Speaker 1: Hello there, it's Amantha.
Speaker 2: I'm currently on a Christmas break, so I've handpicked a
Speaker 2: bunch of my favorite episodes from the last year to
Speaker 2: share with you.
Speaker 1: Okay, on with today's best of episode.
Speaker 2: Did you exercise this morning or are you planning on
Speaker 2: exercising later today? Or maybe you're doing your exercise right
Speaker 2: now with me in your ear, or maybe you just
Speaker 2: told yourself that you didn't have time.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: How I Work has not turned into a health and
Speaker 2: fitness podcast, but today I want to talk about some
Speaker 2: call tools to improve your health. I place a huge
Speaker 2: value on my health. It's actually my number one priority
Speaker 2: because if you're not healthy, chances are you are a
Speaker 2: whole lot less productive. My name is doctor Amantha INMBA.
Speaker 2: I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium,
Speaker 2: and this is How I Work, a show about how
Speaker 2: to help you do your best work. Long term listeners
Speaker 2: of How I Work will know the immense value I
Speaker 2: place on my health, because without your health in place.
Speaker 1: I just think you have nothing. If you're not healthy, you.
Speaker 2: Can't be a great parent, a great friend, a great daughter,
Speaker 2: and so on.
Speaker 1: And you can be sure that your productivity will be
Speaker 1: impacted too.
Speaker 2: So let's chat about five tools that I use to
Speaker 2: stay healthy. The first one is the Tangram Factory smart rope.
Speaker 2: Now I'll be linking to all these in the show notes.
Speaker 2: So this is a skipping rope that is smart, so
Speaker 2: it detects how many reps you're doing. I'm a big
Speaker 2: fan of skipping, and five times a week I love
Speaker 2: doing a short skipping warm up for a few minutes
Speaker 2: before my weight training workouts. And as skippers will know,
Speaker 2: it's so tedious to count the number of reps that
Speaker 2: you do you're skipping, but this smartrope does it for you,
Speaker 2: which I find awesome. So I have a little goal
Speaker 2: of doing two hundred reps on the skipping rope is
Speaker 2: my warm up. The smart rope connects to my phone
Speaker 2: via Bluetooth to a specific app and accounts it for me,
Speaker 2: which I love. So I've been using that for about
Speaker 2: a year. It's super reliable and I would find it
Speaker 2: really hard to go back to using.
Speaker 1: A normal rope.
Speaker 2: The next tool I want to talk about is one
Speaker 2: of the newer things that I've added to my repertoire,
Speaker 2: and that is the Whoop band. So Whop. I discovered
Speaker 2: Woop because it made Fast Companies Most Innovative Companies list
Speaker 2: this year.
Speaker 1: So Whoop is a wearable device.
Speaker 2: It's basically a band made out of fabric that you
Speaker 2: wear on your wrist. It's waterproof and it only needs
Speaker 2: to be charged every five days, and it's designed to
Speaker 2: basically optimize the way that you sleep and the way
Speaker 2: that you train. The Woop band is unusual in that
Speaker 2: it's got no screen on it. It's just a band,
Speaker 2: so in order to understand the data that it's getting
Speaker 2: from you, you need to actually open up the Woop
Speaker 2: mobile app to check it out. So Woop tracks a
Speaker 2: few things that tracks heart rate variability, resting heart rate,
Speaker 2: your sleep and your respiratory rate. And with these particular markets,
Speaker 2: it can assess how well you're sleeping. Your sleep efficiency
Speaker 2: optimizes how much time you need to be spending in bed,
Speaker 2: and based on this data and your activity levels from
Speaker 2: the day before, it calculates ideally how hard you should
Speaker 2: push yourself the following day, or whether perhaps you need
Speaker 2: to schedule a recovery date.
Speaker 1: And then you could run mini.
Speaker 2: Experiments with yourself to see how doing certain things like
Speaker 2: maybe having a glass of wine at night impacts your sleep,
Speaker 2: although you probably already know the answer to that one.
Speaker 2: So there's heaps of data, and the more that you
Speaker 2: use it, the more useful the data becomes because it
Speaker 2: starts to set baselines and averages, and interestingly, I was
Speaker 2: reading that it's actually very accurate a predicting whether you
Speaker 2: have COVID, So there you go.
Speaker 1: That's whoop. Now the next thing.
Speaker 2: I have been using an Apple Watch for many years,
Speaker 2: but something that used to frustrate me about my Apple
Speaker 2: Watch is that I have a goal of doing at
Speaker 2: least ten thousand steps a day, but you can't actually
Speaker 2: set that up on your home screen to have the
Speaker 2: number of steps that you've done on the standard Apple
Speaker 2: Watch setup.
Speaker 1: But there is a.
Speaker 2: Workaround, and that is with the Pedometer plus plus app.
