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June 16, 2019
We can think of work as consisting of job design characteristics (what a person is supposed to do), skill development (how a person improves), motivational factors (why a person exerts effort), and relational dimensions (with whom and how a person interacts).
we discovered that seven “work smart” practices seemed to explain a substantial portion of performance.
When you work smart, you select a tiny set of priorities and make huge efforts in those chosen areas (what I call the work scope practice). You focus on creating value, not just reaching preset goals (targeting). You eschew mindless repetition in favor of better skills practice (quality learning). You seek roles that match your passion with a strong sense of purpose (inner motivation). You shrewdly deploy influence tactics to gain the support of others (advocacy). You cut back on wasteful team meetings, and make sure that the ones you do attend spark vigorous debate (rigorous teamwork). You
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Once they had focused on a few priorities, they obsessed over those tasks to produce quality work.
Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort.
overturns much conventional thinking about focusing that urges you to choose a few tasks to prioritize. Choice is only half of the equation—you also need to obsess. This finding led us to reformulate the “...
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The matching of passion and purpose, and not passion alone, produced the best results.
Top performers collaborate less. They carefully choose which projects and tasks to join and which to flee, and they channel their efforts and resources to excel in the few chosen ones. They discipline their collaboration.
The very best people didn’t just work smart in a conventional sense, but pursued more nuanced practices, like doing less and obsessing, and matching purpose with passion.
Whenever they could, top performers carefully selected which priorities, tasks, collaborations, team meetings, committees, analyses, customers, new ideas, steps in a process, and interactions to undertake, and which to neglect or reject.
The very best redesigned their work so that they would create the most value (a term we will define in chapter three) and then they applied intense, targeted efforts in their selected work activities.
To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort.
But the real key to individual performance is the seven “work smarter” practices.
By improving on the seven practices, you can boost your performance beyond what it would be if you relied on talent, luck, or the sheer number of hours worked.
Being great at work means performing in your job, infusing your work with passion and a strong sense of purpose, and living well, too. How great is that?
you are disciplined enough to choose a few priorities, you will succeed. Picking a few priorities is only half the equation. The other half is the harsh requirement that you must obsess over your chosen area of focus to excel.
The term “focus” consists of two activities: choosing a few priorities, and then dedicating your efforts toward excelling at them. Many people prioritize a few items at work, but they don’t obsess—they simply do less. That’s a mistake.
The predicted effect turned out to be substantial. People who were average at other practices but mastered “do less, then obsess” would likely place 25 percentage points higher in the performance ranking than those who didn’t embrace this practice.12
“Do less, then obsess” affects performance more than any other practice in this book.
One boss gave a low “do less, then obsess” score to Maria, a mortgage specialist in her fifties at a Milwaukee bank. “She gets overwhelmed,” the boss said. “When there’s too much work, she just tries to do it herself, as opposed to delegating it.” Maria landed in the bottom 41 percent on the “do less, then obsess” principle. It was a different story with Cathy, a fifty-six-year-old quality engineer at a company that manufactures car parts. She could narrow her attention to focus on the most important tasks at hand, and could stick to the priorities she had set. Once, when Cathy had prioritized
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“He/she is extremely good at focusing on key priorities, no matter how much work and how many things he/she has to do.”
There are, however, two big problems with scattering your efforts in this way. The first is the spread-too-thin trap.
economics Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon quipped, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”16 The more items we attend to, the less time we can allot to each, and the less well we will perform any one of them.
second problem with an increase in the scope of our activities is what I call the complexity trap.
judges who handled many cases simultaneously (multitasking) took longer to complete them than those who performed them in sequence.
The differences were striking: the slowest judge spent on average 398 days to close the cases, while the fastest took “only” 178 days, or less than half the time.
We don’t need to add more work activities to excel. There’s a better way to work, one that prevents us from falling into the spread-too-thin and complexity traps. If we select just a few items and obsess to excel in those, we can perform at our best.
The people in our study cited three main reasons for failing to focus: broad scope of work activities (including having too many meetings and too many work items), temptations (including distractions imposed by others and temptations created by oneself), and pesky, “do-more” bosses (who lack direction and set too many priorities).
These three main reasons correspond in turn to three tactics we can deploy to do less and obsess. Let’s look at how to narrow your scope.
