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

Executive overview

Bad habits creep in during stressful periods — even for productivity experts. Amantha Imber stepped down as CEO, went through a separation, and found herself buried in email, checking news constantly, and losing the discipline she teaches others.

Her solution: treat it like a hard reset. Set clear goals, write rules that remove self-negotiation, and structure email as a batch task rather than a constant feed.

The fastest path back to good habits is a clean start date with explicit rules, not gradual improvement.

Life changes and the CEO transition

• Stepped down as CEO of Inventium; now "Chief Maker" — focused on speaking, writing, research, new products
• No staff management responsibilities; role is purely creative and client-facing
• Went through separation after 14 years; co-parenting a six-year-old half the time
• "Birds nesting" for five months (child stays in family home; parents rotate in/out) destroyed sleep and concentration
• Therapist described her state as "diminished capacity" — a direct result of constant displacement

Team rhythms and the Inventium experiment

• Team of eight; deliberately kept small to avoid clique formation and cultural fragility
• One bad hire, Imber found, can destroy a small team's culture very quickly
• Weekly meeting rhythm: Monday (decisions), Wednesday (optional virtual lunch), Friday (team game)
• Check-in protocol borrowed from Mia Friedman: each person scores themselves 1–10 for work and personal life at the start of meetings
• Low scores prompt a follow-up call later — not an immediate group discussion
• Moving away from fixed office; exploring six-weekly face-to-face sprints or a shared Friday co-working day

The four-day work week (100-80-100)

• 100% pay, 80% of time, 100% of output — based on Andrew Barnes's Perpetual Guardian model
• Friday is the day off; called "the gift of the fifth" to frame it as a gift, not an entitlement
• Opt-in; co-created with the team rather than mandated by management
• Pre-mortem done as a team: mapped what could go wrong before launch
• Imber's personal preparation: clear OKRs, weekly planning broken into daily deep-work blocks, post-it notes for tactile task tracking
• Weekly planning takes 5–10 minutes; reduces stress by making workload visible and deadlines challengeable

The bad habits reset

• COVID triggered constant news-checking and reactive email behaviour — common even for productivity experts
• Email is her biggest weakness; never returned to phone but too many mornings started reactively in inbox
• Gym sessions require the phone for workout tracking, creating an opening for messages first thing — unresolved friction point

New rules and workflows

• Rule: no email until at least one major deep-work sprint is complete (replaces a time-based rule like "not before lunch")
• Time-boxing: block calendar slots for specific tasks; overestimate duration; shift overflow to next day
• Email batching: three 20–30 minute blocks per day, scheduled in the calendar
• Laura May Martin's (Google) three-bucket system: to-do (action required), waiting (ball in someone else's court), read (low urgency)
• Process all incoming email into buckets in one sitting; handle to-do items during deep work, read items during shallow afternoon time
• Walk during phone meetings: produces better thinking, removes the immobility of back-to-back video calls

Recovery advice for others

• Lower expectations during high-stress periods — succumbing to inbox dopamine is understandable, not shameful
• Pick a reset date and commit to it; "pre-game training" mindset before the new system kicks off
• Reconnect with purpose through journaling: recall why the work matters before trying to fix the system
• "We don't do X" framing sticks better than "I'm trying to do less X" — identity-based rules outperform intention-based ones