Learn to Work Smarter, Not Harder: Before it Kills You

Glen Allsopp / 25 Comments / July 14th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

You may find the title of this blog post a little dramatic, personally I think it could have more impact but I don’t want you to think I’m trying to pull off a ’social-friendly’ title without the content to back it up. Killing, or more appropriately, death, is used here not as the death of your physical form, but of your soul and who you are.

You probably didn’t notice that I was sent to hospital on Monday (I use Wordpress future post feature) and got out today, repeatedly reassuring everyone back home I’ll be fine. Spending 5 days in a private room where nurses have to wear masks and gloves to see you can start to put things into perspective, and I greatly appreciate the experience.

My skin is like that all over my body (check my neck), this isn’t a post looking for sympathy, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I truly that you can push yourself so hard that you can actually orchestrate your own illness.

I say I appreciate the experience, not because I’m psycho and addicted to pain, but because I had lots of time to sit back, take everything in and just enjoy the present for what it is.

My ‘Epiphany’

When you’ve been working online for pretty much three solid years, it can be the strangest feeling to be away from the web, or even a computer. I have no doubt that this quote from my favourite book, The Power of Now (highly recommended), could relate to my situation:

Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.

Thus, the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place.

When you have no choice but to rest and take a break, you start to think about the more important things in life such as family, friends, happiness and so on. I reached a point where I could have been in hospital for a month and not missed a computer; I guess you could say it was a feeling of inner peace. With that in mind, I want to share my collective thoughts on how you can get more done by working smarter, not harder.

Hopefully, this can then help keep you from feelings of stress, anxiety or fear towards any projects that you are working on, whether online or off. And in turn, keep you physically and mentally healthy.

Five Steps to Working Smarter

1. Have Patience

Possibly the biggest thing that drives people to working harder is the desire to get things done in a shorter time period. Whether that means writing multiple blog posts on a daily basis to get more traffic or spending hours looking for links in every corner of the web, it can be a killer.

It’s very rare that you will hear of websites that became overnight successes, any blog you see now with over a thousand feed subscribers has probably been around at least a year and any site ranking highly for a competitive keyword has probably been around at least 2. Be patient in your tasks…good things come to those who wait.

2. Have Other Aims

If your internet business is the main thing you are working hard for to succeed at in life, then it would be no surprise to me if you were working overly hard to reach that goal. This may sound strange, but coming from that mindset, even when you reach this goal you have; you still aren’t going to be happy.

Have other aims in your life that you can work on at the same time, meaning you don’t have enough time to work too hard on your internet project. Personally I enjoy using the gym in my apartment building and am trying to increase the weight I can lift or the strength of my body. If you don’t have other things to work on it can be all too easy to get obsessed with what you are doing and exhaust yourself.

3. Prioritise Tasks

I once read a little story that was quite interesting. Basically, a man asked his friend how he could be more productive at work. “Simple”, the friend replied, “Write down a list of your tasks in order of importance, then work on the most important, even if it takes you all day you could not have been more productive”. Whilst there are exceptions to all rules, I hope you can take a message from that.

Prioritise what is important to you, not necessarily what will be the most fun task or the quickest to complete but the ones that need to be done. That way you aren’t focusing on lots of little tasks which can become distracting in themselves.

4. Set a Time Schedule

I covered this in more detail in my internet business organisation post, but I want to re-state the point here. One of the best ways to work smarter is to only allow yourself a certain timeframe during the day where you can work on your online projects or on a specific task pertaining to them. For e.g. if you are a blogger you might give yourself 2 hours in the evening to write a blog post, if it goes over that limit you can finish it the next day.

The benefit of this strategy is that it forces you to focus on the task in hand and allows you to give a time value to your actions.

5. Analyse your Goals

This is probably my favourite and one that most people won’t do, the job of analysing what you think it is you are trying to achieve. The main things to ask yourself about your goals are:

• Is it realistic
• Is it what I really want
• Is it effective

If your ‘goal’ is to be making $100,000 a month on the internet, it can be very easy to give-up before you get even close because it is not an effective or initially realistic goal. Set short term goals that you can keep achieving and these will help motivate you to continue.

P.S. Good luck to everyone in the Daily Blog Tips, Blogging Idol Contest. I’ve planned not to do anything different and my absense certainly won’t have helped but I love the idea of the competition so look forward to the results!

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