A Day in the Life of Ali Abdaal’s Personal Assistant

Good morning and welcome back to a day in my life. I'll be sharing a full work day, as I don't have university, which means that instead of training to be a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service, I'll be focusing all my attention on improving one person's life, Ali Abdaal. I have a guilty start to my day at 9am, as waking up late means I've officially missed our morning power hour with the Inner Circle team, but it's nothing that a mixture of various forms of sugars for breakfast can't fix. I'm usually the last member of the team to wake up, so I catch up with the boys on Slack while having the food. The topic of conversation today is the dislike of late night team meetings and something about doubling income from shares overnight. I start work by checking my own tasks and also see what Ali has overbooked himself for today. I realise that there is actually going to be little opportunity for him to be a waste man, as he's over committed to back to back meetings all day. I also realise Sheen has managed to book herself in for a meeting with Ali, something we've been planning behind his back as the only way to get this man's attention. Nothing on his calendar requires my immediate input, so I move on to email. Between the marriage requests, fan mail, questions and payment receipts, reading emails is at once the most entertaining, heartwarming and confusing part of my day. There must have been something interesting Ali recently posted, because there is a fresh wave of wife applications. Getting the inbox down to zero is harder than Ali getting a six pack, so I decide to pause work on this for now. By the way, the marriage tab in the email is absolutely real and you can get in touch with us with any personal requests. The emotional roller coaster, however, is far from over. Me and Angus need to go through scholarship video applications for our new YouTuber Academy, something I've been trying to put off doing for the last two days. The process of rejection genuinely breaks my heart, so I decide to put it off for a bit longer and go on my daily-ish walk to shake the feeling of being a dreambreaker. I'm listening to Tim Ferriss's new podcast with Michael Phelps, which towards the end makes a surprising turn towards mental health and prompts me to make a few notes, which I sort out on Notion once I get home at around 11.40. I then get started on watching the application videos for the next few hours. I mix it up by switching back and forth from Chrome to Safari, which really is the wildest form of fun I have during lockdown. Me and Ali are also trying to convince Angus and Christian that there is value in having team social nights, which hopefully will start up again soon. After some more investment talk, with passions rising in the group chat after socks being suspended, I continue my own life in blissful ignorance and at 1.30 I make lunch and actually attend the second group working session of the day. These are always so heartwarming and I get to live vicariously through people lucky enough to have pets. After getting in a few MCQs for the day, I finally catch up on a call with Ali and James Clear. I am pinching myself listening to the gems here and feel super inspired, so I dive into some research on what we're working on. Between this and chatting with Angus on our need to get educated on the stock market, a few hours have passed at this point and it's almost 6pm, which is when I have a call with Ali, so I quickly order some food. I bribe myself to do videos like this with unhealthy food, which is not a good long-term strategy. As it arrives, I carry my pizza and Ali to the window. It's lovely to be able to look at the view every now and then and I find it makes long meetings a lot more enjoyable. We try to explain to each other why we haven't done what we were supposed to do again and we try to plan our tasks for the upcoming week. Ali is actually planning on changing his glasses, which is a huge event for us as a business. Between this and the new shirts, I prepare myself mentally for the upcoming wave of extra wife emails. He's the one that does the typing in these meetings and it's my goal for 2021 to be able to type faster than Ali, so if anyone has any tips, please let me know. I had promised myself I would sleep early today, but not getting started on projects after our chats is about as likely as Ali sticking to his daily macros, so I take my laptop to bed this time and spend the next few hours working on one of our projects. I realise we haven't sent our daily YouTuber email course, so at 11pm I end up calling Ali and trying to negotiate him into getting this done. He's actually surprisingly compliant and now that I've got something else ticked off my to-do list, I can get back to work. My night ends at 2am after being engrossed in reading on the psychology of happiness and meaning. Wishing I could actually talk about all this right now, I save it for my meeting with him tomorrow and go to bed. Realising this is exactly why I keep missing our morning power hours, I promise myself for the 10th month in a row to fix my sleeping schedule. I am honestly endlessly grateful to the most productive wasteland out there for giving me these types of days. And if you did make it so far, thank you so much for spending this day with me. I hope you have a wonderful one yourself.