately struck with how seamlessly his process carries over to Org-mode.
Some of the things he says in the video about his structured planning of videos makes me think that I should adopt some of his ideas for writing Irreal posts. I have a process that’s sort of like what he does but his video shows there’s plenty of room for improvement. The nice thing is that I could adopt his entire procedure in Org-mode if I needed to.