Your Best Just Got Better

Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Achieve More

Jason W. Womack

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781118121986
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118230039
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Imagine if your best just got better every single day

In Your Best Just Got Better, productivity expert Jason Womack teaches readers that working longer hours doesn't make up for a flawed approach to productivity and performance. Workers need to clarify their habits, build mindset-based strategies, and be proactive. Womack's signature "workplace performance" techniques offer specific strategies to consistently and incrementally improve performance.

Readers will:

• Understand the fundamentals of workflow and the principles of human performance
• Arm themselves with the tools and the processes to get more of their work done, on time, with fewer resources, and with less stress

Making your best better won't happen overnight, but learning how to effectively manage just a few critical success factors lead to an effective workday and an overall successful professional career.

PART 1

Work Smarter

In the workplace, there is a constant feeling of pressure to do more and more. . .often with less. How many of you have less time and fewer resources while you’re managing bigger goals and more complexity? New projects arrive, team members move on, and the organization’s leadership sets bigger, or different, goals. Simultaneously, opportunities arise, surprises show up, and life changes on a personal level, as well. How smart you work depends on: how well you know yourself, how clear your next-level goals are, and how you’re using that all-too-limited resource, time. These are the topics of the first three chapters of this book.

Successful people set a clear direction to move in, and work effectively utilizing all their strengths. By applying just a little focus to when you’re at your best, you can improve the way you approach the things you need to get done, both on the job and off. Don’t just wish things were different; set yourself up to engage and make new things possible. As business philosopher Jim Rohn said, “Instead of wishing things were easier, wish you were better.”

Setting realistic goals does not mean you should understate what you think is possible. Instead, direct your focus toward the experience of completion and give ample attention to the next milestone of achievement. Build a series of bridges as you continually reach toward experiencing more of your Ideal Days.

With only 96 15-minute blocks in a 24-hour day, and more to do than we have time to do it in, we need to work smarter, getting more of the right things done. When you identify tasks that take too much time, and practice ways to work productively, effectively, and efficiently, you could easily net 1 to 3 extra 15-minute blocks of time each day. With 15 to 45 extra minutes tomorrow, and every day after that, imagine how you could make progress toward setting up and experiencing your own Ideal Days!

I promise, after reading and implementing the ideas in the next three chapters you’ll have more time, energy, and focus to make progress and achieve more of your Most Important Things!

Chapter 1

Improvement and You

Identifying Your Role in Making Your Best Better

In 1988, Nike launched its Just Do It advertising campaign. Ever since, those three words have been used to motivate, inspire, encourage, and even demand people to take on all kinds of goals and work harder to make things happen—personally and professionally. What have you ever tried to “just do”? Of course, that slogan may resonate for some people, some of the time, for some of the things they work to achieve. But if you’re anything like me (and I’m assuming you’re at least a little like me since you’re reading this book), you’ve occasionally found that “just doing it” can be hard.

When you take on something big, it can be daunting to think, “Okay, I’ll just do it.” How do you make it easier to achieve a goal, or even begin to move in a specific direction?

To identify your role in making your best better, you must know how you work, how you think, and how you make things happen. The better you understand yourself, the better able you will be to work effectively and efficiently to get the important things done.

When you think of changing the way you do things, how you can work smarter, think bigger, and make more, stop and ask yourself:

• Where do I begin?
• What if it’s too much to take on?
• What if something doesn’t work out?
• What if I’m not yet ready to start?

These kinds of “contingency” questions are extremely useful when you’re project planning; you have the opportunity to bring up all kinds of possible scenarios. Unfortunately, for more creative people (you among them, perhaps?), these kinds of questions may actually slow you down; you may even stop and question that which you’re planning to change (and hopefully) improve. These questions can force hesitation; even worse, prompts like this may make you feel so intimidated by the prospect of taking action that you end up just not doing it. (Sorry, Nike.)

What are you interested in making better? That is, “Why did you pick this book?” Of all the books on improving your performance, increasing your productivity, and getting more of what you want, you picked this one.

I know you can work smarter, think bigger, and make more. I, myself, have used all the techniques that I write about, and I coach clients around the world to test the very same principles, methods, and activities I outline for you here. As you can guess, the campaign that I promote is: “Just get started!”

Once you clarify your role in improvement, you’ll use every chapter in this book as a rung on the ladder to success. Each chapter in each part adds another level of depth to the overall mission of professional and personal development.

Now, you must be wondering, “Okay, how do I do that? How do I ‘just get started?’” Fortunately, the I.D.E.A. elements I teach will guide you in taking personal responsibility and achieving your goals. They are:

I: Identify a very specific area you want to improve. Focus your attention on making the best better in one area of your life, and clarify what that will look like when you get there.

