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 amantha@inventium.com.au

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 amantha@inventium.com.au

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 amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.