Today, I'm pulling back the curtain on my own productivity systems and answering your burning questions about work habits, psychology, and the tools that actually make a difference. Have you
ever wondered what my ideal workday really looks like? Or maybe you're curious about which popular productivity advice I think is complete rubbish, Or maybe you're dying to know the one habit that's transformed my energy levels well, from my perhaps controversial approach to email management to the surprising environmental hacks that changed my behavior, I am sharing the strategies that have genuinely moved the needle in my own life
and work. So whether you're struggling with focus on off days or looking for a planning process that actually works, this episode will definitely have something for you. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
Thank you for joining me today. In this Ask Me Anything episode, I am going to go through a bit of a backlog of listener questions that I've got, and remember, if you want me to answer something in one of these ask Me Anything epps, then there is a little link to my email in the show notes.
Okay, let's get into the first question, which I had different.
Versions of this from quite a few listeners, and the question is what does your ideal workday look like from start to finish.
Well, at the moment.
It's a little bit different because I am on a deadline for my fifth book, and when I am book writing, everything changes. So what that looks like right now is typically between the hours of seven to nine AM or eight to ten as generally those first two golden hours of the morning, because that's when I do my best work. I am writing my book, So I am in my home office and I am glued to the screen, and I am in research mode and writing mode. I'm generally
doing both concurrently. I'm doing some research and then I'm consolidating that and then I'm writing up what I find.
And right now.
I have a very strict daily deadline, which is something I found works for me when I'm working on a manuscript.
I write one thousand words a day.
That is not negotiable, although I do give myself one day or one thousand words worth of hall passes, and I find that's really useful because the quicker I can get down.
I guess a first.
Draft is what it is because I have already ironed out the structure.
Then that just.
It makes me feel on top of things. It makes me feel confident that I'm going to hit the deadline, and I love having a lot of time to edit and play around.
So that's first thing in the morning.
Then I get to my actual full time job, which is running Inventium, my behavior change consultancy, and I will typically then do a couple of hours of deep work for Inventium, which might be working on a new product or at the moment, working on the strategy for the new financial year, or a whole host of other things. And then I typically have meetings in the afternoons. So my assistant GEM knows that I like my meetings batched and I don't like to do meetings before about eleven AM.
So that is typically what my workday looks like. I would generally clock off at about five of ish at the moment, because I'm writing a book, it does make for a long day, but I know that this is temporary in terms of having this manuscript deadline, and it matters to me. Producing a great book really matters to me,
and so I'm very happy to spend that time writing. Okay, the next question comes from prayer, and that is what's the most effective productivity technique you've ever used and still use?
Okay, that would have to be time boxing.
So if you're a regular listener of how I work, you probably know what that is. But in case you don't, time boxing is essentially booking a meeting with yourself in the diary to do the thing. So my diary is covered in meetings with myself that say DW stands for deep work Colin, and.
Then whatever the task is is.
I really like time boxing because it firstly reduces the need for me to make decisions about what am I doing next, and also it stops me procrastinating because if I don't know what I'm doing, if I've got nothing time boxed in my morning, I find that my focus can be lacking.
So the other thing.
That I find very helpful with time boxing is that I often overestimate how long things will take, which is slightly uncommon. A lot of people underestimate how long things will take. I like to overestimate, and I do that deliberately because then when I finish something early I feel like it's a little win and that I'm actually running my day a.
Little bit early on time now.
I do also want to mention chronotypes again. If you're a long time listener, you will know that chronotypes are about the different ebbs and flows in our energy over a twenty four hour period. There are three different types of chronotypes. Larks who are mourning people, middlebirds who are.
In the middle, and ours who come to life at night.
I am most definitely a lark, which is why you might go, why are you writing your book at seven a m.
That is early for me.
I am at my prime in those hours, and I'm not very useful at work that requires deep thinking and focus after lunch.
Okay, what productivity.
Advice do you think is completely overrated?
And this comes from James. Thank you, James. All right, I think that the most.
Overrated productivity advice is stay out of your inbox all day except check it two or three times a day. I mean, you hear that advice a lot from people that recognize that a lot of time spent in your
inbox is probably time wasted. And the average person I read this spends two and a half to three hours doing email every day, and when you combine that with another statistic, I heard that the average knowledge worker spends about twenty one point five hours in meetings per week, you kind of left with about five hours to do your actual job, which is why a lot of us are completely burnt out and working at night or on weekends.
