How I Work

About this creator

How I Work explores practical ideas on work habits, productivity, decision-making, and building more sustainable ways of operating.

Why they're in the library

Included for practical guidance on work habits, productivity, decision-making, and building more sustainable ways of operating.

Showing 195 digests for How I Work.

Deep work & focus

Podcast

Running two CEO roles with analogue productivity systems

How I Work August 18, 2021


Deep work & focus 9
Productivity & habits 8
Management 5
  • How Post-it notes and quarterly cascades keep two CEO roles aligned
  • Unilever's four-day week: eliminating work, not compressing it
  • Why reverse mentoring junior staff sharpens executive decision-making

Goal setting

Podcast

A simple strategy for making better decisions: the Iceberg Yes

How I Work June 28, 2021


Goal setting 9
  • Saying yes to anything means saying yes to the full iceberg
  • We overweight exciting outcomes and underweight hidden effort
  • One question reframes every decision: what's below the surface?

Deep work & focus

Podcast

Cal Newport on deep work, digital minimalism, and workflow design

How I Work January 13, 2021


Deep work & focus 9
Productivity & habits 7
Processes & SOPs 5
  • Busyness is not productivity — deep work is what actually creates value
  • Habit tweaks can't fix a workflow built on constant unstructured communication
  • Solitude deprivation from endless screen use quietly destroys cognition and wellbeing

Deep work & focus

Podcast

Dan Pink on writing, timing, and designing your workday

How I Work January 6, 2021


Deep work & focus 9
Productivity & habits 8
Processes & SOPs 5
  • Your peak mental hours are too valuable to spend on email.
  • Environment design beats willpower for sustaining deep work.
  • Generating 60 bad titles surfaces the one good one.

Productivity & habits

Podcast

Adam Grant on productivity, motivation, and managing your time

How I Work December 16, 2020


Productivity & habits 9
Delegation 8
Deep work & focus 6
  • Sequencing tasks wrong tanks performance — taper from interesting to boring.
  • Rapid email responsiveness backfires by generating even more email.
  • Stack meetings back-to-back; scattered meetings waste 22% of surrounding time.

Productivity & habits

Podcast

How Ashutosh Priyadarshy designs a focused, bullshit-free workday

How I Work November 4, 2020


Productivity & habits 9
Time management 8
Processes & SOPs 5
  • If a task is two steps from your goal, it's probably bullshit
  • Separate meeting days from deep work days to eliminate context-switching
  • Two-day sprints force creative problem-solving and faster learning

Motivation

Podcast

Practical strategies for motivation, collaboration, and productivity in lockdown

How I Work October 7, 2020


Motivation 9
Resilience & grit 7
Communication 6
  • Autonomy, mastery, or connection: diagnosing which is missing fixes most slumps.
  • Phone beats video for hard conversations and genuine emotional reading.
  • Six five-minute movement breaks outperform one long break for sustained energy.

Hiring & recruitment

Podcast

How Amazon runs meetings, decisions, and hiring without PowerPoint

How I Work September 2, 2020


Hiring & recruitment 9
Culture building 9
Business operating systems 8
  • Why banning PowerPoint forces clearer thinking and better decisions
  • Constraint beats unlimited resources for driving real innovation
  • A veto-wielding bar raiser removes bias from every hiring decision

Productivity & habits

Podcast

Amantha Imber: resetting work habits, the four-day week, and life after CEO

How I Work July 22, 2020


Productivity & habits 9
Management 6
Processes & SOPs 5
  • Why productivity experts fall into the same email traps as everyone else
  • The 100-80-100 four-day work week: same output, one day back
  • Identity-based rules beat willpower for breaking bad work habits

Culture building

Podcast

How Atlassian redesigned meetings and culture for distributed work

How I Work July 8, 2020


Culture building 9
Management 7
Processes & SOPs 6
  • Make caring for each other an explicit meeting agenda item.
  • One dial-in rule from Trello creates a true level playing field.
  • Productivity metrics built for factories fail knowledge workers.

Productivity & habits

Podcast

Working from home productively: tips on focus, energy and team culture

How I Work April 29, 2020


Productivity & habits 9
Deep work & focus 8
Work-life balance 7
  • Align deep work to your chronotype — most people get this wrong.
  • Stopping mid-sentence makes re-entering flow almost effortless.
  • Remote culture is built by rituals you repeat, not values you state.

Processes & SOPs

Podcast

How Andrew Barnes made a four-day work week work at scale

How I Work April 22, 2020


Processes & SOPs 9
Deep work & focus 7
Management 5
  • Time scarcity, not management pressure, is what cuts workplace waste
  • Open-plan offices cost 22 minutes of recovery for every 11-minute interruption
  • Team-based accountability makes wasting colleagues' time a shared risk

Deep work & focus

Podcast

Six apps to reduce distractions when working from home

How I Work April 13, 2020


Deep work & focus 9
Productivity & habits 6
Automation & tools 5
  • Closing email entirely beats minimising it for focus.
  • Forest's dying tree makes phone avoidance surprisingly motivating.
  • Pocket batches article reading so tabs never multiply.

Objection handling

Podcast

How auctioneer Phillip Kingston builds rapport, creates urgency, and wins on auction day

How I Work March 11, 2020


Objection handling 9
Closing techniques 8
Productivity & habits 6
  • Why genuine curiosity beats scripts in every sales conversation
  • The FORD framework turns small talk into actionable intelligence
  • Theatre, humor, and warmth are the real auction strategy

Business operating systems

Podcast

Amazon's operating principles: how AWS builds at scale with frugality and rigour

How I Work February 5, 2020


Business operating systems 10
Hiring & recruitment 6
  • Why resource constraints make teams more innovative, not less
  • Six-page narratives replace PowerPoint and expose weak thinking
  • Amazon's default is finding a path to yes, not gatekeeping ideas

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