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1-Page Summary of Great At Work
Working Smart
In 2011, a business professor studied 5,000 managers and employees to find out how people become great at work. He found that most of the top performers don’t work longer hours; instead they make every hour count by following seven “work-smart” principles. These include performing well in your job, infusing your work with passion and purpose, and living well too.
Principle One: “Do Less; Then Obsess”
When people want to be the best, they often work too much. They try to do as many things as possible and end up doing them poorly. When this happens, it’s important for those people to figure out how their activities relate to each other and decide which ones are most important. However, when someone is overwhelmed with all of his tasks he tends not to prioritize his activities well enough and instead focuses on one thing at a time, thus reducing the quality of his work in every area that he tries to accomplish.
The author found that the best performers are more successful because they focus on a few things and do them well. The author provides an example of how this worked for Robert Scott, who was competing to be first to reach the South Pole in 1911. Amundsen focused on just one means of transport: sled dogs, while Scott prepared five ways to traverse Antarctica: dogs, motorized sledges, ponies, skis and manual hauling. In doing so, he spread his attention over many possible methods of transport and didn’t get any of them right.
Narrowing your focus in a complex and fast-moving business environment can be difficult. Hansen provides these helpful strategies: *Recalibrate how you measure accomplishment by eliminating tasks instead of adding to them.
Cut off your access to distractions – Just as Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship in Homer’s Odyssey, you should remove your laptop from internet capability and designate it as a work-only computer. If co-workers distract you, Hansen suggests that you arrive at the office an hour early and stay an hour late or commandeer an empty conference room.
Get your boss’s input – Streamlining your focus is difficult if you don’t have a clear sense of priorities from the top. Talk to your boss about which projects are most important and get his/her feedback on how to prioritize them.
Principle Two: “Redesign Your Work”
When you have a lot of tasks to complete, prioritize the most important ones. Determine how much value each task provides for your organization or yourself. If an action is valuable, it’s worth doing well.
The author recommends measuring the value of an activity by looking at it from outside in. This is opposed to conventional thinking, which looks at activities from inside out using internal targets as a metric for success. The author also emphasizes that multitasking reduces productivity and effectiveness, so we should avoid doing several things simultaneously.
Principle Three: “Don’t Just Learn; Loop”
It can be difficult to find time to practice and refine skills, unlike an athlete or musician. However, you can integrate practice into your daily tasks by using “the learning loop” that involves soliciting feedback on how well you’re doing and making adjustments based on the feedback. There are six guidelines for creating a learning loop:
Set aside 15 minutes a day to work on the skill you’re trying to improve. Practice one micro-behavior at a time, like asking questions that spark creative thinking.
Once you have a list of questions to ask, keep track of how often you ask them. Monitor the number of new ideas that team members suggest.
