Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Mental strength isn't toughness. Psychotherapist Amy Morin makes the case that it's what gets you through stress, burnout, and the hard seasons when you still have to show up for work.
Amy Morin is a psychotherapist and the bestselling author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, with more than a million books sold and a TEDx talk past 25 million views. About a year into her career she lost her mother, and three years later to the day she lost her husband, then went back to sitting across from her own clients. The tools that got her through became her new book, The Mental Strength Playbook: 50 Tools to Cope with Stress, Thrive Under Pressure, and Gain a Competitive Edge in the Workplace.
In this conversation, we cover:
Strength vs. toughness: Why pushing through and shoving everything down backfires, and how mental strength works across what you think, feel, and do.
Act as if, not fake it: The night before her first big stage, and why acting like your most confident self is different from pretending to be someone else.
Naming your inner critic: Meet Fretting Phyllis, plus getting the noise out of your head and onto paper (and into the trash).
Emotions at work: Why a bad mood makes for a bad negotiation, the "smell the pizza" breathing exercise, and scheduling time to worry so worry stops scheduling you.
High performers vs. strategic contributors: The tension in a book that promises a competitive edge while talking you out of the grind, and how to reset boundaries that have quietly eroded.
If you're carrying something heavy and still have to walk into Tuesday's meeting, this one's for you. Amy closes with one question to ask at the end of each day, which is as good a place to start as any. Find The Mental Strength Playbook wherever books are sold.
Connect with Amy:
Website
The Mental Strength Playbook
Free reference guide to all 50 plays
Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin
Instagram
LinkedIn
Connect with Erik:
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Facebook
Bluesky
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Most deep work doesn't fail at your desk. It fails in the team around you, which is what leadership researcher Shawn Vanderhoven spent three years studying.
Shawn is a partner at The Wiseman Group, where he works alongside Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers. With his wife and co-author, Anne Vanderhoven, he wrote Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World, built on interviews with more than 400 people about the leaders who made focus possible for them, and the ones who made it impossible. Partway through the research, his own team told him which kind he was.
In this conversation, we cover:
The table slam: the workshop moment that started the research, and why Shawn says personal productivity advice aims too low when one ping from a manager can undo the whole system.
Permission vs. sponsorship: why "feel free to focus" crumbles under pressure, and what changes when a leader puts their own reputation behind protected time.
Pausing up: a managing-up move anyone can make, asking your boss for advice on your priority list instead of quietly trying to do all fifteen things.
Majors and minors: how to give important work you can't drop a smaller, fixed share of your time so it stops crowding out what matters most.
Clearing your desk: how leaders lose good people first to distraction, then to departure, and what one act of full attention did for Shawn.
If you've ever built a system that worked right up until the first message from your boss, this one's for you. You don't need a title to start: Shawn's first step is to write down everything you're carrying, put rough percentages beside it, and talk it through with one other person. Less of your attention goes to work you never chose, and more is left for the rest of your life. Find Pause and the free resources at pausebook.co.
Connect with Shawn:
Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World
LinkedIn
The Wiseman Group
Connect with Erik:
LinkedIn
Threads
Facebook
Bluesky
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Optimism isn't a mood you're born with, and it isn't a mindset you can summon on command. It's a set of habits you practice, especially on the hard days. That's the case Michelle Gielan makes in her new book, Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times.
Michelle is a positive psychology researcher, a former CBS News anchor, and the bestselling author of Broadcasting Happiness. She holds a master's in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and runs GoodThink, a research and training firm, with her husband, Shawn Achor. She left the anchor desk after years of reporting recession news to study the opposite problem: how people find a path forward when things are hard.
In this conversation, we cover:
Three minutes of bad news: Her study with Arianna Huffington found that three minutes of negative news in the morning left people 27% more likely to call their whole day negative six to eight hours later. Pairing problems with solutions made people 20% better at creative problem-solving.
The best-moments text: A one-to-two-minute nightly practice that swaps "was today good?" for "what was good today?" and trains you to notice what's working.
Stress and meaning: Why stress usually points at something you care about, and how asking what's behind it changes what it does to you.
