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Speaker 1: Today's show is an Ask Me Anything episode where I answer your awesome listener questions. So today I will be sharing exactly how I use AI to boost my productivity every single day, from supercharging research to streamlining my personal life as well. I'm also going to be diving into how I structure my week to stay focused and avoid context switching. And I also talk about my current favorite tech and software tools, and I'll also be giving an update on my upcoming book, The Energy Game. Well, let's get into it.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
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Speaker 1: The first question comes from James and he asks how are you using AI to improve your own productivity? And that is a great question, James, because I use AI every single day, multiple times a day, and have been for the last few years. So one of the big areas that it saves me so much time is in research, and there are a few ways I use it. So firstly, when I am doing research for say a new product at Inventium. So a little while ago we were creating a program around psychological safety and what my process is for research is. Typically when it's academic research, I go to consensus dot app. It is one of my favorite AI tools out there, and it is basically eaten up all the academic research that has been published, so millions and millions of academic papers, and you can then ask questions of the database and it will use AI to give you a summary. It will give you a what it's called consensus is if you ask it a yes or no question, it will give you a consensus of what the research says. Is it mostly yes, is it mostly no? Is it mixed? And I find that very very useful for sourcing articles that I never would have come across and that certainly I have found it and not picked up by doing deep research using tools like perplexity and chat GPT, which I do also use, but yeah, I love consensus so much. I use deep research in chat, GPT, Gemini and perplexity quite often when I'm researching guests for this very podcast. So most of the guests that I have on are people that I am personally curious about that I might have read their book, or used their products or services, or I just love their thinking. So even though I receive a lot of pictures from people to come on the show, probably about ten pitches per day. I would estimate generally the guests that I'm having on and that you're listening to are ones that I have hand selected, so I already know quite a bit about them, but I'm supplementing that with dep research. Then I also use these tools in my personal life. As an example, about a month ago, I came down with a cold and that really sucked because I'd been cold free, flu free, etc. For the whole year, and I thought, oh my god, I'm going to have the first year of my life where I do not get sick. And I was feeling really smug about that, and then I got sick. So what I did is I hopped on consensus and I asked it what supplements reduced the severity and duration of a cold? And it scanned through probably thousands millions of different papers, and it presented me at a very neat table, these are the supplements where there is mild and up to moderate and up to strong evidence that they will help reduce the severity and duration of the cold. And then I asked for what doseiage did the studies say that I need to take? And then I hopped onto Perplexity, and I asked Perplexity to source me what are the best reputable brands in these supplements that are available where I live in Melbourne. And I had a little bit of a shopping list that I was then able to go out down my local shopping strip and get all the supplements and I was over the cold in five days, which is better than the average which is seven days. Now, another thing that I do probably the last thing I'll talk about before I move on to the next question, because very seriously, there's a lot that I could talk about here. But I have very task specific GPTs, which which is probably something that I do differently to the average person or maybe someone that is more sort of well, I guess less into the world of AI. They might be using it a lot, but I think that this is something that I find separates more experienced users with more with people that have mostly been you know, dabbling and perhaps getting substandard results. The kind of people that come to our programs that invent him. So if that is you, I will link to our latest round of AI programs in the show notes. You might want to come join us. But I have very task specific GPTs so GPT so I use chat GPT and I build GPTs. But if you're you know, in the Google ecosystem, these are called gems. If you're in the Microsoft Co Pilots ecosystem, therese are called agents, and Inclaude they're called a pro. So I create very tak specific GPTs. So, for example, I have a GPT that I have created that is specifically for podcast episode title generation. That is how specific I get. I also have I was experimenting with Instagram reels for a while and if you want to see those, you can follow me on Instagram at Amantha. I is how you find me And I don't know that was an interesting experiment, but for that I did a whole lot of research into what's best practice for reels on Instagram and you know, creating compelling cooks and all those sorts of things. And I then created a specific script creator for Instagram reels where I would talk through some content and I would work with it to create a short script. I also have for my newsletters, so you might be a subscriber to one percent Better, where I share tips weekly on how to live a better life and work life and Again, there's a link to sign up to that in the show notes. But I've got a very specific GPT that I built to help me edit content. So my workflow for that is that typically I will, you know, I'll come up with ideas for the newsletter all the time. I've got a page in notion where I capture those ideas, and then I will generally talk out the idea or the story, and then I'll work with that GPT to mold that into you know, around five to seven hundred words that