It turns out just sweeping the floor won't make you rich

One thing is right, and that Is the fact that if you work hard enough you can anchieve your set goals. However, working hard is only a part of the equation, as there are many more factors that influence your success, such as the quality of the decisions you're taking, what kind of habits you have, the relationships you have and what is your disposition towards adverse situations. All of this and many more have a great effect regarding the development of your projects and predicting whether they will make It or not. In this article I'll expand further on this subject, talking about how the common Idea of "You're just not trying hard enough" is the wrong focus when trying to approach a problem, and providing you with what you really should pay attention to. Let's begin by talking how a future of just "working hard" might look in the long run.

From dawn till dusk:

Being the first and the last in the office, working yourself till exhaustion everyday, spending little time with your family because of that, cutting off relationships with your friends. Repeating this pattern for 25 years will suck you dry, as you will lose with every year what's most valuable to you, youthful and vital energy to dedicate to what you love. This is where most people fail, by choosing a work they hate telling to themselves that It is just "temporary" and ending stuck in a rut for the rest of your working years thinking that If you work hard in the same thing, you'll get to the top of the food chain in no time. Sadly, this is mostly not the case, as there will be other people competing for the same spot and using different methods, such as the adquisition of knowledge, improving their relationships with those on the company and increasing their overall value through so much more avenues, making themselves reliable and unreplaceable, all with maybe half of the effort you had put and leaving you with the same job in the bottom while they ascend.

However, there's a different philosophy regarding work ethic that you can use to your benefit: Hours spent don't mean work done. Let's expand on this.

Being Near It doesn't make you an expert on It.

Let me put up a simple example. Let's say you go to work from 9 to 5, and in your first hour you check up the email for any urgent 0r important message. It turns out that what you have in your inbox are just offers from your favorite clothes store. After that, you go filling forms leaving your phone close just in case someone calls for a new assignment, making you turn your head with every notification and distracting you from the work. Let's say this drags on for a long 3 hours till It's time for lunch break. After that, you're left with only 2:30-3 productive hours to dedicate to your job, and It's certain that you'll spend most of that time distracted due to your focus energy being depleted in menial tasks and all the distractions you are exposed to, making you think that you have done a lot when you just have been all over the place not generating any meaningful input, all while slowly decreasing your ability to focus.

Now, let's talk about a tidier routine. In the same span (9 to 5), making sure that you had made clear to people that you won't respond any emails or messages received in that time frame and leaving your phone in a further part of the room with notifications (Except for call/sms ones) turned off, you begin by putting the effort in whatever are the real functions of your job. Let's say you keep up with this for 3 hours just before lunch break, then taking the period from 13:00 to 15:00 to finish It up, hour in which you save your progress, turn back the notifications and go to search for emails while leaving the organization tasks for an specific day or even better, delegating them and now leaving you with the sensation of having made more and being more content about the quality of the work, all with a simple set of decisions.

What differentiates these two scenarios are the chosen approaches, in one you let distractions reign and you dedicate yourself to go back and forth between different pieces of information, at the end forfeiting your capacity to focus and taking from you the most productive hours of the day, the earlier ones, where you are fresh and ready to work, even in difficult tasks. In the other hand, for the second approach, you get rid of all distractions and take into account the first hours of your workday as valuable spaces of time to put the effort into, leaving just the easier parts for last and using your energy reserves in a fairer way. The first one chose to work hard, though It didn't have a clear direction about in which task to work hard, making the person waste precious time in just anything, passing It as "Important job" while the second one took all the precautions and from the get go focused in what was really important, the main part of the work Itself, making much more progress.

I hope that with this introduction to the series you can get a better grasp of how many things make an effect on how good your output is, where by just taking better decisions you can improve your workflow and production with a lesser amount of resources and with that, proving correct the point of working smarter, not harder. In the next one I'll talk about many strategies on how to optimize your environment to get the most out of your workday and get the best results out of It. Thank you for your support and good luck!