Work smarter, not harder

The title says it all.  This is something that I have heard many different people  say over the years.  Normally I have heard it said the most when I am involved in some hard manual labor.  I like to think that you can apply this to many more things than just hard labor.  In fact I have a great story where a little education went a very long way and made a man extremely happy.

I had just finished high school and was doing some work for my Dad at his shop.  He was having a logo painted on a trailer while I was there.  The painter had been painting signs and logos for years and did almost everything free hand.  It was impressive how good things looked.  I ended up talking to him for a bit and he was talking about the logo he was painting.  There was a large oval around the words and he said that it took him about an hour to make the oval.  That is a really long time and I thought about it for a minute and I said I thought of a way to help him draw an oval faster.

In math class in high school, my teacher had made us make note cards filled with everything he taught us.  Being an educational pack rat, I kept all of my notes.  So I went home and found my geometry notes from a couple years ago and started looking for my formulas for an ellipse.  I found the midpoint formula for the ellipse and took it back up to my Dad’s shop.  The formula is designed so that if you take a string that is as long as the ellipse is wide and then find two points inside the ellipse.  So I brought a string, and some measuring tape.  I measured out the area and went through the formula.  I had the painter help me hold the string and we drew an ellipse.  We ended up drawing three ovals in just about 15 minutes.

Needless to say, he was extremely excited.  I had showed him how to shorten three hours worth of work down to 15 minutes.  He offered me a job on the spot, which I declined since I was about to head to college, but he was definitely a very happy man.  I made sure to write out how to do the formula and everything and give it to him.  He definitely will be able to draw ovals a lot easier now.

This is just one example of using your head to make your life a little easier.  He was spending an hour to draw an oval, it was probably how he learned to do it and didn’t know any better.  I was definitely glad that I could show him something to make his life better.  Especially since he got paid per project completed.  He will be able to complete more projects doing what he already does and that will help him make more money in the same amount of time.

It can be hard to figure out what you can do to help you work smarter, so if you need some outside help, then get some.  Take a little time to step back and look at what your already doing.  It is a lot easier to work with what you’ve got than it is to try and see how you can do this entire brand new side job for extra cash, which is also a good option for some people.  So go look at what you can change to make more money with where your at and doing what your already doing.

  • Share/Bookmark

6 comments to Work smarter, not harder

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>