BlessUP Work Smart Friday, business soul friends!
The pursuit of excellence requires sacrifices. To excel in what you do requires hard work, fortitude, and constant practice but it does not entail restlessness, neglecting your family, or a diminished social life. We presume work and other areas of our lives cannot thrive together but they can and they should. After all, the goal of excellence is not just to perform well, but also to live well.
Unfortunately, when work starts to demand more of us, we automatically see work as an enemy whose only purpose is to take away our time from our friends and families. We rarely look deeply into why work is needing extra attention and we think putting in more hours and taking on more tasks is the only way forward.
But as Sir Morten Hansen advises in his book Great at Work, when work starts seeping through other areas of our lives, it’s alarming us that there is a deeper problem that cannot be simply fixed with heavier plate and overtime. You see, working harder is not always the only answer. We must move past the traditional work harder mindset and learn to work smarter too.
The way to achieve both better performance and better well-being isn’t always to put in more hours and then buttress your personal life with ironclad boundaries. It’s to concentrate on working smarter. Work on how you work, not on protecting your life from your work.
The late Black Mamba himself even strongly advocated working smartly:
So look back on what you do and how you do during Gemba game time hours: What’s slowing you down and causing you to go beyond your shift?
Are you mixing social media or games in between tasks? Are you living off FOTs and consultations rather than learning the skill itself? Perhaps you are accepting so many unnecessary meetings and you are not duplicating. Or it could be your noisy environment that prevents you from building momentum.
Find the room to improve how you work and take action. Lean in and don’t turn a blind eye to bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Remember, innovation isn’t just on products, you can be an innovator of work too. #AbK!
Most importantly, don’t mix irrelevant activities when it’s bSoul ARTwork creation time, so when it’s time to rest and recharge, work does not force its way and intrudes.
Work will give us the time we need to thrive in other areas of our lives if we are truly serious about work, so take Sir Jim Rohn’s word below and make work a SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Until I SEE YOU again,
Get serious.
Get smart.
The only way work gets better for you is when YOU yourself get better.
BlessUP 🙏
– Necta ✨
