Context: Change Your Environment

• “Identify a very specific area” – Decide what in your life or work you want to fix.
• “Develop strategies” – Determine what steps to take and what methods to use to achieve your targeted improvements.
• “Experiment” – Try diff...

Focus on a pared-down to-do list and commit to giving those tasks your complete attention.

Start the day by setting the alarm for the time you actually get up; don’t build in time to press the snooze button and fall back asleep.

Gather the tools you need to work more efficiently, bu...

Tap the power of your social network – the web of people with whom you are connected. Your social network existed long before the advent of Facebook or Twitter.

List the people you admire, those you want to spend more time with and those you’d like to be around less.

This categoriza...

Your beliefs determine your success. Remember, “If you think you can, you can.”

Thinking bigger involves building “self-efficacy” – the belief that your actions will succeed. Self-efficacy can be hard to maintain when you have more priorities on your to-do list than you have time to comple...

Imagine your ideal day. What time would you get up in the morning? What would you do first? What would you accomplish? Who would you be with? Visualizing your ideal day and committing that vision to paper will help you “work smarter, think bigger and make more.”

Like most people, you tend to keep doing what you have always done. What you have been doing thus far has taken you to where you are now, so your routines probably seem successful. But to achieve more, you must do more, and that means changing your routine.

 The people surrounding you greatly influence the choices you make, even if you don’t realize it. This includes people you physically interact with, as well as those in your social networks. To change your habits, change the people around you who influence you; add a person or tw...

Making more – money, time, opportunities, memories or anything else – requires creating a continuous cycle of improvement. One powerful way to continue improving is to ask for feedback.

When you redirect your focus, your perspective changes, and when that happens, you have a significant...

With so little time in the day, follow a three-step process to achieve your targets: “set a goal, be consistent” and “take action.” Identify your “Most Important Things” (MITs) – the top goals you want to address during a set time period.

How will you break down these goals? Some people ma...

Arrange your workspace with care: What visual and auditory distractions break your focus? Visual distractions might include piles of papers on your desk, a blinking phone light or any stimulus that draws your attention from work. Auditory distractions are prevalent in open plan offices.

Foc...

• First, to work smarter, use all the available time in your schedule, identify your top priority tasks, pare your task list down and maintain your focus. To work better, change your work habits, even if your existing habits brought you success.

A day consists of 96 blocks of time that are 15 minutes long, so each 15-minute block is about 1% of your day. You can dramatically increase your efficiency by managing the time on your calendar in blocks of a quarter of an hour. When you suddenly have an extra 15 minutes, such as when a ...

Changing the way you work requires gathering data, something that most business professionals understand. To reduce interruptions and to make sure you do your work when you are at your best, monitor your work habits and record any changes.

For example, if you want to increase the numbe...

• “Results” – At the end of a set period of time, consider how the matters you want to change are going now.
• “Experience” – This is how you feel your life is transpiring.
• “Contribution” – “Who said thanks?” View others’ apprec...

To make more, you have to focus to finish. Two techniques can help you maintain your focus, though they have varying degrees of effectiveness:

• Use the “stop and do” tactic when a task should take so little time that it makes sense to just go ahead and do it. This approach can lead to a...