Business & Tech

'Tweak' Work, Personal Life for Better Fit, Local Author Says

Cali Williams Yost's new book 'Tweak It: Make What Matters To You Happen Every Day' helps people manage their personal and professional lives.

Eight years after local author Cali Williams Yost's first book helped people add flexibility to when and where they work to achieve a better fit for their professional and personal lives, she has written a new book about making small changes to help people manage their lives in a more satisfying way on a day-to-day basis.

While her 2005 book "Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You" addressed making "official" changes to work hours and locations, Yost realized there was an even more basic need: people were having trouble making time to clean their homes and meet with friends.

"I realized people didn't even know how to get to the gym," Yost said. "The everyday aspects of life and managing your job weren't happening."

Yost's new book, "Tweak It: Make What Matters To You Happen Every Day," was released this week and a launch event is planned in the borough on Thursday.

A discussion about "Tweak It" is scheduled for 7:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Sages Pages. Yost will be interview by Julie Burstein, Peabody Award-winning WNYC Radison producer and best-selling author of "Spark: How Creativity Works" at the event.

Yost is the president and founder of Work+Life Fit, Inc., a company that works with businesses to help empower individuals manage how work fits in their lives.

Yost said she is a Sages Pages customer and the owner of the bookstore, Lillian Trujillo, is supportive of her as an author, which is how she came to be holding Thursday's event there. Yost lives in Madison with her husband and two daughters.

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'Naturals'

Yost has come to find that about 10 to 15 percent of people "intuitively understand how to manage everything." She calls those people "the naturals" and explores how they make their work and personal lives fit. The book distills their secrets to key points:

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  • Recognize you have to manage your work life fit
  • Keep work and personal calendar and priority list in the same place so you consider both in the same picture
  • Spend 30 minutes each week looking at the picture to see what you want more or less of. "If you see a gap, take a small action that closes that gap."

Over time, people build a foundation of well being and order, Yost said.

The book has a companion, mobile-optimized website designed to let people share their "tweaks": www.tweakittogether.com.

"I'm excited about it," she said.

Ultimately, the book is meant to help people develop manage their lives, which Yost said is "a new, modern skillset we need to have" as many of the traditional boundaries between work and personal lives have collapsed with smartphones and networks that allow people to work from home.


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