It is Not a Choice Between Working Smarter or Working Harder...it's Worse than That!
Earlier this week I was talking with a friend about the idea of working smarter. I asked her how long we have been hearing the encouraging words, “You need to work smarter not harder!” She thought for a moment and offered that it seems like a phrase that has been .jpg)
around at least twenty years. We both agreed that we’ve heard these words used usually like a healing salve in certain contexts:
- Right after a layoff was announced
- Right after a budget reduction was announced
- Right after we had been informed of our newest “stretch objective”
As our conversation continued I realized that what had originally been offered as insight intended to enlighten had clearly become cliché, guaranteed to annoy!
After our call I began to wonder what others like me might have to say on this concept of smarter vs. harder so I ventured out into the rarified air of the blog-o-sphere yet one more time. Tips! Yikes…ten things to this…five ways to that; as rapidly as I could I waded through the obvious “advice” that proliferates around topics like this and eventually settled in on a piece written recently by Nate Moller on May 6th this year titled ‘Why I Hate the Cliché Work Harder, Not Smarter.’ It turned out to be a bit of a rant on Nate’s part but he provided an interesting distinction that got me thinking further. Nate quoted Seth Godin , which these days seems a good idea when looking to establish credibility.
I’m not quite sure of the source Nate was using but Seth was making a distinction between Long Work, .i.e., hours for the sake of hours, and Hard Work, using innovative or creative thinking to come up with a novel solution to a problem. Nate’s point was that in this life there really is no escaping HARD WORK at times. OK, I get that but I wasn’t looking to wiggle out of hard work, unless it was yard work!
The messages from the piece Nate has written are valid; 1) Do not confuse long hours worked with value added, they may be the same thing but not likely.2) And for sure don't kid yourself into thinking there is any way out of hard work. But am I then to accept that HARD WORK and SMART WORK are interchangeable notions? That I do not! Unless, by HARD WORK Nate meant to suggest, or maybe it was Seth Godin’s suggestion, that it takes HARD WORK to WORK SMARTER. Now maybe we are getting somewhere and now maybe the dilemma we’ve been facing becomes clear. It is actually easier, more comfortable, more familiar, safer etc. to work longer than it is to find another (smarter) way to work.
I wonder if all these years we have been looking in the wrong place for the answer to this seeming paradox that has been posed to us about working more productively without working longer hours.
Almost for sure you know the joke about the guy looking around the street lamp for lost keys right? When asked what he’s doing he reports that while he lost his keys somewhere down the street he’s looking for them under the lamp because that’s where the light is. It seems silly and funny no matter how many times you hear it for the very reason that it is what we do. We come up against problems we don’t know how to solve and we look for solutions where we have always found them, under the metaphorical street lamp because that’s where the light is. So, we work harder and harder and harder, knowing we will not find the keys and hoping we get some credit for the hardness with which we are working and most certainly not asking for help from anyone else. If we are honest, at least with ourselves, we finally admit that left to our own resources we have no idea how to work smarter. In that moment of surrender the future opens up before us!
- Would you be willing to accept the possibility that working smarter might mean more frequent collaboration with others if it meant you’d have to share the credit for results achieved but you’d work less hours? Don’t answer too quickly.
