How I Work

How much is a million-dollar investment worth?  If that feels like a trick question, maybe you haven’t come across ‘bad money’ the way Dr Catriona Wallace has. When she was the CEO of Flamingo AI, Catriona received a million-dollar investment offer, but there was a catch: the investors would only hand over the cash if Cat promised to stop wearing a nose ring in public.  She said no.  Why? Why woul...

**BEST OF 2022** David Siegel’s in his third CEO role, and if all his years of experience as a leader have taught him anything, it’s that most people take too long to make a decision. The clearest example: company strategy. When David joined Meetup, he drafted the new company strategy as quickly as possible. At first, that sounds like a pretty irresponsible treatment of such a huge part of the bus...

A good presentation can almost feel like alchemy; it requires deep and fascinating subject matter, delivered with confidence and style, and it needs to impart some kind of message. That’s a lot of boxes to check! But therein lies the key: parenting expert Dr Justin Coulson sees just how much audiences need to get out of a keynote, so he puts just as much in.  Justin breaks down how evidence, stori...

**BEST OF 2022** There’s a moment in the 2013 comedy movie We’re the Millers that points to how pervasive - and misguided - the “no regrets” life motto has become. A character proudly displays a tattoo that reads, “no rAgrets”, and even more proudly proclaims that he really doesn’t have any regrets. Not even one letter.  Bestselling author Dan Pink highlights this scene as a great metaphor for soc...

How would you feel if we were in the middle of a conversation and I suddenly started talking to someone else from across the room?  Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing whenever we let our phones or laptops drag us down the multi-tasking rabbit hole.  Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss are hyper-vigilant of their device usage. This makes sense for two people who are devoted to produ...

**BEST OF 2022** If your job title is “Executive Productivity Advisor for Google,” you probably need a pretty refined definition of productivity, right? And Laura Mae Martin certainly does. But she says it’s equally important that every individual has their own, unique definition of productivity. It’s all too easy to fall into “busy language”, she says. Back-to-back meetings and a three-page to-do...

Whatever happened to that huge, game-changing project you started working on last year? Or the idea you had a couple of months ago?  If you’ve got an ever-lengthening list of unfinished and abandoned pursuits, it’s probably because you’re not prioritising the correct ‘time horizons’, as Atlassian’s Dom Price calls them. The first horizon is the short-term: answering emails, making sales calls, del...

Melissa Doyle is a picture of professionalism. She’s adamant that even when she had young children, and felt like she hadn’t slept for weeks on end, she never had good cause to complain about her 4am call times as a news presenter. After all, she’d dreamed of being on the news since she was a little girl, and now it was a reality. Plus, she was working with a fiercely focused purpose. Melissa shar...

Picture this: you’ve just finished an incredibly important presentation. It was dense with crucial information… And you absolutely nailed it.  At the end, one of your colleagues wants to give you some feedback. You thrive on constructive criticism, and welcome the chance to learn. But all he says is: your outfit is too distracting. Your dress is so sparkly it made it difficult to concentrate.  How...

What does success really mean? And more importantly, what does it mean to you?  These are big questions, questions that author and executive coach Nigel Marsh says we can’t ignore. In fact, he believes that we can’t reliably achieve anything meaningful if we don’t first answer these questions.  Nigel’s mantra is “clarity, alignment, momentum”, and he seeks each in that order. Without clarity and a...

When it comes to productivity, you are your own worst enemy. Nobody knows how to trick you into procrastinating or cutting corners quite like you do. You know all of your own strengths, weaknesses and thought patterns.  But if you know yourself better than anyone else does, that also means you are your own best resource for productivity tools, hacks, tips and tactics.  Writer Eric Barker knows how...

Not long ago, Australian theatre star Elise McCann was struggling. Like everyone else in the entertainment industry, her work ground to a screeching halt early in the pandemic, and she turned to mindfulness and meditation for help. But unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy.  Elise’s good friend and fellow actor Lucy Durack was struggling, too. In fact, she felt like she couldn’t even get meditation r...

Richard Wiseman’s love of magic has improved his work as a psychologist in some unexpected ways. Of course, it’s helpful when he’s conducting experiments or research into the psychology of magic and illusions; but the lessons magic teaches about performance and holding an audience’s attention have been just as valuable.  For one thing, Richard never gives away “the answer” too early. If you open y...

