Work Smarter, not Harder

Raise your hand if you have had someone tell you to "work smarter, not harder"?  Ah, I see the majority of hands in the air.  (Careful about that.  People might think it strange for you to raise your hand in response to a line in an email.  I won't tell anyone though.)  So, how do you work smarter, not harder?  (i.e. increase productivity)  Yes, in the following paragraphs I am going to give you an entire book's worth of advice, so pay attention, this is pure gold!

The premise behind "smarter not harder" is that you only spend time on the most important things and leave the "back burner" stuff until there is time to do it.

There, that's it.  That'll be $19.95 CDN please.  Only PayPal at the moment.

Wow, that was most ... unsatisfying.  But, you know what, I think I've saved a lot of you $19.95.  Let's face it, there is no silver bullet for dramatically increasing productivity.  No magic spell is going to dramatically make you more productive.  Nothing you can do right now is going to have a significant impact on improving your productivity in the next couple of weeks, right when your supervisor wants it most.  You can read books, attend seminars, hire personal development coaches or a myriad of other things, but the truth is that change takes time.  if you type 30 words a minute, you aren't going to suddenly start typing 60 words a minute because your supervisor said you should.  If you can run a six minute mile, you aren't going to get down to a five minute mile just because a book told you that you could.

All of these things, including "smarter not harder" require practice.  A book might tell you what you need to practice.  A seminar might guide you in the right direction for general areas of improvement and a personal development coach might lay out a detailed plan, but the reality is that it all depends on you.  Without the practice, the commitment and the desire to work smarter, it isn't going to happen.  But even if all of these things are in place, it is going to take time.

So, where does this leave all of the people telling others to work "smarter, not harder"?  Well, the odds are that they are in a supervisory position.  The odds are also in my favour that this person is experiencing a time crunch whereby the amount of work has now exceeded the capacity of the staff.  So, in an effort to increase the capacity of the staff they are asked to work smarter.  This may or may not be used in conjunction with greed ("we'll give you a bonus if it's done on time"), fear ("we'll can you if it's not done on time"), heroism ("everyone is depending on you to save their butts") or, as I've seen in one instance, all three approaches.

Essentially, if you are at the point where you are telling people to work "smarter, not harder", you've already lost.  Suck it up, realistically plan the project and change either the target date (sometimes), the scope (sometimes) or add more people (dangerous as this will also increase the effort required).  If you really want people to work smarter, then help them at the beginning of the project, not when there is a crisis.  Help them plan their work.  Help them organize their InBox.  Help them become better developers prior  to you needing them to become better developers.