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My favourite AI trick isn't a fancy tool (although there are many cool ones) or a long and convoluted prompt that you need to comment “Prompt” into an Instagram post to access. It's using AI to fix the way I'm using AI. (And yes, I appreciate how insufferably meta that sounds.) Here’s what it looks like in practice. When I’m not sure how to structure something Last week, I wanted to work with AI to help me rebuild Inventium’s self-reflection process (our version of performanc

Last week, my EA Jem shared an email in our Inventium WhatsApp group. The sender wanted to know: “Are you actually a real person?” Jem, to her credit, didn’t reply with “beep beep.” (She’s clearly a more evolved person than I am). It’s not the first time she has been asked this question. And while it’s mildly annoying, it’s also (perhaps) understandable given part of our business does AI training. We’ve spent the last two years telling people bots can do this stuff. Jem uses

Most people I talk to use AI most days. They prompt, they play, they’re pretty good at it. You can probably write an email in 60 seconds that used to take you 20 minutes. Congratulations: you’ve saved enough time over a year to watch the entire Lord of the Rings extended trilogy. Twice*. But most people stop there. They’ve got AI doing ad hoc tasks faster, and they think that’s it. Meanwhile, the boring, repetitive stuff is still being done by hand. Same task, same week, same

Congratulations. You’ve been promoted. You’re now middle management. The team you’re managing? Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever AI tool your company has rolled out, and possibly two more depending on the day. They’re brilliant. They’re tireless. They will not stop pinging you for feedback, review, correction, and the occasional reprompt. Welcome to your unpaid promotion. Last week on How I Work I sat down with Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, a behavioural scientist at BCG whose

There’s a new credibility tax on written content, and most people don’t realise they’re paying it. You might be doing the actual thinking (as you should!). You might have a genuinely interesting idea. But if your writing smells like AI, readers will skim it, dismiss it, or outsource their reading of it back to AI. Which is a deeply ironic loop. The problem isn’t using AI to help you write - you should use it as your editor and critique. The problem is when you let AI sand of

There's a particular kind of mental overhead that doesn't get talked about enough. It's not the urgent stuff, like emails, deadlines, and the actual work. It's the ambient guilt of everything you're not doing. The stack of newsletters you've bookmarked with great intentions. The Friday afternoon nagging feeling that something important happened in your industry last week and you were too busy to notice. Psychologists call this kind of thing attentional residue: the way unfi

Greetings Reader So you got the email a few weeks ago. Maybe a few months ago. Something along the lines of "Exciting news!" with a screenshot of a chatbot interface and instructions to log in to Copilot, ChatGPT, or whatever your organisation's AI of choice might be. And then… nothing. No training. No guidance. Just you, a search bar that says "Ask Anything!!!" and an expectation of dramatically increased productivity. If that's you, you're not alone. So many companies hand

Greetings Reader My inbox is my productivity Achilles heel. The amount of incoming messages I receive and my ability to respond (as well as do my actual job, which is not being a professional email responder) often feels like I'm playing a game of whack-a-mole. And sadly, I am never the winner. But I have good news: AI can help. If you prompt it well, it will turn chaos into clarity. Here are five AI hacks to tame your inbox, plus the exact prompts for you to try. 1. Triage

Greetings Reader Many times over the summer holidays, I threw burritos at my daughter and husband. Not real ones, obviously. That would be gross. I threw the foam ones from Throw Throw Burrito . This masterpiece of a game comes via the Exploding Kittens empire. You might have heard of Exploding Kittens. It started as a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign by game designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman. It went on to raise nearly $9 million in 30 days a

You've got 47 tabs open comparing noise-cancelling headphones. You've read 12 Reddit threads. You're now comparing decibel ratings like you're training to be an audiophile. You still don't know which one to buy. Most of us approach product research like we're writing a dissertation (except the dissertation is on washing machines. Fun!). We compare spec sheets for features we don't understand. We build mental matrices. We read reviews that contradict each other. We learn that

