How I Work

One surgeon takes his boat out onto a lake, screams until he can't scream anymore, and then cries. It is how he recovers from a job where patients die and he can't fall apart in front of his team.  That is what emotional rest can look like for one person, and it is only one of seven types of rest that most of us have never thought to separate. Which raises this possibility: you might be resting effectively in one area while a completely different part of you runs on empty.  In this episode, I sit down with Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, the doctor behind the seven types of rest framework and author of Sacred Rest, to unpack what each type of rest actually is and how to tell which one you are missing. I share how I scored on her Rest Quiz, and we test the theory against my own life, from a joyful community singing night to nature walks with a friend.  If you keep waking up tired after a decent night's sleep, this conversation will help you work out what is really missing.  Saundra and I discuss:  The three-question morning energy check-in Saundra uses herself, and how some of her clients set an AI up to ask it for them  The seven types of rest  Why mental and emotional rest are the two areas where people score highest for depletion, and the gender pattern Saundra sees  The signs of a mental rest deficit  How suppressing emotions at work drains your energy, and what an emotional rest deficit can look like in everyday life  How one activity can restore several types of rest at once, from yoga to a phone-free dinner table  Saundra's annual rest retreat weekend with girlfriends  How mirror neurons help explain why some people leave you drained  Two simple sensory rest snacks you can do today, including one that involves your phone settings  Key quotes  "We don't recognize how much energy it takes to suppress emotions."  "Creative rest at the very heart of it is the rest that helps to awaken awe and wonder inside of us."  Connect with Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith on Instagram, LinkedIn and her website, take her rest quiz at restquiz.com, and check out her book Sacred Rest.    More from How I Work  If managing your energy and burnout is something you want to go deeper on, I have put together a Spotify playlist of my favourite How I Work episodes on exactly that. Listen to the playlist here.  And if you enjoyed this episode, a great companion listen is my conversation with Shelley Johnson, where we go deep into the science-backed strategies from my book The Energy Game. We cover how to boost your energy in under five minutes, what actually counts as rest versus fake rest, and the protect strategies that stop your energy leaking in the first place. Listen to the episode here.    My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M  Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)  Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)  If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/  Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.  Get in touch at [email protected]  Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of us have a favourite chat thread we keep coming back to, adding a bit more context every time we open it. It feels efficient, like you're building up a work buddy who really knows your stuff. But every extra message quietly chips away at how reliable that thread becomes, and by the time you notice, it's surprisingly hard to pull it back.  Knowing when to walk away from a chat, and how to take your best thinking with you, is one of the most useful AI habits you can build.  In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack why long chat threads lose their way and how to move your work into a fresh chat without leaving the good stuff behind.  What you'll learn:  The point in a chat thread where AI becomes more likely to hallucinate  How to think about the lifespan of a chat thread  The simple way to carry your work into a new chat, and where it falls short  What a strong handoff brief includes, and why its opening lines matter  The signs it's time to start fresh, even before AI goes off track  Practical AI tools for productivity and focus  Real-world AI workflows used by high performers  How to use AI at work without burning out  Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load  Download Neo's handoff skill here: https://amantha-imber.kit.com/e53f183014  Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.      How I AI with Dr Amantha Imber and Neo Aplin explores how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm.  Want more practical ways to put AI to work? You can now follow How I AI separately on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.     My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M   Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)   Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)   If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/   Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.   Get in touch at [email protected]   Credits:   Host: Amantha Imber   Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've read the books. You've locked the phone in a drawer. You've set a hard cut-off at 8 PM. And none of it has lasted more than two weeks.  That's exactly where Shaun found himself. By day he's a senior corporate strategy leader at Bupa, and by night he's the volunteer operations manager for a junior footy club responsible for 450 kids across eight teams. The systems he runs at work are tight. The systems he runs at home? Nowhere to be seen.  In this Work Edit, I sit down with Shaun to figure out why the productivity habits that protect him in his corporate role have never made it home, and what it would actually take to change that. We get into AI knowledge agents, ghost mode, setting expectations as an act of generosity, and a specific gratitude practice I think is worth trying even if you find most of them a bit naff.  If you've ever been brilliant at boundary-setting for everyone else and terrible at it for yourself, this one's for you.  