Speaker 2: So if you install that particular app on your phone,
Speaker 2: you can then set the home screen of your Apple
Speaker 2: Watch to show how many steps that you've done. And
Speaker 2: I find this little workaround very, very useful because it
Speaker 2: helps me just make sure that I build in regular
Speaker 2: movement to my day to day to reach my goal,
Speaker 2: which is a good segue into the next thing I
Speaker 2: want to talk about, which is the walking pad, pro
Speaker 2: treadmill and Ergo desk automatic standing dep So this is
Speaker 2: a treadmill desk, and I mentioned it in the episode
Speaker 2: that I did about my ultimate home office setup. Now
Speaker 2: I don't use this as my main work desk, but
Speaker 2: I have a second workstation at home, and I think
Speaker 2: of this as my movement desk where I've got my
Speaker 2: old laptop set up that I only use now when
Speaker 2: I travel on rare occasions and I can basically walk
Speaker 2: and work at the same time, or if I'm doing
Speaker 2: phone meetings. I have a general rule where I will
Speaker 2: always walk if I'm doing phone meetings or move in
Speaker 2: some way.
Speaker 1: And this is really handy. That's desk because now.
Speaker 2: I can take notes on my laptop while I walk
Speaker 2: on the treadmill, which is super cool.
Speaker 1: And again it just helps me move.
Speaker 2: And stay healthy during my work day, which if I
Speaker 2: don't try to build in all these habits, can be
Speaker 2: very sedentary because I am a classic desk worker. Now,
Speaker 2: the final tool I want to talk about is something
Speaker 2: to stay mentally healthy. And this is a company that
Speaker 2: I love called Magic Puzzle Company. So I discovered them
Speaker 2: through their kickstart a campaign where they launch three jigsaw
Speaker 2: puzzles that each have a secret when you get to
Speaker 2: the end, and I'm not going to tell you what
Speaker 2: that secret is, but it's very cool. I'm onto the
Speaker 2: third of the three puzzles now, and I can tell
Speaker 2: you I'm going to be very depressed when I finish
Speaker 2: this last one because they've been such a joy for
Speaker 2: myself and my seven year old daughter Frankie to do together.
Speaker 2: They're one thousand pieces and they're very very challenging, I
Speaker 2: will say, and they've become a mainstay on my dining
Speaker 2: room table, so whenever family and friends come to visit,
Speaker 2: they're always invited to contribute to doing the jigsaw puzzles.
Speaker 1: I think the jigsaw puzzles are such a great way
Speaker 1: to stretch your brain.
Speaker 2: And I also find that I get into chicksaw flow
Speaker 2: quite easily and I just love it.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do when I finish this third puzzle,
Speaker 2: but the mas Chick Puzzle company who created these jigsaws
Speaker 2: are working on the next series, so stay.
Speaker 1: Tuned for that.
Speaker 2: So those are five tools that I use to stay healthy.
Speaker 2: That is it for today's show. If you have been
Speaker 2: loving how I work, you might also enjoy MoMA MIA's podcast,
Speaker 2: Ladies Startup Stories. Each week, Georgia Love, who you might
Speaker 2: remember from The Bachelorette, sits down with female entrepreneurs to
Speaker 2: ask how they've built their businesses. Georgia recently sat down
Speaker 2: with Michelle Battersby, the woman who helped launch the dating
Speaker 2: app Bumble into Australia. But Michelle isn't here to talk Bumble.
Speaker 2: She is actually co founding an app called Sunroom, so
Speaker 2: she joins Georgia to talk about why she left a
Speaker 2: very secure job to go out on her own and
Speaker 2: why she thought Sunroom was worth taking a risk on.
Speaker 1: Here's a little snippet.
Speaker 3: It's crazy to say, Ellie, Lucy and I have never
Speaker 3: met each other in real life.
Speaker 1: Wow wow. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So they're both in the States and I'm here. So
Speaker 3: the company is actually based in la and I'm moving
Speaker 3: over there in a month. But it's very twenty two.
Speaker 3: We've co founded a business without ever meeting each other
Speaker 3: in real life, and I think it's been an advantage
Speaker 3: because it meant that Lucy could pick the skill sets
Speaker 3: that she needed and then go and find those people.
Speaker 3: But we did this thing called a co founder dating
Speaker 3: questionnaire and I think it was around seventy five questions,
Speaker 3: and it gets into some really deep stuff, things like
Speaker 3: can one co founder fire another? Would you prefer to
Speaker 3: own eight percent of a billion dollar company or eighty
Speaker 3: percent of a one hundred million dollar company? Big goal
Speaker 3: type stuff, but questions you really should be asking your
Speaker 3: co founders and things you really should know about each
Speaker 3: other before you decide to enter a business, like what
Speaker 3: is the worst interpersonal conflict you've ever dealt with?
Speaker 1: What makes you feel stressed? How do you deal with stress?
Speaker 1: Have you ever dealt with depression?
Speaker 3: Like a lot of big questions, And we did a
Speaker 3: couple of sessions or going through how we'd answered these
Speaker 3: questions to really get to know one another. And our
Speaker 3: values were just so aligned, where three actually very different people,
Speaker 3: but our values are all the same. And yeah, it's
Speaker 3: crazy to think that we have never been in the
Speaker 3: same room and we just closed a pre seed and
Speaker 3: are about to launch an up.
Speaker 1: Hello. There, that is it for today's show.
Speaker 2: If you enjoyed today's episode, why not share it with
Speaker 2: someone else that you think would benefit and maybe get
Speaker 2: some useful tips to improve the way that they work.
Speaker 2: Hell I Work is produced by Inventi and with production
Speaker 2: support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin
Speaker 2: Nimbus who does the audio mix for every show and
Speaker 2: makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 1: See you next time.