Run Your Own Business by Infinite Ideas

Author:Infinite Ideas [Infinite Ideas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Ltd
Published: 2012-03-29T23:00:00+00:00

25. Work smarter, not harder

Working smarter is another management maxim seen as a modern development, but the seed of the idea was there back in 1758 when Benjamin Franklin advised us in The Way to Wealth to ‘let us then be up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity’.

An enthusiastic advocate of hard work, Franklin was not blind to the fact that labor for labor’s sake is not in itself a virtue and that real productivity goes hand in hand with the ability to focus on the real goals and deliverables.

The working culture of long hours and lunchtimes snatched at the keyboard is no longer the purely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon it once was. Increasingly, employees feel they are expected to put in long hours in order to show commitment. Often this culture comes in by means of an insidious creep, where nobody wants to be seen to go home earliest or take the longest lunch break, and a lose/lose escalation kicks off.

Working smarter can really be boiled down to a combination of personal organization, prioritizing and (where appropriate) delegation – in that order.

Personal organization starts with managing your diary at the very least, and project management software if that’s what you are using. A lot of work crises that seem to ambush us at the last minute are, if we are honest with ourselves, entirely predictable were we to spend a little more time with our diaries working out deadline clashes. If your project is very complicated then project management software, with its ability to track and schedule multiple stages and tasks within a single project, is well worth the investment in both finance and learning that you need to get up to speed.

Prioritization goes hand in hand with organization. You have to be absolutely ruthless about which deadlines are critical and which are merely desirable. It’s a classic human error to waste time dabbling on two projects rather than focusing on just one, or to be distracted into working on the more attractive one despite it being less urgent.

Delegating is part of prioritizing. If you’ve managed your time looking forwards and realize that you’re not going to be able to satisfy the demands on you, then you may need to look to some personal outsourcing if you’re still going to hit your goals. Small businesses, sole traders and self-made entrepreneurs are notoriously bad at this since they tend to resent paying anyone else for something they can do themselves. Often, however, this means that while your clients pay you for a skill they value, you are wasting your own time on skills they don’t – such as bookkeeping or admin. We know it’s not cost effective, but many of us spend hours doing petty tasks that could easily be batched up and handed off to someone else for a fraction of the hourly rate we ourselves are worth.

Defining idea…

When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.

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