The Difference Between Hard Work And Smart Work
Posted by Abdul Vasi on 23 Nov 2009 at 6:00 pm | Tagged as:
You’ve heard this all your life ‘There is no substitute for hard work.’ Before going into business, any veterans in the field you might have spoken to for advice would have again emphasized the same point. And it’s true. There really is no substitute for hard work. You can never hope to own a successful till you make the effort to help it grow and flourish. However hard work without ‘Smarts’ is going to get you nowhere. You only end up utilizing your resources with no discernable result. You need to work smartly, figure out the problem and solution to it with as little wastage of resources as possible to really be able to reap the benefits of your hard work. This is the new mantra for today’s work ethics. This is called Smart Work.
Smart work essentially means that you take certain steps and measures to ensure that you always achieve the desired result after investing your time, energy and resources. You can ensure this by incorporating the following in your work schedule:
1)Delegate: Delegate as much work as possible. Don’t tire yourself out by doing the labor intensive part of any task. Delegate this part to others (who you have chosen after careful consideration).You can undertake the conceptualizing and hand over the responsibility of execution to someone else.
2)Finish Important Tasks First: Often, you may have several projects at hand and their deadlines looming on the horizon.Analyse the tasks. See which one is more important in terms of deadlines and work on that one first, instead of in serial order. This may seem random but it will ensure that you never miss deadlines.
3)Keep a Record of everything: Keep a detailed record of every assignment, task or project from its original brief to its culmination. Try and keep as much data on each as possible. You could have text, images, preseantations, graphs etc. maybe even doodles or scribbles related to the task. You never what might come in handy again.
4)Be aware: You have to keep abreast of the latest developments in your industry. Join a group that deals with your line of work or subscribe to newsletters, magazines etc. to stay aware. Networking is also an excellent way to be at par with your industry and a great way for you to learn new things.
As you probably have noticed, to be a smart worker you do not need to change your entire work methodology. You simply need to tweak some ends and add a few elements to the existing one and this gives you the path to smart work. One of the biggest advantages of smart working is that you save precious time. Time is your most valuable resource and saving time is akin to creating it. When you work smart, you also tend to be much more relaxed and stress free as you can meet deadlines easily and this in turn increases productivity. As the entrepreneur, not only should you incorporate these into your own system, you need to encourage your employees to do so as well. Collective smart work leads to a giant improvement in productivity which in turn simply leads to better profitability.