will work and you know, be in my specific tone of writing for the newsletter. So there are a few examples of how I use AI. Okay, the next question is from Caroline. Caroline, Caroline, my biggest performance challenge right now is keeping track of all my work. My work work. What this currently looks like is being very reactive and not getting to the things I want to do or only getting to them in a rash, less than idea way, in a very firm deadline. So how do we keep track of all the work and stop being so reactive? Okay? Why my system is this? So I have a weekly ritual and a daily ritual around thinking about what are my tasks and what are my priorities. So most I don't know this every week, but most weeks, and I'm much more likely to do this when I'm feeling overwhelmed is I will think about what are the big projects that I've got on right now, and what are the most important things that I need to finish this week. I then typically time box them across the week, so basically book a meeting with myself to do the task, and that then makes sure that the task gets done. Inevitably, though unpredictable things come up, and if I had something time box like a meeting with myself diary, and something urgent came up that I needed to deal with, then I would simply move that meeting to the following day, and theoretically, by the end of the week, I have then completed all those tasks because they were meetings. And what is quite handy about having a company inventium that is a four day week company, is that I don't work Fridays. I try to take the gift of the fifth as we call it, an inventium on Fridays. But if I have tasks that have just you know, they've just kept getting pushed and pushed. Friday mornings are a really great time to just do an hour or two of deep work, and then I would typically take the rest of the day off my inventium work. I also a little hack that I found that's very useful is typically I separate the tasks that I have to do into deep work tasks, tasks that require focusing and concentration and shallow work tasks that might be call such and such about you know something small shallow work. And what I do is I keep my deep work tasks in notion, which is kind of I guess, like my my storage system for all my notes and anything I'm working on. It's got all the projects that I'm currently working on, and just like it's like my digital filing system, I guess for things that you know are not like a word document or a PowerPoint document. But I use Apple Reminders for my shallow work. And why I've developed that workflow and this wasn't actually a deliberate thing, It's kind of emerged this way because I used to keep Man, I've experimented with so many to do lists. But anyway, why I find that useful is that I am an iPhone user and I will often think of tasks that I have to do when I'm on the go, and I will ask Siri to oh, no, I've just at devated Siri anyway. I will ask Siri to capture that as a reminder, and I will give it a time and a date as to when I need to be reminded of that. And it's really it's never deep work tasks that come to mind when you're on the go. It's always shallow work tasks. And so my reminder's list in Siri is brilliant because I can capture things. I can get things out of my head, which is great so that I don't lose tasks or forget them. And I think get reminded at a time that works for me. So that is my system from Philliper. My biggest performance challenge is context switching. I currently have three roles within my one corporate job. My day is a juggle around the multiple hours of meetings and deadlines for each role, and I'm struggling to give quality time to each It's tapping my energy and motivation and I find myself wasting time jumping from one thing to the next. How can I structure my day to give quality focus to each role and minimize context switching. Great question, Philipart, Well, my advice, and I mean, I feel like the clients that we work with at Inventium, you've just described many of them, and it's really easy, I think when you've got complete autonomy over your work life, as I feel like I've got a lot of autonomy as a business owner, to have this idealistic view of where you know, we can all just have three hours of deep work every morning, but I know that it doesn't work like that in the real world. So my advice is to just start small. Try to protect just one hour per day and have that be deep work, important work, things where you're not just being reactive. And what I recommend doing is the night before or the you know, the late afternoon before, whenever you clock off, is to ask yourself, what is the most important thing that I can get done tomorrow that will get me closer to my goals and whatever. The answer to that is time, Bob in your diary. Eighty percent of people have their best thinking power, best thinking quality in the morning, So maybe do it in the morning. Book a meeting with yourself to do the thing, and also try not to be unrealistic in what you aim to achieve. One of my little hacks for time boxing is that I always overestimate how long something will take to achieve, so that almost always I'll get it done, you know, quicker than I've timeboxed in my diary, and that makes me feel like I am winning. So that also in terms of context switching, I mean, digital distractions are really big problem. So I feel like it's very cliche to say, but try website and app blocking software. Freedom Dot two I think is still the most popular one out there. I love Forest on the mobile. Forest is a great mobile app where you set the timer for how long you want to beocused for, ie, not check your phone, and it grows a digital tree for say, you know, sixty minutes or however long you set. But if you check your phone during that time, the tree dies. And I know it is just a digital tree, but it feels quite devastating to kill any kind of a tree. I also experimented for a little while with a mobile app called one sec. So one is in the number sec as in second, And what it does is it kind of it runs in conjunction, like it links to different apps that you are finding problematic in terms of ones that are hijacking your attention. So let's take Instagram as an example. You can set an automation in your phone to when you go to open up Instagram. What happens is one sec opens instead and it says, Okay, just take a deep breath and are you really sure that you need to check Instagram? And it basically just gets you being more mindful about those automatic behaviors. But you know, there's so many of us do with the digital distractions in our life. We will be back soon and after the break I will be talking about some of my current favorite tech and software tools that I am absolutely obsessed with right now. Okay, the next question is from Nick and it's around psychological safety. And if you listened to my interview with Elan Lee, co founder co creator of Exploding Kittens, he talked about what was essentially psychological safety that he'd built up in his team. And by the way, I'm paraphrasing Nick here, where he as a leader talked about how he role models having his ideas rejected and being totally okay with that. Highly recommend going and listening to that interview with el Amley. I'll link to that in the show notes. But it's a really great example of how he has created very high psych safety with his team because they feel comfortable sharing ideas and having those ideas being rejected, failing, and just quickly moving on to the next idea. So Nick asks, as someone working in an organization that's about to implement the new Victorians psych safety regulations, I'm interested in how we talk about psych safety, create it, and foster it, and how we promote resilience in the workforce so that not everything becomes the situation of individuals feeling psychologically unsafe. So it's a great question. It's such a big question. I mean, I could and should probably do an episode on psych safety. One thing I would recommend is to go back to an episode I did on how I work recently with one of my teammates, Ali Sully and Ali I've worked with Ali for a few years now, and we UNPAW twenty twenty four, where I would say psych safety at invent Him was very mixed. We'd gone from having very high psych safety to having a year where some people felt it and other people didn't. And I have then spent twenty twenty five and certainly the latter part of twenty twenty four working really hard to build that up and you know, building real trust with people. And in that interview that I did with Ali, where she shared her experience and some of the things that I had done as a leader to help create that trust and build that trust, is we had a we had a moment in It was August twenty twenty four, and I hadn't had a lot to do with Ali. I stepped back into the CEO role at Invent Him this year. I was out of it for a lot of last year, and then I'd been out of it five years prior, so I hadn't had a great deal to do with Ali, like as the leader. And what happened is she is accredited in a really excellent well being survey and we were thinking about, oh, do we bring this in to Invent Him. And so she asked me if I wanted to be a guinea pig do the survey and she would debrief me on the results, and it's it's about work and your personal life, and you know, there are like a lot of personal questions in the survey and in the debrief I remember I remember thinking, look, I've got a choice here. I mean I at the time was I Allie's manager. I might have been, I might not have been, actually, but I was still, you know, the founder of the business. And I thought, oh, I could trade carefully, I could you know, hide I guess some of what I've been going through, which was extreme burnout, or I could just be really upfront. And I just thought, you know, stuff it. I will just be really upfront because I'm going to get more out of the process and as someone you know, stepping into the role to debrief me on these results, then you know, I feel like that's really appropriate for me to just come as I am and be very very honest and very open and quite vulnerable as well. And Allie said that was a real turning point for her in kind of really seeing me as a human and building trust. And look in that interview that we did, there are a whole lot of moments about how how trust was cultivated. But I do think about that, and I think I'm really glad that I made that choice, and I think, you know, maybe there's something in that for people that are wondering, you know, how how vulnerable authentic Although I hate the word authentic, how vulnerable to be now I think, I hope I feel like that kind of answers some of the question. Nick. Sorry if that was a SELB standard answer, but anyway, I think you know, I mean, trust is absolutely the you know, a precursor to psych safety. Okay, let's move on to something else. What are your favorite tech tools right now? This comes from anonymous. Okay, let me go through a few that I am absolutely loving. I did mention consensus at the start. I do love consensus. It's one of my favorite AI tools for doing research. Okay, Next, I absolutely love a tool called whisper flow, and that is spelled wispr flow. And again I'll link to all these in the show notes. So what whisper flow is is it is technology where you set up a shortcut on your keyboard and for me, it's the function key. And so when I hit the function key, I can simply talk and I can be in any software application. I can be in word, I can be writing a comment on LinkedIn, I can be in a powerful presentation, I can be in my inbox and I simply press the function key and I start to walking and then as soon as I let it go, it basically does an almost perfect transcription. Although it does use American spelling as to what I have just said, it puts in appropriate punctuation. It is incredibly accurate, and it is incredibly quick as well. There is very minimal lag time between me speaking and the words appearing on the screen. Now why I love this two reasons. Firstly, we can all talk faster than we can type, and so I find this really efficient. And I also like it because, say, with my inbox, I will sometimes use AIS to write the first draft of an email, but more often than not, I find it's quicker if I just talk it out, and so I will typically in my inbox when I'm trying to get