How I Work

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 business… but David...

A productivity tip that’s hard to swallow for people who like productivity tips: nothing except doing the work will get the work done. You can have the cleanest calendar, the emptiest inbox and the tightest morning routine, but if you’re not sitting down and putting in the work, your “hacks” serve as little more than decoration.  Unless those tips and tricks steer you towards the right kind of dee...

**BEST OF** It’s 9:30, and you’ve got just under an hour before your next Zoom meeting. There’s already just a bit too much caffeine buzzing around your brain, and your eyes are half-crossed from the last video call. So how do you recharge and show up refreshed for that next one?  If you’re Evernote and mmhmm co-founder Phil Libin, you swim laps. Thanks to the “distributed” nature of mmhmm’s workf...

**BEST OF** You need to be in the office at nine, and if you want to be performing at your best, you’ll need to get in a quick workout and a nutritious breakfast. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for trying to pull an outfit together, so you’ll also need to sort that out the night before.  Oh, and you need to make sure your kids have eaten a healthy breakfast, put their school uniforms on, brushed...

**BEST OF** It wouldn’t work to try to tell the Michael Bungay Stanier story - if anyone’s a collection of stories, it’s MBS. He finished law school being sued for defamation by his professor, he was a Rhodes Scholar in his early 20s, and he’s coached Brene Brown on her own podcast.  A life and career with so many twists, turns and new directions brings with it an equally eclectic and overflowing...

**BEST OF** I was a competitive kid, and some classroom rivalries pushed me to better grades than I might have achieved otherwise. However, I was also a perfectionist, and any “A”s that came without a “+” beside them started to feel less like an almost-perfect achievement and more like a glaring signal that I’d missed the mark.  I hated failing, and when you combine that with believing anything le...

Nobody hears from Janice Lintz just once. Whether she’s chasing down information on her phone bill or chasing down the Queen of England, Janice doesn’t stop until she gets what she needs, and she believes others can benefit from that kind of tenacity.  It’s reflected in a lesson Janice learned from the great civil rights activist, Vernon Jordan - don’t answer the phone until someone calls you the...

If you’re trying to talk to Josh Piterman after a show… good luck. The second he’s said his farewells to his fellow castmates and crew members, he won’t utter a word until he returns to the theatre the following day.  Josh knows there’s no short-cutting recovery, and like everything else, his approach to rest is both holistic and spiritual. A healthy voice is part of a healthy body, and a healthy...

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 society’s almost com...

Asking someone else for anything is a delicate enough task, but when you’re asking them to be vulnerable, it’s something else entirely. How do you make people comfortable sharing something that is, by definition, uncomfortable?  Jamila Rizvi, the bestselling author, public speaker, podcast presenter and interviewer, is no stranger to this tricky task. She’s spoken to everyone from Bill Gates to Ki...

How I Work is a product of the modern world - it’s a podcast, a format which didn’t even exist at the turn of the century, and a lot of the productivity tools and hacks are geared towards knowledge work for the digital age.  So it’s surprising to hear that Darius Foroux, himself an entrepreneur and writer taking advantage of the digital space, lives and works by the ancient philosophy of Stoicism....

Thanks to social media, everyone’s a storyteller now. Whether you’re guiding your work to the right audience, developing your personal brand or keeping the public up-to-date on the COVID-19 situation, your job is to tell a story. If people don’t understand you, or don’t tune in, then everything else is for nought.  So how do you get better at communicating? Norman Swan, a physician, journalist, br...

You’ve reached the end of yet another long Zoom call with your team when you realise… you didn’t say a word!  You’re smart, you have good ideas, and you’ve put in the work. Plus, your team and your clients respect you… So how did this happen?  According to Zoe Chance, Yale School of Management professor and author of Influence is Your Superpower, it’s because you didn’t speak up early enough. If y...