D: Develop strategies to engage in specific actions and techniques to direct your professional improvement and personal development. Acknowledge the process—remember, you’re just getting started! An important aspect is that the most sustainable changes people tend to make usually start small, are repeated with consistency, and often result in a payoff greater than anyone could have hoped.

E: Experiment by planning for and taking actions that generate bursts of momentum. Experimenting gives you the freedom to stop at any time to try something new. It also provides a more objective framework so that you can determine whether you should stop or continue moving forward. When you take specific actions to make your best better, it continues to get better.

A: Assess the value the effort has created. Here is the question I consistently ask myself, my friends, my family, even my clients: “Is what you’re doing worth the effort?”

It All Starts with You

Begin at the beginning; tell your own story—the tale of you getting from where you were to where you are to where you are going. There’s no time like the present; take the time right now to clarify your role in making your best better.

One of my favorite sayings comes from a high school math teacher who said, “If you wait long enough, the bell will ring!” There are several distinct factors and experiences that set me on this path of learning, experimentation, and achievement. Throughout the book, I will share them with you. My hope in doing so is that you will generate new ideas of what you can do. Read this book, talk about the ideas with your friends and colleagues, and practice with the ideas and exercises. Little by little, your best will get better.

Since before I started college, I’ve been interested in how people get from here to there. I distinctly remember having dinner one night while I was still in high school and living with my father, stepmother, and younger brother. One evening I asked my dad, “When did you know you were an executive?”

He was the president and COO of a store called The Sharper Image, and I wanted to know what he had done to get there. He talked about the work he had done to figure out how he worked most effectively, and the goals he set for each three-year period of his life. He also told me about the importance of patience and pacing, something that I believe I’ve gotten better at over the past few decades.

Beginning in August 2000, and for the next six years, I worked as a senior facilitator with David Allen, originator of Getting Things Done (GTD), a work-life management system. I coached senior leaders in effective workflow and organization strategies, and presented more than 350 GTD seminars in Europe, South America, and throughout the United States. During that same time, my wife Jodi (who was the first full-time employee of David Allen Company) worked as an office administrator, customer service liaison, and public seminar coordinator.

In 2006, I decided to set a new goal, and it was then that I launched The Jason Womack Company. I had gained the experience of working for someone else in presenting information; now it was my turn to create content, publish reports and articles, and work with clients focused on their next level of success. I am dedicated to advising individual leaders at small to large-sized companies, providing “Workplace Performance” seminars and coaching.

The company is now more than five years old, and I continue to take my leadership role as a founder very seriously. I use all of the methods and systems you’ll read about in this book to manage the complexities, surprises, and successes of our coaching and publishing company. How do I do it? It’s quite simple (though not always easy!); I continue to return to the theme of this chapter: I just get started.

Let me share with you how some of my goal-setting and strategic planning sessions with mentors have changed things for the better for me.

Over lunch one day with my long-time mentor, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, I shared my dedication to a three-step process, which I outline in detail a little later in the chapter: (1) Set a goal. (2) Be consistent. (3) Take action. During that discussion and throughout subsequent e-mail conversations, he encouraged me to stay on message. “What is it you want to do?” he asked. Though it sounds like a simple question, it took us a couple of hours to discover the real core goal I had set for my small company:

I teach principles of human psychology and sociology that make it easier to get done what you have to do, so you have the time, energy, and focus for what you really want to do.

That is the ultimate goal for my company—and, this book! The statement also acts as a filter while I’m interviewing a client, talking with a journalist, writing an article, or serving as an advisor to a board. It’s the entire purpose of my work. If we ever get to share a conversation, and if what I am sharing with you can help you work smarter, think bigger, and make more, let’s keep talking and figure out a way to work together!

I reflect often on that lunchtime conversation with Marshall. I know it was one of two best things I did when my wife and I were preparing to launch this company. A second memorable coaching session also took place over a meal some time later.

The next meeting Jodi and I scheduled was with another of our mentors, Jim Polk, here in our hometown of Ojai, California. We met for breakfast one morning to share the overarching goal of our company. He encouraged us to think about the overall strategy of our company—that is, what would indicate that we were living and working “on purpose”? His questions were intense, and the conversation was deep.

Subsequently, Jodi and I had several conversations about the prompts that Jim gave us; they were great business development questions we could come back to again and again. And, notably, they triggered our thinking b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Praise for Your Best Just Got Better
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part 1: Work Smarter
• Part 2: Think Bigger
• Part 3: Make More
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Index