To work hard is to do it for long hours, with a lot of concentration, energy and interest in the task at hand. Of course, working in this way is necessary to achieve great achievements, although if that intensity is combined with doing it intelligently, all the better. You may be at work for a long time, doing thousands of things; This is often called hard work.
Although that does not mean that you will be more productive. You may be doing the wrong things or you are doing them wrong. The extreme is that of people who spend all day in front of the computer but who are really on social networks.
Another case is if you are doing the right things, spending enough time and doing everything with a high quality. You may spend less time, but you are more productive. This is called working smart.
In my opinion there are two problems in these two ways of working:
- Working for a long time is absurd if it is later a poor quality job or causes you to have poor health.
- Working smart can be insufficient if you don't produce enough, if you miss deadlines, or if your competitors outperform you (even if they had lower quality).
In our Western culture we revere to work hard. In some organizations there is the phenomenon of "presenteeism", which is not really related to productivity at all. Bosses believe that employees have to spend more time in the office, because they "will be working", although much of that time "only presence" is lost on the Internet.
Nowadays, productivity is being given more and more priority and there are initiatives that promote work-family reconciliation, although it is not enough at all. Furthermore, with the crisis, working conditions have worsened; long hours are worked, scandalously underpaid, and overtime is often unpaid.
In my opinion, you have to get away from that kind of job where people are treated badly and exploited. For me it is not valid that "it is what there is, there is no work." Perhaps, the best option would be for you to take a little risk and look for something better.
Work hard or smart?
Leaving aside the jobs in which you are not valued, you waste your time and therefore your life… I wonder… why don't we mix the two ways of working?
Doing it smart is important, but I think it's just part of the "equation." Anyone who has achieved a great achievement is unlikely to have done it just by working smart.
Einstein, Newton, Fleming or Edison spent thousands of hours studying and researching to arrive at their discoveries.
As Thomas Edison himself said:
Of course, Edison worked smartly, he was actually very smart - he recorded 1,000 inventions and was the forerunner of electric street lighting.
There are many CEOs of companies - CEOS - who claim to get up at 6:15 am or even work two hours after dinner. They comment that they sometimes work 18 hours a day.
So here is the problem, there is a real conflict between life and work. If you work so hard, you won't have a social or family life. Another thing is that this work is concentrated in a time of year or by some event.
Tireless worker cases
Make no mistake, big goals are hard to achieve. In this world we are many millions of people and in whatever you want you will have to make an effort.
If you want a job you will have to compete with hundreds of candidates, if you want a partner you will have to compete with other "competitors", if you want to win a marathon you will have to compete with hundreds of runners.
If you don't believe it, take a look at these facts from some of the most successful people today and in history:
-Roger Federer, the best tennis player in history, trains 10 hours a day, reaching 100 hours in some key weeks.
-The Beatles played from 1960 to 1964 for more than 10,000 hours in Hamburg, Germany.
-Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter stated in an interview that he worked 8-10 hours.
-Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, works some weeks up to 130 hours.
-Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbuck, works about 13 hours a day.
-Tim Cook, Apple CEO starts work at 4:30 am
-Barack Obama, president of the United States, sleeps about 6 hours a day. He gets up at 7:00 am and goes to bed at 1:00.
-Thomas Edison slept 3-4 hours every night.
-Benjamin Franklin slept 5 hours every night.
-Nikola Tesla slept 2 hours every night.
In these examples, working harder seems to have led to great achievements. But it's not always like this…
Low productivity cases
According to the European Commission, productivity per hour in Germany exceeds 42 euros, while the Spanish one remains at 32 euros.
An average of 1,780 hours a year are worked in Spain, a figure only surpassed by Japan (1,790 hours), the United States (1,800 hours) and South Korea (2,100 hours). Spain has 68.5 points in productivity per hour worked, far from Germany (87.1) and the Eurozone (75.9).
Therefore, productivity does not depend on the number of hours worked, but on whether those hours have been worked efficiently. Therefore, quality is more important than quality.
Conclusions
For me the conclusion is clear: yes, you want to achieve a complicated goal, it is necessary to work hard but also intelligently.
Work hard, smartly, productively, and constantly improving. The historical figures that I mentioned before worked a lot but they also did it efficiently.
How to do it? The key is to maintain a level of persistence and focus on your goals while you learn and find new ways of doing things more efficiently, that is, with the same investment of resources (time, money, energy…) you achieve the same or better results.
On the other hand, although they are very important, for you to achieve great achievements it will not be enough to work in one way or another, other factors such as your strategy, training, degree of risk, creativity, opportunities or even luck will also influence.