I'm sure that if you spent any amount of time on the Internet you saw at least one article talking about why it's always better to work smart than hard, and why you should start doing it immediately in order to boost your profits and reduce the time you spend doing something you don't particularly like.
I might've wrote one of those articles in the past as well, blinded by the fact that I wasn't really working smart at all. I was working really hard, but that was it.
One important factor that those articles never really mention is the requirements for working smart. You see, when someone decides to talk about why you should begin working smarter, not harder, they usually give fairly easy to understand examples to prove their point, which is nice, but not always applicable for everyone.
Now, I'm not gonna talk about general things you can do to "work smarter" such as time management, organizing your environment and all that general crap. Those are things you will eventually understand in time, as you read dozens of articles featuring pretty much the same methods again and again.
What I want to focus on is the experience of a person who understands the task that needs to be done, and then uses his other existing skills to reduce the time it takes for him or her to do that specific task (or tasks, depending on their job).
For example, let's say you work at a job and part of what you need to do on a daily basis is do a bunch of math that involves simple operations, such as adding and subtracting numbers. Some of that math repeats itself again and again, and the only variable that you need to change is the daily numbers that are always different.
So, you can go about this in two ways: either get so good at typing and doing that math that it takes you less time that it would take someone else, which is good enough, or create something like an Excel sheet to do the math for you. If you have operations that you have to repeat again and again, automating an Excel file to do them for you and reducing your work to only adding the numbers that change daily to the file, will greatly reduce the amount of work you have to do every day for that specific task.
Let's think of another example, this one being really simple and already automatized, to a certain degree - sending emails. Let's say you work in a company that has around 50 important clients, and every week you need to send an e-mail to each client with certain types of data from the company.
Now, since it's a task that you do once a week, you can take it easy and just write all the emails in a single day when you have to send them all. It's gonna take you a few hours, but it's nothing you can't do. If you get bored, you can even begin to copy and paste a few of them, and change small little things here and there in order to move a bit faster.
The other method would be for you to come up with an e-mail template, and then search for a piece of software that allows you to add that template to it, and then select parts of the email that you need to edit (such as the names for each client, the data they need, numbers, etc), and then use that template to make your work a lot easier. Instead of writing 50 more or less unique e-mails, you write a single general one and then you simply edit the important and unique data in each email.
This kind of "shortcut" can cut your working time from several hours to 30 - 40 minutes, depending on the amount of work required to put in all the data you have for the clients.
You get the point.
But the important part that a lot of people don't always mention in their articles is the fact that in order for you to do any of those things, you need to know what exactly you're doing. You can't begin to work smart on your first day at the job, unless you are really good at what you do, and you've worked in the industry before.
You need to know your job as well as different tools that you can use to reduce the amount of work you have to put in. You can't make an Excel file to automate some of the math you need to do daily if you don't know how to use Excel at even the most basic level, and you can't create an automated e-mail system using a template you create if you don't even know that's possible.
Experience in different fields, and experimentation with different tools throughout life are pretty important factors when it comes to working smart.
I can't work smart in Photoshop by creating Actions to reduce the amount of time I spend doing things that I have to repeat again and again if I don't even know that actions are a thing.
I can't create scripts for myself to bind certain actions to certain keys on my keyboard or my mouse if I don't know that tools such as AutoHotKey exist.
I can't create programs for myself, such as a folder creator that let's me create as many folders as I want, or a software that allows me to quickly put together repetitive + dynamic commands without having to spend a lot of time rewriting the same repetitive commands again and again, unless I know a bit of coding.
This can keep going.
Experience is what makes working smart a possibility. If you don't know what tools are available to you, or what tools exist out there, it's gonna be hard for you to hugely reduce the amount of work you have to do, while being as productive, or even more productive, than before. Even if you're smart, and you can create those tools yourself, that can take way more time than it would if you'd simply know that the tool exists, and that you can download it and begin using it in minutes.
Being generally experienced, both at what you do and at different skills and areas in your life will allow you to work a lot smarter than simply doing things such as time management or keeping your desk organized.