Working more hours or working smarter?

Jobs should be related to what must be done and what is important to the company. The world is full with hard workers, people than put more hours than they are supposed to do and yet they their jobs are not relevant to the company. Don′t get me wrong, those jobs have to be done. But doing them doesn’t make the company bigger or better.

Last week, I had lunch with a friend who described that situation in her company. There were a lot of people working over time, but they are not rewarded. These people had a lot of frustration, including my friend, because rewards and promotions were given to their peers who apparently didn′t work as hard as they did. She failed to differentiate what is relevant to the company from just doing a job.

The question to ask yourself is do you want to work more hours or do you want to work smarter and how to do it. In order to work smarter, you have to make your job relevant to the company. The first step is to align your job and projects to the economical objectives of your company.

Peter Drucker in his article “What makes an Effective Executive” described how to align your job and projects to the companies. His paper was oriented to top level executives, but it applies to everybody. He said it’s more effective to focus on opportunities than on problems. Finding and exploiting opportunities produces results for the company. Solving problems does not produce results, it only prevents damage.

The company is paying you for your time and brains in a job, therefore you should look how to use that time more effectively. Time management is a good place to start. I’m going to give you two simple examples of where to look for opportunities to use your time more effectively: meetings and work plans.

To run effective meetings: put clear objectives at the start of the meeting, follow them, wrap up and follow up. Avoid small talk and discussing topics that moves away from the original objectives.

Write down a work plan; remember to align it to the economic objectives of the company. The work plan in order to be effective and right for the company it must have boundaries. It is an intentions plan, not commitments or a to-do list. The plan should show how to invest time and should be periodically reviewed so you can track down errors or problems in the results.

Working smarter needs discipline and your commitment. It’s not easy, but it’s a good start to be becoming more relevant.