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January 6 - January 27, 2019
The phrase “work smarter, not harder” has been thrown around so much that it has become a cliché. Who wants to “work dumb”? But many people do in fact work dumb because they don’t know exactly how to work smart.
Every author seemed to say something different. Prioritize. Delegate. Keep a calendar. Avoid distractions. Set clear goals. Execute better. Influence people. Inspire. Manage up. Manage down. Network. Tap into passion. Find a purpose. The list went on, more than 100 pieces of advice.
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).
Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. This insight 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.
they strove to find roles that contributed value to the organization and society, and then matched passion with that sense of purpose. 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 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.
For all that has been written about performance, no book to my knowledge has presented an evidence-based, comprehensive understanding of what enables individuals to perform at the highest level at work. Great at Work fills this gap. It gives you a simple and practical framework that you can use to work at your best. Think of it as a complement to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
DO LESS, THEN OBSESS
Writers like Daniel Goleman and Stephen Covey have argued that people can only perform at their best if they select a few items to work on and say no to others.
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.
“Do less, then obsess” affects performance more than any other practice in this book.
As economics Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon quipped, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
The marvelous 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi follows Jiro as he prepares the day’s offerings.
We often disparage obsessions in our daily lives, viewing them as dangerous or debilitating. But obsession can be a productive force.
grouped them into four types, based on their degree of focus and obsession (by measuring their degree of effort).
“accept more, then coast”
“Do less, no stress.”
“do more, then stress”
“do less, then obsess”
As few as you can, as many as you must.
Occam’s razor at work doesn’t say that you should simplify all the way to one. It says you should do everything possible to cull activities—the fewest metrics, the fewest goals, the fewest steps, the fewest pieces of sushi—while retaining everything necessary to do great work. As the 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.”
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.
Wharton professor Adam Grant reports in his book Originals, “Many people fail to develop originality because they generate few ideas.”
2. When you know your options, but are uncertain which to choose.
The second tactic for focusing and obsessing, then, is to seal yourself off from those distractions.
There are many ways to tie yourself to the mast. Do it ahead of time, so that when you sit at your desk feeling the urge to distract yourself, you can’t.
A third tactic for doing less and obsessing is to manage your boss’s expectations around your scope of work.
what is value, exactly? As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.
The advice “start with goals” when planning an effort, is wrong. We need to start with value, then proceed to goals. Ask yourself: what benefits do your various work activities produce, really?
DON’T PURSUE GOALS, BUT VALUE9
Here’s a traditional productivity equation:10 A person’s work productivity = output of work / hours of input
equation that emphasizes value: The value of a person’s work = Benefits to others × quality × efficiency
Putting it all together, we get a more precise view of value: to produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.
If you want to perform at your best, you need to home in on a few key tasks and channel your efforts to perfect them—the “do less, then obsess” principle. But which activities warrant such focus? If you’re going to focus on a tiny set of activities, they’d better be the right ones. The answer is to redesign work so as to focus on activities that maximize value, as defined in the above value equation. But how exactly do you do that?
When people redesign, the key is not the degree of change they’re undertaking. Instead, it’s the magnitude of the value they can create.
Hunting for pain points is counterintuitive. When we hear people complain, we tend to dismiss them as whiners.
You can create tremendous value in your job if you spot and help colleagues, customers, and suppliers alleviate their most significant grievances.
As Dan Pink has argued in his book Drive, we’re entrapped by what academics call “functional fixedness”—our inability to solve problems due to our fixation on how work has always been done.
Don’t just see yourself as an employee—see yourself as an innovator of work. Hunt and cure pain points, ask stupid questions, and zoom in on how you can redesign and create value for others.
Good redesigns create more value—the benefits work activities bring to others. That outside-in view is very different from traditional, inside-out ways of setting goals, tasks, and metrics. People can achieve their goals and be very productive, yet produce zero value.
The value equation emphasizes three distinct components. To produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.
Explore five ways to redesign work to create value: • Less fluff: eliminate existing activities of little value • More right stuff: increase existing activities of high value • More “Gee, whiz”: Create new activities of high value • Five star rating: improve quality of ex...
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We created a learning loop scorecard consisting of six items that included phrases such as: “makes changes in an effort to improve”; “tries out new approaches”; “learns from failures”; “is curious;” “doesn’t believe he/she knows best”; and “experiments a lot”
Learning on the job is not about practicing for 10,000 hours; it’s about making sure you perform each loop with high quality.
it takes about 15 minutes of work time every day to improve a skill using the learning loop.
