Coach Yourself to Success, Revised and Updated Edition, 2nd Edition

 

PART SEVEN

WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER

       It is no credit to anyone to work too hard.

E. W. HOWE

It always annoyed me when managers quipped, “Work smarter, not harder,” without providing any clear instructions on just how to work smarter.

In Part Seven, you will learn how to become exceptionally efficient, productive, and effective by doing less, not more. You have probably heard the 80/20 rule—80 percent of your results comes from 20 percent of your efforts. If you could just figure out which 20 percent of your efforts was effective, theoretically you could safely eliminate 80 percent of what you currently do. This is working smarter. It goes back to the “less is more” principle.

In Part Two, we saw that having less stuff enabled us to ...