Creation of any kind is so complex - even when we do it ourselves, we sometimes wonder how it even happened. So if creation is so tricky, where do we even start with re -creation?  For comedy legend Wil Anderson, the re-creation process is almost the more important one. After all, he only needs to write a show from scratch once, but he needs to recreate that show every single time he steps onto st...

What’s the difference between goals and dreams? For O2E Brands founder and CEO Brian Scudamore, there isn’t one.  After entering the hyper-competitive world of entrepreneurship, Brian was disillusioned - he couldn’t help but compare himself to his new peers, who had bigger, more successful businesses. Struggling to stay motivated or excited about the future, Brian turned to his imagination. Debati...

Is your life too complicated? Sure, work’s always a bit hectic and keeping family life running smoothly is as challenging as ever - but have you noticed that even the ‘good’ stuff can get a bit overwhelming sometimes?  Was picking a movie to watch after work on a Friday night always this difficult? Was your closet always so stuffed with items you can’t even remember buying?  This is part of what L...

Want to improve the quality of your thinking? Well, then you need to improve the quality of your writing… Need proof? Look no further than Frances Frei, an author, TED speaker and Professor of Technology and Informations Management at Harvard Business School. Clearly an excellent thinker - but it doesn’t happen by accident. Frances believes writing is the key to unlocking and improving our thinkin...

Sarah Wilson’s work gives new meaning to the word ‘holistic’. She’s widely known for founding the I Quit Sugar movement, but is also an author, podcaster, keynote speaker, philanthropist and climate change advisor. And somehow - every job’s connected.  One of the threads linking everything Sarah does is anxiety. Whether it’s nixing sugar from her diet to promote better mental health, or advocating...

Do you need to reset?  Whether you’re starting at a new company, starting a new position, or just starting a new season in your work-life, an effective reset is the key to hitting the ground running at a new, more efficient pace.  For the execs at Google, this is absolutely critical - that’s why they listen to Laura Mae Martin, Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor. Step one: don’t just do what...

You’ve got big ideas… Big dreams for your company… Maybe even for the world! But how do you keep those big dreams and ideas alive on a day-to-day basis?  Daniel Flynn knows a thing or two about keeping big ideas alive. He founded thankyou with hopes of ending poverty, and they’re still making moves on this front, more than a decade on. And Daniel says the key is to make time and space for big-pict...

What do your Mondays look like? Or more importantly, what do they feel like?  You might be demolishing your to-do list and running meeting after meeting, but do you feel energised? Do you feel enthusiastic about what you’re doing?  If you don’t, it probably doesn’t matter how many items get ticked off your list, because you’re going to run out of steam before you get the meaningful work done. So,...

You think you’ve got a procrastination problem? TIm Urban, the man behind the sensationally popular blog Wait But Why reckons he might have you covered. He’s so well-acquainted with procrastination, in fact, that he gave a TED talk on the topic… And finalised it at the last minute.  However, for a self-proclaimed master procrastinator, Tim sure gets a lot done. And thankfully, among the many, many...

We all have that ONE friend - that friend who somehow manages to get into the gym every morning, crush her workday, hang out with her family, and read the kinds of books you’ve had on your “to-read” list for years. All without breaking a sweat. How do they do it?  Well, that’s exactly the question author, economist and Wharton professor Katy Milkman wants you to ask. Research shows that when we ta...

Imagine trying to hold the attention of a child for a full, uninterrupted hour. Now imagine trying to hold the attention of a whole theatre full of them! If it seems impossible, comedy duo Richard Higgins and Matt Kelly (AKA The Listies) have proven the opposite. And they’ve managed to do it while keeping adults equally entertained.  Rich and Matt share their process for bringing a full show to li...

How do you talk about big issues, on the internet, without getting cancelled? In our modern information age, most of our most heated and important debates happen online, whether it’s through blogs, comment sections, YouTube videos or podcasts.  While this unprecedented level of access to almost anyone’s opinions might’ve sounded like a dream to the tech-heads of yesteryear… Well, you probably know...