How To Work Smarter, Not Harder
If you are a manager, you have multiple responsibilities around meeting specific business deliverables, budgets and managing people. That’s a lot of work that you need to oversee each day. How do you create business plans, budgets and find time to listen and set goals for each team member?
If you want to be a successful manager, take the time to acquire skills that help you drive your business unit. What do you need to learn to stay on top of your work and create a balance in your life?
There are many different articles available to guide you in working smarter in your life.
Jeff Haden on Inc.com, wrote the piece “5 Scientifically Proven Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder.” In this article the author is addressing how to take care of yourself: take more breaks, naps, spend time in nature, move and work in blocks, and surprisingly, check your email first thing. When you take a break, you have a chance to recharge your body and sharpen your thinking. They say, on an average, a brain can remain focused for only 90 minutes. We all try to push the envelope and plow through until completion beyond the 90 minute period. Are we still productive with the extra time? He provides other ways to recharge your battery and use your focus for excellence.
Here is a post on Forbes.com “Want to Work Smarter, Not Harder? Follow These 14 Steps.” This post provides a reality check:
If you want to work smarter, you need to take a good, hard look at your daily tasks and learn to prioritize them or pass them off to someone else when necessary.
These 14 Steps help you create a strong management style and learn how to use your time wisely. Some ideas are: delegate, tighten up meetings, hire people smarter than you, manage your habits, do one thing at a time, slow down, understand the value of your time and more. Learning to do the most important tasks and not the easy ones, so you feel you have accomplished something, helps in building a smarter work lifestyle.
One step I would like to focus on is “hiring people smarter than you.” Why would you want to do this? Maybe hiring someone who is smarter than you can create anxiety around your role in the company. A smart manager knows that people are the most important asset in the business. Business today is focused mainly on knowledge or service, so intelligent people are needed if you want to succeed in business. Smart people create a stronger team by providing diverse ideas to strengthen a product or a service.
Check out CIO.com’s article by Sharon Florentine “Why You Should Hire People Smarter Than You.” All the big technology companies recognize that hiring smarter people improves performance for the whole company. To know if they are smarter than you, you need to review your strengths and weaknesses and be willing to let go of your ego.
In Harvard Business Review, there is an article written by Rebecca Knight “How to Manage People Who Are Smarter Than You.” After you hire them, you have to build a working relationship with people who know more than you about a specific subject. How do you build trust and respect from each member of your team?
Your Thoughts
In your experience, do the articles presented here provide you with helpful tools to manage your teams and working smarter? You may have other ideas that worked for you and could be beneficial to others…love to see your comments.
Be well,
Pat
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