Commitment triage: Sorting your commitments into a core impact list, a secondary list, and a not-to-do list. Plus what to do when you don't control your own schedule.
Recharging smarter: Why resilience isn't about how much you can endure, and why ten-minute daily recharges matter as much as the vacation.
This one's for anyone running a full life on a low battery. Michelle hopes none of this ever gets mistaken for a productivity hack. The point is protecting your energy so you can actually live the life you've built. Find the book and the resources that go with it at resilientoptimism.com.
Connect with Michelle:
Website
Resilient Optimism
GoodThink
LinkedIn
Connect with Erik:
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Threads
Facebook
Bluesky
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Focus, sleep, and stress all run on the same 90-minute cycle — and Dr. Christian Poensgen argues that's where productivity that lasts actually begins. He's a scientist turned executive coach whose doctoral work was on the relationship between stress and performance, and co-author, with Eric Partaker, of Ultraproductive: The 90-Minute Method to Optimize Focus, Sleep, and Stress.
Christian's own wake-up call was the quiet kind. No ambulance, no emergency — just an 80-hour week, seven hours in bed, and the feeling every morning that a truck had hit him. He had the PhD in stress and performance and still walked into near-burnout. What he found on the way out is the spine of this conversation: three levers that carry most of the weight, and a body clock that was running underneath all of it the whole time.
In this conversation, we cover:
Pseudo-productive busyness: Why long hours and a cleared inbox can leave the things that matter untouched — and why an inbox is really a to-do list other people built for you.
Working the edges of the day: Deep focus is hardest between nine and five, so Christian makes the case for claiming 15 or 30 minutes before or after, and the 3-3-11 rule for finding your own best windows.
The fight phase: Why the first five to ten minutes of focused work always feel lousy, for everyone, and why that resistance is a sign you're about to do something good rather than a sign to stop.
Junk sleep: Seven hours in bed is a quantity. Deep and REM sleep are the nutrition — and Christian found he was getting under 30 minutes of deep sleep a night while doing everything "right."
Stress as a signal, not an enemy: Nearly everything worth having arrives with some stress attached. The line that matters is duration — and the exhale is the fastest way back down.
If you've been doing all the right things and still feel like you're running on empty, this one will make sense of why. Christian's practical takeaways are small enough to start today: a full exhale when stress hits, and ten minutes of bright light in the morning. The deeper framework is in the book.
Connect with Christian:
Ultraproductive.com
Christian's writing at IMD
Connect with Erik:
LinkedIn
Threads
Facebook
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Simplicity and decision fatigue are the focus of this conversation with Roy Schwartz, co-founder and president of Axios.
Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios and Axios HQ after helping build Politico, where he first saw how much of modern work is just noise competing for attention. His dyslexia forced him to compress everything down to the core just to keep up — a coping strategy that became the foundation for Smart Brevity and, later, his new book Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less, co-written with his Axios co-founders.
In this conversation, we cover:
Confront, Delete, Amplify: Roy's three-step framework for finding where your time actually goes, cutting what doesn't serve your real goals, and redirecting that time toward the few things you're genuinely good at.
Why delete is harder than it sounds: the evolutionary pull to accumulate — meetings, reports, obligations — and why saying no requires deciding what you're protecting time for, not just what you're cutting.
Decision fatigue and the handcuffs method: how removing small daily choices (clothing, groceries, consumables) frees up mental bandwidth for decisions that actually matter.
AI as both the problem and the fix: why the same tool producing more content than ever can also become your most honest editor — if you give it the right instructions.
The four levers of a whole life: relationships, fitness, diet, and sleep — and why Roy ranks relationships first, even in a book built by a productivity nerd.
This episode is for anyone who feels like their calendar, inbox, or life in general has gotten away from them and suspects the answer isn't a better system — it's fewer things. Roy's framework gives you a place to start today: one decision, one meeting, one "no."
Connect with Roy:
Simplify — the book
Smart Brevity free resources
Connect with Erik:
LinkedIn
Threads
Facebook
Bluesky
This Podcast is Powered By:
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Descript
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Podpage
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Grab Shortcasts from Beyond The To-Do List by Blinkist: http://beyondthetodolist.com/blinkist
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.