What are some uncommon ways towork smarter instead of harder?)
William Pietri), Maker,starter, writer.
Two I like:**When you're behind, go home early.**In the past when I was feeling behind, I'd stay up late trying to catch up.This works if you do it very occasionally, but I did it all the time. That mademe tired, meaning more mistakes, less foresight, and less energy focused on thework.Now when I'm feeling behind and tired I go home early and come in the next dayraring to go.**Use a kanban board.**A kanban board is a board with one card or sticky note per unit of work, andone area per state the work can be in. For example, my home one has fiveareas: backlog, on deck, doing, onhold, and done. Some important features of a kanbanboard:
· The size of each active area isstrictly limited. On my home board, doing and on hold havethree spots each; on deck has six. I rarely use all thosespots.
· It's not a schedule. Work takesas long as it takes.
· It's not a to-do list, where youlist everything you could do. It's just the things you think are importantenough to do soon.
The magic of a kanban board is that it helps you focus. If it's not inthe doing column, I'm not doing it. If it's not in ondeck then I don't have to think about it when I'm considering what todo next. If the doing area is full, then I can't start anythingelse. And until something gets close to the doing column Iknow I don't need to invest much effort in planning it. That focus means I getmore done and do those things better than if I'm juggling a bunch of stuff.
I use one to keep track of my household tasks, but I find it even more valuableat work, where we use one to track almost everything we do at my startup: