TIPS FOR DOING SMART WORK

In my previous blog post on Hard work vs Smart Work, there was a case study in which a worker on the first day cuts down 6 trees in 8 hrs., next day 4 trees in 12 hours and to his frustration in spite of the increased effort of  16 hours was able to cut down 2 trees only. So the question i put forward to you was that why it was happening.

 Possible Answer

Some of the answers that might have come to you mind might be that the person must be getting tired or de-motivated. He must have lost interest in his work. He must not be getting enough encouragement from the management. The person might be going through a rough patch in his personal life and must be under a lot of stress. He must not be putting his best efforts. All these answers might be right to some extent but there can still be another very good reason for dip in his performance and that is he is not sharpening his axe. First day as his axe was very sharp so he was able to chop down trees. Axe was getting blunt day by day by chopping down more tress and that was the reason for dip in performance in spite of the increased efforts on behalf of this person.

 The Creative and Correct  Answer.

Now please think more deeply about this story and might be we get a very valuable lesson for our life.  The axe in the story is represents our skill level of doing a work. In our case, we need to update our work daily as our work is not static like tree in the story. For example, Microsoft windows, MS office program, after every two three years, latest version of the program is released. A computer user has to continuously update his knowledge of the programs by constantly training himself. It means we need to sharpen our skill continuously to reaming competitive in today’s word of cut- throat competition which works on the Darwin theory of “survival of the fittest”.  

 Implication for the daily Life.

The greatest axe the human being possesses is human mind that need to sharpen continuously by learning and training. When I was a child I used to ask my father that why there are 365 days in a year. It would have been nice if there would have been just 360 days and each month have 30 days. That would have saved the labour of learning the exact number of days in month. Lately this has come to my mind that God want us devote at least five days in a year to learn new things about the work we do or in general life. It might be attending workshops, seminars, reading books, watching videos, listening to audio tapes, interacting with the skilled people in your field, reading a magazine related to your field. These all things will help us to be more skilled at our work and we will be able to bring innovation to our work. Otherwise when someone will ask you about your experience you might tell him it is twenty years but that will simply mean one year experience repeated nineteen times without adding anything to our knowledge.