There are always going to be ongoing debates about working hard and working smart, so let’s settle it. Growing up, what the majority of us ever heard was “if you want to succeed make sure you work hard” be it in school or your career. As true as that may be, there are other ways to achieve your goals.
People often confuse or wonder at the difference between working hard and working smart. Well let’s break it down;
working hard emphasizes putting in strenuous hours to complete tasks while working smart emphasizes finding effective and efficient ways to accomplish those tasks while managing your time and effort.
I always wondered why no one ever told me about working smart, now I think it’s because they didn’t know about it either. So let’s educate ourselves.
First, debunk the narrative that there’s no other way to reach your goals aside from working hard because working smart is the secret to efficiently getting your work done and achieving your goals.
Let’s be honest, nobody likes stress and there’s nothing quite as stressful as a job. Working hard banks on stressing you out especially when it comes to completing tasks. While working smart minimize your stress level by offering more productive ways to do things.
Working smart creates a flexible process that involves planning, delegating tasks, organizing a team in a particular way, and prioritizing schedules all to archive set goals and objectives. Also since smart work is time effective, you can achieve goals within the deadline without compromising its quality.
Now, this is not to say you should stop working hard because you might be setting yourself up for failure. It is important to start with hard work to understand the nature of your work, which will then help you construct an accurate smart work plan for yourself.
Hard work and smart work are both essential in their way, and they both help to bring effectiveness and efficiency to a task.