At Lassian's, Dom Price is just like anyone else. Some days he just doesn't want to get out of bed. The difference is he stays in bed. After years of working at breakneck speed as head of research and development and also at Lassian's resident work futurist, Dom's learning to listen to the signals his body sends him and it's working. Wonders, but what about when it's something beyond a bad day.
What about when he's feeling truly burnt out. Dom's theory is that part of what causes burnout is information obesity, and one of the best ways to overcome it is with action. Dom believes the world can be a duocracy, and that means picking one thing to do right now and seeing how it goes. My name is doctor Amanthea Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show
about how to help you do your best work. On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick up my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Dom Price and I asked him what does he do when he doesn't have the energy to bring himself to work or have a conversation like the one that we were recording for this podcast.
Stay in Bed, Stay in Bed. I do I do a month because I think one of the things I've learned, and you know a bit about my story with with like personal health and mental health and stuff, is I've learned, like probably a bit late in life. I'm forty four now, to listen, listen to those signals, Like there's times I'm like, it's not going to work today. A couple of Thursdays ago is the two year anniversary of my sister passing.
My girlfriend both took the day off. We went to Freshwater Beach in Sydney, watched the sunrise, strolled around, grabbed some breakfast, meeped around, We voted early. There's a whold of stuff we got done. But we had a day for just me and her. Right An Our new tradition is we get we call it fucked up.
Right.
She puts a nice dress on, I put a nice outf on and we go to a different nice restaurant in Sydney for a late lunch and I'm like we always joke like will this be our lifestyle instead of it being one day a year. Is there going to be a time when this is normal, when we're sipping a chardonnay and not caring about the world at two pm and watching the sun? And I might probably not, not in the near future. But it's to listen, right,
to listen to my body. And then the other thing is I got some great advice from a mental years ago. I need some help on some stuff. And I arrived at the conversation and I did. I thought it was a very English thing. Apparently it's just a very human thing. Where I arrived and I just winged and then after five minutes she was like, right, that's your five minutes of winging up. This is a session where we fix, not winge. So how do you want to spend the
next fifty five minutes? And I was like oh, And I was like and she's like, well, the first five minutes was cathartic. Now you've got it off your chest, what are you going to do about it? And I was like, I thought I was here just a wine for an hour and maybe you do agree with me, and I just feel better. And she's like, no, Like, if this is a real mental relationship. We're going to help you fix it. And by the way, she's like, I've not got the answer. I'm just here to ask questions.
You've got the answer. And so it was very confronting at the time, and I was like, Ah, I probably have got the answer, but whilst I'm in that five minute pity party, I'm definitely not going to find the answer. And so how do we do the time switch? Right? So I always, even when I use that now and I'm coaching on mentoring others, I'm like, you've had your five minutes of winge and sulk. What are we going to do about it right from now on? And so I have a word etched at the back of my head,
which is deocracy. I'm a massive fact if I ever bothered to write a book, if I was as smart as you, I'd write a book. But I'm not. It would be called deuocracy, which is how do we move from this? I have this belief that as a society we suffer with knowledge obesity, and I think it's what causes some of the burnout. We gather all these debtor and insights, we don't do anything with it. Right, I'm constantly reading about what it takes to get fit. But at no point if I got on a treadmill, right,
I've not gone for a walk. So I'm like, I've got knowledge, obeast it. I know what I need to do. I need to eat less chocolate and I need to walk more like it's not hard, but for some reason we just block it out. And so I'm like, instead of knowledge, obeest tea, let's turn it into a deocracy. And so all I do is I look for the one thing I can do, one thing. So my if you flip that that my one of my trigger phrases right now is best practice. Right It drives me insane
because it doesn't exist. And so my marketing brethrens that at LASTI and hate me because every time that I'm like, there's no such thing as best how do you know it's best? And they're like, well, it's a common known phrase. No, it don't use it. It doesn't make any sense. It's patronizing, it's condescending, and it's ignorant. So let's instead go for better, and let's look at incrementally, what's the one thing I
can do right now in this time horizon. It could be today, could be this hour could be this week. The one thing I can do to make something better by intent doesn't mean it will be better. My intent is to make it better. And then my job is did it make it better? Yes? Or no? If it did, do more of it. If it didn't, what can I do differently? And so basically, instead of thinking about life as input, process output, this linear thing, I think about life as a loop. And my job is to make
that loop tight and to have many loops. That's my job as a human. Right. If I have these giant, long loops, I'm not learning quick. And if my learning velocity is too slow, and by the time I find something out, I'm annoyed because it's taken too long. So lots of small learning loops. And so when I sign up for that, I'm like, cool. If I'm signing up for a small learning loop, what's the one thing I can do to get around the loop? What's the one
thing I can try? Right? And that way, instead of looking at all the things in your way that are frustrations, you find the one thing you can do and suddenly you're building momentum forward. I still look in the rear view mirror, because that's where I get a lot of my lessons learned. I'm just not sort of nostalgic wondering about the good old days, because today's the good old days.
We are creating the good old days today. And as soon as we wake up to that, you're like, oh, instead of wallowing about what it used to be, like, yeah, I joined it lastly in a Mantha when it's five hundred people, it's so friendly and family orienty, and you're like, I get that, we've all got history, we've all got a story, but it won't be a five hundred personal
organization again. So wake up to the reality that it's now this ass What can we do to still make it fun and family oriented, a nimble and all the things, John, Because you own that, right, there's not this weird system that decides that for you, right YouTube. You make that choice every single day. And so for me, that deocracy mindset really helps me get through those those slow days, those hard times when I'm like it's all broken, it's not going to work, is waste of time. I'm like, actually,
you know what, stop, what's the one thing. There's always one thing we can do, And then you do it and you're like, ah, suddenly the shoulders come up a little bit, and then you do one more thing. You're like, ah, now I've got a little bit of mojo. Right then you do the third thing. You're like, now, now the ViBe's going. Now I can feel it. It all started with one thing.
If you enjoyed these excerpt from my chat with Dom, you might want to go back and listen to the full episode, which you can find a link to in the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter. There contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets that I'm loving through to interesting research findings. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how
I Work dot co. Thank you for sharing part of your day with me by listening to How I Work. If you're keen for more tips on how to work better, connect with me via LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm very easy to find. Just search for Amanthaimba. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cool and Nation. I am so grateful for being able to work and live on this beautiful land, and I want to pay my respects to elders, past,
present and emerging. How I work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise