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Are you working harder these days or working smarter and how do you know the difference? Many of the reasons we end up working so hard, and not so smart, is because we fail to recognize those things that are wasting our precious time. We may just have the wrong paradigm. The focus in a lean thinking paradigm is to eliminate waste or muda (the Japanese word for waste).

Working Harder

In our western culture, our values influence the organizational design. So, the harder we work the better we feel. The only problem with this mentality is that working harder does not necessarily translate into working productively. In other words, the goal is producing results, and working hard does not always translate into results. To produce results we need to work smarter, not harder.
There is an easy way to tell the difference between working harder and working smarter. The symptoms of working harder include:

• Working more than 40 hours a week (overtime)
  
• Struggling to meet deadlines
  
• Juggling multiple projects to get more done
  
• Reworking/editing/repairing your projects to make them better
  
• Wasting valuable time with non-value added activities
  
• Asking for more resources (time, money, people, or equipment) to solve a problem.

We all work hard to some degree. We are pressed for time, take work home and yet still struggle to meet deadlines as we rush from project to project. What is going on? Well, the biggest waste of all is that we are underutilizing our brains to solve the problem. We need information, knowledge and wisdom to be efficient. Working harder will not resolve the chaos. The only way to reduce the chaos in our lives is to work smarter, not harder.

Working Smarter

Working smarter requires that we understand the waste that occurs in our organizations and that we have a system to eliminate the waste in a continuous manner. In a lean organization it is the objective and responsibility of process improvement or the quality system (as in ISO compliance) to identify and eliminate all wasted activity. Just what does this waste look like?