You know, like “always split on 18,” or “having kids is the most rewarding thing you can do in life.”
What’s that one bit of advice you got from a trusted friend that you know deep, deep down would just ruin your thing?
You know, like “always split on 18,” or “having kids is the most rewarding thing you can do in life.”
What’s that one bit of advice you got from a trusted friend that you know deep, deep down would just ruin your thing?
That is not quite the quote, and its meaning changes significantly.
“Worker smarter, not harder”. Means that when a challenge increases or you are wanting to do better/faster/more to step back and think about your methods instead of just brute forcing the problem.
No one that says should mean “do not work hard”. That is the complete wrong meaning to take from this statement.
Yeah, when I worked in factories, I wanted to do better, just increase my numbers because I like improving. I looked up to the people who would be casually doing their job while doing way more output than I could and from that I could easily tell that there were better ways than what I was doing.
I got the best results from things like optimizing my foot positions to reduce steps, thinking about how objects needed to be oriented before I picked them up, finding areas where things could be parallelized (like only pack a part while the machine is building the next one), reducing context switches (like if there’s 5 stages, do a bunch in stage 1 before moving on to stage 2 so you spend less time picking up and putting down tools).
Once you’ve optimized the way you’re doing the work (work smarter), then you can add speed to it if you want it even faster (work harder). If you skip that first step, you can end up working your ass off only to still be embarrassed by the guy that looks like he’s half asleep.
Perfect example. Thank you!
This. I used to do assembly, the reason I was great at it wasn’t that I pushed myself to the limit to make each thing as fast as possible, it’s that I built everything in batches so I didn’t have to transition between steps on each individual part. If something slowed me down, I’d make a tool specifically for that tedious task. Don’t waste energy trying to make a bad system work.