Part of my journey involves steadily improving my level of productivity and success, and helping you improve yours. Along the way to such a goal, it’s important to deliver your best work, not just for the satisfaction of doing it, but because your best work is:
- Less likely to generate problems or require re-work,
- More likely to produce good outcomes, and
- More likely to bring you better opportunities and personal success.
But there’s an inherent difficulty here: what you produce is not always your best work. That’s true for everyone. Even the best of us generally produce a significant amount of average work, even if our average is higher than most other people’s. And – let’s face it – we also produce a certain amount of work that’s sub-par, work we realistically could have done better, but didn’t.
That’s why it’s useful to put into practice some approaches that can help you produce more of your better work – up to and including your best.
These approaches include:
Manage the Pressure
Research shows there’s a “sweet spot” of pressure that tends to bring out the best in people.
Too much pressure will have you feeling rushed, full of self-doubt, unable to focus fully, and prone to mistakes. When you’re under heavy pressure, you’re unlikely to perform at your best.
Too little pressure will have you feeling indolent, distracted, unmotivated, and maybe even lazy. When nothing is pushing you to greatness, you’re unlikely to try very hard or care very much about the quality of your performance.
Just the right amount of pressure, however – and this amount is different for each of us, at different times, in different situations – will have you feeling highly motivated, tightly focused, and fully engaged in the task, project, or goal at hand. Just the right pressure is ideal for generating top-flight work products.
With practice, you can learn to vary the level of pressure you’re feeling by adjusting whatever factors are under your control. Note that in different situations, certain of these factors may be fully, partially, or not-at-all under your control:
- The amount of time you spend on the task, project, or goal,
- The constraints under which you’re operating, including budget, resources, tools, and all the rest,
- Your knowledge of and experience with the details involved,
- The important unknowns and variables involved,
and so forth.
Make Your Own Choices
Another way to upgrade the quality of your deliverables is to consciously avoid the simple, obvious, default choices available to you. Meekly accepting whatever is offered tends to restrict your opportunities to do anything different from what others do, or to consistently exceed the level of quality at which they do it. You’re automatically part of the crowd.
The better approach to delivering your best work is to think things through on your own, do your own research, draw your own conclusions, and make your own choices about:
- What to do,
- How to do it,
- What tools to use,
and any other options that may pertain.
Taking your own path helps you see problems and possible solutions with fresh eyes, and affords you more opportunities to make use of your own ideas, preferences, resources, talents, knowledge, and skill sets. In a great many cases, the more clearly you chart your own course, the more opportunities you will enjoy to produce your best work.
Revise Freely
One problem with feeling rushed or otherwise constrained is that you usually won’t allow yourself enough time and flexibility to think about what you’re doing and ways to do it better.
This is unfortunate, because the path to your best work product almost always runs through the “realm of revision.”
In other words, your first idea, your first attempt, your first iteration of anything is unlikely to be your best. You can almost always do better when you take more time to look in depth at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and then to experiment and explore possibilities for improvements.
That’s why:
- Making a prototype can be so valuable,
- Rewriting your material before you send it out can make it more effective, and
- “Sleeping on a decision” or putting work aside and coming back to it later can vastly upgrade the quality of your work.
When you give your subconscious mind a challenge plus time to work, you often generate superior insights, procedures, tactics, and strategies.
Of course, there’s no guarantee your second and third ideas are any better than your first. The key to improving your results, then, is to keep working, keep revising, keep striving to improve your deliverables. Generally speaking, the more revisions you go through, the better the odds that your work will improve.
In my experience, no one is able to perform at 100% all of the time. But when it counts the most, these approaches can help you boost the frequency with which you deliver your best in both your work and your life.
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