through emails quickly is I will use whisper flow all the time to respond to emails super quick. Why I also like it is when I was in the depths of book writing, I was at my computer a lot, and I kept getting like really sort of tight neck and shoulders, a lot of neck and shoulder pain and like from all the typing and mousework I was doing. And I find that doing less typing is doing wonders for my neck and shoulders. So there we go, whisper Flow. I also am a huge fan of Granola. It is my favorite tool for capturing meetings. So it is different to tools like Fireflies and Otter and Fathom and all the inbuilt ones like you know, Zoom's got its own you know, I think zoom iq or something like that for the less of a Zoom user. These days, Teams has obviously got a way to record it in Teams premium for Teams meetings. But Granola is really well, it doesn't actually create a recording, a voice or audio recording, or sorry, an audio or video recording of meetings. But instead what it does is it creates a near perfect transcription just going on in the background, so it's very unobtrusive. But what's really cool is I also like to take notes during meetings, like that is important. It helps me understand what I'm hearing. It helps me note down the really important things because you don't get that from a transcript. And so what Granola then does is while I'm taking notes, it's transcribing the whole meeting in the background, and at the end of the meeting it then pulls that together. So it pulls the transcription and my notes together to create a summary, and then I can ask questions of that summary. And I love it because it means I don't have to focus on typing out everything. But also there's not this obtrusive AI bot that's joined the meeting, and I feel like it's just very off putting when you know when that joins meetings, Like, I'm fine with it, but it's also it's just like weird sometimes. I think, Okay, a couple of other things that I will call out. I for podcast listening, I cannot rate snipped highly enough. S n ip, apostrophe d I think with there an apostrophe maybe not. Anyway, Snipped is awesome for listening to podcasts that are educational like this one. And what you can do I used to find often with podcasts is I would hear something and I would I would have a silly little work throw where I workflow, where I would pause the podcast, I would tell Siri to remind me about something, or I would you know, manually search for something, or I would create a voice note for myself or something like that, and then I'd get back into the podcast. Very annoying, sub optimal listening experience. But with snipped, you can literally create snips of key parts of the podcast that you want to capture, and then it will write in a little AI summary. There are more features to snipped than what I'm describing, but that's the one that I use all the time, and I love it. It has become like the only app that I used to listen to podcasts in I reckon. That's that's probably enough tools I could go on. I'll save some more for the next Ask me anything. Okay, final question for the day is when is your new book coming out? And this comes from Claire. Thank you so much Claire for asking. So my new book, which I think I have occasionally mentioned on this podcast, is coming out in July next year, July twenty twenty six, and it is called The Energy Game. Interestingly, with my last two books, The Health Habit and time Wise, the title that I had put forward to Penguin, my publishers ended up getting changed, so that turned into time Wise in the Health Habit, and they were quite hard titles to land on. But interestingly, the Energy Game was the like that was the title that I came up with when I initially put together the book proposal for Penguin, and it has remained that way, which is kind of cool and has never really happened to me before, so the book. So I submitted the manuscript at the end of October, which was massive. It was like such a massive, all consuming project this year and it felt good to submit it. Then what happens at Penguin, and I think most major publishers, is that there's two rounds of edits. So there's a structural edit where my main editor, the wonderful Ash, will read the manuscript and you know, if things are not flowing or looking out of place, or there's major rewrites, then that then comes back to me to do a lot of work there. Quite thankfully and surprisingly, my last two books, Health Habit and now The Energy Game have not edited a structural edit, which I feel quite smug about. Anyway. The second edit is more of a copy edit. So this is the fine details of the manuscript. It's like did I use the same word twice in a paragraph? Like just real, real details like that. And Clive has been my copy editor for Time Wise, the Health Habit and now The Energy Game. Clive is just like such a genius. I love working with him. And so in a week I will, I think, be getting around of edits to start working on from from Clive and Ash to get done during December then anyway, so how it works with the book, so it'll launch in July. Pre Orders for books these days typically go live three months prior to launch. So what does that mean June, May, April, maybe April. I might be letting you know that it's available for pre order and the cover design is about to be briefed in which I'm very excited about. So that is it for this Ask Me Anything now. If you would like me to answer your question next time, because I'm doing these Ask Me Anything episodes about every three or four months, I will put a link because what I really love is people sending in little voice messages. So I will put a link for you to send in a question that might be on your mind. You can record yourself talking it, or if you want, if you prefer, like everyone has preferred for today's episode, is to simply drop me an email. My email is in the show notes. I hope this has been valuable and I will see you next time. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
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Speaker 2: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the warrangery people part of the Cooler Nation. A big thank you to Martin Im for doing the sound mix.
