One phrase that has been coming up lately, as I finished law school, studied for the bar, and started articling, is “work smarter, not harder”. It’s one of those canned phrases that gets thrown around a lot when preparing to take on something big. And while on a certain level, that statement makes sense, I think that it misses the mark.
The idea is that just working hard for the sake of working hard isn't a good way to work when it is not accomplishing anything or not accomplishing it efficiently. That’s why it is so often used in conjunction with reminders to ask for help when you need it. This makes a lot of sense. Especially as a student intern or young professional, it is easy to become fixated on the idea that you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and accomplish every task you are assigned entirely on your own - even when that means spending hours spinning in circles. More often than not, working smarter means asking for help when you need it, and making sure that you don’t spin your wheels for more than 10 minutes before trying a different approach.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this statement a lot in the context of long-distance running. For many years I believed (and I think this was the general wisdom of the time) that working hard was about running as many kilometres as possible in a week. I would go for multiple runs that lasted more than 90 minutes. This year, I started focusing on building speed, which has meant doing what can only be described as working smarter. My average runs are shorter and faster. In the context of running, I began to see how “work smarter, not harder” is a bit of a swing and a miss.
What we should really say is “work smarter to work harder”.
I work harder when I’m running now than when I was running 30 more kilometres weekly. Working smarter by focusing on shorter speed training and not allowing myself to become overly tired has made it possible for me to work harder on achieving my goals because I have the physical and psychological capacity to do so.
The same can be said for the other circumstances where this phrase is so often bandied about. The reason to ask for clarification when you don’t understand something you are tasked with is, yes, to allow yourself to work smarter, but the purpose of working smarter isn’t that you won’t have to put as much effort into what you’re doing. The reason to work smarter is so that you can maximize the output of the effort that you are putting into accomplishing something. Suppose you have five hours to complete a task and spend three hours working very hard because you don’t understand what you are doing, and are afraid to double-check. In that case, the ability to maximize your final product will be limited by the time lost working hard on the wrong thing.
Working smarter is often phrased as an alternative to hard work. But working smarter is all about hard work - it is about providing yourself with the opportunities to work hard in a way that matters.