Work smarter not harder Archives - Work Less & Achieve More

1. Understand Your Mind (Accept The Truth)

2. What Attitude Do You Want To Master? (Will Affect Your Mindset)

3. Turning Point – Develop Open-Mindedness

Owners, managers and supervisors can create large efficiency gains in a business by turning closed-mindedness into open-mindedness. This will help develop valuable above average foundational skills which are essential for creative thinking.

3 Steps to Turn Closed-Mindedness Into Open-Mindedness

Definition Of Being Open-minded

Open-mindedness is receptiveness to new ideas. Open-mindedness relates to the way in which people approach the views and knowledge of others, and in the words of Dean Tjosvold “incorporate the beliefs that others should be free to express their views and that the value of others’ knowledge should be recognized.” – Wikipedia.org . I feel open-mindedness goes even further than this. If you are open-minded then you have the capacity to look at everything with the view that there could be a better way.

1. Understand Your Mind (Accept The Truth)

When studying something Stephen Covey says it is advantageous to study it’s opposite to gain valuable insights. That is why I have looked at closed-mindedness below.

Closed-mindedness is the opposite of open-mindedness. To me closed-mindedness is where one believes that they and their own opinion matters the most and certainly more than any arguments someone else may put forward.

This can be a major problem when trying to teach them new things. Not only that, but closed- minded people are really not interested in the views and ideas of others. This leaves them exposed to being left with second or even third grade ideas which could very well have been upgraded by listening to and developing on the views of others. Closed-mindedness causes people to shut down to a degree and pay less attention to what is going on around them. As a result this generates a domino effect limiting the urge to pay real attention therefore a lower level of observation and listen skills are applied. Look for the closed-minded people at your work and observe the domino effect for yourself. Test their listening skills out compared to an open-minded person!

Open-minded people on the other hand understand that their own knowledge is not all there is to know on a topic. For this reason they realize that efficiency could be enhanced by actively observing and listening to others. They are open to taking suggestions and feedback from others. This can be very useful as people don’t always view things from the same perspective. The perspective of another person could be completely different to yours. In turn this may deliver an even better idea by combining your original idea and the other person’s suggestions.

How Open-Minded Are You?

Most of us like to think that we are 100% open minded. Really it is actually hard to be and stay 100% open-minded. See how well you fair by truthfully answering YES or NO to the survey questions below.

 Do you think you are 100% open-minded?
 In meetings are you the person who never interrupts people who are speaking?
 Do you keep listening actively when others disagree with you?
 Are you open to the idea that others may have better ideas than you?
 When others are speaking are you actively listening or thinking about what you will say next which (equals a No)?
 Are you open to change caused by new ideas?
 When working in a team do you feel there is no need to stand out?
 Would you fully back an idea that you think is better than your own?

If you answered NO to more than one there is scope to improve your open-mindedness!

2. What Attitude Do You Want To Master? (Will Affect Your Mindset)

Your ATTITUDE will be affected by your MINDSET. A positive mindset will be a vast advantage to you every day. Being Open-Minded is foundational to maintaining a constant positive attitude. This may sound simple but it is really important.

Closed-Minded To Change

The crux of the matter comes when viewing how people react to change. Change can be challenging for many people and can affect their attitude to work. Change constantly creates new work which adds to current workloads. Think about all the abundant new technology that is around today that was rarely used 20 years ago. All these things have changed our lives for the better.

There is a tax that comes with new technology, that is the change and learning that is required to make it work. For example, the extra work to learn new procedures and policies which adds to current workload. When change happens frequently it is difficult to manage for many people. Not only that but new technology often renders obsolete old technology that people are good at. This can be a major cause of frustration as an experienced person has to start from the beginning to learn whole new ways of doing things now.This can be a major reason why experienced staff are tainted against change. Who can blame them, the point is that when changes are introduced with new technology they need to be managed extremely well or management will find that they receive a negative backlash. According to Forbes a huge 70% of change programs fail. Not only that but it can push staff towards becoming disengaged which has been shown to lower their efficiency.

Subject To Closed-Minded Thinking

People can have closed minds to certain divisive subjects. Let me give you a classic example. BITCION is often derided as a scam or just rubbish that should be band. If you think this way you will have a very closed mind on the topic. What this means though is that if there are any benefits to studying bitcoin then you will certainly miss them.