As few as you can, as many as you must. Instead of asking how many tasks you can tackle given your working hours, ask how many you can ditch given what you must do to excel. The Skyline Hospital team changed its approach from “Diagnose then double-check” to “Diagnose once and obsess over doing it right.”
French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observed, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”
The idea was to narrow the scope to one client segment—senior searches in media—and to do higher-quality work. As few segments as she could, as many as she must.
His chief of staff asked me to use only one slide in my meeting with the CEO. “One slide?” I asked in disbelief. “Yes, one slide.” Holy cow! How could I distill fifteen slides into one? I tried shrinking four slides onto one. Then I thought, “What is the key issue?” I applied the razor and cut all my slides except for one: a graphic displaying the program’s hourly calendar. Then I obsessed to get that graphic right. I had formerly spent three slides showcasing the program’s three topics. Now I conveyed the same information by coloring the calendar segments using three different colors, one for
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To perform at your best, discipline yourself to shave away any options that you stick with for psychological comfort alone.
WHEN YOU SHOULD NOT FOCUS There are two circumstances when you may want to “do more” and not focus, at least temporarily. 1. When you need to generate many new ideas. When we start a new task, we often don’t know what the best option will be. In this phase, academic research suggests it’s best to generate and consider many ideas. As Wharton professor Adam Grant reports in his book Originals, “Many people fail to develop originality because they generate few ideas.”32 At a certain point, you must cull your ideas and zoom in on the one that works best. In our book Great by Choice, Jim Collins
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2. When you know your options, but are uncertain which to
choose. A manager in one of my executive education programs at the University of California, Berkeley recalled an instance when she had pursued two technological solutions to a product because her team didn’t know which one would win in the marketplace. Eventually, she and her colleagues grew confident that one solution would succeed. Only then did they select that solution and ditch the other. “It would have...
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Twenty-one percent of employees in our study regarded temptations and distractions as key impediments to focusing. The second tactic for focusing and obsessing, then, is to seal yourself off from those distractions.
Make clear to your boss that you’re not trying to slack off. You’re prioritizing because you want to dedicate all your effort to excelling in a few key areas. Ask if your boss would like you to reprioritize. Put the decision back on your boss’s shoulders. You want to prevent your boss from forcing you into the “do more, then stress” category, since your performance will be much better in the “do less, then obsess” approach. Your boss will (or should) appreciate
that.
Apply Occam’s razor to cut out a few needless, nonproductive parts of your work. Find a few techniques that enable you to “tie yourself to the mast,” so that you aren’t prevented from obsessing over key priorities. Ask your boss to prioritize some of your responsibilities
so that you understand better where to focus.
The New “Work Smarter” Perspective Doing more is usually a flawed strategy. The imperative to focus is also misunderstood. Focus isn’t simply about choosing to concentrate on a few areas, as many people think. There is a second harsh requirement: You must also obsess in those areas to produce exceptional quality. The smart way to work is to first do less, then obsess.
Key Points • People in our study who chose a few key priorities and then made huge efforts to do terrific work in those areas scored on average 25 percentage points higher in their performance than those who pursued many priorities. “Do less, then obsess” was the most powerful practice among the seven discussed in this book. • “Doing more” creates two traps. In the spread-too-thin trap, people take on many tasks, but can’t allocate enough attention to each. In the complexity trap, the energy required to manage the interrelationship between tasks leads people to waste time and execute poorly.
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can I remove, given what I must do to excel? Remember: As few as you can, as many as you must. 2. Tie yourself to the mast: Set clear rules ahead of time to fend off temptation and distraction. Create a rule as trivial as not allowing yourself to check email for an hour. 3. Say “no” to your boss: Explain to your boss that adding more to your to-do list will hurt your performance. The path to greatness isn’t pleasing ...
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Maybe if we reinvent whatever our lives give us we find poems. —Naomi Shihab Nye1
They had to rethink the work itself, redesigning and transforming the way teaching was done. “Why do we keep sending homework home when students aren’t doing it?” Green asked the teachers. The old model wasn’t working.
With these options, Green would have pushed people to work harder within the existing model—to do more of the same. That’s the traditional “work harder” paradigm. Instead Green redesigned the work itself, changing the way teaching was done. He found a way to achieve greater impact with the same effort—in other words, to work smarter.
As the Clintondale story illustrates, a smarter way to work often exists, provided we can craft clever redesigns of key tasks.
you want to perform at your best, you need to do what Greg Green and many others in our study did: break with convention and try new ways of working.
