How I Work

**REPLAY** What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them.  Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same th...

Who keeps moving my buttons? You know the one. You finally learn where everything lives, and overnight the menu has been rearranged, the feature has a new name, and the thing you spent months perfecting is on a list of things being retired.  In this How I AI episode, Neo and I make sense of the latest shake-up: what is replacing GPTs and Gems, when the lights go out on each platform, and how...

Twenty minutes doesn't sound like much. Multiply it by ten sales calls a week and it adds up to more than three hours spent on a task that someone, or something, else could be doing.  Now think about how many tasks like that are hiding in your own week, repeated so often that you no longer notice them.  In this Work Edit, I sit down with Stephen, an organisational transformation advisor...

You ask AI for ideas and get a tidy list of ten, each one praised as being brilliant. The tempting move is to grab the first one that looks decent and get on with your day. The catch is that you've handed over the thinking, and what comes back tends to look a lot like what everyone else is getting.  AI can be a far better brainstorming partner when it sharpens your thinking instead of replaci...

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 resti...

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...

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 ti...

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 promp...

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 prob...

You've put in the work on your prompts. You know how to give AI the right context, set the right tone, ask the right questions. But then, mid-conversation, something shifts. The AI starts making things up, forgetting what you told it five minutes ago, contradicting itself.  In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack what is actually happening when AI gets unreliable mid-conversation, includin...

There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from working hard, but from never quite feeling like you've worked on the right things. You finish a full day, maybe a long one, and yet the projects that actually matter haven't moved. The inbox is cleaner, the meetings are done, but the needle hasn't shifted.  Cyril Peupion has spent two decades coaching executives on exactly this problem...

When Dr Catriona Wallace was offered a million dollars to take out her nose ring, she didn’t hesitate. Her response wasn’t defiance - it was clarity.  In this Quick Win, Catriona shares how she dealt with the sexism and double standards she faced as a tech CEO, from being told to “brush her hair” to being offered a million dollars to look more like the kind of leader i...

You give your team something rare. A four-day week. Flexible hours. Real breathing room. And for a while, it works beautifully. Then, gradually, the gratitude fades. The expectation creeps in. And suddenly, the gift feels like a given.  This is one of the more uncomfortable paradoxes of building a genuinely good workplace: the better the culture you create, the faster it b...

Trust doesn’t rebuild with one big apology. It grows back quietly - through small, consistent moments that prove you mean what you say.  In this Quick Win episode, my teammate Aly Solly and I share how we rebuilt trust after one of Inventium’s toughest years. Together, we discovered that trust isn’t restored overnight - it’s rebuilt in small, deliberate ways that show...

Every productivity guru will tell you the same thing: set realistic goals, or you're setting yourself up to fail. Jia Jiang did the opposite. He told the internet he'd sell 10,000 copies of his new book in 100 days, sold about 3,000, and is now going around calling it one of the best things he's ever done.  He's not being delusional about it either. He'll tell you straight up that part of him...

AI might be saving you time, but if you don’t know what to do with that time, it’s not worth much. In this Quick Win, I’m joined by Dom Price, who spent 12 years as the Work Futurist at Atlassian. Dom shares a powerful reminder: saving time with AI is meaningless unless you know how to reinvest that time intentionally. After watching o...

Hiring feels like the obvious next move when a business starts doing well. More people, more capacity, more revenue. The logic is so clean it barely needs questioning.  But the businesses with the smallest teams are sometimes the ones making the most money.  This episode is part of The Work Edit, a format where I sit down with someone facing a real professional challenge and we...

How much of your week goes into fixing what AI just handed you? Not writing from scratch, just cleaning up, correcting, and nudging a draft that looked fine for about ten seconds before you actually needed it to work.  That endless back and forth has a name. We call it slop fixing, and there is research suggesting it is quietly eating close to a full day of our working week.  I...

Every manager and every parent has met the same wall. Someone who won't engage, won't budge, won't do the thing, no matter how hard you push or how much you offer.  Dr Justin Coulson has spent two decades inside the research explaining why pushing and bribing rarely work, and what actually does.  Justin is a psychologist, bestselling auth...

There is a quiet guilt a lot of people carry every time they open ChatGPT. Somewhere between the headlines about data centres and the vague sense that AI is somehow worse for the planet than everything else we do without a second thought, it becomes easier to just feel bad than to actually work out whether that guilt is warranted.  Nobody hands you the compa...

There's a particular kind of tightness that creeps in when the world feels unpredictable. We tidy the to-do list, tighten the routine, optimise one more thing, all in an attempt to feel a bit more in control.  Oliver Burkeman has a word for this: clenching. And he reckons it's squeezing the life out of us, even when it looks a lot like productivity...

Before you paste that customer list, that blood test result or that contract into your favourite AI tool, it's worth pausing for a second. Whatever you hand over doesn't just disappear after you get your answer. It sits somewhere, and depending on the tool and the settings, it might be doing more than just answering your question.  Most people have never actually...

There is a version of leadership that looks effortless from the outside. The one where the leader always has the answers, always holds the vision, always appears composed. And then there is the version that happens in private, at 5:00 AM, when your mind is rehearsing every possible failure and no one can see it.  What surprises most people is how often those two versions belong to t...

The AI world has has done a spectacularly bad job of naming things. Agents, GPTs, gems, notebooks, projects, skills - you'll find a completely different word for what is essentially the same kind of tool. Agents in one place, GPTs in another, gems somewhere else. Different names, similar ideas - and no handbook to tell you that.  But the tools themselves are not...

**  Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm)  here  and order The Energy Game book  here .**   What if the stories you're most afraid to tell are the ones people most need to hear?  Christian O'Connell has spent 28 years pulling stories out of strangers on live radio. He's had two number one breakfast shows on opposi...