Working Smarter & Harder

Traditionally, spending a lot of time at the workspace meant for employers that the employee was putting a lot of effort to succeed, showing motivation and dedication to their mission.

Measuring effort has always been easier for manual jobs because we could easily describe the tasks required to perform and job and measure the effort and the outcome. Spending more time in the workspace automatically translated into improved productivity. This is why many managers still require people to come to the office to work rather than work remotely. While usually, workers’ additional time was paid as overtime, that was not the case for office workers, especially when they had a managerial position.

This mindset prevailed for centuries, and employees, who wanted to show their devotion to the organization and to the boss, spent too many hours at the office. Bosses also should spend many hours at the office, being the first to come and the last to leave, setting a good example to the team, and becoming role models for others.

While spending a lot of time at the office could usually mean that you could deliver more, that was not always the case, especially when people were procrastinating, losing their energy and ability to focus and work effectively.

This is why in the last decades, the motto of “working smart, not hard” became widespread and in fashion. What’s certainly true is that spending a lot of time at work doesn’t necessarily make you more efficient and productive, whether you are an employee or a leader. On the contrary, it may lead to inertia, complacency, anxiety, toxicity, negative energy, depression, burnout, and more. That would negatively affect your performance and the performance of your organization.

Having good energy is important to people, especially in the knowledge economy. Working effectively on gathering, processing, and sharing information and communicating collaboratively with many stakeholders (peers, customers, suppliers) is what delivers value. To have positive energy and a clear mind, people need to take care of their well-being and disconnect from work, whether this means going to the gym or for a walk, spending more time with family and friends, taking a vacation, etc.

While it’s true that “working hard and stupid” has no value, it is a misunderstanding that we can succeed by working “smart but not hard”. It’s a myth!

Certainly, if we were working in an ideal Cosmos where our bosses, peers, teams, partners, authorities, and family would be excellent, efficient, and supportive, that motto could have been true.

However, in reality, our Cosmos is far from perfect and ideal. All our ecosystems are super inefficient, thus draining our valuable time and energy, sometimes caused by unreliable people, inefficient processes, unexpected events, or emergencies.

We need to follow up with many unreliable people in order to achieve something simple; we need to spend a lot of time convincing a boss or a peer or a subordinate or a government official, our kid, or our spouse about simple topics. Our company’s IT systems failures or utility outages can delay or destroy our plans. Transportation delays or cancelations can cause us to lose valuable time. Sudden requests by the boss, the bank, or a tax authority require additional time, even for topics we thought were already settled. House, car, or office emergencies could happen at any time. Family or health emergencies will take an important part of time and energy.

How efficient we are doesn’t depend only on how smart to handle those situations or how fast we can convince people but also depends on the personalities and organizations we deal with in our Cosmos. Even the smartest and most efficient people usually become inefficient because of the imperfect ecosystems where we live. When we have ambitious plans and demanding schedules, we can only recover the lost time caused by our inefficient Cosmos by working more. Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand to solve this situation.

We certainly need to work smart but also hard so that we complete a lot of necessary or unnecessary errands, the ones which are caused by our inefficient ecosystem, so that we have some time to invest in quality work and real value-producing activities such as strategy formulation, presentation to key stakeholders, coaching and aligning leaders, engaging with customers, key suppliers, and partners, being informed about what going on or learning a new skill.

Especially for leaders to succeed, they do need to work “smart & hard” because they need to engage many humans with different personalities, and this is not possible unless you invest time in one-on-one and many-to-many discussions.

ISOROPIN is extremely difficult. You need to “work smart & hard”.