Member-only story
Everyone’s chasing this idea of “work smarter, not harder.” I personally believe that many people regularly overstate how busy they are (more on that in a second), but business is complex these days for sure. You’ve got digital tools proliferating by the second. Globalization’s a real thing; I just did some business with some people in Singapore and New Zealand, two places I’ve absolutely never been. And, of course, most managers are terrible at their jobs — 82 percent by some estimate. So you’ve got all these things to figure out and the person who should help you, i.e. your manager, is probably a target-chasing buffoon.
Hard to argue that we’re moving towards “work smarter not harder” in that environment, right?
But maybe there’s a way to capture this mythical unicorn of work smarter not harder. Let’s run through a couple of steps on this idea, shall we?
Work smarter not harder: The psychology
Because work is (still, at least) made up of human beings, you cannot strip the psychology from any discussion about it. We often do, but that’s dumb. Work is an emotional place. You spend hours there. People evaluate you. How could it not be emotional? Sheesh.
We tend to over-complicate most work discussions in about 17,933 different ways, but let me keep this simple for you. In…
