Day 25 — How to hardly work — part 1

Topic of day 23 was “how to work hard”. In response to it, a friend asked me to write about “how to hardly work”. He has worked pretty hard in his life and don’t want to work hard anymore. So, let’s understand how to hardly work and achieve more!

There are simply three strategies to reduce your work. They are as follows,

1. Avoidance
2. Organisation
3. Delegation

Let’s understand each of them one by one.

Avoidance

Avoidance is the first strategy to avoid extra work. One has to be dilligent in committing for any work. Trust is positively correlated with the commitment. If you do what you commit, the trust is build between you and the other person. If you commit more and do less, you lose the other person’s trust. Hence, one must think about feasibility of the work before commiting to it.

Hardest Thing for most people

I have seen many people flood with a lot of work. The only reason why they are flooded with work is because they don’t know how to say no. Saying no is a hard thing especially when you are doing it to your boss. But saying yes now but failure to complete will lead you to a bad relationship with your manager eventually. Hence, saying no is essential to not overflood ourself from work.

I remember a funny incident that happened during my early years at work. Once, I, my technical leader and team’s director were present in the same bay. My director asked me “Is it done?”. In return I asked him “Which one are you talking about, orgs or datamask policy or the bug?”. He told me in return “This is not how you do it. let me ask the same question to the technical leader. hey, is it done?”. My technical leader told in return “Yes, it’s done”. We all laughed after this.

Though it was done to tease me, it had a deep meaning. People on the top management like to listen the word ‘YES’ more often than the excuses. The person who says yes to everything does it just to be in good books of the leader. But this strategy ends really bad for the person. The person overcommits, works at a really high stress level, misses the deadline and eventually lose the trust of that leader.

Power of saying no

There was one more person in the team. He was a senior engineer, even senior than the technical leader. He was not afraid of the leadership to say ‘No’ to anything. Whenever he saw something that couldn’t be achieve in the desired time slot, he will simply say No to the leader. Leader will take that no as a feedback and then either assign more people to the task or will adjust the deadlines. As a result, he always delivered his commitments on time. He had earned a good place in the team and was promoted frequently due to his good work. That’s how saying no help you.

But there’s more to the story. Both saying yes always or saying no always will lead you to a bad result. Whenever a new work is coming, the right thing is to take few minutes to evaluate before saying yes or no. Say yes only if this task helps both you and your company.

It might be a tedious task which have less impact on the company. Impact may be restricted to one or two customers. Then, you can say no because of low impact nature.

In the other scenario, the work is good for the company but doesn’t do any good for you. It might be working on some legacy technology, or some project which is not relevant anymore. It makes sense to say no because it will not help in your career development.

In an exception scenario, when something really urgent comes up, it’s a good idea to say yes. Saying yes to a really urgent task also helps in building the trust between you and your boss.

After going through this article, you will have a good sense of when to say yes and when to say no.

The next strategies will be covered in subsequent articles.