Yost - Tweak it: small changes, big impact make what matters to you happen every day

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Copyright 2013 by Work+Life Fit, Inc.

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Tweaks of the Week is a registered trademark owned by the author.

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First e-book edition: January 2013

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ISBN 978-1-4555-1786-2

For Andy, Emma, Maddie, and everyone who shared their work+life fit stories with me over the past seventeen years. You are my inspiration.

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious.

Thomas Moore

Work and life. As recently as twenty years ago, the rules that we all followed about when to work and when to manage everything else in life were pretty clear. Then the boundaries began to blur and the rules started to change. Unfortunately, someone forgot to send the memo with the new guidelines. Every day, we struggled to answer questions like:

Do I:

• leave work a few minutes early to get to the gym, or prepare for a meeting?
• work from home in the evening to catch up on e-mails, or meet a friend for coffee?
• cover a coworkers shift, or shop for food for the week?
• ask for overtime, or take my mother to the doctor?
• catch up on paperwork, or read at my childs school?
• go to a lunchtime networking event, or balance my checkbook?

What if I told you there was a better way? The Tweak It practice outlined in this book will make what matters to you happen. This simple weekly routine of small, deliberate choices, or tweaks, will build the foundation of contentment, well-being, and order you crave, one step at a time. Imagine, if over one year, you managed to do your job but also:

• enjoyed lunches and a cup of coffee with your friends;
• updated your online professional profile on LinkedIn and attended a few networking events;
• kept track of your checking account and credit card purchases;
• took each of your kids to lunch or the movies one-on-one;
• made sure your backup child care for the summer was in place before the last day of school;
• completed an online course to learn a new skill for your job;
• sent out presents and birthday cards on time;
• ate mostly healthy, simple meals;
• had a few date nights with your spouse or partner;
• made it to your annual physical;
• had your car serviced so it didnt break down from preventable problems and require costly repairs;
• took a walk with a group of friends or your dog a couple of times a week;
• got your hair cut regularly so you felt good about the way you look; and
• scheduled and took a vacation that let you disconnect the way you want to.

You can. How do I know? For almost two decades, Ive been on the front lines creating new, more modern and flexible ways of managing work and life. Ive worked with tens of thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations, including JPMorgan Chase, JCPenney, Ernst & Young, the U.S. Navy, and the United Nations.

Ive given individuals the tools to create successful flexibility plans that change the way they work (through telecommuting or more flexible hours) in order to manage their lives off the job. And Ive shown organizations how to use these same flexible work solutions to make their business more productive, save money, and provide better customer service.

Over those years, Ive learned seven truths about work and life in our modern, hectic world. These truths challenge many of our long-standing, core beliefs. The first three emerged as I began to study work+life issues in the early 1990s and continued up to the publication of my first book, Work+Life: Finding the Fit Thats Right for You (Riverhead), in 2004. But as I promoted that book, I became aware of an important piece missing from the work+life puzzle. This discovery led me to the last four truths and, ultimately, to the Tweak It practice youll find in these pages.

Before we go any further, its important to note that Tweak It doesnt let employers and the government off the hook. Flexibility in the way work is done is critical if wecorporations, government, and individualsare going to compete and succeed in todays highly competitive, 24/7 global economy.

The government needs to update public policies that are woefully ill suited to modern times. This includes outdated tax policies that penalize out-of-state teleworkers, overtime regulations that make it difficult for hourly nonexempt workers to access flexibility in the way they work,

And we, as individuals, need to learn how to reset the way work fits into life when we experience major life events like having a baby, caring for an aging adult, going back to school, or working in retirement. But none of these broader changes will succeed unless they are supported by a foundation of everyday contentment and order that only we can build for ourselves. This is why Tweak It is the important piece thats been missing from this big, complex puzzle. Until now. And it starts by acknowledging the seven modern truths about work and life.

In the early 1990s, I was put in charge of the day-to-day management of a group of commercial bankers. At the time, there wasnt need to train people how to fit work into the other parts of their lives. It was pretty clear. A workshop would have taken three minutes, including Q & A: