How I Work

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 becomes the new normal. And once people stop noticing it, they start resenting any friction that interrupts it.  

This episode is part of The Work Edit, a format where I sit down with someone facing a real professional challenge and we work through it together. My guest is Marilla, who has spent eight years building Equality Media and Marketing, a 30-person agency where flexible time is a core part of the culture. Marilla came to me with a challenge I hear a lot from leaders of genuinely good workplaces: what do you do when your team starts taking the culture for granted?  

If you lead people, this one is full of things you can take straight into your week: 

• The goat story: an ancient parable that explains why people stop appreciating what's good, and how to use it as a leadership tool 

• Why Inventium runs a Four Day Week policy reset every one to two years, and the specific questions that make those conversations productive 

• Why checking emails for 45 minutes feels like "working all night", and what that distortion does to team morale 

• What to do when one or two people are quietly poisoning the culture, and when to stop trying to bring them around 

• The "deal or no deal" conversation: how to give people a genuine choice about whether they're still on the bus 
• The single question I ask before any team-wide pep talk, to make sure I'm not just avoiding a direct conversation I need to have 

Key quotes 

"All I can control is how I approach the conversation and the messages that I deliver. I can't control how that other person is gonna react." 

"Is this about the minority or the majority? Because that's really unfair if it's just the minority that's the root cause of what's happening." 

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 [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 care, honesty, and vulnerability. 

Aly and I discuss: 

• The moment a leadership wellbeing survey sparked real vulnerability 

• Why openness - when it feels uncomfortable - can transform a relationship 

• How showing up consistently matters more than grand gestures 

• The “ugly cry” call that turned a breaking point into a rebuild 

• What to do when you’re trying to repair trust at work 

KEY QUOTES

“Trust doesn’t hinge on one big apology or grand gesture. It’s built through the small stuff - the check-ins, the honesty, the willingness to be vulnerable.” 

“You don’t wait for the perfect moment. You just start showing up consistently and with care.” 

Connect with Aly Solly on LinkedIn. 

Listen to the full conversation with Aly here. 

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

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-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 wishes he'd hit the number. He just thinks failing loudly beats succeeding quietly, which might explain why only 9% of people who make a New Year's resolution actually stick to it. Most of us are setting goals to feel good for five minutes, not because we've figured out how to actually get there. 

In this episode, I sit down with Jia Jiang, the entrepreneur and speaker behind 100 Days of Rejection, a YouTube experiment that became a TED Talk with more than 10 million views. We talk about his new book, Easy Discipline, and how he turns huge, terrifying goals into something he can actually control day to day. 

If you have ever downgraded a goal so you wouldn't have to feel bad about missing it, Jia is about to make you rethink that entirely. 

Jia and I discuss: 

• Why Jia deliberately sets goals so ambitious he is likely to miss them, and why a public near miss beats a comfortable target 

• The one action goal: how to turn a big, uncontrollable ambition into a daily input you can fully control 

• The inspiration index, the two numbers Jia tracks on every project, and why you need both the outcome and the input 

• The Mover's Manual, and how changing his physical environment lets Jia get three to ten times more done in an afternoon 

• Reverse AI: what happened when Jia started deliberately training himself the way AI models are trained 

• The letter he wrote to Steven Bartlett after being turned down for Diary of a CEO, and why he published it anyway 

Key quotes 

"I'd rather fail my ambition publicly than letting it die inside privately." 

"When you are already rejected, you have nothing to lose. When you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear." 

Connect with Jia Jiang on Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn and his website, read his newsletter on Substack, and check out his latest book Easy Discipline. 

If you enjoyed this episode, check out my chat with Google's Executive Productivity Advisor, Laura Mae Martin, on the practical strategies she uses to get more done in less time: https://www.amantha.com/podcasts/ruthless-prioritization-with-googles-executive-productivity-advisor-laura-mae-martin 

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 [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 organisations roll out sophisticated AI tools without upgrading the human system around them, Dom explains why people often use their newfound hours poorly - and how a single, deliberate question can transform the return you get from AI.  

Dom and I discuss: 

• Why organisations focus on AI tools but forget the human system that actually uses them  

• The surprising behaviour Dom saw when teams became “35 percent more productive” - including a huge spike in meetings  

• What happens when people gain time but aren’t guided on how to use it 

• The small mindset shift that helps you reinvest saved time more wisely 

• The reflection question that turns AI gains into genuine value: What’s the most valuable thing I can do with this time?  

KEY QUOTES 

“I don’t care what you saved. I care what you did with it.”  

“Take a moment before filling that space. Ask yourself: what’s the most valuable thing I can do with this time?”  

Connect with Dom Price on Instagram, LinkedIn and his website. 

Listen to the full conversation with Dom here.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

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-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 work through it together. My guest is Lisa, who has spent four years building The Culture Ministry, a diversity and inclusion consulting business. She came to me with a question I hear constantly: how do I scale? 

What followed was a conversation about why growth doesn't have to mean hiring, what a proposal win rate above 60% is really telling you, and why a well-designed experiment beats any polished strategy framework. 

If you run your own business, or you're thinking about going out on your own, this one will give you plenty of tips to apply. 

Lisa and I discuss: 

• Why hiring more people often grows revenue but not profit, and how Inventium is having its highest-profit year ever with a smaller team 

• The single line in your profit and loss statement that signals when it's genuinely time to hire 

• How AI has reshaped businesses, and the surprising place it creates new bottlenecks rather than removing them 

• What a high proposal win rate is actually telling you about your pricing 

• The Inventium ROI guarantee, and the slightly awkward question worth asking past clients about what you should have charged 
• How to treat a market shift as an experiment to learn from, rather than a personal failure 

Key quotes 

"If you are getting the majority of your proposals accepted, I would say you're not charging enough." 