Shaun and I discuss:  Why Shaun's corporate productivity systems work flawlessly at Bupa but have never crossed over into his volunteer role or home life  The AI knowledge agent idea: how building a self-serve FAQ for 450 families could cut the stream of evening messages and remove Shaun as the constant bottleneck  Staying in your lane: why context switching between work mode and parent mode leaves you doing neither well, and the simple question that helps you catch yourself doing it  Ghost mode: the difference between locking your phone away and actually choosing to be fully present, and why that reframe matters  Setting expectations as an act of generosity: how a simple autoresponder or comms window can relieve the guilt of not responding instantly, without making you seem rigid  Three good things: a specific gratitude practice, grounded in research, that quiets a busy work brain at night, and why doing it with your kids makes it even more powerful    More from How I Work  If you related to Shaun's struggle with an always-on role that never quite lets you clock off, I think you'll love my conversation with Katie. She's 18 months into a consulting portfolio career, and saying no is a muscle she's still building. Requests were multiplying faster than she could field them, which is honestly just the same problem wearing a different outfit.  Listen to Katie's episode here.    My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M  Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)  Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)  If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/  Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.  Get in touch at [email protected]  Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most people treat AI like a vending machine: you show up, you ask, you wait. But what if there's another way to use it, one where the work gets done before you've even thought to ask for it.  In this How I AI episode, Neo and I explore scheduled prompts: what they are, why they're worth setting up, and how to actually write one that works.  What you'll learn:  What a scheduled prompt is and how it differs from a regular AI conversation  When it makes sense to run a prompt in the background rather than in real time  The kinds of recurring tasks that are well suited to scheduling  How to know when a scheduled prompt has actually run  Neo's trick for writing a prompt worth scheduling again and again  Practical AI tools for productivity and focus  Real-world AI workflows used by high performers  How to use AI at work without burning out  Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load  Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.    How I AI with Dr Amantha Imber and Neo Aplin explores how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. Want more practical ways to put AI to work? You can now follow How I AI separately on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.   My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M  Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)  Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)  If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/  Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.  Get in touch at [email protected]  Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hiring someone is one of the highest-stakes decisions a founder makes. Get it wrong and you can lose time, money, and momentum. And after 16 years of building Showpo from her parents' garage into a nine-figure business, Jane Lu is the first to admit they still do not always get it right.  But across all those hires, she has landed on one single biggest red flag she screens for, and it is probably not what you would expect.  In this episode, I sit down with Jane Lu, founder of Showpo, to talk about what that red flag is, how she structures interviews to surface it, why she has built her whole leadership philosophy around being a lazy CEO, and the distinction between dopamine tasks and dividend tasks that explains why so many of us feel busy but stuck.  Jane and I discuss:  How Jane treats her calendar as her external brain, scheduling everything from supplements to podcast links to make good habits frictionless  The difference between dopamine tasks (inbox zero, Slack notifications) and dividend tasks (the work that compounds but offers no immediate reward) and how to stop letting the former crowd out the latter  Jane's content creation workflow and how she gradually built a small team of offshore editors to take the process off her plate  What 16 years of hiring has taught her about misaligned values and ego as the biggest red flags to screen for, and the specific interview questions she uses to uncover them  The accidental lesson in delegation that came from leaving her business to go to a music festival, and how it revealed what systems and a trusted team can do when the founder steps back  The case for being a lazy CEO: building the right culture, setting up strong systems, recruiting well, and then genuinely getting out of the way  Key quotes  "Being lazy is setting up the right systems and processes and really trusting your team."  "The biggest red flag I personally look for when it comes to the wrong people is ego."  Connect with Jane Lu on Instagram, LinkedIn and her website.  More from How I Work  Check out last week's conversation with Cyril Peupion, a great companion listen for anyone wanting a framework for protecting time for the work that actually matters. Listen here.  And if you want to get clearer on what deserves your time and get better at saying no to the rest, we have pulled together a Spotify playlist of our favourite How I Work episodes on exactly that. Find it here.    My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M  Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)  Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)  If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/  Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.  Get in touch at [email protected]  Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.