Bitcoin

I used to think this way for a while about bitcoin. Then after talking with some friends I decided to look at it more closely. The technology behind bitcoin is called blockchain. It is a super clever piece of technology which has been used for 10 years now but is still in the early stages of development. As with all newly released technology there can be a lot of bugs that need ironing out. This is still happening with blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology has the ability to positively impact all industries right across the globe. Not only that but it will certainly give any business that embraces it a distinct advantage over current ways of doing things. If you have a closed mind this will sound like rubbish to you. Do yourself a favour and do a little research about the blockchain and how it is and will go onto impact business for the next 50 years. Blockchain is really a type of clever automation that will revolutionise how industries function as much as the internet did in the last 20 years. That is the reason that many hundreds of multinational businesses are now finally embracing blockchain and cryptocurrencies via the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Multinational companies would not be wasting their time if they had not investigated the benefits of blockchain to convince themselves of the potential value to be unlocked.

3. Turning Point – Develop Open-Mindedness

To move from close-minded to open-minded thinking will genuinely be a watershed moment. It will be the turning point that allows anyone to gain much more from the same amount of thinking effort. Possibly even less thinking effort. If a person is closed-minded, they are relying 100% on themselves to do all their thinking. This may sound great but it is not. Simply by actively listening and observing others it can spark fresh ideas. Some of these will be your own new ideas and many will come from others. This is the basis of brainstorming which is a super powerful technique that has proven itself over many decades.

Watershed Thinking

Anyone with a fully closed-mind will be creating a permanent barrier to ideas generated from Creative: thinking, active listening, observations & techniques. The value of an idea will not reduce if it is not 100% derived from you, often the contrary is true.

Diverted thinking image

Remember that most of the brilliant ideas or even businesses started out as a small seed idea which has been fostered to grow and develop over time into something exponentially more valuable. They never started out as a large fully developed idea or business.

Lazy Person’s Tool

I’m not suggesting for a minute that creative thinking is being lazy. The point is that while creative thinking tools stop us from linking to the thoughts and patterns of the past, they save us time and effort. This is done because lots of effort has been put into the tools at the research and design stage. A Creative Thinking tool which has been designed for a specific purpose allows a vast amount of leverage to be built into the tool to amplify the value that can be extracted from it. Let me give you an example. Mind-mapping is a creative tool that will allow anyone to maximize their thinking power when writing essays, working on projects and the like. The brilliance of this tool is in the design. It is designed to allow us to use 100% of our brain power for each of the 3 steps involved. So simply by using a tool that breaks the work involved down into 3 pieces we are able to use all of our brain power for each step. This will triple our thinking power used for this task. Wow. Sounds a little basic and silly but it does work extremely well and has other advantages that I will not discuss at present. But remember that keeping an open-mind is vital because many really valuable seed ideas come from things that sound different, basic and sometimes a little silly.

Leverage Minds Of Others

This is a no brainer. If you use active listening and observation you will be able to catch more of the clever ideas and actions that others are doing. Why not utilize the best of what you hear and see? This is a simple way to leverage the minds of others. When in meetings don’t try to argue or refute the idea of others before you have spent at least a few minutes trying to find ways to strengthen them to make them better. This goes even if it is an idea that is in direct opposition to your own idea. If you keep doing things this way you will end up with much better ideas on average. Most importantly, these better ideas will most likely make things quicker and easier to do. Therefore, you will become more efficient. That in turn will make your work less stressful.

Solutions To Change

Managing changes is one of the most difficult things for executives. 45% of frontline professionals prefer to keep the status quo as shown by the chart below from Forbes.

Status Quo image

It is counterintuitive to say that the solution for businesses and staff from the
pressure and stress bought about by constant change is to embrace micro changes. Let me explain. The best way to counteract change in business is to keep ahead of the game. Firstly, remaining open-minded to change will help. Secondly, by implementing micro changes now before they are forced on you. Change is driven by the need for businesses to become more efficient. If all staff members are working actively each week at making micro changes to become more efficient then the need and pressure for change could lessen. There will always be some pressure for change. Fighting change at any level will often be a waste of time and energy.

That is why in most instances to maintain an open mind will yield many valuable benefits. The best part is that these benefits flow naturally from the clever design of creative thinking tools or talents like open-mindedness. If you are a business owner, manager or supervisor you will be able to multiply the value from open-mindedness by instilling these concepts into your team. By making your team more effective you will make yourself look like a brilliant leader. Isn’t that the name of the game? Everyone is a winner in this situation.

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Regards,
Eric Elsley
Work Less & Achieve More

1. Think Smart – to minimise your effort required with leverage

2. Work Smart – create small changes to make big time gains

3. Smart Bonus – increase efficiency to cut down pressure and stress

I believe that working smarter not harder is important for most staff. With the pace of technology change and the trend of continuous improvement it is important to know how to beat the working blues driven by too much change and uncertainty.