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. 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 [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I get into why this happens and the two very different ways of working with AI that decide whether it does. You will hear the difference between gunslinging and architecting, what a proper brief actually sounds like, and how to have a conversation with AI before you ask it to build anything. By the end, you will be getting version one at 90 percent instead of 20. 

What you'll learn: 

• What actually separates AI slop from work that lands 

• The difference between gunslinging and architecting with AI 

• What a proper brief for AI actually sounds like 

• How to have a real conversation with AI before asking it to build anything 

• Why version one can land at 90 percent instead of 20 

• 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 [email protected] 

Credits: 
Host: Amantha Imber 
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 author, host of the TV show Parental Guidance, and father of six daughters, and his work sits inside self-determination theory, one of the most evidence-based bodies of research in psychology. 

In this episode, I sit down with Justin to unpack the three basic psychological needs that shift someone from doing something because they have to, to doing it because they're genuinely on board. We also get into his early morning breathwork practice, why he believes boys are the solution rather than the problem, and a story involving his wife, a health retreat and a news website that will make you want to throw your phone into a river. 

If you've ever managed someone who just won't engage, or parented a kid who won't do anything without a fight, this conversation will change how you think about motivation altogether. 

Justin and I discuss: 

• The four levels of motivation, from extrinsic to intrinsic, and why chasing intrinsic motivation in a team or a family is setting the bar too high 

• The three basic psychological needs, relatedness, competence and autonomy, and why autonomy is often the linchpin 

• Why "autonomy" doesn't mean freedom, and what it actually means in practice 

• The three simple questions Justin uses with his own kids and with employees to work out where someone sits on the motivation continuum 

• How he uses breathwork and carbon dioxide tolerance as a daily practice in building resilience 
• What's really going on with boys today, and why Justin believes a healthy model of masculinity is the answer 

Key quotes 

"When people understand the value in the activity, when people buy the why, they will choose to do it autonomously, which means that you don't have motivation problems." 

"Most motivation problems aren't motivation problems at all. They're rationale problems." 

Connect with Justin Coulson on Instagram, LinkedIn and his website. Check out his latest book Boys, and listen to his podcast Happy Families. 

If this conversation got you thinking about motivation, I'd also recommend my episode with Dan Pink, where we dig further into the science of what drives us. Listen 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 [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 comparison points. Is a heavy day of prompting worse than a night of Netflix? Worse than a round of golf? Nobody says. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I go looking for the real figures. You will hear how an hour of heavy AI use stacks up against an hour of Netflix, why American golf courses use far more water than AI data centres, and the two things you can personally do that make a genuine difference, including one that has nothing to do with AI at all. 

What you'll learn: 

• How an hour of heavy AI use actually compares to an hour of Netflix 

• Why golf courses use more water than AI data centres, and why nobody is calling to ban golf 

• What separates the environmental cost of training AI from simply using it 

• What governments, companies and individuals can each actually do about AI's environmental impact 

• The one everyday habit that beats cutting your AI use altogether 

• 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 [email protected] 

Credits: 
Host: Amantha Imber 
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 

In this episode, I sit down with Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and former writer of The Guardian's This Column Will Change Your Life, to talk about his forthcoming book Aliveness and what he calls unclenching, learning to loosen your grip on certainty rather than white-knuckle your way through it. 

We get into flexible goals, why urgency is so often someone else's agenda in disguise, and how to stop tying your self-worth to your latest achievement. 

If you have ever hit a goal and felt the satisfaction evaporate within minutes, this conversation will change how you think about ambition altogether. 

Oliver and I discuss: 

• What "clenching" is, and why our instinct to grip tighter in uncertain times actually backfires 

• The insecure overachiever trap, and why hitting a goal rarely feels like enough for long 

• How Oliver's open list, closed list approach stops you drowning in fifty half-started things 

• Setting a "no later than" time instead of a strict start time, and why looser goals often get more done 

• Why urgency is so often someone else's agenda in disguise, and how to tell when it is genuinely yours 

• What Oliver actually does with the emails he has not gotten to yet 

Key quotes 

"If you have this feeling of aliveness, even the most difficult challenges are copeable with, and if you don't have this feeling of aliveness, even the most impressive accomplishments are kind of worthless." 

"You will do enough, because you will do everything that it's within your capacities and your energy levels and your talents to do, and that just by definition will be all that you could ever have done." 

Connect with Oliver Burkeman on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and his website. Check out his latest book Meditations for Mortals and look out for his upcoming book Aliveness in 2027. 

If you want more from Oliver, listen back to our earlier conversation on time management, a great companion episode to this one: (https://www.amantha.com/podcasts/want-to-make-time-for-the-things-that-count) 

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 [email protected] 

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 checked what happens to their data once it goes in or thought about the difference between what's fine to share and what's better redacted first. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I work through what's actually safe to give AI and what's better left out. We cover how to check your settings so free tools aren't training on your data, how to de-identify sensitive things like health results and contracts, the rules that change once you're at work, and the one question to ask yourself before you upload anything. 

What you'll learn: 

• How to know if AI is quietly training on the data you give it, and how to switch that off 

• The one question to ask before you upload anything to AI 

• Why work and home should be treated completely differently when it comes to AI 

• What to redact from contracts, spreadsheets and client files before sharing them 

• Where the line sits between using AI as a sounding board and relying on it too much 

• 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 [email protected] 

Credits: 
Host: Amantha Imber 
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.