Dale Carnegie Training India Presents

Q&A Topic For The Week

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

A lot of people work hard, but I prefer to work smart. As a top sales executive, I learned a long time ago that you can either waste your time working in the business or you can earn a nice living working on the business. Don't get bogged down with paperwork and the busy work at the office. Spend the selling hours reaching out to new prospects and building relationships with existing clients. Manage your territory. If you know you're going to be in a certain area on a Tuesday, make sure you take care of all your business in that particular area that day. Don't waste time going back there again on Thursday. Plan your day the night before. If you walk into the office and aren't sure what you're going to do that day, you won't be making much money. People don't plan to fail. They fail to plan.

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Bruce PompeaniAdvertising Consultant

Hard work may not be productive - just hard and endless. Smart work is hard work applied productively by preplanned, carefuldetermination of the best course by which to proceed before

launchingthe effort.

Kenneth LarsonRetired Aerospace Contracts Manager

Hard work is when we keep repeating the same old things in order to make a difference in the results. 

Smart work is being able to discover and correct mistakes and keep working at the resulting things in order to make a difference in the results. Renjit Ebroo

Coach: Organizational Behaviour and Entrepreneurship

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Smart work is doing things that only bring about the desired end result. 

Hard work is the "conditioned belief" society has bought into...believing if it isn't hard, back breaking, long hours, etc, it isn't work. 

The key is to only do work that brings about the desired result....this requires commitment to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

Ramesh KumarCorporate Trainer at tutorPace

It is achieving the same results while working effectively by being focused and use your time wisely and effectively by setting proper SMART goals and executing them and using body energy at the right rhythm and knowing the work/balance effect

Sahar Andrade, MB.BChDiversity& Inclusion|Leadership training

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

For me hard work is about working a lot (many hours), being focused on the task and delivering the best we can. Smart work is about creativity and innovation. It's having the ability to think out of the box in order to deliver better results than originally planned. I agree that the two are a fantastic combination.

Sylvia GautierProactive Life Coach

I've seen endless instances where people have spent hours and hours on tasks given to them; late evenings, all nighters. But when the way it is done is incorrect, when the deadline has slipped, when the delivered item is not as per specification, all this 'hard work' results in nothing. 

Know what you are doing. We all get paid for results, not the number of hours we put in

Hussain AkbarCTO at Converge Technologies (Pvt) Ltd

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

This question reminds me something from the book Seven habits of highly successful people. In the 7th habit "Sharpen the saw", Covey gives the following example. A man is working really hard and cutting trees all day with an unsharp saw. The condition of the saw is that it does not help him cut even one small tree in a day. When asked why can't he sharpen the saw his answer is "I am busy cutting the tree and I don't have time to sharpen the saw". He is sure a hard worker. But if he sharpened the saw you could have cut more trees with the same effort.

Logu VenkatachalamSoftware Solution Provider  

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Hard work is to work many hours, to perform a lot of task. Smart work is to do things on a efficient way, in order to spare time and to reach better results. People can work hard and reach low performance level, other can work less hard and reach better results. But in successful business, hard and smart work are needed.

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Michelle HillFitness content writer for current/retired pro athletes

The difference about hard work and smart work is simply a matter of preference, proper adjustment and definition. If you work smart then hard work turns into smart, however if you work hard does not necessarily mean that you are working smart. Smart work is about using all of your resources in such way that even the hardest work seems easy. Hard work, well if we don't work smart then it's easy to make our work harder. Does that all make sense? To simplify, it takes smart work to manage hard work. Smart work triggers our unconscious mind. If we believe that the work is hard to start with then it will be. If we believe that the work is smart it will be too. It's a matter of approach and attitude. The hardest work is to make hard work turn into smart one.

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Peter SliwinskiLearning & development professional

The "where" and "how" we focus our energy into our work will determine whether it is smart or hard work. Some will focus on the 80 percent of work that brings 20 percent of the results - because it is easier or maybe even due to a lack of awareness. 

When we can learn to focus on where and how to best put our energy into work that yields a greater result, we've started to move into smart work. A quick is example is in how we process our emails. For many, the email box is a frequent distraction throughout the day. Each small pop-up takes our attention away from what we were doing previously in order to check the contents of a message that was probably meant to be sent to the spam box anyway. In reality, we end up spending most of our day on email. 

The alternative would be to adapt a process, like in the "4 hour work week" by Tim Ferriss where he suggests checking email twice per day. You maximize the time in sorting through emails and responding to what is important and give your self focused time to get other things done.

What is the difference between hard work and smart work?

Paris Law Being Extra-ordinary - L&D Manager at CMG

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