When I saw this blog entry and began to skim over it I decided to read it as soon as I saw the first suggestion "Stop Working Hard" because the thought of accomplishing my goals without working so hard sounds appealing to me. And we all have heard the saying "Work Smarter, Not Harder" time and time again. But the reason this blog struck a chord with me is I have experienced in my career a number of specific instances where these guidelines have worked as suggested.
I am employed as a Senior Developer in the IT Department of my employer where I write custom software applications, mostly for our finance departments, to provide added functionality to our integrated suite of enterprise software. A lot of that involves applying software skills that I have learned over years of practice but sometime writing software is more an art than a science.
Occasionally a particularly difficult issue arises with writing the software required to solve a special problem. Instead of working harder or concentrating more, many times doing exactly the opposite is exactly what is needed as the author suggests. Sometimes just getting up to walk around for a few minutes is enough. Countless times through the years I have experienced a moment away from work where the light bulb in my brain goes on. For reasons I can only guess the majority of those have occurred in the shower shortly after rising in the morning.
There was one memorable time though I was fortunate to apply the "Record Your Genius" suggestion. I was working on a project that presented a particularly difficult challenge. Unfortunately with the passage of time I don't remember exactly what the problem was. But I remember when I solved it.
We have three sons that participated in Boy Scouts so I became a troop leader and have spent hundreds of nights camping out with our troop. In this instance I was sleeping in a tent alone probably because I was camping with two of our sons who were in their separate tent. I awoke at approximately 2:00 a.m. with my mind racing and realized I was focused on that problem. Despite my initial effort to go back to sleep my mind kept moving quickly until I realized I might have just started down the path to the solution of this challenging problem.
I got out of my sleeping bag and reached for the battery-powered lantern I always have while camping and turned it on. Fortunately I followed the "Be Prepared" motto so I had a pen and an 8 1/2 by 11 writing pad in my pack. I grabbed them, sat up, and went to work. For the next half-hour I wrote code, crossed out code, and rewrote it again and again. By the time I was done I had my solution coded and consolidated in just two pages of code. When I got back to work the following week I revised the program that I was working on to incorporate my camping code into it and then tested it successfully.
I have had many examples when not working so hard has been not only helpful but necessary but this episode in the most obvious example of how you can be surprisingly productive by not working so hard. Read the blog and his four guidelines and see what you think. Maybe you can think of some specific instance where this has worked for you also.
I am employed as a Senior Developer in the IT Department of my employer where I write custom software applications, mostly for our finance departments, to provide added functionality to our integrated suite of enterprise software. A lot of that involves applying software skills that I have learned over years of practice but sometime writing software is more an art than a science.
Occasionally a particularly difficult issue arises with writing the software required to solve a special problem. Instead of working harder or concentrating more, many times doing exactly the opposite is exactly what is needed as the author suggests. Sometimes just getting up to walk around for a few minutes is enough. Countless times through the years I have experienced a moment away from work where the light bulb in my brain goes on. For reasons I can only guess the majority of those have occurred in the shower shortly after rising in the morning.
There was one memorable time though I was fortunate to apply the "Record Your Genius" suggestion. I was working on a project that presented a particularly difficult challenge. Unfortunately with the passage of time I don't remember exactly what the problem was. But I remember when I solved it.
We have three sons that participated in Boy Scouts so I became a troop leader and have spent hundreds of nights camping out with our troop. In this instance I was sleeping in a tent alone probably because I was camping with two of our sons who were in their separate tent. I awoke at approximately 2:00 a.m. with my mind racing and realized I was focused on that problem. Despite my initial effort to go back to sleep my mind kept moving quickly until I realized I might have just started down the path to the solution of this challenging problem.
I got out of my sleeping bag and reached for the battery-powered lantern I always have while camping and turned it on. Fortunately I followed the "Be Prepared" motto so I had a pen and an 8 1/2 by 11 writing pad in my pack. I grabbed them, sat up, and went to work. For the next half-hour I wrote code, crossed out code, and rewrote it again and again. By the time I was done I had my solution coded and consolidated in just two pages of code. When I got back to work the following week I revised the program that I was working on to incorporate my camping code into it and then tested it successfully.
I have had many examples when not working so hard has been not only helpful but necessary but this episode in the most obvious example of how you can be surprisingly productive by not working so hard. Read the blog and his four guidelines and see what you think. Maybe you can think of some specific instance where this has worked for you also.
