less is more

Nov 7 2011

What does “Working Smart” mean?

Don’t work hard, work smart.

It’s an axiom that’s repeated everywhere. But most people don’t really believe it. Everybody hears it, yes. Everybody repeats it, yes. But most people still don’t truly believe it. When work isn’t finished, the instinctive reaction is to…

…work more hours.

What would you say if someone told you that to finish your work, you should work less hours? Ridiculous! But there you go, sometimes, going against “common” sense is the best thing to do.

Is it really common sense?

They say that Einstein used this quote:

The definition of insane is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

- Albert Einstein? Rita Mae Brown?

So let’s look at that in the context of work. Boss gives you work. You don’t manage to finish it in time. It extends to the next day. Boss gives you more work. You’re late for the first deadline and now have to juggle 2 projects at once.

Obviously this slows down your work on your 2nd project. This makes you even slower and ensures that you don’t finish your 2nd project on time. By that time, the boss has given you 2 more projects. The cycle continues.

So what’s the solution? Well, if you can’t finish it on time, then obviously you need more time right? So you keep working later hours, and even weekends, in the hope of “catching up” and “getting back on track”.

But as you repeat this again and again, you should notice at some point that doing it isn’t giving you results. So, are you fulfilling the definition of insanity? Doing it over and over and somehow expecting it to be different this time?

Oddly enough, most of us never notice it until it’s pointed out to us. Even now, I’m sure you’re reading this and going, “That can’t be right. So working harder isn’t helping me finish my work?”.

After all, you’re using common sense, right?

Uncommon sense & Parkinson’s Law

Let me tell you Parkinson’s law, in the hope that you haven’t heard it before and now think I’m an absolute genius for saying this:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

-  Cyril Northcote Parkinson

As you give yourself more and more time to complete a job, the job becomes harder and harder to complete! Of course, this isn’t true about the complexity of the job in and of itself. It’s just that as you allow it more time, it psychologically becomes more complex to complete.

It might be that you waste more time in stressing and worrying about it. It might be that you spend an unusual amount of time in the planning stage in order to “make sure that everything runs smoothly later on”.

It might just be that since you know at the back of your mind that you have plenty of time, you allow yourself to relax more and goof off more in checking emails and facebook or following silly youtube links. The amount of work that you do will expand to fill the time you set aside for it.

It’s not just goofing off though. You actually spend more time doing the job itself. You spend time doing things that are job-related that don’t actually help you to finish it. Instead of just finishing it, you start spending time choosing the best font, or formatting the paperwork, or other trivial things. Now, imagine if the deadline was 3 hours ago, would you still spend time on that stuff? No! Because it has nothing to do with getting the job done.

So… what to do! What to do if working longer hours DOESN’T help you finish your job? Here’s an idea… work less.

Working less hours = Finish your job faster?

I know, I know. It sounds like a contradiction. How can working less help you finish your job?

1. Your job doesn’t ever finish

Here’s the first answer. But to understand it, you’ll need a huge shift in thinking. Your job doesn’t “finish“. That’s a concept that floated in from nowhere. Your current project might finish, but your job should be one that you’re going to continue for quite some time. Your job is “finished” when you’re fired or retired. Your job doesn’t “finish“.

In that case, what’s the point of working more hours? I don’t mean there’s no point in working at all, or that there’s no point in making sure a job is done well, or even that working more hours won’t do something to lessen your workload.

But you have to notice that at some point, you’re just working too hard. Your life is imbalanced. You’re spending waaaayyyyy too much time on your job and you’re not spending enough time time taking care of the other details in your life. When this happens, everything else just gets screwed up and goes down the drain. At that point, working more hours won’t help you “finish“ your job. Perhaps working less won’t help you ”finish“ it either. But it will have minimal effect on your workload and will do wonders for the rest of your life and your general well-being.

So the first answer is: It’s not about finishing your job. It’s about what’s best for you.

2. Get enough sleep

The second answer… the second answer is interesting, because it’s based on what I said just now in the first answer. If your job requires even a small amount of thought and creativity (like I’m sure it does), then it the results of your job aren’t tied so much to the quantity of time you put in, but rather the quality of time you put in.

When your life is imbalanced, there’s a good chance that you’re not getting enough rest and that your mind is worrying over a hundred tiny details that you haven’t had time to resolve yet. This definitely affects the rest that you get. Less work equals to quality rest.

By working less and getting better rest, you can then think straight and finish your work properly. You get to do quality work. As in, work that you do right the first time around and that you don’t have to go back and fix later on. I’ve found that if you do it rushed the first time around, you’ll only have to go back later and spend even more time to fix it.

