Smart work OR Hard work?

Smart work OR Hard work?

The debate on working hard vs. working smart, never actually ends. An eminent personality once said, “Workaholics aren’t heroes, they don’t save the day, they use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done” This is the absolute truth. People work whole day long, but in the end, they won’t gain the result of their hard work. Whereas smart people come up with better and easy ways to finish their task and the final result will be amazing.

There are two types of people in a workplace. The ones who work 24X7 a day and the ones who work just 9 hours a day. Let’s categorize the first under workaholics. They are so in love with their job that they lose sight of everything surrounding them. In other words, such people are submerged in their jobs. All that they want is to see that big smile on their boss’ face. They might do ten thousand things in a day which is not necessary at the moment and that simply means their concentration is splitting to a thousand channels. This gesture cannot be measured as productive work. Whereas the latter does only 9 hours of work a day which turns out to be much more productive and result oriented. Apparently, this has a different scenario. So, here’s the big question, do smart people not work hard? Or do hard workers not work smartly?

‘Success comes only with hard work’, this one quote has been drilled into our brains long back. People advise you to work/study for long hours, burning the midnight oil. But is it truly productive?

Hard work and smart work are correlated. In order to work hard, we need smart ideas. It’s not that someone wakes up one fine morning and decides to think smarter or work smarter. It’s a process. Working smart means to come up with effective ideas and to implement them. People who work smartly will have good time management skills. They know what to do and what not to do in the few hours of time they have.

There are people who worked smarter and won big time, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t work ‘hard’.

Let’s take the case of successful singers/actors/politicians, they tasted success only because they worked smarter. But we can’t say it was just their smartness. The amount of hard work they had put into reaching great heights is unimaginable. We just can’t measure their hard work and we don’t know what they went through to achieve all that they have today. People who are successful in their profession today had to go through so much before attaining success. Be it any profession, in order to achieve success, one needs dedication and determination. In fact, smart work and hard work go hand-in-hand. For example, take the case of musicians, they need to practice so hard to hone their skills, sometimes even for 12 hours a day, that is a big deal of hard work. And once they reach a respectable position or say, the pinnacle of success, they start making fewer mistakes and errors. Now they know how to manage time, what to do and what not to do. That’s what we call smartness. To do ‘smart’ work, one needs to set his priorities, set time and do what is necessary. Needless to say, one needs to focus on one task at a time and never try to take up everything together.

Some tips for working smart are as follows,

• Find out when you’re at your most productive time and make sure to complete the tedious tasks during that time. This strategy will help you high time.
• Try to find out shortcuts but don’t forget the fact that there are no shortcuts to success. Finding shortcuts means to do tasks in a much more efficient manner. By doing this you can save hours of your precious time. All you need to do is to check whether there is an efficient or easy way to do the same quantity of work without compromising on the quality.
• Another crucial thing is to understand your strength and weakness. Discover what you’re really good at and work accordingly. If you’re not good at something, don’t worry, take your time and indulge in some good amount of practice because we all know practice makes things better.
• Try to stay updated, no matter in which field you work on. Education, as we all know is a powerful tool. You need to gain knowledge, learn and read things in order to work smart.

Always make sure to work hard in working smart, that’s the only key to success. Don’t indulge in long hours of work if you already know that the result won’t be a masterpiece. Instead, find out better ways to attain your end result. Stay motivated, stay positive and moreover, stay YOU.

Hope this blog helps you to become a more productive person at your workplace. Adiós for now.