Work Smarter Not Harder

Unless you live under a crack rock, I am sure that you have heard the phrase"work smarter not harder".

A lot of people use this phrase to explain their lack of hard work. These people are lazy. They're not working smarter. They are just trying to get out of work by pretending they're smart.

Some people however are actually able to work smarter and get more done. Below I will give you an example of this, and possibly the training needed to accomplish this. It is easy if you change your way of thinking.

In the following example I will use two people. One is a union carpenter named Bob. The second is a non union carpenter named Felipe.

A huge hotel is being renovated and all of the rooms still need trim work done. Bob is in room 724 and Felipe is across the hall in room 723. Both rooms are equal size, and both rooms have the exact same things needing done. Trim work around the floor, doors, ceilings, windows, etc.

Once Bob gets his trim cut for the entire room, he will next have to glue it. As he walks into the hallway to grab the glue, Bob also grabs the nailer, the air hose, the nails, and everything else that he will need to perform his tasks in the near future.

Felipe finishes cutting his trim for one window and goes to grab the glue. He comes back and glues his trim. He then Returns to the hallway and grabs the nailer. When he needs more Nails he makes another trip to the hallway to grab more nails. After that, he begins to cut trim for a doorway, repeating the entire process over again.

Bob is relaxed, working at a normal pace and actually enjoying himself as he performs his work. Bob takes great pride in his craftsmanship, and he enjoys what he is doing.

Felipe is rolling in sweat, running back and forth, and trying to work as fast as he can. He is working very hard but he is still struggling. Felipe needs this job. He needs to send money back home to his family.

To the onlookers, Felipe seems to be working way harder than Bob. Bob hears one of the people say, "wow what a hard worker", as they are looking into Felipe's room.

As they notice the speed at which Bob is moving, they seem to be in disbelief at the fact that he still has a job. In comparison, Bob appears to be moving at the speed of a tortoise while Felipe is moving as fast as a hare. The onlookers stand and shake their heads in disbelief at Bob's laziness.

As the audience continues on down the hallway to inspect the progress of the renovation, Bob finishes his first room and moves on to the next. Felipe is still struggling, he is almost halfway through his first room but he can't understand how Bob is getting so much more done.

This is a pretty extreme example, and it usually happens on much a smaller scale but thousands of times a day by the same type of people. They just seem to have too many wasted movements. They also lack the proper training needed to complete the job efficiently.

Some people can achieve the exact same results with far less work. In the hypothetical case of Bob and Felipe, Bob would have possibly finished three or four rooms in the time it took Felipe to do one. Felipe was working way harder but Bob was working smarter.

Felipe was trying to rush so that he could keep up with Bob, but rushing also caused Philipe to make mistakes which he had to correct, therfore wasting even more time.

In the end, Bob's finished product looked far better and it was done in a much shorter time period. Bob worked efficiently. Felipe lacked the proper training, and mindset. This caused Felipe to create a subpar product at a much higher price. It was not because Felipe wasn't working hard. He just needs to learn to work smarter.

Image source