So sleep is important. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of super achievers like Benjamin Franklin who supposedly only slept 2 hours a day. I don’t believe those stories. Sleep is important. But these people worked smart. They knew the right thing to do.

Go to work with a sharp mind.

80/20 : The Pareto Rule

Here’s another fancy rule from those people who make observations about life. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

It’s a simple rule. It’s based on the idea that when you start from 0%, it’s very easy to improve. It needs just a little bit of effort to go to 40%. And going from 40% to 60% needs double the effort. Going from 60% to 70% requires double the effort again. In economics you call it the theory of diminishing returns.

So the question is, how much time should you spend on your work?

Based on the Pareto rule, it follows that if you spend only 20% of your time and effort on your job, you can still get 80% of it done.

HOW???!!!!! I can hear you shouting it from across the room. The idea is that most of what we do isn’t central to our work. We waste time researching when we have enough info, checking emails (yes, checking emails too much is a waste of time), formatting our work to “make it look nice for the boss”, and so on.

Cut away that wasted effort. Focus only on the core part of your job. Ever heard your boss talk about the “core business” of your company? Focus on the core business of your job.

Be the best in your field

Now, all this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t put any effort into work. In fact, you need to put a lot of effort into it. You need to learn everything about your field of work. You need to study it so well that you know every little shortcut and loophole. You need to learn how to use the software at work so that you can use it effortlessly, whether it be Word & Excel or something as complicated as MATLAB.

You need to put so much effort into your job, that when actual work comes around, you don’t have to put in any effort at all.

This is how you put in 20% effort and still get 80% of your results. It’s the people who have no idea how to do their job who work hard instead of work smart.

Most of us, after doing our work, learn to get by with “just enough” skills. If your work deals with Excel everyday, do you go out of your way to learn excel tips and tricks online including new ways to program systems? Do you challenge your skills so that you can solve ever more complicated problems?

But of course, you’ll never have the time to do this unless you work less hours.

Learn how to do your job better. There’s always new things to learn.

It’s all about doing the right thing

Working hard is just doing more. It could be doing more of the wrong thing. In fact, it usually is.

Working smart is when you do the right thing. Because so few do it, it’s enough to do just a little bit. The most successful people know the right thing to do. Then… They worked hard. They did more and more of the right thing. Who can compete with that?

We usually use the terms talent (knowing the right thing to do) and hard work (doing more of it). Hard work can best talent sometimes. But a talent who also works hard?

That’s who you need to be.

By Lutfi Torla • Life Hacks • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Sep 13 2011

The best decision is often the fastest one

Most people seem to fall into one of two extremes when it comes to making choices. The first group never thinks about them and just does whatever comes their way (or even worse, they do what they think others expect them to do). The second group thinks endlessly about them and they ‘research’ forever and thus are paralyzed because they’re waiting for the ‘best’ decision.

Luckily there’s a third choice. Not as popular, but infinitely more productive. Where  you spend a short while on ‘research’ then make a decision based on whatever info you have.

Because the best decision you can make, is often the fastest one.

Actions always speak louder than words.

In the end, when you look back on life, you’ll reflect on the choices you made, not on the discussions you had about those choices. You won’t judge yourself and be proud that you took 2 years to come up with a decision.

Those same 2 years could’ve been put into trying out those choices instead of simply thinking about them.

Thinking about it for a long time probably won’t improve your decision.

In economics you call it decreasing utility. It means that as you spend more and go higher up the expensive scale, the returns you get become less and less per dollar. Example, spending 200 bucks on a phone gets you a phone. Add 200 more? The phone will be 3 times better. Add 200 more? It’ll only be twice better. Keep doing this and you’ll realize later that even adding 200 bucks more won’t improve the phone by any noticable amount.

In the same way, spending more time will not improve your decision much. Spending half an hour thinking on a problem will probably give you 90% of the choices you have. You’ll probably even know what you should do by the end of it. Or maybe it’s a decision that needs a few days of thought, where you need to also ask friends and family. That’s fine. Spending 3 weeks on it probably won’t improve the decision you will make. It might even make you more confused as you over-analyze it.

Spending 2 years? It’ll probably just destroy your self-esteem as someone who can’t even make up your mind. And you’ll never make a decision. So it’s a guarantee that you’re not making the ‘best’ decision.  As they say, “you can’t win unless you play the game“.

But most people never actually think about their futures?

You’ll probably misunderstand when I say this, because generally people DO think about their futures. In fact, a lot of people can’t stop thinking about it. But they only really worry about it. They don’t sit and think about what they really want in their futures, they only follow what society expects them to do and think about how to achieve what society wants from them.