Speaker 1: Today's show is an Ask Me Anything episode where I answer your awesome listener questions. So today I will be sharing exactly how I use AI to boost my productivity every single day, from supercharging research to streamlining my personal life as well. I'm also going to be diving into how I structure my week to stay focused and avoid context switching. And I also talk about my current favorite tech and software tools, and I'll also be giving an update on my upcoming book, The Energy Game. Well, let's get into it.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
00:00:56
Speaker 1: The first question comes from James and he asks how are you using AI to improve your own productivity? And that is a great question, James, because I use AI every single day, multiple times a day, and have been for the last few years. So one of the big areas that it saves me so much time is in research, and there are a few ways I use it. So firstly, when I am doing research for say a new product at Inventium. So a little while ago we were creating a program around psychological safety and what my process is for research is. Typically when it's academic research, I go to consensus dot app. It is one of my favorite AI tools out there, and it is basically eaten up all the academic research that has been published, so millions and millions of academic papers, and you can then ask questions of the database and it will use AI to give you a summary. It will give you a what it's called consensus is if you ask it a yes or no question, it will give you a consensus of what the research says. Is it mostly yes, is it mostly no? Is it mixed? And I find that very very useful for sourcing articles that I never would have come across and that certainly I have found it and not picked up by doing deep research using tools like perplexity and chat GPT, which I do also use, but yeah, I love consensus so much. I use deep research in chat, GPT, Gemini and perplexity quite often when I'm researching guests for this very podcast. So most of the guests that I have on are people that I am personally curious about that I might have read their book, or used their products or services, or I just love their thinking. So even though I receive a lot of pictures from people to come on the show, probably about ten pitches per day. I would estimate generally the guests that I'm having on and that you're listening to are ones that I have hand selected, so I already know quite a bit about them, but I'm supplementing that with dep research. Then I also use these tools in my personal life. As an example, about a month ago, I came down with a cold and that really sucked because I'd been cold free, flu free, etc. For the whole year, and I thought, oh my god, I'm going to have the first year of my life where I do not get sick. And I was feeling really smug about that, and then I got sick. So what I did is I hopped on consensus and I asked it what supplements reduced the severity and duration of a cold? And it scanned through probably thousands millions of different papers, and it presented me at a very neat table, these are the supplements where there is mild and up to moderate and up to strong evidence that they will help reduce the severity and duration of the cold. And then I asked for what doseiage did the studies say that I need to take? And then I hopped onto Perplexity, and I asked Perplexity to source me what are the best reputable brands in these supplements that are available where I live in Melbourne. And I had a little bit of a shopping list that I was then able to go out down my local shopping strip and get all the supplements and I was over the cold in five days, which is better than the average which is seven days. Now, another thing that I do probably the last thing I'll talk about before I move on to the next question, because very seriously, there's a lot that I could talk about here. But I have very task specific GPTs, which which is probably something that I do differently to the average person or maybe someone that is more sort of well, I guess less into the world of AI. They might be using it a lot, but I think that this is something that I find separates more experienced users with more with people that have mostly been you know, dabbling and perhaps getting substandard results. The kind of people that come to our programs that invent him. So if that is you, I will link to our latest round of AI programs in the show notes. You might want to come join us. But I have very task specific GPTs so GPT so I use chat GPT and I build GPTs. But if you're you know, in the Google ecosystem, these are called gems. If you're in the Microsoft Co Pilots ecosystem, therese are called agents, and Inclaude they're called a pro. So I create very tak specific GPTs. So, for example, I have a GPT that I have created that is specifically for podcast episode title generation. That is how specific I get. I also have I was experimenting with Instagram reels for a while and if you want to see those, you can follow me on Instagram at Amantha. I is how you find me And I don't know that was an interesting experiment, but for that I did a whole lot of research into what's best practice for reels on Instagram and you know, creating compelling cooks and all those sorts of things. And I then created a specific script creator for Instagram reels where I would talk through some content and I would work with it to create a short script. I also have for my newsletters, so you might be a subscriber to one percent Better, where I share tips weekly on how to live a better life and work life and Again, there's a link to sign up to that in the show notes. But I've got a very specific GPT that I built to help me edit content. So my workflow for that is that typically I will, you know, I'll come up with ideas for the newsletter all the time. I've got a page in notion where I capture those ideas, and then I will generally talk out the idea or the story, and then I'll work with that GPT to mold that into you know, around five to seven hundred words that will work and you know, be in my specific tone