Do you know what this means, ‘working smarter not harder’? It means that there are efficient, more effective ways to do things — that are smarter, rather than to do things the hard way, in an unorganized, haphazard way. It may seem easier and quicker to do them the hard way – especially if we are in a crazed rush because we did not have any kind of a plan or control with how we will use what time we have to accomplish what is necessary.
Pretty much with anything if you take some time in front first of all to clear your slate, then to prepare, to research, to create your plan of action, it will go more smoothly. Yes it does take some time to do this first step; but again, if you don’t, it may come back to bite you, wasting time over and over in different ways as you move forward.
Just for an example: If you have 10 people you need to send the same email to you could sit and compose your content for each one or copy and paste it, and send it off. OR you could spend some time finding out how to do mail merge in MS Office or any word processor; or you could set up your message and list of email addresses in an autoresponder. In either case once you get it set up you will just do the send process once.
To explain – a mail merge program will have a master document which is the message. It may or may not have pre-defined fields such as ‘Address’ for [email_address ] and First_Name for the salutation “Dear [ first name ]”. Then it also has a list of addresses you want to send the message to, along with their first name. When you have it all set up and you click the merge button, it puts together the message with the list of addresses and names, and creates individual messages for each person. So ‘Dear [ First_name ] will say ‘Dear Joseph’ or whomever.
If you did not take the time first of all to learn how to use the mail merge program, or to set up your master document and list, then clicking the ‘merge’ button will produce nothing. Or say if you read only half the instructions, it just won’t work right. You may end up sending messages that actually still say ‘Dear First Name’. Did you figure you could get away without reading the directions because you are new and the universe will understand if it is not perfect? It is fine if it is not absolutely perfect within reason, but if it doesn’t work correctly or not at all – then what have you saved by not taking the time to do it right? You could apply this analogy to anything that you do.
So working smarter would be to do something requiring the least number of steps or actions and therefore creating the least chaos for yourself. Obviously trying to get from point A to point B is much more efficient if you have a map when you are in ‘uncharted waters’. If you are new to the Internet or doing business online then it is perfectly natural and advisable to ‘chart your course’ before venturing out. If not, you will spend a lot of time going in circles or ‘spinning your wheels’. There is just so much information to navigate you will likely lose your focus and just throw up your hands and walk away because it is ‘too confusing’, or you are just ‘lost’.
Find your way. Get a plan.
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