By Max Tyler

Are your working hard ? Or hardly working ?

Working smart is a lot harder than it sounds. 

Getting in early and leaving at 6 is working hard, but hard work doesn’t get you far if you aren’t using the time wisely.

Making the most out of the day is becoming increasingly more important as time is ticking away, playful child mode becomes harder to get into when you have pressures surrounding you from every angle. Time, opinions, deadlines, competition and reviews. You want to please yourself but you feel like you need to please others first, what do I take on board ? What do I change ? Why isn’t this good enough ? Why do people like this one and not that one ?

Realising I was working hard but not smart was hard to come to terms with, I have been tiring myself out and depleting myself of energy which wasn’t paying off. When you focus on working hard the things that are most important go out the window, having fun, talking about things, doing stuff outside school. These are the things I think make work easier to do.

Planning the day was a thing I thought I new how to do. Turns out I was wrong… If you are putting 110% in but getting 50% or less back this is a clear indicator of a bad habit is lingering somewhere in your routine. This time is very independent now and it’s up to us to make our working process as efficient as possible. I was being a bit too loose with scheduling time. I would think about one thing until it was done, but you need to release your mind from what you are doing to let new thoughts come in. Being strict with my time has helped my work flow improve the day, I’m breaking bad habits and working out how to start working smarter. 

 There is an ad for Febreeze called ‘nose blind’ and I think this ad related to my routine. It’s the principle that if you are in an environment for too long you cant see the errors because you have adapted to the environment. This being nose blind to your smelly bed sheets is the same as being nose blind to the fact you are spending too long eating breakfast instead of chatting about work.

Working smart doesn’t actually mean you can work any less hard from what Im finding, its like crystallising the time you spend doing hard work and making sure you cut things off and bring new things in at the right times. 

Will see how it goes.