Learning to work smart and not hard is essential to your personal development. When you work smarter you reap in all the benefits of working hard but without having to put such a physical toll on your body. You accomplish this by using and developing a certain set of skills.
Benefits of working smart:
- Get farther with less physical effort
- Have a better understanding of things
- Be more successful
- Your effort will yield better results
- You will feel Accomplished
- Stand out from fellow co-workers
- Better time management
- More free time
- Less Stress
By working smart you can accomplish just as much if not more than a regular person with less physical effort. You will need to learn to use you mind to think of ways to solve the problem at hand or get the work done in a non conventional way. This isn’t as hard as it sounds and can be very easy once you learn the steps. The most successful people in the world know and use this technique and almost everyone has at least heard of it.
Have you ever worked somewhere and saw someone completing the exact same work you are doing half the time or with a lot less effort. This isn’t because they are lucky, smarter, older, younger, or favorites of others. It’s because they are using their heads to think of creative ways to solve a task. This trait allows them to challenge the standard way of doing this task for a chance at discovering a better and faster method to reach their goal. Don’t worry you might try some things and it ends up being slow or messed up at the end this is a normal part of the learning and if you keep trying eventually you will have success. This change to the way you perform tasks will open up broad new doors that can impact you in many different ways.
You will be able to live you life as you intended without having to make sacrifices such as sleep or family time to get things done. The truth is that most things that are done can be done in half the time with the proper method of completion. This is how things are so refined and work so way in the present day. Do you think for example that cars are made the same way today as they were one hundred years ago? They have been through many many changes to the assembly process and now they are done with very little effort and costs are greatly reduced. Along the way their have been several pioneering thinkers that challenged the traditional way to make cars and their changes saved the companies they worked for a lot of time and money. That doesn’t mean that they worked harder or longer hours but that they used their heads to come up with a better solution.
This method of handling the situation leads to a more productive lifestyle and will dramatically reduce your stress. Imagine you normally spend the whole day cleaning your house. If you could find a smarter way to do this then you could do it in lets say half of a day. The extra half of the day you have left is extra time now. It can be like a reward for your efforts allowing you to have free time. This extra free time will make life more and enjoyable for you and lead to stress reduction and allow you some time to relax.
Just because you finish something much quicker that you used to doesn’t mean that its any less quality. If it is then your shortcut was too much and you need to rework your strategy to get it done in the same quality if not better. Quality is such an important element to measure the effectiveness of the work that has been completed. It’s the only true thing that is left behind the next day for people to judge how much effort went into your task.
When you think creatively you open up a barrage of questions such as “why” or “how” to unlock the mysteries of why things are being done the way they are. This will give you a better understanding of how things work and why they are done a certain way. Now if you agree to the way they are being done and don’t want to jeopardize the quality then spend the time but 90% or more of things can be improved on in some fashion or another.
Once you master the skills needed to get this development under you hat you will have so much more free time. You will be able to complete things quickly and easily without wasting all of that extra time on unimportant aspects of the task. This will allow you to get done quicker put things down and enjoy some personal fun time to do whatever it is that you want.
Tips and Advice to work smarter:
- Plan things
- Learn Time Management
- Think Outside the Box
- Organize your life
- Stick with your plans and finish things all the way through
- Find creative solutions
Time management is one of the keys to gaining this ability as a personality trait. Lean to use your time wisely and you will be able to get much more done in a smaller amount of time. There are several ways to learn better time management that I am going to teach you. Start out by planning things you are about to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s for work or at home just take a piece of paper and write down all of the things you would like to accomplish today. Then beside the things you wrote down put about how long it will take you to do them. Be reasonable and realistic it’s not a race and quality can be far more important than quantity here. Now take your list and rewrite in breaking up some of the longer tasks with periods of the smaller easier ones in between. Also, its important to give yourself plenty of breaks and down time as well. If you complete a thirty minute task then give yourself a give minute break before starting the next one. Also, make sure to schedule time in there for meals. Your goal is to try to list everything you possibly can and see if you have enough time available to complete the task at hand. Once you get your plan finished stick with it. Don’t start then get sidetracked and start wasting time. Work at a constant pace so that you don’t burn your energy out earlier and make sure to avoid things that are going to distract you such as text messaging or the phone.
Another point I want to make is don’t overload yourself. If you think you have more on your list than you can handle pick a different day to do some of the tasks if at all possible. You can even make rough draft lists for other days and plan farther ahead. Once you start organizing your life you will find that with the time you have you will get more done.
Start asking questions like “how does this work” or “why do with do it this way” and as long as its in a positive constructive manner you will find answers for as many questions as you can think of. If you are approaching a boss at work make sure you have the right attitude when you address the issue and not the wrong one. The last thing you want at work is a boss that thinks you don’t want to do what you are supposed to. Explain to him you have been working at this particular thing for some time now and you have come up with a way to make the job easier and cutting back on the it takes. In the business world time is money and if you can save a company big money they will definitely take notice.
Add some personality to things you do. There is nothing wrong with adding your own personal touch and in fact some people may enjoy seeing something that a little flair in it than from getting the same robotic result from people who are too afraid to bend the rules. This could be a great opportunity for you to accidentally discover a smarter way to get work done.
Finding creative solutions to the work you need to complete will find you ways to do things that might yield better results. Don’t feel afraid to challenge the status quot or the method that you have been told you must follow. Sometimes this is harder in a corporate environment, but you still have the ability to add your touch to things. With constant success at the way you do things you will get noticed and they might even change their policies to the way you complete tasks. Do you think that all of those policies just came out of thin air? Realistically someone in the past had a great way of doing things and they adopted it and made it policy. But, there is always room for improvement and don’t ever be afraid to let your creativity surge. Even if you have to but heads with someone in the corporate chain, family member, friend, or spouse. Don’t fear rejection if you believe in your ideas persevere until you make the difference.