November 26, 2025 • 29 mins
**Record a question for Amantha’s next Ask Me Anything here: https://www.speakpipe.com/howiwork **
I talk about AI a lot - but if you’ve ever wondered how I actually use it in my own work, not just to experiment but to genuinely save time and think better, this episode is for you.
In this Ask Me Anything episode I’m sharing the exact ways I use AI to research faster, write smarter, and stay organised - along with the simple rituals and tech tools that help me cut through distraction and get things done with more focus and flow - plus a sneak peek into my next book, The Energy Game, coming in July 2026.
In this episode, I share:
- How I use AI every day for research, writing, and personal decisions
- My favourite AI tools - and how each one helps me save time
- Weekly and daily rituals for managing tasks and priorities
- How to minimise context switching when juggling multiple roles
- Building psychological safety through trust and vulnerability
- My favourite tech tools for meetings, focus, and idea capture
- An update on my upcoming book The Energy Game
Amantha recommends:
These are the AI tools I rely on every week - from research to writing and everything in between.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha Imber.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
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,
(01:18):
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
(01:40):
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
(02:00):
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
(02:22):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:53):
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
(04:13):
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
(04:36):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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,
(06:04):
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
(06:26):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:08):
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,
(07:29):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:03):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:46):
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,
(11:06):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:16):
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
(12:37):
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.
(12:57):
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
(13:18):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:11):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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.
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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.
(17:23):
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.
(17:44):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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.
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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,
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:56):
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.
(21:20):
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,
(21:40):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:25):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:10):
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,
(23:32):
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,
(23:57):
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.
(24:17):
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
(24:37):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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,
(26:05):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:49):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:32):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
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.
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
(00:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha Imber.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
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,
(01:18):
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
(01:40):
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
(02:00):
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
(02:22):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:53):
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
(04:13):
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
(04:36):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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,
(06:04):
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
(06:26):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:08):
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,
(07:29):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:03):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:46):
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,
(11:06):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:16):
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
(12:37):
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.
(12:57):
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
(13:18):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:11):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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.
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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.
(17:23):
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.
(17:44):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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.
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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,
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:56):
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.
(21:20):
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,
(21:40):
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
(22:01):
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
(22:25):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:10):
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,
(23:32):
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,
(23:57):
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.
(24:17):
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
(24:37):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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,
(26:05):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:49):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:32):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
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.
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