Work Hard or Smart – you decide

How many times in your career have you heard the words ‘work smarter, not harder’? Top billers seem to have the innate ability to do this, they do work hard but they choose to work on the right activities, the right candidates, the right clients, where they know they will get a return on investment on their time. So how do we train our consultants to work smart without just saying it? It seems to me that if you break down what working smart is, the key  is decision making which I believe gets overlooked somewhat in our training and coaching activities.

I believe a consultant’s results are driven by certain factors: Mindset, Knowledge and Experience of the process and Activity levels which lead to Results. A consultant’s thought process and ability to manage their emotions (emotional intelligence) will drive their Mindset and the decisions they make will drive their activity levels which leads to results.

We make decisions all day long, some we are consciously aware of e.g I will decide to plan my day and stick to it, to others which are made unconsciously e.g to go on linkedin (conscious decision) and to get lost in it for 30 minutes (unconscious). The other day in a Rookie training programme we broke down a day in the life of a recruiter and how many decisions were made in that time. We came up with 42 decisions and I am sure if you worked next to one of your Consultants for a whole day and really looked at every decision they made consciously and unconsciously there will be thousands more.

Here are some of the decisions we came up with:

1. What sort of day I will have (made before I get into work)
2. Whether to plan my day or not (or just a rough To-Do list)
3. Whether to stick to my plan (or adjust)
4. What activities to prioritise
5. Whether to go home having not completed everything I needed to do
6. Which jobs to work on, for how long and at what point in the day
7. Which jobs to stop working and when
8. Which clients to call and when
9. Which candidates to work on and for how long
10. Whether I will get distracted and for how long
11. To change my plan for the afternoon based on my progress in the morning
12. Whether to plan my calls or just call through a list
13. How long to spend on calls (getting results not just getting my call times up)
14. How long to feel down for when something has gone wrong (if you can’t change it, move on)
15. To do business development calls even when I have lots of jobs to work

It is so easy to be busy in this job and it is easy to be a busy fool. I get asked all the time to deliver time management training and yes there are some hints, tips and tricks you can adopt however the most critical skill when it comes to time management is to look at the decisions being made around time. You can’t manage time, we have the same hours in every day but you can manage yourself.

Working Smart is managing yourself, making the right decisions, making conscious decisions and choosing where to spend your time and energy. So the next time you want to diagnosis why you haven’t had a successful day or month, look back to the decisions you made and I bet there lies the answers.