Choosing Smart Work Over Hard Work
One of the things that life should teach you from experience is that it is only the result that is always recognized and rewarded. I ask you, in your place of work for example and you are the boss; if an employee works so hard for hours on a task and not finally complete it, while another employee finds and easier and better way to get the task done and does it within minutes and completes the task, who will you reward? Obviously, it will be the employee that has completed the task. It is not how hard or how challenging the steps you have taken that will guarantee the result. You have to understand that there are easier ways to get what you want to do done. When you understand this, you will favour smart work over hard work.
Working smart simply means putting your time, resources, and energy towards effective and efficient usage to achieve a result with minimal efforts. This includes using assistance, from technology, tools, etc, and learning to streamline your tasks and take on high-impact tasks as a matter of priority. To work smart, you have to learn to prioritise your tasks and begin with the most relevant. You also need to remove distractors and focus on the clear goals that you have set. You can delegate tasks where necessary. Then you have to understand that you cannot do it relying 100% on manpower. So try to incorporate other assistance like technology, automation, mechanisation, etc.
Before this era, if someone tells you that they are farmer, you will automatically imagine them going through intense physical and manual labour to undergo farming activities. However, in this era now, by reason of industrialisation and mechanisation, a lot of ease have been seen in the farming sector. Not just that, but with higher productivity, reduced labour, and quicker time. Some days back, I paid one of my friends a visit in his farm and he was telling me about the evolution of farming in his family and the journey so far. His grandfather was a farmer because it was their family business. Then his father took after that and then him.
However, what made the difference is how the business has evolved over the years. He told me that when he was a kid and would follow his grandfather to the farm, he would watch him exert so much effort and manpower in his farm because of minimal farm implements at that time. Then during his father's era, he had access to simple machines and other tools to make it easier and better. Then fast-forward to his own era, he has integrated industrial automation into his own and his farm could run over 75% without human supervision, and he now experiences even more productivity than his forebears ever did. Same farming business, but different approach, which lead to different results.
In everything that you do, you have to keep your mind focused on result. With that, you will look for the best available way to get to it. Trust me, no matter how hard you have tried a thing, if you do not have a result to show for it, then there will not be any proof. But when you have the result, then it will validate the methods no matter how easy it may look. You do not have to knock yourself out with work for you to know that you made an attempt, you just have to have results to show for it. When people were using the manual typewriter, document processing was tedious and tiring, but when computer systems came on board, it became easy, quicker and better to process documents.
I was going through one of the biographies of the late Steve Jobs, who was a very pivotal innovator behind the establishment of Apple Inc. He was asked how he normally picks the people to work with him and he quickly replied that he loved to employ "lazy" people. The interviewer feeling curious by the response asked the reason behind it, then he said that he discovers that when he gives a lazy person a task to do, they will always come up with the fastest and easiest way to get the job done. After all, the ultimate idea is to get the work done, not to flex hard work. Of course, the person that works smart with results is better than the person that has put in so much hard work without achieving the result. So focus more on working smart and on the result that you want to obtain.
Thanks for reading