of writing for the newsletter. So there are a few examples of how I use AI. Okay, the next question is from Caroline. Caroline, Caroline, my biggest performance challenge right now is keeping track of all my work. My work work. What this currently looks like is being very reactive and not getting to the things I want to do or only getting to them in a rash, less than idea way, in a very firm deadline. So how do we keep track of all the work and stop being so reactive? Okay? Why my system is this? So I have a weekly ritual and a daily ritual around thinking about what are my tasks and what are my priorities. So most I don't know this every week, but most weeks, and I'm much more likely to do this when I'm feeling overwhelmed is I will think about what are the big projects that I've got on right now, and what are the most important things that I need to finish this week. I then typically time box them across the week, so basically book a meeting with myself to do the task, and that then makes sure that the task gets done. Inevitably, though unpredictable things come up, and if I had something time box like a meeting with myself diary, and something urgent came up that I needed to deal with, then I would simply move that meeting to the following day, and theoretically, by the end of the week, I have then completed all those tasks because they were meetings. And what is quite handy about having a company inventium that is a four day week company, is that I don't work Fridays. I try to take the gift of the fifth as we call it, an inventium on Fridays. But if I have tasks that have just you know, they've just kept getting pushed and pushed. Friday mornings are a really great time to just do an hour or two of deep work, and then I would typically take the rest of the day off my inventium work. I also a little hack that I found that's very useful is typically I separate the tasks that I have to do into deep work tasks, tasks that require focusing and concentration and shallow work tasks that might be call such and such about you know something small shallow work. And what I do is I keep my deep work tasks in notion, which is kind of I guess, like my my storage system for all my notes and anything I'm working on. It's got all the projects that I'm currently working on, and just like it's like my digital filing system, I guess for things that you know are not like a word document or a PowerPoint document. But I use Apple Reminders for my shallow work. And why I've developed that workflow and this wasn't actually a deliberate thing, It's kind of emerged this way because I used to keep Man, I've experimented with so many to do lists. But anyway, why I find that useful is that I am an iPhone user and I will often think of tasks that I have to do when I'm on the go, and I will ask Siri to oh, no, I've just at devated Siri anyway. I will ask Siri to capture that as a reminder, and I will give it a time and a date as to when I need to be reminded of that. And it's really it's never deep work tasks that come to mind when you're on the go. It's always shallow work tasks. And so my reminder's list in Siri is brilliant because I can capture things. I can get things out of my head, which is great so that I don't lose tasks or forget them. And I think get reminded at a time that works for me. So that is my system from Philliper. My biggest performance challenge is context switching. I currently have three roles within my one corporate job. My day is a juggle around the multiple hours of meetings and deadlines for each role, and I'm struggling to give quality time to each It's tapping my energy and motivation and I find myself wasting time jumping from one thing to the next. How can I structure my day to give quality focus to each role and minimize context switching. Great question, Philipart, Well, my advice, and I mean, I feel like the clients that we work with at Inventium, you've just described many of them, and it's really easy, I think when you've got complete autonomy over your work life, as I feel like I've got a lot of autonomy as a business owner, to have this idealistic view of where you know, we can all just have three hours of deep work every morning, but I know that it doesn't work like that in the real world. So my advice is to just start small. Try to protect just one hour per day and have that be deep work, important work, things where you're not just being reactive. And what I recommend doing is the night before or the you know, the late afternoon before, whenever you clock off, is to ask yourself, what is the most important thing that I can get done tomorrow that will get me closer to my goals and whatever. The answer to that is time, Bob in your diary. Eighty percent of people have their best thinking power, best thinking quality in the morning, So maybe do it in the morning. Book a meeting with yourself to do the thing, and also try not to be unrealistic in what you aim to achieve. One of my little hacks for time boxing is that I always overestimate how long something will take to achieve, so that almost always I'll get it done, you know, quicker than I've timeboxed in my diary, and that makes me feel like I am winning. So that also in terms of context switching, I mean, digital distractions are really big problem. So I feel like it's very cliche to say, but try website and app blocking software. Freedom Dot two I think is still the most popular one out there. I love Forest on the mobile. Forest is a great mobile app where you set the timer for how long you want to beocused for, ie, not check your phone, and it grows a digital tree for say, you know, sixty minutes or however long you set. But if you check your phone during that time, the tree dies. And I know it is just a digital tree, but it feels quite devastating to kill any kind of a tree. I also experimented for a little while with a mobile app called one sec. So one is in the number sec as in second, And what it does is it kind of it runs in conjunction, like it links to different apps that you are finding problematic in terms of ones that are hijacking your attention. So let's take Instagram as an example. You can set