the complexity of "work smarter, not harder"

who gets to be efficient?

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Today I’m talking about the phrase “work smarter, not harder.”

When I was in grad school I had a side gig as a writing consultant. I negotiated a contract where I was paid for 5 hours every week with the expectation that the hours I actually worked would level out over time—a slow week here, a crunch week there.

While I literally had no work to do some weeks (free money!), the catch was I promised to prioritize this job anytime they needed me. When they did reach out with an assignment, I responded to their emails immediately and cleared my schedule so I could prioritize completing their work ASAP.

Was I working smarter? It certainly felt smart. My hourly rate was very high some months. By definition, I was efficient: getting a maximum output for minimum input. But the urgency to complete my work in binges added stress and overwhelm to my life, which certainly felt hard.

I have a distinct memory of frantically trying to complete an edit on a project that was holding me up from going on a road trip. I felt angry and anxious, which are signals that my boundaries are being pushed. In the case of my side gig, I had slashed my own boundaries around my availability in exchange for guaranteed pay. My position eventually ended because of budget cuts at the university, and looking back now, I have compassion for my desire to sacrifice urgency for income.

Before I dive into unpacking “work smarter, not harder” I want to note that while I’m a big proponent for slow living, I’m not anti-efficiency. It’s more nuanced than that, because efficiency can help us finish tasks quickly so we have more time to rest and play. That being said, I invite us to pause and reflect on the complicated directive to “work smarter, not harder.”

What does working “smarter” actually look like?

I have…complicated feelings…about the concept of working “smarter.” I like the idea of using prioritization and time management to make progress in a way that feels accessible to you, so I’m not going to completely throw the act of optimizing your productivity out the window. I like some of the suggested activities on “how to work smarter, not harder” lists, like scheduling breaks and choosing tasks that line up with your energy levels.

Yet, I have some critiques of “work smarter, not harder.” Since I’m going to be saying that phrase a lot, I’ll just write WSNH (look at me, shaving a few seconds off my work—I’m WSNHing).

First critique: WSNH implies a dichotomy between a better, wiser way to work and another “less smart” and, as a result, more challenging approach. But “smart” is not an antonym for “hard.”

Here’s how I trace the implication of the phrase:

• Smarter = efficient and wise, easier, the better choice

• Harder = unnecessarily challenging and thus the not smart (unintelligent, unexperienced, naive) and worse choice

Second critique: WSNH makes it sound like we choose to take a challenging approach, when in reality the “smarter” options are most accessible to people who have the most money, power, support, access, etc. The “smarter” options also assume increased executive functioning skills around scheduling, prioritization, etc.

But for many folks, the personal resources (time, energy, focus, spoons, etc.) that fuel our productivity shift from day to day. This is especially true for folks who are working parents, who live with chronic illness, pain, fatigue, and Long Covid, who are juggling a lot of balls and trying not to drop any. These folks may not have access to the “work smarter” best practices, like waking up earlier, rearranging your schedule to fit your needs, or delegating.

Who gets to delegate?

A common tool in productivity circles is The Eisenhower Matrix. At first, it can seem like an answer to all of our problems. It is meant to help you prioritize tasks of differing urgency and importance by separating the tasks into one of four approaches: do now, decide when to do and schedule for later, delegate or delay, or delete entirely from your to-do list.

I like that this tool can help people to choose which tasks they should do first and which things they should postpone until later. (Here’s a blog post I wrote in 2018 how I used it on a research fellowship.) If it works for you, GOOD! Use it!

I want to unpack the suggestion to delegate urgent yet not important tasks to others.

Often, delegation assumes an exchange of labor for payment. Professors can delegate tasks that need to be done but they don’t want to do themselves to research assistants, who are hopefully being paid by the university, but who might be paid by the professors. I have a virtual assistant who helps me with my business, which saves me time and energy, and I pay her for her services. Some folks delegate tasks through trade, exchanging time or labor for support.

To make more time and energy for our work (which is important because it pays the bills), we could delegate urgent tasks like cleaning our home, doing our grocery shopping, washing and folding our laundry—but delegating these things cost money. (There’s a separate and important conversation to be had about the undervaluing and underpaying of domestic and care labor that I may revisit in a future letter.) If someone doesn’t have resources to delegate these activities, they will need to expend time and energy to ensure they get done.

Again, I’m not anti-efficiency or even anti-delegating (as I said, I do it!), but I ask us to rethink delegation as a go-to WSNH action because it is inherently ableist and classist to assume everyone has access to that “smart” choice.

So where does this leave us?

WSNH offers a complicated promise of productivity that assumes everyone can (or wants to!) access the same approaches to efficiency and output. In terms of WSNH, prioritizing one approach to productivity as the superior way to find success implies that other ways are “stupid” (and therefore inferior). As I wrote in my first Substack letter, we can use rhetoric to influence the ways we treat others. Aligning increased output and efficiency with intelligence implies that the folks who practice it are more optimized themselves.

I know I can only start to scratch the surface for topics like this in my letters, but I hope to explore the concept of hacking productivity more this year, because I’m interested in the ways we can repurpose productivity “best practices” to make the field of knowledge work a bit more accessible. I’d love to hear your thoughts about phrases like “work smarter, not harder” and other go-to productivity-isms and welcome you to write a comment below.

Recommended resources if you want to think about this stuff more:

• Sarah Jaffee’s Work Won’t Love You Back

• KC Davis’s How to Keep House While Drowning

• My interview with Brooke McAlary about Slow Productivity for The Slow Home Podcast

• My free downloads on personal resources and achievable goals, available to those who subscribe to my newsletter. If you’re a subscriber and would like me to resend these to you, send me an email at kate@katehenry.com.

Curiosities

This section of my letters is for things that made me say “hmmm” or “wow!” recently.

• Dr. Briana Barner’s guest post about her postdoc experience on Jenn McClearen’s Publish Not Perish Substack. Dr. Barner is a former client and I was honored by her kind words about my Productivity Coaching.

• Asher Pandjiris and Onyx Fujii’s “We Need Not Be Fine: A manifesto for mental healthcare workers who can’t go on like this.” Pandjiris and Fugii are the creators of the Kintsugi Therapist Collective and Pandjiris runs the “Living In This Queer Body Podcast.”

• I devoured R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War and am halfway through her The Dragon Republic, the second book of the trilogy. I’m fascinated with the magical aspects, but am a bit squeamish about the descriptions of physical violence. Overall I’m excited to see what happens next!

  

For Your Consideration

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• Sign up for the waitlist for Perceptible Progress: A Goals Course

• Order my book, Tend to It: A Holistic Guide to Intentional Productivity

• Listen to my podcast interviews

xo,

Dr. Kate

Image Description: Dr. Kate is a white femme with long red hair. She is smiling and looking at the camera with her arms crossed in front of her.