Ronni Kahn does not like to hear about people throwing away their lettuce. If you compost lettuce, it takes about two weeks to decompose. If you throw it in the book, you can bump that number up to twenty-five. Sorry, twenty-five years, that is.  As the founder of food rescue charity OzHarvest, Ronni’s an expert on preventing food waste on a massive scale. But what about on the small scale?  Yep,...

How did the world’s most successful people get to the top? Is it genetics? Nepotism? Grit? Can we even know for sure?  Dr. Ruth Gotian believes we can, and she’s on a mission to figure it out and share it with the world. Ruth studies top performers from all walks of life, including Olympic medallists, NASA Astronauts and top academics. She’s uncovered four key traits that all high achievers share,...

2022 is well underway and… yeah. We’re still doing a lot of virtual meetings. While there’s great optimism in the air around the new level of flexibility most companies are offering their workers now, virtual meetings are still pretty… average.  But let’s not blame Zoom straight away: meetings as a work practice have gone unexamined for far longer than they’ve been online. Atlassian’s Dom Price sa...

Have you worked with someone whose abilities were so awe-inspiring that they started to rub off on you? We’ve all had bosses, co-workers, friends or study mates whose discipline we’ve tried to tap into before.  And Taylor Jacobson founded Focusmate so he could do that forever! After excelling in college because of his carefully selected study mates, Taylor realised his tactics could be used by any...

It’s 3pm and Nicky Sparshott is ducking out of the office to go watch her kids perform at their school’s exhibition. Sweet, right? But shouldn’t it be impossible?  Nicky’s the CEO of Unilever Australia & New Zealand, and at the time of recording, was also the global CEO of T2 - how can she possibly have time in the middle of the work day for a school show?  Well, it’s the positive side she’s d...

You know what it’s like when you move house - you’re tripping over boxes for weeks, eating takeout on the floor while you wait for that new dining table to arrive, and lamenting that the rest of the world - including work - doesn’t take a pause while you get your life in order. We’ve all been there, but have you ever used that moment of chaos as the trigger to start writing a book?  It sounds insa...

You wouldn’t think of roasting a chicken as a poignant metaphor for life, but when Maggie Beer talks cooking, you get words to live by.  Starting with sourcing the perfect chicken, Maggie teaches you why it’s so important to do a little research before you buy anything, and from there, gives you a step-by-step walkthrough on the whole process.  Yep, you’re getting a free masterclass from the maste...

If anything immediately strikes me as a pretty bad idea, it’s an adult learning to ride a skateboard. Without the years of experience built up over a childhood spent cruising on the asphalt, stepping on a skateboard almost promises to put you on your butt. And as an adult, a skateboarding injury could have a pretty disastrous effect on your daily life. Kids bounce back pretty easily, but I know if...

Running late is… stressful. You worry that you’re going to get in trouble, let someone down or miss something important. Your heart rate rises, adrenaline courses through your body - and then someone wants to get in front of you on the road. Oh. My. God.  But what if it wasn’t stressful? Sounds too good to be true, right? What if it’s all in your head?  Meshel Laurie, a podcaster and author, belie...

Life Admin. That phrase probably makes you nervous - I know it does for me. It makes me think about all the stuff I have to keep on top of: I need to remember to pay my car rego, to RSVP to that parent-teacher conference, and to book my next doctor’s appointment.  But when you think about all the things you have to get done at the office in 2022, you’re probably pretty confident, right? There’s he...

If you’re a bit of a productivity buff, you probably have some clever hacks for reducing time spent reading or sending emails. Maybe you use Superhuman, like I do, or maybe you’re a big proponent of Inbox Zero.  Either way, you’re probably not looking for, say, a How I Work episode that suggests you spend more time on email! But this is different…  The goal of true productivity, after all, is to g...

Sometimes you have to put yourself on the line to test your assumptions. How better to know if something will work for you than to do it yourself? Michael Mosley takes this one step further than your average person, though… Like when he willingly infested his body with worms. Seriously.  TV producer, presenter, journalist, author and former doctor Michael Mosley has done all manner of weird and wo...