So I actually think this with this advice of to stay out of your inbox, why I don't like it because I think it's just so unrealistic.
I look at a lot of our.
Clients at Inventium who are tipillian knowledge workers, a lot of mid to senior level managers, and part of their job involves being contactable and being fairly responsive, and I think that realistic advice. And I heard this from Laura may Martin, who is Google's executive productivity advisor. What she recommends is try to with your inbox. Fine, keep it open for most of the day, but try to find at least two, maybe even.
Three one hour periods where.
You keep it closed when you're doing your deep work. And I love that advice because I think that is so much more realistic.
I personally use it myself.
My inbox software, my email software which is superhuman, which I Love stays closed for most of the morning, really until I've done my deep work, and then it's open intimately for the rest of the day. The next question comes from Sonya and she has asked, how do you deal with distractions and stay focused when you're having an off day? Well, Sonya, I've tried a whole bunch of different things.
I would say. When I first discovered deep work.
Back in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen or whatever I first read cal Newport's book, I used a combination of Oh no, actually, I think I solely relied on Freedom dot two, which is website and application blocking software, which is great because if you don't want to rely on your willpower, and ideally we want to design systems where we're not relying on our willpower because it does get depleted.
Freedom is a really good way to go. You basically program it to block you from the apps and software that you find most distracting, you know, which might be Outlook or Slack or ABC News or whatever the case may be, and you pick the hours. And I found that using that was really great at just having me focus on the thing which was often hard or dull, or you know, producing negative emotions.
It just kept me on track.
I've since tried using Forest, which is an app on your phone where you set the time of how long you want to focus, and it will grow a digital tree, and if you check your phone during that time, the tree dies, which is strangely motivating. But probably the other thing that I do is that generally my mobile phone is not within arm's reach.
I got that tip from Adam.
Alter, and I think the further away I am from my phone for the most amount of hours in the day is a really good thing in terms of staying focused. Because if my phone is in a different room and I think, oh, I might just check my phone for something.
Generally I can't be bothered.
And the thought will pass and I'll just get on with things without being distracted. Now, there are definitely days, because I am human, where I am really really distractable and really unfocused. I find what helps there is a state change, So I'll typically just go for a walk around the block almost do a mental reset, because typically if I'm succumbing to distractions, it probably means my energy or my motivation is a little bit low. So I
try to reenergize and then get back to things. Okay, next question is from Amy, what does your weekly planning process look like? Well, I don't so much have a weekly planning process, although I do time box, but that is typically a daily planning process. I have this year started to do a monthly planning process, which I think I should have done long ago, but I find it's really helpful. I've got my annual goals as a company
and as an individual. I've typically got things that I'm trying to get done over the next three to six months for inventingum and what I find keeps me on track and also helps me know what is the most important thing I could be doing this week or this day. Is at the start of the month, I list and I do this very basically. I was doing this in Apple Notes and I've recently started doing it in notion. Instead.
Is I list out what are the big goals or the big chunks of deep work essentially that I want to achieve, what.
Are the big things that will shift the dial?
And in Apple Notes, I was pinning that note to the top, so I you know, it was something that I would look at, gosh, probably every day or two just to reorient me and make me go, Okay, what is the thing that I should be doing today? And it is so simple, but I found it is so
effective in keeping me on track with what needs to happen. Okay, we are just going to take a short break, but when we come back, I'm going to be talking about the habit that has had the biggest impact on my energy and wellbeing, and also some tools that I am currently quite obsessed with. The next question comes from anonymous someone that has not left their name, and they have asked, what habit has had the biggest impact on your energy and well being. Ah, it's a good question, and I
would say it's all my habits around sleep. And in the coming weeks, I'm actually going to record a more in depth episode about sleep because I get asked about sleep so often. I think that whenever I'm giving a keynote on habit change and there's a wellbeing theme around it, I will always get questions on sleep. So I'm going to do a much bigger episode on that in the
near future. But what I will say is that I take sleep very seriously, and I think that the habit that has had the biggest impact on me is that I go to bed at about the same time every night, and I wake up at about the same time every every morning, within about a half hour window. So I'm someone who leaves events unfashionably early. I'm always the first
to leave. I hate being out after nine o'clock. Really, the only time that happens is if I am at a show, like at the theater, and there is no choice but to stay till later because obviously I want to watch the end of the show.
So yeah, I am hardcore about that.
And that has just had the biggest impact on everything, particularly my energy, and without energy, I feel like we are useless to everyone.
