Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. In today's show, I've been mentioning that I'm looking for listener questions and I've been getting some really awesome ones. So today's show is dedicated to answering a listener question
that comes from Rosie. Rosie is clearly someone that is very passionate about her work, and her question to me was how do you approach yourself when you get too excited about work? So, Rosie and maybe other people that might have this challenge, I want to share with you how I think about work and boundaries and also trying to have time to chill as well. So firstly, and this is probably obvious to regular listeners of the show,
I find it really hard to switch off. So something I talk about on the show and with clients is having boot up and shut down rituals. So having a boot up ritual to start your day something that kind of gets your brain into gear and for me kind of gets me on a deep work sprint, starts my
day productively and proactively rather than reactively checking emails. And then I also talk a lot about having a shutdown ritual, and these are two really important things, particularly for those of you that are working from home where it's really easy for the boundaries to blur. So for me personally,
I'm pretty good with my morning routine. Typically what that looks like is, well, the very first thing I do is I will generally do a workout in my home gym, and then if I've got my daughter Frankie with me, we will do a few fun things in the morning until school of virtual school starts. And if I don't have Frankie, I'll typically start work a little bit earlier.
So I make myself a hot beverage, which might be a decaf or a caffeinated coffee, and I will look at my calendar because I time box my deep work, so I literally make meetings with myself in terms of what are the deep work tasks that I'm going to do, and I simply get on with it. So that is typically my boot up routine in terms of shutting down my day. I sometimes do this. I sometimes do a couple of minute exercise where I reflect on what if I made progress on and what are the biggest things
that I want to focus on the next day. But often I'm a little bit messy in my shutdown, and I don't shut down, and I kind of work on and off because there is always something to do, so I don't necessarily reckon mend it, but that is just what I tend to do now. Something that I found really helpful to balancing me out is that Inventium are currently trialing a four day week where basically we call
it Gift of the Fifth. So if we can get our work done in four normal workdays, we get the gift of time on Friday and we take Friday off, which has been really useful for me in having four really focused and productive days from Monday to Thursday and kind of forcing myself to decompress on Friday. So how that works for me in practice is I do often do a little bit of work on Friday, to be honest, but it's generally deep work and work that I'm really
excited about. So I try to limit that though, to one or two hours and it's generally worked for the podcast, I find because it tends to get pushed to the side during the week when I'm focusing on inventing and work and client work. But what I also found when I started having Fridays off is I was just keen
to sync my teeth into something else. So I created a passion project with my closest girlfriend, Monique, and we launched a podcast called How to Date, which is, in my opinion, a super fun podcast that goes into very practical advice on how to get better at dating, which is something that I'm doing in my early forties because I am a bit over a year out of my marriage. So we interview all sorts of experts from around the
world to get really interesting advice. So if you are single and looking for advice, you might want to check out How to Date. But I find that I will work on my passion project on for Fridays. Now. Another thing I think about is I have my daughter Frankie with me fifty percent of the time, and I try to be really strict about not working on weekends when
I have Frankie with me. It's just sort of a bit of a rule that I have if there is something like an exception to that rule, like I have to do a podcast edit because I'm on a deadline. I try to involve her. Not that she's particularly interested in how I work content, but she's somewhat interested in hearing her mother talk I'm all. Also, the final thing is I'm very fussy in how I spend my downtime. I try to do quality things, and I try to
schedule things. So in my friendship group, I am the one that plans and organizes and proactively suggests things and put things in the diary, even phone chats, because I find my friends are busy, even though where a lot of us are in lockdown, although slowly emerging out of it. I'll even book in phone chats in the evening because that is something that I find very very enriching, connecting
with my friends and doing other things for downtime. So, Rosie, I hope that has provided some kind of a useful answer to your question. Thank you so much for sending that in. If you list and you have a question for me that you'd like to get my perspective on, or for some questions, I will certainly dig into the research as well. Please send that through to Amantha at Inbentium dot com dot au, and my email address is always in the show notes as well. So thank you
for listening if you found it useful. If you know someone who maybe is having a bit of trouble switching off, maybe share this episode with them if you think they'd find it useful. And if you're enjoying how I work, I'd love you to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. And thank you to all the super awesome and amazing brilliant people who have done that over the two years that this show has been around. That is it for today and I will see you next time.