Have you ever run into a time where it’s better to “Work Harder Not Smarter?”
The mantra is meant to get people to think of innovative approaches to tasks by making them shorter or less labor-intensive to accomplish and it can apply to every white or blue-collar job there is out there. I have a problem with this mantra. This advice is given to just about anyone approaching a large task.
The reason I have such a problem with this is although it’s said all the time, I feel it doesn’t apply to every job or task being addressed. Some approaches are more effective with the most basic and at times labor-intensive efforts to complete the task on time and on budget. Even worse, I’ve found that the mantra can be PARALYZING by driving someone to search for faster or easier solutions when they should just be focusing on getting the job done! How about you? What kind of projects have you worked on where you finally said enough and just started chipping away at it?
For example, I worked on a project where, as the owner of digital marketing, we needed a complete spreadsheet of each page we had on our website which included the URL, SEO keywords, persona, product focus, and page type, along with a few other key attributes. At the time, between our main pages, secondaries, resources, landing pages (yes these should have been in Marketo), and conversion page, we had over 600 pages we needed to find, review, and list, and we had one week to do it. Taking the work smarter not harder approach, I would have first looked to see if any businesses offer such services. Many SEO service companies do these inventories however that would have taken a few weeks, a four-figure budget, and internal approval. I would then look to quick task companies to divvy out the work. Fiverr.com and Taskrabbit.com are good examples for quick projects, but for something like this I would need to turn to Amazon’s MTurk (Mechanical Turk – A great service by the way.) This would also require a budget however we could have achieved what we needed crowed sourced to several people and complete the project for most likely $.50-$1.00 per page.
This process, however, would still require some budget approval, plus a substantial amount of preparation to enable the crowdsourced workforce. After a day to get approval, another day to build and review the prepared instructions, and potentially another day to post the jobs to the site, you’re already 2-3 days in just in preparation. Then if, and I mean IF people accept your job (if the money isn’t right, the job may never get picked up) it will take roughly 2-4 days to process the work on a new one-time project. Then you need to build in time to review and approve the work. Just because the process works in your mind, doesn’t mean someone reading your instructions will understand them the same. When we assessed that each page to review could be done in 30 seconds to 1 minute for internal marketing team members, vs an external consultant taking 60-90 seconds with questionable accuracy (due to not being familiar with our brand, personas, verticals, or products) we decided to divvy up the 600 pages across the four of us. (Seriously, Ashley, Colleen, and Michelle you saved my life).
We finished the project in two days giving us adequate time to review the work and realize our accuracy rates were fantastic. Although this approach was monstrous, boring, and tedious work, we achieved the goal ahead of schedule without incurring a budget expense (granted our time is valuable as well). This process worked well for us when we had to research our top 200 targeted banks for an upcoming campaign. Again we could have outsourced this work but it was only two hours for us to get in a room, divvy up the list, pop a few beers, and just blunt force research and complete the list.
The mantra “work smarter not harder” again is fantastic to get you thinking of faster and innovative ways to complete tasks however when the mantra is mentioned typically when approaching a large and tedious project, it can be paralyzing. If you spend too much time trying to figure out a faster or easier way to complete a task, you’ll find yourself full of anxiety when the deadline is approaching and you haven’t made a dent in the work.