Greetings! Today is special (for me, at least), because I've just launched a new podcast into the world. Because I thought to myself, "There are just not enough podcasts out there for people." Kidding. I launched it because I've been hunting around for great AI podcasts that share one or two super practical tips, drop the tech jargon, and don't go into boring detail about things that I don't need to know. I couldn't find it, so I've created it with Neo Aplin, who heads up Inv

It started with a tickle in my throat. Friday morning. First sore throat of the year. I was furious. I’d made it almost twelve months without a single cold (a personal record) and now my immune system had decided to clock off early. But instead of sulking, I decided to experiment. What if I used AI to get over my cold faster? I opened Consensus.app , which scans academic journals for actual research (not influencer opinions). I set it to M edical mode (searching ONLY medical

Today's newsletter is a triple-threat (or perhaps more accurately, broken into three parts). 1. Winner winner chicken dinner So last night, I was a finalist in the Australian AI Awards and holy crap, I won AI Consultant of the Year. I was stoked just to be a finalist (and yes, I know that's what everyone who has ever been up for an award says, but seriously: legit happy). Anyway, I was in total shock when my name got called out and have absolutely no idea what words came out

Have you been getting buried under an avalanche of polished-looking documents that turn out to be total rubbish? You're not going mad – AI slop is officially everywhere, and it's making our workdays a nightmare. What the hell is "AI Slop"? Think of AI slop as the workplace equivalent of junk food – it looks appealing from the outside, but there's zero nutritional value. It's those 10-page documents that someone clearly pumped out in five minutes using ChatGPT, complete with f

I bang on about AI at work all the time, but what about using it to stop your home life from being an absolute disaster? AI can help with that!! Here are 25 practical ways to use AI at home. Whether you want to save time, solve annoying problems, or spark some creativity with the family, these are all hacks you can try today. Food and kitchen wizardry The Fridge Detective Trick: Take photos of your full fridge (doors open, obviously – we're not photographing appliances for f

AI is supposed to make us smarter, but most of us are using it like a glorified cheerleader. We ask it to do something, it does exactly what we say without question, and we walk away thinking we're geniuses. But the most valuable thing AI can do isn't agreeing with us - it's challenging us. The cognitive laziness trap. We humans are designed to be cognitively lazy. It's not a character flaw – it's survival. If we analysed every single decision and pattern, we'd run out of men

Have you tried asking ChatGPT to write an email and got back something so painfully formal it made you cringe? Or maybe it was so vague your recipient probably thought you'd had a personality transplant? Most people are absolutely butchering AI email writing. But here's the thing: it's not the AI's fault. It's yours. The real problem (and it's not what you think). Everyone obsesses over the actual writing bit, but that's not where most people stuff up. The real issue? Context

Artificial Intelligence. Part of me loves this term - I mean, we share initials. What's not to love? But when I sat down to interview world-renowned Silicon Valley futurist Bob Johansen on How I Work this week, he shared a simple reframe that has stuck with me. Bob loathes the term "artificial intelligence." Like, really can't stand it. Instead, he thinks of it as Augmented Intelligence. And for me, it's a useful mindset shift for how we use these tools. Why this word flip

A few weeks ago, I read an article about Flight Story CEO Georgie Holt. It said: “I’m trying to kill myself [with AI] in 60 days. Can I remove myself entirely from the organisation, and could it run without me, is what I’m trying to test.” Georgie co-founded Flight Story alongside Stephen Bartlett and Christiana Brenton - the media powerhouse behind Diary of a CEO. And after reading about her audacious AI experiment, I knew I had to get her on How I Work to dig into the nitt

Have you ever felt like you're in an endless loop with AI tools? "Hi ChatGPT, I'm Amantha, I am an organisational psychologist, I prefer a conversational tone, I don't like corporate jargon..." And then you start a new chat: "Hi ChatGPT, I'm Amantha..." It's exhausting, right? Like having a colleague with short-term memory loss who needs the same introduction every morning. Today, we are going to solve this problem. Groundhog Day with AI AI can easily give you a decent result