How to work smart

You have been taught to work hard, no matter what the cost, put in the effort and results will follow. This was the narrative at school, by your parents and a principle that just seemed good to follow. I felt this too. When I entered the working world my perspective on this began to shift. Not that working hard is a bad thing, but it isn’t as important as knowing how to work smart.

For clarification, I will define the two:

Work hard — no matter the cost, run at full steam the whole time, for every second of the working day. Not usually sustainable and leads to burn out.

Work smart — doing the most important tasks at the time where you have most energy, and doing the tasks which require less brain power when you have less energy.

Trying to operate at 100%

The first trigger in switching approach, for me, was facing burnout. For the first time after university I was in an office for 8 hours a day; working as close to capacity as possible. I would get home and simply crash. It was manageable on a Monday but as the week went on my rate of getting things done massively depleted. I wanted to sustain my output throughout the week, but also not write off my evenings and weekends to recover. Trying to operate at 100% all of the time is not sustainable. I was working hard but my output was limited as a result. Instead I needed to work smart.

I began looking into productivity and came across the work of Chris Bailey. Chris spent a year testing…