Even more important is to know how to become more efficient to keep your boss happy while minimising your own effort. Please keep an open mind as many of the ideas I am suggesting are counterintuitive. Make sure you read this whole post before you start to judge if you think this system will work for you.

3 secrets to working smarter PIN — **PIN me, please**

I used to work in the information technology (IT) section of a busy regional library service with 15 branch libraries.

Along with my IT work I was responsible for performance reporting which included delivering many statistical reports. Since much of my work with statistics had to be delivered within a short timeframe (generally 4-6 days), I felt the added pressure of a tight deadline which in turn increased my stress levels.

I was learning statistics and trying to keep up with changes in IT that were happening often. Stress built up and I had a heart attack. My ECG readout was called a Tombstone reading. That meant I very nearly died. Luckily for me I made it to the hospital quickly after my heart attack to receive fast treatment. I was sweating so much the nurses had trouble getting the ECG pads to stick to my body.

When they saw the ECG readout I was whisked away and was given a clot busting injection that saved my life. Later I found out I had a 90% blockage plus a clot. No wonder it was very painful. After I was stabilised, I spent some days in Intensive Care waiting and was eventually had an angiogram then a stent was inserted near my heart to solve the problem. That was brilliant and I was released the next day. The doctor gave me one week off work to recuperate. I knew that something had to change with the way I worked so that I did not get to stressed again.

1. Think Smart – To Minimise Your Effort Required With Leverage

An opportunity presented itself when I read a book called “80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch. It suggested that 20% of our activity gave us 80% of our results. To me this meant some things we do are much more productive than others. Richard showed me a smarter way to think was required first which would lead to a smarter way to work. That in turn would lead to efficiency gains in the long run.

My plan was to focus on the most important 20% of my work at the present time. For me this was the area in my work that was causing me the most problems which elevated the pressure and stress I felt. At the time that was my role keeping statistics for the 15 libraries in the service.

Statistics gathering was a task that I had to do each month and report them to my manager. It was repetitive work that required a high level of accuracy. That meant I had to be 100% focussed when doing these tasks. I was always removed from other rostered duties until I had completed my statistical reporting for the month as they were generally required urgently by my manager.

Let me give you an example of a 20% action that delivered an 80% improvement in results. After meeting my monthly deadline, I decided to evaluate my work with statistics to see where large efficiencies could be made with only small changes to my workflow.

When I exported statistics from our library system to excel a glitch would happen where 2 blank rows appeared between each row of data. Now consider that some of these reports were ending up 156 pages long with the blank lines included. It was a real struggle to delete all the empty rows and often took from 10-20 minutes per report. I decided to research on the web for a quicker way. There was a way which saved heaps of time but it was a little tricky. I persevered and found a way to make it work every time. Wow, the rows could all be deleted in around 45 seconds.

As I ran more than 10 reports each month with this problem the time savings soon added up. The 80/20 Principle that Richard wrote about was the factor that focussed me to smarter work practices. It also delivered huge leverage to my efforts by multiplying the return on my small workflow change. What I found was that not only did I save a considerable amount of time that month on all 10 reports but I also saved the same amount of time each month from then onwards.

2. Work Smart – Create Small Changes To Make Big Time Gains

It took me about 50 minutes to research my problem and test it a few times making modifications to the procedure to have it work brilliantly every time. This gave me a huge leap in efficiency (with top accuracy) which was a real help as statistics work was repetitious, tedious and always had tight deadlines as they were required for further reports to top level management.

I will show the approximate time saved by this workflow change.

Time Invested / Saved In First Month

Net Time Saved Per Year

Return On Time Invested

3. Smart Bonus – Increase Efficiency To Cut Pressure & Stress

The time saving also helped me to meet the deadline more easily. It reduced my stress levels which allowed me to work even more efficiently. Have you noticed that when you are stressed it slows you down…when I was stressed out, I could not work at my normal pace.

It has occurred to me that each time I make use of the 80/20 Principle it improves my efficiency, saves me time (not first off but in the long run). I found an extra benefit was to boost my morale and self-esteem because I had found a better way to speed up my work and deliver results faster without noticing an increase in pressure or stress.

Just imagine the difference you could make to your efficiency at work if you were able to implement one tiny 80/20 change per week or even per month. As change is happening very fast in business it seems counterintuitive to think that the solution to pressure and stress brought about by change is for us to embrace tiny changes in our workflow to make us more productive. This way we are counter acting the pressure and stress brought on by change and continuous improvement / efficiency programs.

I hope this article will assist you to work smarter not harder and still achieve valuable efficiency gains.

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