EP 90: Stop Managing Your Time. Start Managing Your Energy with Dr Amantha Imber

What if getting more done isn’t about finding more hours in the day?In this episode, I sit down with Dr Amantha Imber — organisational psychologist, bestselling author and founder of Inventium — to talk about her latest book, The Energy Game, and why managing our energy could be far more important than managing our time.Amantha burnt out in 2024 despite being one of Australia’s leading experts on productivity. That experience led her to rethink the way we approach productivity and ultimately became the basis for her most personal book yet — a science-backed look at how to boost, rest and protect your energy so you can perform at your best without running yourself into the ground.We also talk about AI, why it isn’t delivering the productivity gains many organisations expected, what we risk when we outsource too much of our thinking, and the one experiment Amantha challenges every listener to try this week.Key TopicsWhy time management alone won’t save you from burnout — and what to focus on insteadThe three categories of energy strategies: boost, rest and protect, and when to use eachWhy most of us are doing “fake rest” and what real rest actually looks likeThe minimum viable dose of cold water immersion and why you don’t need an ice bathHow AI could be making us cognitively lazy and what we risk losing if we outsource our thinkingWhy AI isn’t delivering the productivity gains many organisations expectedThe silent walk — one of Amantha’s favourite strategies and why it worksAbout AmanthaDr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist, bestselling author and founder of the award-winning behaviour change consultancy Inventium. In 2021, she became the first Australian to win the prestigious Thinkers50 Innovation Award, described by the Financial Times as the “Oscars of Management Thinking”. In 2025, she was named AI Consultant of the Year at the Australian AI Awards.She is the host of the number-one-ranking business podcast How I Work, with more than six million downloads, and her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes and Fast Company. Her latest book, The Energy Game, explores the science of how to better protect, restore and use your energy.Connect with Amantha⁠Book: The Energy Game⁠⁠Substack: One Percent Better⁠⁠How I Work podcast