Maybe my vision of life on earth is different from others but I can’t imagine having a job that eats up my nights and weekends, or to live in a house that’s so big that I never get to see my own kids, or to work in a place half an hour away (and that’s without traffic thankyouverymuch), or to be in debt (while the bank is charging interest!), or to while away my life listening to the latest and greatest tunes “because they describe my life so very well!”, or to follow the lives of such strangers on tv that you don’t follow the lives of your own friends and family, or to update my Facebook statuses and my Twitter in the hope somebody will notice me and retweet. But ohmygod, don’t you know it, I’ve just described 95% of the population.

And if I ask where they want to be 20 years from now, they don’t have an answer to give. After thinking a little, they’ll tell you that they want to be a manager, or earn 10 thousand a month. They never say that they want to be the best dad in the world.

It’s almost as if they don’t know what they will want in the future.

Do YOU know what you want in your future?

But once you know what you want, you’ll often have to make a choice on what to do to get there. And life unfortunately offers many choices. Which choice do you take?

I read once before (I forget who wrote it) that when you have a few business ideas in mind, you should always start with the one that fails the fastest. Time is money. Time is the resource that is most precious to you. So if the chances of them succeeding are all decent, choose the one which will fail the fastest. If it succeeds, all is well. But if it fails, at least it will fail fast and you can quickly move on to the next thing.

Faster! Faster!

You never want to try something that is slow in failing. Imagine trying something out where it will take you 5 years to see the result. What if it fails then? 5 years wasted. And if you had another business where you could see the results in 4 months instead? It would’ve failed and you could’ve moved on to the next thing.

I figure life choices can be made the same way. If you’re trying to figure out a new direction in life and you have the choice between an 18 month management program and a 3 month introductory course to PhotoShop skills, it’s probably better to take the 3 month course. If it’s bad for you, you’ve only lost 3 months instead of 18.

I guess that in the end it just means that if you have to make a mistake, start with the mistakes that aren’t so expensive. And expense is measured in terms of time.

So in the end there are two aspects to making fast decisions:

  1. Don’t spend too much time making decisions. Often you’ll know what to do in the first 5 minutes anyway. It’s just about whether you can bring yourself to do it.
  2. When torn between 2 decisions (because you’re not psychic and can’t predict what will happen in the future), choose the one that will fail the fastest.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Making Plans • 5 • Tags: , , , , ,

May 23 2011

Gradual Backlash: The Society that Doesn’t Own Anything

When change comes too fast, the human instinct is to rebel. To fight back. To go against the change. The same thing happens on a much larger scale as well. Even on the scale of entire human societies.

For example, when location services like foursquare came out, I was (and still am) paranoid about letting people know where I am. My privacy is gold to me and I was ready to Alt+F4 the whole thing if I could. I couldn’t stand the way all these online companies know so much about me. Many others in the online community felt that way too. There was a backlash. This backlash was fast and more of a reflex.

But I think there’s a weird version of backlash that has come at a much slower pace. So slow that we didn’t even notice it. We had a backlash against owning too much.

Should I have more stuff?

I’m thinking, actually, of how 50 years ago we had very little stuff. Then the Industrial Revolution came along and now we have a lot of stuff. But we’re slowly starting to realize that a lot of this stuff is holding us down and making us unhappy. We now have to care for and maintain a lot.

I see many who rent apartments, order food, cater at parties, hire tax people, and generally outsource as many things as they can. Heck we even keep our photos online and videos on youtube instead of in our own computer. We’ve found that owning something (which is something we are instinctively proud of) also means caring for it (which is not so much fun).

The thing is that, 30 years ago, you would care for what you had at the time. But that same Industrial Revolution made everything so cheap that it wasn’t worth it to repair your old stuff no more. It was cheaper to throw it away and buy a new shirt instead. And so we keep getting new things and having backlogs of old things.

Predicting the future

Two generations from now, we’ll probably have societies who only rent apartments so that they don’t have to worry about maintaining their gardens or hiring security or having to clean out the pool. Oh wait! That’s already happening. I meant that 2 generations later we’ll have societies that don’t use a kitchen but instead eat out all the time. Oops too late. I meant societies that would put all their information and photos and videos online on computers they don’t own so th—

Hmm…. I guess I’m a bit too late.

What about this: some won’t even own furniture but will rent it instead. *sees the ad: Furnished Apartment for rent* Darn it!

But what is true is that these trends will become even more pronounced over the next few decades. As much as possible, people will want to own less so that they have to care for less. We’ll want to use public services if we can, or rent if we can’t. We’ll outsource as much as possible so that we have more free time (that will be used to finish up more work).

“Please sir…”

If Oliver Twist were here in this day and age, we’d probably hear:

Please sir, I don’t want some more.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Reflections • 6 • Tags: , ,

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