Gears For Careers

Working SMART everyday

Shake up your job: You’re unlikely to work smart if you feel restless or in comfy mode. Know the bits of your job that motivate you to use them to remind yourself why it’s doing your best work daily. Set yourself some standards. Do something better than the last time you did it. Push the envelope; even take some risks in your attempt to find a better way to do things.

Maintain your flow: Focus is important to achieving this so you must limit distractions and set up a system that helps you to limit interruptions. Learn to be comfortable working with timelines and efficient routines.

Accelerate self-challenge: Don’t force yourself to work beneath your potential. Playing safe with your potential does not serve you or your team or your organisation or your career longer term. Build an effective structure, support, guidance to meet the standards you’ve set for yourself even on the rough days. Don’t work on the basis of how you feel.

Root out the weeds: Weeds are the little things that trip you up, waste your time and suck up your energy such as obsessing over minor details. Don’t spend time worrying about things instead of taking action to solve them or focussing on weaknesses that don’t matter, spending hours stuck on a problem in the hope you will solve it. Some things need to be done, and there are the nice-to-do things that don’t exactly contribute to anything in the long-run.

Target your talents: What you are good at you tend to do it well and in less time. So recognise your own talents. If you have work that demands skills you are weak at draw on others.

Now take action: When are you most productive each day?

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