Now. The next question is from Amelia.
What is a behavior change strategy that works surprisingly well but most people overlook. Okay, I would say hacking your environment, like redesigning your physical and digital environment so that it supports the behavior that you're trying to do more of.
So, for example, at.
Inventium, we have been doing a lot of Genai training with our clients and.
All sorts of people.
To be honest, and it's really easy to come to a training program on Genai and get really excited about the possibilities, but your digital environment is not set up to have using Genai as the default. So let's take
let's take doing search as an example. We talk about using tools like Perplexity instead of Google when you are searching for information for various reasons, and most people are their default browser window, certainly for people that are using Chrome as their browser, the default tab or the default homepage if you like, is going to be Google. Of
course it is because it's Chrome. And if that's your default that's the first screen that you see when you're opening your browser window, then of course you're going to default to using Google for search. But instead what we recommend is going, well, if you want to really double down on Jenai and start to be using it every day and look ideally every hour, then change that home screen, change it to Perplexity, which actually in Chrome you can't do.
You need to create it as a shortcut, but in other browsers it's a little bit easier to do.
So that's just one example. But change your.
Environment, and particularly your digital environment to support the behavior that you're trying to do more of. Now, fine, old question that we've got for today, and I will remind you if you have got questions that you would like me to answer that might be about my own practices.
It might be about your workplace. Maybe.
In the past, I've received all sorts of all sorts of questions about troublesome workplaces and managers and coworkers and what to do, and I can tackle all of those. Please drop me a note. My email is in the show notes. I'm very accessible, or drop me a DM on LinkedIn, where I am also very accessible, So please do that. I love, love, love getting listener questions, and even better, send it to me as a voice memo so I can play it.
People always email me these things, but I would love voice memo questions and I will play that on the show.
Okay, final question that I'm tackling today comes from George, and that is.
What books, tools, or gadgets are you currently obsessed with?
Well, the best book that I've read recently was Reset by Dan Heath. I love the Heath Brothers. I love all their books. Reset was fantastic. It was all about how to create change. It was the book that my book club did a couple of months back, and it was so good.
I know everyone in the book club also loved it. In terms of software, two things I will give a shout out to.
First is Snipped, which is the app that I use to listen to podcasts. I no longer use Spotify or Apple podcasts or Google podcasts back when that existed, as I have mucked around with in the past, I listened to all my podcasts on snip. It is amazing. The problem for me that it solves is that quite often when I'm listening to a work related or educational pod is that I'll hear something, but.
I'll be on the run.
My typical podcast time is when I'm exercising, so doing weights or out for a run, and it's an inconvenient time to write something down that. With Snipped, there's a little button that you can hit that it says something like creator snip and it records the previous minute or so that was sort of identifies with AI. Oh yeah, you were probably trying to snip that, and then it sends you that in an email.
It is so good. It does a really good.
AI summaries of episodes as well, so you can think about do I really want to invest an hour of my life listening to this?
I just love it so much.
It is so good, and it's also quite helpful when you discover a new podcast. You can also sort by how many snips it has or how many people have snipped things in it.
It's one of those two things.
And that's also really good because presumably the more times a show or an episode has been snipped, then probably the more gems there are.
Is just some logic that I have applied that.
Typically only works with the really popular shows, because a lot of shows do not have any snips.
So there is that. Okay.
One other tool that I will give a shout out to, which I'm absolutely loving, is called whisper flow.
And what this is so, I mean, computers.
Have had dictation features for a while now, but they just haven't been very good, so I haven't used them. But I recently discovered whisper flow and it is amazing at dictation. So you basically download the software. You set it to have like a one button shortcut. So on my Mac, it's the function key that if I hold that down, it just starts recording what I'm saying. So I can be in any program, I can be in my email, I.
Can be on like a notes page, I can be in.
A word document and I just hit the function button and I talk and it will write what I'm saying. But it also does automatic formatting and I have found that it is very, very accurate. So those are my two favorite tools right now, Snipped and whisper Flow.
I will put a link to both of those in the show notes. Highly recommend them both. Check them out.
Okay, we have got to the end of the episode. Thank you so much for all those listeners that sent in questions. They were super awesome questions, which is why I chose them to have on this episode. And if you have got questions you would like me to cover, please send them through to me via email or on LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for joining me.
If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted where new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Coulan Nation. A big thank you to Martin Nimmer for doing the sound mix.