an automation in your phone to when you go to open up Instagram. What happens is one sec opens instead and it says, Okay, just take a deep breath and are you really sure that you need to check Instagram? And it basically just gets you being more mindful about those automatic behaviors. But you know, there's so many of us do with the digital distractions in our life. We will be back soon and after the break I will be talking about some of my current favorite tech and software tools that I am absolutely obsessed with right now. Okay, the next question is from Nick and it's around psychological safety. And if you listened to my interview with Elan Lee, co founder co creator of Exploding Kittens, he talked about what was essentially psychological safety that he'd built up in his team. And by the way, I'm paraphrasing Nick here, where he as a leader talked about how he role models having his ideas rejected and being totally okay with that. Highly recommend going and listening to that interview with el Amley. I'll link to that in the show notes. But it's a really great example of how he has created very high psych safety with his team because they feel comfortable sharing ideas and having those ideas being rejected, failing, and just quickly moving on to the next idea. So Nick asks, as someone working in an organization that's about to implement the new Victorians psych safety regulations, I'm interested in how we talk about psych safety, create it, and foster it, and how we promote resilience in the workforce so that not everything becomes the situation of individuals feeling psychologically unsafe. So it's a great question. It's such a big question. I mean, I could and should probably do an episode on psych safety. One thing I would recommend is to go back to an episode I did on how I work recently with one of my teammates, Ali Sully and Ali I've worked with Ali for a few years now, and we UNPAW twenty twenty four, where I would say psych safety at invent Him was very mixed. We'd gone from having very high psych safety to having a year where some people felt it and other people didn't. And I have then spent twenty twenty five and certainly the latter part of twenty twenty four working really hard to build that up and you know, building real trust with people. And in that interview that I did with Ali, where she shared her experience and some of the things that I had done as a leader to help create that trust and build that trust, is we had a we had a moment in It was August twenty twenty four, and I hadn't had a lot to do with Ali. I stepped back into the CEO role at Invent Him this year. I was out of it for a lot of last year, and then I'd been out of it five years prior, so I hadn't had a great deal to do with Ali, like as the leader. And what happened is she is accredited in a really excellent well being survey and we were thinking about, oh, do we bring this in to Invent Him. And so she asked me if I wanted to be a guinea pig do the survey and she would debrief me on the results, and it's it's about work and your personal life, and you know, there are like a lot of personal questions in the survey and in the debrief I remember I remember thinking, look, I've got a choice here. I mean I at the time was I Allie's manager. I might have been, I might not have been, actually, but I was still, you know, the founder of the business. And I thought, oh, I could trade carefully, I could you know, hide I guess some of what I've been going through, which was extreme burnout, or I could just be really upfront. And I just thought, you know, stuff it. I will just be really upfront because I'm going to get more out of the process and as someone you know, stepping into the role to debrief me on these results, then you know, I feel like that's really appropriate for me to just come as I am and be very very honest and very open and quite vulnerable as well. And Allie said that was a real turning point for her in kind of really seeing me as a human and building trust. And look in that interview that we did, there are a whole lot of moments about how how trust was cultivated. But I do think about that, and I think I'm really glad that I made that choice, and I think, you know, maybe there's something in that for people that are wondering, you know, how how vulnerable authentic Although I hate the word authentic, how vulnerable to be now I think, I hope I feel like that kind of answers some of the question. Nick. Sorry if that was a SELB standard answer, but anyway, I think you know, I mean, trust is absolutely the you know, a precursor to psych safety. Okay, let's move on to something else. What are your favorite tech tools right now? This comes from anonymous. Okay, let me go through a few that I am absolutely loving. I did mention consensus at the start. I do love consensus. It's one of my favorite AI tools for doing research. Okay, Next, I absolutely love a tool called whisper flow, and that is spelled wispr flow. And again I'll link to all these in the show notes. So what whisper flow is is it is technology where you set up a shortcut on your keyboard and for me, it's the function key. And so when I hit the function key, I can simply talk and I can be in any software application. I can be in word, I can be writing a comment on LinkedIn, I can be in a powerful presentation, I can be in my inbox and I simply press the function key and I start to walking and then as soon as I let it go, it basically does an almost perfect transcription. Although it does use American spelling as to what I have just said, it puts in appropriate punctuation. It is incredibly accurate, and it is incredibly quick as well. There is very minimal lag time between me speaking and the words appearing on the screen. Now why I love this two reasons. Firstly, we can all talk faster than we can type, and so I find this really efficient. And I also like it because, say, with my inbox, I will sometimes use AIS to write the first draft of an email, but more often than not, I find it's quicker if I just talk it out, and so I will typically in my inbox when I'm trying to get through emails quickly is I will use whisper flow all