Today I wanted to talk about something called the McDonald’s habit, which I was introduced to by the author of one of my favourite books, Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks.
Tbh it could easily be called the Starbucks habit or the Costa habit or the “waiting literally anywhere” habit, but McDonald’s is what stuck so I guess we’ll roll with it.
And the concept is pretty straightforward: imagine you’re meeting someone at a McDonald’s but they’re running late, let’s say they’re 7 minutes late. You’re sitting there and you haven’t ordered anything yet so you’re just…waiting.
If you’re like most people (and like me before I learned this habit), you’d probably pull out your phone and start scrolling through X or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, essentially just filling the time until they arrive.
But instead of defaulting to the scroll, you could use those 7 minutes to make actual progress on your YouTube channel.
Back when I was working as a doctor in the UK, I found these little pockets of time everywhere when I was trying to grow my channel alongside working full-time in order to stay consistent with uploads.
There’d be a few minutes here and there between seeing patients, waiting for blood results to come back, hanging around for a scan to arrive, and yep, some of the time I’d just be scrolling on my phone (because the occasional scroll really isn’t that bad and I’m not saying you should never do this). But most of the time, I tried to open up the Notes app or Notion on my phone or iPad and just capture something.
Maybe it was a rough outline for a video or a thumbnail concept that popped into my head or maybe it was a hook for an upcoming intro.
None of these were complete thoughts or groundbreaking pieces of work – they were just fragments. But over the years I’ve realised that creative work doesn’t actually require these massive uninterrupted blocks of time where you go all-in on “monk mode” and don’t speak to anyone to get started.
Deep work sessions and quality focus time are needed to refine and polish things eventually, but the raw materials and those initial fragments of ideas can definitely happen in 7-minute bursts (or even less).
In fact, I reckon some of my best video ideas have come from these random little moments – not from sitting down at my desk with a blank page and a timer set for “creative brainstorming time” (which usually results in me staring at the screen for 20 minutes before eventually opening up Claude and asking it to give me a hand 😅).
And the magical thing about this habit is that it compounds massively. If you capture one idea today, one tomorrow, one the day after, suddenly you’ve got this collection of raw material to work with when you do sit down for that longer focus session.
You’re not starting from zero and you’ve already done some of the heavy lifting in those weird little gaps throughout your week.
So the next time you find yourself in one of those 7-minute waiting moments – whether it’s at a coffee shop, in a taxi, waiting for a meeting to start, or literally in a McDonald’s – try capturing something for your YouTube channel.
It could be a video idea. A thumbnail concept you spotted on someone else’s video that you could adapt. A random observation from your day that could become a 30-second story in your next video.
What’s important to remember is that it doesn’t have to be perfect or complete, it just needs to be captured somewhere.
And if you’re thinking “okay Ali, but where do I actually store all these ideas so they don’t just become a chaotic mess in my Notes app?” – then inside Part-Time YouTuber Academy (PTYA) we’ve got something called YouTuberOS, which is basically all the key templates, worksheets, and systems I’ve created over the past few years, bundled into one Notion hub that you can duplicate into your own workspace.
There’s a dedicated place for capturing and organising all your video ideas, plus a bunch of other stuff to help you stay consistent with your YouTube journey so if that sounds useful, you can check out PTYA here.
But even if you just start with the Notes app on your phone, that’s already a massive win – hit reply and let me know how you get on.
Have a great rest of your week 😌
Ali xx