• Thanushree Anil

9 Uncommon ways to work smarter

As a millennial, your culture, your parent’s lessons, generation-old sayings linger in the mind and the new thoughts of technology making life easier, new ideas projecting, the old sayings completely eat dust with the race of new-age thoughts.

The biggest example is of new thoughts are “Don’t work hard, work smart”

Hard work pays off, wasn’t that something we listened to growing up when we got fewer marks in a subject and our parents instilled this thought in our mind.

So you study, you revise three times and give the exams and voila! You get excellent marks and your parents say, "See! Told you so .”

The conflicting sides of hard work and smart work are that hard work takes time, a huge amount of time to get completed. On the other hand, smart work takes up less amount of time.

Now, what about the saying that goes along the lines of “ Slow and steady wins the race”?

This saying came from the story of the hare and the tortoise, where it glorifies the tortoise’s vigour of not stopping in between.

That’s a fable old as the fossils, what if the hares of today do not lag and sleep in the between or what if the tortoises use a skateboard?


Generations have changed and its time to change the thoughts to motivate yourself.

The world is growing every second and it isn’t going along with the lines of slow and steady anymore.

Here are nine ways to prove that it is time to change your thoughts from old school to new school


So many people of the generation are trying hard to find ways to be productive in less amount of time. Now think about a self-build table that you bought from the store, you look at the layout, you need to fix the smaller pieces, go to the bigger pieces, attach all of them together and boom you have the final product ready to use.


So if you have something to do, say write a blog, plan the layout on what points that you feel that you need to stretch on, cut them along like pizza pieces, divide them into small write-ups, add your fairy dust touch and you have the final article.


There are a lot of misconceptions that the hard workers will win at the end of the race anyhow in the long run and the smart workers just find out shortcuts and as we all know how the saying goes, “There are no shortcuts to success”. We could agree on that for now.

You see any person who does hard work or smart work goes through the entire layout with an equal amount of effort what brings a difference is the manner of execution.

Take a look at an old example, and most certainly a common one

An axe is given to a hard worker and then told to cut a tree. That person would immediately start working trying to cut the tree, say it took him at least 6 hrs to cut it.

But when the same axe is given to a smart person, they would spend a considerable amount of time sharpening the axe and then cut the tree in much fewer hours than the hard worker.

Smart workers find resources and techniques to fill in the gaps and complete it as quickly as possible.

They don’t find a shortcut, they find a loophole in the question of what is causing the delay and then fill that hole up with their common sense.


Pick up the three most crucial tasks that you have to complete that day and get on to work with that first. The rest of the day could be filled with the other tasks that don’t have much of importance.

When you finish the work that is more important than the work that takes a lot of time, say you have a project presentation to make that you have to submit in the afternoon and you have a project model to turn-in day after tomorrow which could take a lot of time.

By completing that tiny project presentation you can be completely relaxed for the rest of the day and work with your brain for creative ideas and indulge in the work immensely.


Do not think that if you work around the clock your boss will notice you, they would just take advantage of you to finish tedious tasks. Instead, work smart find the right tools, find the right resources, save time and take a Kit Kat and get the work done. There is nothing beneficial for the body if you work like a donkey and cause discomfort to your body.


Work for an hour and take at least a 10-minute break, those 10 minute has 600 seconds, don’t just sit there and close your eyes, get stretch, listen to those muscles popping and hear your body yell at you for sitting so long.

You could also take up the Pomodoro technique which is working for 25 minutes exactly and taking a 5 minutes break. Keep a checklist, its not possible that you would be immersed in your work for 25 minutes in the beginning. So keep a checklist of how many times you were distracted in those 25 minutes and overtime you would be able to see, those checks lessening and your lists getting ticked off sooner.


Starting of the week, take those yellow notes and take a pen and write down the tasks that you have ahead of you in the following week, you may notice some of the tasks are related or are in line with one another, so what do you do?

Get them into a relationship, get them together, get all those small tiny teeny tasks together and you

can knock them off with your bowling ball of productivity all at once.


Work your wrist movements not for chanting “Wingardium Leviosa” but anyone young in today's world with the pandemic going on too would use less and less of paper, everything has become digitalised, you can have tiny notebooks in your laptop or phone and you even have the strikethrough option to cut them off.

In a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer

“Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note-taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops.”

And what is true joy without striking off that heavy task that you had gotten with a sense of satisfaction?


All music lovers would love listening to music any time of the day, working out, hard rock songs in, walking to your way back home, emotional songs where you look out of the window and pretend that you are in the music video. Don’t lie! We all do that. We just need an excuse to just listen to songs, we set songs to match the activity that we do.

So set your songs that match your mood and that match your tasks. For easy and short tasks that don’t require your keen attention, soft music could be played in the background for getting that creative mind up.


Take a task one at a time and try to refrain your mind from thinking of all the pending tasks that you have left. As said before it is in the manner of execution that is different in hard work and smart work. Getting clarity in what you are doing, getting a good vision as of how this would look like in the final stage, or how this would look like in the long run, because we need to run long and win the race.

The breaks that you take could really help you to get another perspective for the work or task that you are doing, you could even maybe do a headstand and see the world inverted to get you a vision of a completely different world. (Also read how to do a headstand perfectly)

NO means NO

You could be efficient, your peers might consider you as hardworking and when they appreciate you, you become so overwhelmed and happy.

Now that’s not a problem, the problem arises when they start dumping even the silliest tasks on you that they could have easily done. Don’t be afraid that if you say no, what other people would think and that your peers would think you aren’t capable anymore.

Be firm to say no without hesitation if you aren’t interested in the task that they give you, helping out a friend is one thing but being taken advantage of is bad for your long run because you would be wasting your precious time.


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