the time to respond to emails super quick. Why I also like it is when I was in the depths of book writing, I was at my computer a lot, and I kept getting like really sort of tight neck and shoulders, a lot of neck and shoulder pain and like from all the typing and mousework I was doing. And I find that doing less typing is doing wonders for my neck and shoulders. So there we go, whisper Flow. I also am a huge fan of Granola. It is my favorite tool for capturing meetings. So it is different to tools like Fireflies and Otter and Fathom and all the inbuilt ones like you know, Zoom's got its own you know, I think zoom iq or something like that for the less of a Zoom user. These days, Teams has obviously got a way to record it in Teams premium for Teams meetings. But Granola is really well, it doesn't actually create a recording, a voice or audio recording, or sorry, an audio or video recording of meetings. But instead what it does is it creates a near perfect transcription just going on in the background, so it's very unobtrusive. But what's really cool is I also like to take notes during meetings, like that is important. It helps me understand what I'm hearing. It helps me note down the really important things because you don't get that from a transcript. And so what Granola then does is while I'm taking notes, it's transcribing the whole meeting in the background, and at the end of the meeting it then pulls that together. So it pulls the transcription and my notes together to create a summary, and then I can ask questions of that summary. And I love it because it means I don't have to focus on typing out everything. But also there's not this obtrusive AI bot that's joined the meeting, and I feel like it's just very off putting when you know when that joins meetings, Like, I'm fine with it, but it's also it's just like weird sometimes. I think, Okay, a couple of other things that I will call out. I for podcast listening, I cannot rate snipped highly enough. S n ip, apostrophe d I think with there an apostrophe maybe not. Anyway, Snipped is awesome for listening to podcasts that are educational like this one. And what you can do I used to find often with podcasts is I would hear something and I would I would have a silly little work throw where I workflow, where I would pause the podcast, I would tell Siri to remind me about something, or I would you know, manually search for something, or I would create a voice note for myself or something like that, and then I'd get back into the podcast. Very annoying, sub optimal listening experience. But with snipped, you can literally create snips of key parts of the podcast that you want to capture, and then it will write in a little AI summary. There are more features to snipped than what I'm describing, but that's the one that I use all the time, and I love it. It has become like the only app that I used to listen to podcasts in I reckon. That's that's probably enough tools I could go on. I'll save some more for the next Ask me anything. Okay, final question for the day is when is your new book coming out? And this comes from Claire. Thank you so much Claire for asking. So my new book, which I think I have occasionally mentioned on this podcast, is coming out in July next year, July twenty twenty six, and it is called The Energy Game. Interestingly, with my last two books, The Health Habit and time Wise, the title that I had put forward to Penguin, my publishers ended up getting changed, so that turned into time Wise in the Health Habit, and they were quite hard titles to land on. But interestingly, the Energy Game was the like that was the title that I came up with when I initially put together the book proposal for Penguin, and it has remained that way, which is kind of cool and has never really happened to me before, so the book. So I submitted the manuscript at the end of October, which was massive. It was like such a massive, all consuming project this year and it felt good to submit it. Then what happens at Penguin, and I think most major publishers, is that there's two rounds of edits. So there's a structural edit where my main editor, the wonderful Ash, will read the manuscript and you know, if things are not flowing or looking out of place, or there's major rewrites, then that then comes back to me to do a lot of work there. Quite thankfully and surprisingly, my last two books, Health Habit and now The Energy Game have not edited a structural edit, which I feel quite smug about. Anyway. The second edit is more of a copy edit. So this is the fine details of the manuscript. It's like did I use the same word twice in a paragraph? Like just real, real details like that. And Clive has been my copy editor for Time Wise, the Health Habit and now The Energy Game. Clive is just like such a genius. I love working with him. And so in a week I will, I think, be getting around of edits to start working on from from Clive and Ash to get done during December then anyway, so how it works with the book, so it'll launch in July. Pre Orders for books these days typically go live three months prior to launch. So what does that mean June, May, April, maybe April. I might be letting you know that it's available for pre order and the cover design is about to be briefed in which I'm very excited about. So that is it for this Ask Me Anything now. If you would like me to answer your question next time, because I'm doing these Ask Me Anything episodes about every three or four months, I will put a link because what I really love is people sending in little voice messages. So I will put a link for you to send in a question that might be on your mind. You can record yourself talking it, or if you want, if you prefer, like everyone has preferred for today's episode, is to simply drop me an email. My email is in the show notes. I hope this has been valuable and I will see you next time. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
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Speaker 2: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the warrangery people part of the Cooler Nation. A big thank you to Martin Im for doing the sound mix.
