Busy vs. Productive, which one are you?

Eye-opening piece about the biggest cliché in the work-world: Work smarter not harder (or longer).

Do you see yourself in this?

Busy-ness is impressive. It puts you in the heat of the action. It gives you an elevated sense of importance. You’re always late for social engagements, barely have enough time for family get-togethers, and hardly get a moment’s sleep. Emails get exchanged, meetings fill up your schedule, worldwide teleconferences become the norm–there’s even the occasional hope of revenue exceeding expenses. You’re like a rock star without the music.

The problem is that working smarter takes a lot of mental effort. Constant prioritizing, not answering e-mails when they come, but when you are ready to answer them, stopping to think about the long term and planning your present based on that.

In the spirit of gaining control over my work-week I’ve started using a process based on Scrum, I call this process Personal Scrum. I’ll post some details of that over the next few weeks. It would be really good to get your input on what techniques you are using to manager your personal work-time. Let the community know by adding a comment to this post.

As for working smarter… try it out, it may even work for you. It certainly does for me.