Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More

We think readers will like this book because it's upbeat, engaging, and really useful. No matter who you are or what you do, you'll find at least a few tips in here that you can use to improve both your work life, and your personal life. And thanks to the author's enthusiasm and downright friendliness, you'll have fun reading along the way.

He's also made his tips and strategies easy to implement. Almost all of them are things you can start doing right now, tomorrow, or this week to make your life better. It's obvious he put a lot of thought into these strategies to make them easy for busy people to implement.

And who is the author? Jason Womack is a productivity expert and executive coach with fourteen years experience helping professionals meet their goals productively. He owns the Jason Womack Company, a productivity consulting firm, and has two Master's degrees, one in education and one in psychology.

So, keep listening to find out why using nouns or verbs in your To-Do List has an impact on your work, three key questions to help you slow down to speed up, and how you can create more time in your schedule by looking at what you do before ten a.m.

"Your Best Just Got Better" is divided into three main parts that match the subtitle of the book: "Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More." So part one focuses on strategies you can use to work smarter. Here you'll learn how to manage your ideas, and make the most of the time you have.

Part two looks at how we can all think bigger. This means developing better leadership skills, using networking more effectively, and improving your work habits and routines to improve performance.

Part three looks at how to make more in your career. And, the author doesn't necessarily mean more money. He means more of whatever it is you want the most, whether it's a bigger paycheck, the ability to keep your promises, more freedom, or something else.

Because of the sheer amount of tips contained in each chapter, we can only cover a small percentage of what's in the book. But we'll go over a few of our favorite chapters, starting with some insightful points the author makes in part one.

He begins by encouraging you to define your Most Important Things, or MITs. These are the goals you hold closest to your heart, the goals that you really want to achieve. Do you know what your own MITs are? Perhaps you've never written them down, but most of us know deep down the kind of life we'd like to be living and the kind of work we'd love to be doing.

The author refers to these MITs several times throughout the book, so you'll find it useful to define them at this early point.

Once you've identified your MITs, the author goes over the importance of ‘iterative improvement'. Iterative improvement is when you make small actions consistently, to build positive momentum. And we all know that taking a bunch small steps is a lot easier to think about than taking a few huge ones.

So stop and look at the work you've done today. Have you done anything, no matter how small, to move yourself forward towards a goal you care about? Many of us will probably say "no" here. Thankfully the author gives us some great tips to help push us forward.

One of these tips is to look at your To-Do List to see if you're a noun person, or a verb person. If you've written down nouns on your list, like people's names, events, or places to jog your memory, then you're a noun person. This means you're probably a visionary, or big-picture thinker. You like to look at the overall project before you discuss details.

Verb people define what needs to be done. If you're a verb person, each item on your list starts with an action word. Your list looks like, "Email Bob. Call Sara about HR project. Write Report." If you're a verb person, then you focus on the details of tasks and projects. You want to know what you're going to do about each item on your list.

So, what's the point of knowing if you're a noun or verb person? Well, the author says we all gravitate to one or the other. But we can increase our effectiveness, and the likelihood that we'll achieve our MITs, by working on using both nouns and verbs on our lists.

Noun people need to add verbs to their To-Do List to help them identify specific actions they need to take. Verb people need to work on looking at the bigger picture of their actions so they don't get lost in the details.

There's a useful exercise in this section to help you start using more nouns or verbs to create a more effective To-Do List.

Part two has plenty of useful advice to help you start working more effectively. One of the key concepts in this section is that you need to slow down to speed up.

It sounds backwards, but pacing is incredibly important when it comes to working effectively. The author says that lots of people want ideas to help them work faster and do more. But you'll often get more work done, at a higher quality, if you slow down, focus, and keep a consistent pace.

One way to do this is to look at what you need to have done in the next 24 to 96 hours. Ask yourself, who expects me to have done what, by when? By focusing on the short term at first, you can learn how to set a slower pace. Then, you can expand your view outwards to focus on larger chunks of time.

So, start by listing people. Write down everyone you expect to spend significant time with over the next week. And this includes friends and family. Use this list as a trigger to identify anything you need to have done for these people.

Next, look at the projects, initiatives, or programs you'll spend time working on over the next twelve months.

Now look at deadlines. What deadlines or meetings are you committed to?

You now have a fairly clear overview of the major and minor obligations you have in your life right now. Your next step is to reset your pace to slow down, so you get more done.

