How To Achieve More And Do Less

photo credit: nlnnet

Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach with an attitude-based approach. He helps others to improve people skills they find relevant and get top notch results. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.

What’s the most popular advice for achieving great things? It’s: “Work hard”. Since the age of seven, most of us have constantly been told by family, teachers, friends and public figures to study hard, work hard, and our efforts will be rewarded by getting ahead.

Now, I am a relatively lazy person. I enjoy very much things like free time, rest and relaxation. So getting this advice, I almost instinctively started searching for a way around it. And guess what? I found it!

I believe that working hard can be an important factor for achieving great results. And at certain points of our lives, if we want to do something big with them, we can’t avoid working hard. However, I also believe that working hard is not a constant necessity, and is just one of many factors with a lot of influence over our results.

Especially in my coaching practice, I have worked with a lot of professionals who managed to achieve great results without a 70-hour work week. Here are 3 of the most important ideas they applied to achieve more and work less:

1. Capitalize On Your Strengths

As a human being, you have naturally developed certain patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving which applied in certain areas, help you create great results. Use them. They will allow you to do more, faster and better. You will be performant in your tasks and you will make this look easy.

Not working in a way which allows you to fully use your natural strengths is just wasting your potential. Maybe you’re analytical and good at seeing cause-effect relations, maybe you are empathic and good and sensing other people’s emotions, maybe you are creative and good at seeing out-of-the box solutions. Whatever your strengths are, dedicate yourself to finding them and using them.

2. Delegate A Lot

You may be asking yourself: “What do I do with the tasks that need to be done but do not capitalize on my strengths?” Well, you find somebody else to do them, and you delegate them. Preferably, someone who can do them better than you, or at least will learn to do them better than you. This way, you save precious time.

One thing I constantly notice is that a lot of people are simply not used to working with others. To matching people’s tasks with people’s strengths and putting in some teamwork to generate the end results. Make a habit out of teamwork, out of delegating and you’ll see impressive results.

3. Learn To Say ‘No’

One major factor which makes people unproductive is the fact they invest time and effort in activities which have low value for them, for the sake of others. They are asked for help by colleagues, friends, neighbors, family and they can’t say no. This only encourages people to ask for even more help from them.

If you want to achieve great things, you most say no to some requests from others, so you can focus your time and energy on the tasks with the biggest return on investment for you. If you don’t know how to do this effectively or don’t have the emotional strength to do it, then this is something you will have to learn.

As you put these ideas into action, not only that you will be more productive, performant, but you will also get an internal sense of doing things right and getting closer to your goals. A feeling I find very meaningful.

Tagged as: achieve, delegate, eduard ezeanu, guest post, strenghts, turn down