Work Smarter Not Harder 

“Self Motivation” is always going to be the key slogan from me, but now we turn into a new chapter of blogs with this starting with my other favorite slogan "work smarter not harder"

This to me represents making smarter choices towards achieving goals as oppose to working harder on tasks which may provide little to no benefit, and even worse actually knowing it will be a path to nowhere but we do it anyway because we feel we have either no choice in the matter, we know of no other option out there.

So this is an introductoryblog of the assessing how hard do we work and how smart should we work.

What is " The Balance"
A lot of every subject is always defined by you need a balance of this and that, too much of anything is bad, too little of anything is bad and it's always a balance. Never excess or otherwise just balance.

But the question I pose is how does someone define balance when there is no baseline defined to determine whether you need more of or less of something?

We will apply it to this scenario of working smarter instead of harder. First we will (including my Self in this as sometimes I really need to take my own advice) need to assess what exactly it is you are trying to achieve and how you are going about it.

Because working hard is a great attitude to have, but the payoff only comes if you are seeing progress from this and not a treadmill effect.

How Hard
Using me as an example when I first started out in IT, I wanted to reach to a consultant or Architect level. Now how to do this wasn't exactly always clear besides working your way up.

Now in this case I was in 1st line support as I think most would normally start at. I took on massive workloads, tasks which wouldn't necessarily be applicable to me and getting my hands on anything I could in order to showcase my skills and to what I was made of. And this should be something everyone should adopt in terms of this attitude and self-motivation, but what I found was that because everyone's position was somewhat cemented, the likelihood of being promoted or obtaining a higher position would not be realistic at all and my job would more than likely not change at all.

So with a focus to achieve what you want what are you to do here? Do you allow your job role and managers to dictate to how high you can go or want to go? Or do you start to analyze your situation and change your approach going forward.
As of course I was working hard to show initiative, but you can see that working hard can have a drawback if you are not getting where you want to be.

How Smart
So now I understand the situation I'm in I realized that with the experience that I have attained I had grown a lot more technically and I still could rise up.....just not at the organization I was working for.

And I had developed a motion of completing a minimum of 3 exams a year which showcased my skill set even more alongside the experience I had gained, so I worked hard in building a portfolio which would not only benefit myself but also able to use it elsewhere.

So I decided to put this in motion and test myself by going to interviews which required someone a lot more senior than the positions I had, and there were some very very brutal technical interviews...And then it really started to pay off because I was really performing on them and then job offers of opportunities much much bigger than what I had (salary was also but wasn’t the main focus)


Working Hard on Being Smart
Put as much effort in working hard towards making a smarter decision rather than working hard at something just for the sake of it. Some situations can be beyond control where all you can do is work hard whether voluntarily or mandatory, but it's always possible to get what you want when you are able to apply both working smarter as well as working hard.

My mother once told me that she has known and seen people work really hard, everyday and then they get nowhere and its extremely unfair to those individuals. And then some can just have one smart idea and with enough dedication to it can just totally exceed past everybody that's still working hard trying to get to where they want.

The point of this blog is really for those who work really hard and know they work really hard to take your power back. Apply your hard working ethic towards your goal with a different approach, and see the results materialize from a smarter strategy in place. This is not to be confused with the "easy way out" as some say where something like a "get rich quick scheme" comes into play, but i'll leave the "easy option" or "easy way out" to your own interpretation.