According to the author, you need to look at three key questions.

The first is, what do you do to manage the time you have? The next is, how do you use tools and technology to help you get things done? The last question is, when do you relax and rejuvenate, to reset the pace?

The author goes into a lot more detail on the best ways to apply these questions to help us slow down, focus, and work more productively, and offers additional strategies too.

One of these is to examine what you get done between the time you wake up and 10 a.m. Over the next few days, write down everything you do by 10 o'clock that takes your time, energy, and focus. This includes everything from taking your dog out, watching the morning news, and making coffee, to checking email and listening in on a conference call.

Once you write it out, you might be surprised that there are 20 or 30 things on the list. Look at these things carefully. You have three choices here. You can keep doing each activity, delete it, or delegate it. The more you can delete or delegate, the more time you'll free up during the morning to focus on your Most Important Things for the day.

Another chapter we really liked was chapter eight. Here, the author talks about the importance of feedback to start making more. And remember, he's not just talking about earning more money. He's talking about having more time, more connections, more energy, or more big ideas.

Start by looking at the symptoms in your life that suggest you might need to make a change. For instance, maybe you got a speeding ticket yesterday because you were running late to a meeting. Perhaps you've put on weight because you've been eating too much and exercising too little. Or maybe you lost a customer because you didn't put your bid in quickly enough.

These events might seem like bad luck or just a lousy day. But the truth is that they're giving you valuable feedback. They're signs that you need to make a change.

There are some valuable insights in this chapter underscoring the importance of feedback, especially as it relates to making your work better. The author gives us a snappy phrase he uses in his own life: "If I know, I can grow."

This is why feedback is so important to him, and why he believes that all of us need to constantly solicit feedback from others, from ourselves, and from our surroundings. According to the author, feedback is the bridge between what you are doing, to what you could be doing to experience different results.

So how do you get feedback from yourself?

Well, the feedback you get from yourself has to be based on something concrete.

The author gives us six sources to use. One of these is Contribution. If you recently finished a project, gave a talk, or chaired a meeting, did anyone stop and say thanks? When people take the time to say "thank you" for your contribution, it's a good indicator that you've done something worthwhile.

Another good source of feedback is measurement. This is when you look at measurable data surrounding a particular goal. For instance, imagine you want to start a side business. You know you need to save a specific amount of money, and you need to spend time in the evening writing a business plan.

So, you can measure those two elements. How much money do you have in your savings account right now? How much did you put aside this week, or this month, to achieve your goal?

As far as your evenings go, how much time are you spending watching TV every night? Which of your evening commitments can you delete or delegate so you can spend more time working on your business plan?

As soon as you start tracking this data you'll get valuable feedback. This feedback lets you know if you're on the right track, or if you still need to make some significant changes.

The author goes into a lot more detail about the importance of feedback. He also outlines a system we can use to get more feedback from ourselves. It starts with a calendar.

Open up your calendar and count 45 days ahead of today's date. Describe in one or two paragraphs where you plan to be on a significant work project at this point. Go into detail about how it's coming along, how you're using resources, and how you will complete the project on time.

Now go ahead 90 days from today's date. Describe a project or goal in your personal life. Maybe it's a health goal, or a travel goal. What are you doing? How do you feel when you achieve this goal? Write it all down.

Last, open your calendar to one year from today. Take some time to imagine, and write down, what things will look like at work, in your personal life, and in your community.

Then, when each date comes along, you can assess how far you've come on each goal since the day you wrote in your forecast. Are you on track? Did you forget about the goal entirely? Did you surpass it? This is an easy and practical way to force yourself to inventory how you're coming along with your most important goals.

So, what's our last word on "Your Best Just Got Better?"

Put simply, we really liked this book. It's fun, it's approachable, and it's inspiring. We think the author did a great job with the tips and strategies he offers, especially because he keeps them easy and practical. A lot of his approaches rely on small changes that increase your productivity, free up time, and focus more energy on the goals that mean the most to you.

The author tells plenty of personal stories from his own life that show he's certainly not perfect. By showing us his own mistakes and weaknesses, and explaining how he used many of these strategies to improve his life dramatically, we get a real-life look at how these ideas could play out in our lives.

All in all, we have no trouble recommending this valuable book.

"Your Best Just Got Better," by Jason Womack, is published by John Wiley and Sons.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.