tips for smart work

Learn to make your money work for you. Working a lot and spending every penny you make is NOT working smart!
When you can work, do. Dont slack or allow time to run out so that youre rushing at the end to meet a deadline. When you finish early, if nothing else has come in, you can go play or rest. Dont do it in the middle of the job on a frequent basis.
When youre sick, stay home and rest until you are well. You make too many mistakes when youre ill or tired to call thatworking smart.

It sounds so simple but it may be the single greatest deficiency in the workplace today. We live in an attention seeking world where cell phone chirps, email alerts, social media posts, and people all vie for our attention.

If we dont plan our time, someone else will, and when that happens, we live life in a state of constant reaction. Planning our time allows us to focus our attention on the important, not just on the urgent.

It can begin with a calendar, a day planner or a task manager. By prioritizing our work then blocking out time for those things that are most important to us, we begin to guard our time for activities that have a high impact. Work/ life balance means that we must also be intentional about planning time for our families and for our relationships then sticking to the plan.

Our teams cannot possibly know what our top priorities are unless we share them. I share my Outlook calendar with my executive team. By doing so, I put both parties in a position to plan rather than to react. If they need something from me, they have a tool to plan their time around my priorities.
At SEI, individual ROIs and 5/15s are shared across the organization on our intranet. Its a great way to help teams align their goals and for everyone to see what our top priorities are.
Leaders who care about results appreciate an employee who takes a proactive approach to sharing their schedule and communicating their priorities.

Ifthere isa task that doesnt fall withina particular area of strength, or that will divert focus from something thathas a greater impact, we should turn it over to someone who is better suited to take care of it.When wetry to do everything our self, its a sure fire way to burn out.

Energy spent doing tasks that have little impact is a recipe for failure. Its easy to get caught up in routine tasks that minimize our ability. We should consider which taskswe spend time on regularly and thenweigh their impact. If the impact is minimal, or if they distract us from things that will have a greater impact, we should consider whether theres a way to automate or delegate them. If not, we should considerwhether wecanremove them from our to do list altogether.

Too often the attitude that we must work hard prevents us from quitting a task when we realize that the outcome isnt going to have the impact we had anticipated. There are times when its ok to quit.

When Steve Jobs created the LISA computer, he spent a significant amount of time and resources developing it. When he realized that it wasnt going to have the impact on personal computing that he had envisioned, he quit and created a different computer the Mac. Apple continued to develop LISA, while Jobs focused his attention on the Mac. In the end, Apple dumped hundreds of thousands of LISA computers in a Utah landfill while the Mac went on to revolutionize personal computing. Jobs succeeded because he decided to

In one of my favorite books, Stephen Covey tells a story about a woodcutter whose saw gets more blunt as time passes and he continues cutting down trees. If the woodcutter were to stop sawing, sharpen his saw, and go back to cutting the tree with a sharp blade, he would actually save time and effort in the long run.

The analogy is an easy one to remember but harder to put into practice. Heres what Covey says about sharpening the saw in our lives:

Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have you. It means having a balanced program for self renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Sharpening the saw is a great habit to get into in all areas of our lives, but I think it can be especially beneficial when it comes to work and helping us avoid burnout.

On average our brains are only able to remain focused for 90 minutes; then we need at least 15 minutes rest. (The phenomenon is based on ultradian rhythms.) By taking period breaks roughly every 90 minutes you allow your mind and body to renew and be ready to fire off another 90 minute period of high activity.

For some people, 15 to 20 minute breaks might be tough to pull off, but taking short breaks throughout the day can still help you to refresh your mind and reset your attention span.

Research shows naps lead to improvement in cognitive function, creative thinking, and memory performance. In particular, napping benefits the learning process by helping us take in and retain information better.

The improved learning process comes from naps actually helping our brain to solidify memories. According to Max Read,Research indicates that when memory is first recorded in the brain in the hippocampus, to be specific its still fragile and easily forgotten, especially if the brain is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems, pushes memories to the neocortex, the brains more permanent storage, preventing them from being overwritten.

One study into memory found that participants did remarkably better on a test following a nap than those who didnt sleep at all.Not only are naps beneficial for consolidating memories and helping us remember new information (handy if your job includes a lot of research during the day!), theyre also useful in helping us to avoid burnout, since research shows burnout is a signal that says you cant take in more information in this part of your brain until youve had a chance to sleep.

Daniel Goleman, author of Focus: The Hidden Power of Excellence, suggests spending time in nature to help us reset our attention span and relax our minds.

One experiment he mentions tested how relaxed people were when taking a walk down a city street versus in a quiet park. The study found that the level of attention needed to navigate a busy city street is high enough that the walk doesnt let the brain relax enough to reset our focus levels:

Unlike natural environments, urban environments are filled with stimulation that captures attention dramatically and additionally requires directed attention (e.g., to avoid being hit by a car), making them less restorative.

Spending time in nature, however, allows your mind to fully relax and unwind and helps you focus longer when you return to work. Plus, other research has found that for students, motivation to learn is higher when they are outside instead of in a classroom.

I recently read a blog post by Joel Runyon about a method he callsworkstation popcorn (which is basically what our back end developer Colin does.)

The idea is that you set up at various caf