You've read the books. You've locked the phone in a drawer. You've set a hard cut-off at 8 PM. And none of it has lasted more than two weeks. 

That's exactly where Shaun found himself. By day he's a senior corporate strategy leader at Bupa, and by night he's the volunteer operations manager for a junior footy club responsible for 450 kids across eight teams. The systems he runs at work are tight. The systems he runs at home? Nowhere to be seen. 

In this Work Edit, I sit down with Shaun to figure out why the productivity habits that protect him in his corporate role have never made it home, and what it would actually take to change that. We get into AI knowledge agents, ghost mode, setting expectations as an act of generosity, and a specific gratitude practice I think is worth trying even if you find most of them a bit naff. 

If you've ever been brilliant at boundary-setting for everyone else and terrible at it for yourself, this one's for you. 

Shaun and I discuss: 

• Why Shaun's corporate productivity systems work flawlessly at Bupa but have never crossed over into his volunteer role or home life 

• The AI knowledge agent idea: how building a self-serve FAQ for 450 families could cut the stream of evening messages and remove Shaun as the constant bottleneck 

• Staying in your lane: why context switching between work mode and parent mode leaves you doing neither well, and the simple question that helps you catch yourself doing it 

• Ghost mode: the difference between locking your phone away and actually choosing to be fully present, and why that reframe matters 

• Setting expectations as an act of generosity: how a simple autoresponder or comms window can relieve the guilt of not responding instantly, without making you seem rigid 

• Three good things: a specific gratitude practice, grounded in research, that quiets a busy work brain at night, and why doing it with your kids makes it even more powerful 

More from How I Work 

If you related to Shaun's struggle with an always-on role that never quite lets you clock off, I think you'll love my conversation with Katie. She's 18 months into a consulting portfolio career, and saying no is a muscle she's still building. Requests were multiplying faster than she could field them, which is honestly just the same problem wearing a different outfit. 

Listen to Katie's episode here.