The Fast-Forward Test
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ali Abdaal borrows a sociological sampling method as a personal life audit. Researchers studying whether life is worth living cannot trust a single end-of-day answer, so they page participants many times a day, ask what they are doing right now, and then ask whether they would press a button to fast forward to the end of this experience while still receiving its benefit. The proportion of a person's day they would skip becomes the measure. Ali runs the same test on himself. As a doctor he would have fast-forwarded most of the working day but never the hours teaching medical students. More recently he realised he would fast-forward sessions with his personal trainer, which he treats as a design fault rather than a discipline problem: the response is to swap the activity for squash, tennis or badminton, not to force compliance.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Sample your day at random, not in retrospect
Ask the question in the moment across many points in the day rather than reflecting at the end. A single retrospective answer is one sample and people default to saying things are fine.
Pro tip A recurring phone alarm a handful of times a day is enough to approximate the pager method.
- 2
Ask the button question exactly
If you could press a button, would you fast forward to the end of this experience and still get the benefit of it? The crucial clause is still getting the benefit, which strips out the excuse that you are enduring it for the payoff.
- 3
Tally what proportion of the day you would skip
Add up the fast-forward answers. Ali's framing is blunt: choosing to fast forward ten hours of your life every day is pretty bad, regardless of how well the job pays or how much you say you enjoy it.
Watch out Clock-watching is the same signal in disguise. Ali's tell as a doctor was looking at the clock waiting for 5pm.
- 4
Separate the false positives
Some blocks are genuinely worth enduring for a specific reason you endorse. Distinguish those from blocks you have simply never questioned, like Ali's realisation that he was chasing six-pack abs he had no particular use for.
- 5
Redesign the skipped blocks rather than forcing them
Where an outcome matters but the activity is fast-forwardable, find a different route to the same outcome. Ali's example is keeping the goal of staying healthy while replacing bench pressing with squash, tennis or badminton, which he would not skip.
Pro tip Pair this with an identity framing rather than an obligation: I want to be the sort of person who does this, instead of I should do this.
Watch out Not every block can be redesigned. The test is a guide to whether you are living the life you want, not a licence to delete every obligation.
- 6
Re-run it periodically
Ali's answers changed as his circumstances did: the medical job, then the trainer. Because the test measures the current shape of your life rather than a fixed preference, it needs repeating whenever the shape changes.
In the wild
Ali says he enjoyed working as a doctor, but when he applies the test honestly the answer splits. Teaching medical students he would not fast forward, because it was fun. The rest of the working day he would, and the behavioural evidence was that he watched the clock waiting to go home at 5pm. The same job produced opposite answers depending on the block, which is the point of sampling many times a day rather than asking once whether you like your job.
→ A job-level yes conceals a block-level no, and the test locates precisely which hours are the problem.
Applying the test a few weeks before the recording, Ali realised he would press the button on his sessions with his personal trainer. He treats this as bad news requiring a change of method rather than more willpower, and questions the underlying goal too, noting that he is not sure why he is trying to get a six-pack. The proposed fix keeps the health outcome and swaps the activity for squash, tennis or badminton, games he would not want to fast forward through.
→ A recurring commitment he was quietly enduring gets redesigned rather than abandoned or forced.
Common mistakes
Asking once at the end of the day
The method exists precisely because single retrospective answers are unreliable. Ask people whether life is worth living and most say yes; the fine-grained sampling is what surfaces the ten hours they would happily skip.
Dropping the still-get-the-benefit clause
Without it, every unpleasant task is defended by its payoff and the test returns nothing. The clause forces you to judge the experience itself, separately from its result.
Answering with more discipline instead of a redesign
A fast-forward answer is information about the design of the activity. Responding by scheduling harder and pushing through recreates the same result next week while adding guilt to it.
From the transcript
“If you could press a button, would you fast forward to the end of this experience?”
“if you would choose to fast forward 10 hours of your life every day, that's like it's pretty bad.”
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