Who is Ali Abdaal?
Doctor turned YouTuber, author and course creator. Known for naming the Resonance Calendar in a 2019 newsletter and teaching Notion to a general productivity audience.
This page recognises Ali Abdaal for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I want to work out what Ali Abdaal actually contributed to Notion, and whether he is a useful person to learn the app from.”
This page traces what he did with Notion, dated to his own newsletters and articles, and points at the free templates and the class he teaches. It does not review his paid courses or communities, and it will not tell you whether his broader productivity advice suits how you work.
On 24 March 2019, Ali Abdaal wrote to his newsletter list that he had just switched all of his note-taking and writing over to Notion. He had fallen down an internet rabbit hole into Tiago Forte's writing on Building a Second Brain, quoted three paragraphs of it, and said reading them blew his mind. He was a junior doctor at the time, making YouTube videos on evenings and days off.
A week later he sent a follow-up, because readers had replied asking for specifics. That second email described a single Notion database holding every article, video, book and podcast that had stuck with him, and gave it a name: the Resonance Calendar. He put the name in brackets and apologised for it. The pattern outlived the apology, and people who have never read the newsletter still build one.
The medicine went first. In August 2020 a planned emergency medicine placement in Australia fell through when the borders closed, Abdaal found himself unemployed by accident, and he went all in on the channel. He published Feel-Good Productivity in 2023, which reached the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He now runs a company of over 20 people from Hong Kong.
He made 52 videos in six months when he should have been revising
Abdaal was born in Karachi in 1994, grew up in Lesotho, and moved to the UK with his mother, brother and grandmother in 2003. At 12 he taught himself to code and took freelance web design work to fund a World of Warcraft habit, which he calls his first taste of making money online. He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2012 to read medicine and got fixated on finding the most time-efficient way to revise, which freed up enough hours to run a side business helping other students get into medical school. The YouTube channel started in 2017 as marketing for that business. He kept going because he enjoyed it, and by his own count made 52 videos in six months to reach 1,000 subscribers, during the run-up to his finals.
One article about a second brain moved his whole system into Notion
The March 2019 newsletter is the clearest record of how Abdaal arrived at Notion, because he wrote it while it was happening. He described the workflow the same week he adopted it: hearing something on a podcast, pausing it, screenshotting the timestamp, sharing it into Notion and writing a few thoughts to flesh out the idea. He was blunt that he was new to personal knowledge management and said he would keep sharing as his system grew. In June 2019 he paid for Forte's course, the most he had ever spent on online education, and wrote later that the first few sessions justified the cost. By the cohort starting 1 September 2020 he was back as an alumni mentor, running live small-group sessions helping students build their own second brain systems.
The Resonance Calendar got a name he called pretentious
The 31 March 2019 email set out one rule: anything at all that resonated with him had to go into the calendar. He showed the same Notion database in list view and in calendar view, and described parking the car at the side of the road to get his phone out and write down what a podcast had just sparked. His point was about the behaviour the database forced, since he had previously finished a book and moved straight on to the next one. That database is now one of two free templates on his Notion Marketplace creator profile, where it holds a 4.9 rating. The other is his Book Notes template, built on Zettelkasten-style prompts, rated 4.9 across more than a hundred ratings and picked up by Notion for its Top 10 Notes and Knowledge templates list.
The system became a class, and then he moved the business to Hong Kong
Notion Masterclass: Maximise Your Productivity and Organisation is the closing class in Abdaal's Skillshare productivity path. The listed materials are pen, paper and Notion, the final project is a LifeOS dashboard students build alongside him, and Skillshare records over 61,000 enrolments and marks it a staff pick. He keeps a page on his own site handing those students 10 or more Notion templates made for the class, and a separate page giving away 8 or more of the templates his team uses daily to run what he describes as a 6M YouTube channel. Writing in 2022 he called Notion the main app behind producing his videos, planning the Deep Dive podcast and running the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, with one piece of advice: start with a very simple system and build it up over time. Since then he has published the book, married and moved from London to Hong Kong in 2024, and co-founded Sparkle Studios, whose first app VoicePal turns rambling voice notes into structured text.
Why Ali Abdaal is on this list
Abdaal put Notion in front of a general productivity audience while it was still largely a power-user tool, and he did it by showing his own half-built systems instead of polished ones. The Resonance Calendar is the concrete artefact: a name and a database pattern he coined in a 2019 newsletter, now rebuilt and renamed by people all over the Notion community. He has also kept the Notion material free, from the production templates his team actually uses to the two templates on his Notion Marketplace profile, and his Skillshare class has walked more than 61,000 people through building a first dashboard.
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