Author: Sun Huanquan. The author authorized the morning reading class reprint. Public ID: Iquanwai. Editor: Juvae
Wu Jun, the author of “Top of the Wave”, mentioned in his column “Get” an incident when Google first entered China. At first, Google headquarters had a very low opinion of the Chinese r&d team, because “no work is done”. Three or four engineers in Beijing are not worth one engineer in Google headquarters.
When Wu helped analyze why, he found that the engineers were not good at finding the most important work and prioritizing it. In China, all the engineers are new and no one tells them how to work. At Google headquarters, new employees are only a small number, so it’s easy to pick up skills quickly with experienced employees.
In the following two years, engineers from Google headquarters came to China one after another to help the team sort out the way of work, and the Chinese team also went to Google headquarters to communicate with each other. This situation was improved, and the Chinese R&D team was finally recognized by the headquarters.
Google engineers are smart people who need to learn the right way of working to be productive. Let alone most people?
We have always believed that if a person has a normal IQ and eq and is willing to study and work, he or she will be able to do well.
However, I have taught many people and recruited many people, but FOUND a strange phenomenon: some people are very willing to learn, work very hard, and have normal IQ and EQ, but their work output is very low, even worse than many people with lower qualifications.
I was puzzled all the time, and for a while I suspected that I was not good at judging people. It was not until a while ago, when I read Wu Jun’s description, that I woke up and thought about the way these people worked and compared them with those who were highly productive. I found that they all had the following three problems:
Problem 1: Focus on the task, not the goal
Let’s say your boss is on a plane and has an hour to make an important presentation to a client. You need to give him a powerpoint presentation. But because you miscalculated the time, the PPT was hastily finished, and found that some of the data was missing, what do you do?
What unproductive people do is: they frantically search for data, and then the data may be available, but the PPT is not finished in time, or the quality is not high.
The average person’s approach is: find someone to help them find data together.
The most effective people, on the other hand, judge how important the data will be based on the purpose of the presentation, and if it doesn’t, spend time perfecting the important pages rather than finding the data, or if it does, finding someone else to help or substitute data.
The gap between these three types of people is actually the gap between task-oriented and goal-oriented.
My previous consulting company made a discovery when conducting research on high-potential talents: high-potential talents have commonalities. Those with these commonalities can do almost anything well, while those without them will face obstacles in doing almost any work.
Among them, there is a common is result-driven. People who are more productive aren’t necessarily faster, but rather better at figuring out what’s best for the outcome and then doing whatever it takes to make sure that outcome is achieved, rather than sticking to their original tasks.
In fact, results-driven is not just a work habit, but a way of thinking. This start-as-you-go mindset is one of the most useful ones I’ve deliberately trained myself.
For example, in the thinking training camp, one of the students asked me: How can I get insight into an industry?
Think about it. What would you say?
I responded by asking her: What is the purpose of being insightful? Do you want your clients to trust you more, or do you want your boss to see your progress?
If you want customers to trust you and think you understand them, what you need to do is to look at the pain points of customers in this industry, and then focus on these pain points, make efforts to research and analysis, have more insights, and then take the opportunity to communicate. Understanding an industry is too big a topic, without a goal, there is no way to start.
So, without results-driven thinking, you just stick to the task, and ultimately, you don’t get to work.
Problem 2: Stress work, not teamwork
If you look at the people around you, you’ll notice that people who spend their days rushing around, jumping up and down, switching from one task to another, sometimes aren’t very productive. Watching them work is like whack-a-mole. After one is finished, another pops up again. Even the people watching are anxious.
On the other hand, there are people who are focused, organized, and seem calm, but in the end, they do the most difficult things without thinking.
The difference between the two is that people in the first group always work under stress. The first thing they do when they wake up is not to plan their day’s work, but to dive right into it, so that when they leave, they find that there are so many things left undone that they may be the most important ones.
In addition, leaders give a task temporarily, customers have a request temporarily, colleagues ask for data temporarily, they will stop what they are doing, to work on these, and finally, they spend a lot of energy in the task switch.
I told the company played an analogy: suppose you average half an hour to finish each task, and switch between tasks is usually half an hour, if you don’t finish is often a switch to the next item, even if a midway through each task switching, that means, 8 hours of work time, you have at least 4 hours spent on the task switching.
This stress type of work is undoubtedly inefficient, but what is efficient? Coordinated work.
The real coordinated work has several characteristics:
Feature one: Work in a planned way.
I usually do my work for the next week by Sunday night, and I do my work for the day every morning. What’s more, I kept the to-do list open and updated in real time during my work, deleting items as I completed them, and inserting corresponding time periods as I added items temporarily. If I couldn’t complete any non-urgent tasks that day, I changed them to the next day’s date.
This way, will let oneself have a sense of control, how many things come, will not be disorderly.
Of course, when planning, you need to allocate the most dedicated time to high-value problems. I wrote about how most people spend 80% of their time doing nothing because they don’t know what they’re really trying to solve. These 6 questions can save you 80% of your wasted time
Characteristic two, form own fixed time habit.
Is my habit, for example, in the morning do need to burn the brain, listen on transportation, after the meal when efficiency is not high concentrated reply WeChat news and messages, in the next article when people conception theme, swipe the public at the time of fatigue, and at the time of the evening with the team meeting, do a simple summary in the evening.
This habit, on the one hand, matches the peaks and troughs of work with different difficulties to maximize efficiency; On the other hand, I know exactly what 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 30 minutes can do for me, so THAT I don’t have the habit of checking moments every time I have a fragment of time.
Feature three: Timely record and daily summary.
When you’re at work, your boss gives you an assignment and a client asks you a question, what happens? A lot of people jump right into temporary tasks, but what’s really good is, if it’s not an emergency, jot down key words in a notebook without thinking, then get right back to the task and look at it again when you’re done.
Also, write down what you learn and what mistakes you make during the day, because after that, you will quickly forget and continue to make the mistake. Of course, these records need to be sorted out at night.
I’ve said that during the fastest growing half of my eight-plus years as a consultant, I kept a daily work diary.
Another benefit of recording is that it can lighten the load on the brain. Make a list of your daily routines and your common mistakes. Your brain is for thinking, and it’s precious. Don’t force it to do what you can do with a pen.
Problem # 3: Almost never “lazy”
“Lazy cancer” is the primary productive force. Take a careful inventory of which of our innovations is not due to laziness? Don’t want to walk, have a car; Don’t want to climb the floor, with the elevator; Don’t want to clean, with a sweeping robot…
Most things at work are not one-off, but ongoing, so you can frame them the first time you do them.
For example, I asked the operation department to do data analysis once a week, which was repetitive, so the efficient way was to build an Excel table and make formulas for fixed parameters to be analyzed. Every week, you only need to paste the exported source data, refresh the data, and then the parameters will come out. Then, you only need to look at the parameters to draw a conclusion.
Being lazy, of course, is not just about being good with tools, it’s also about being good with people.
For example, if you’ve never done data analysis, find out what people have done before. For example, if you have your own team or interns, don’t do anything they can do. Another example is that it’s much more effective to run a community and develop a group leader incentive system than it is to run a group yourself.
So, do these three ways to Work Smart sound difficult? Not at all, and you’ve probably heard of it. But why can’t so many people do this? As I observed, there were several obstacles:
Obstacle 1: Work environment.
Many people’s work is task-oriented rather than results-oriented. What he was required to do in his job was to complete the task, and he didn’t need to know the motivation behind it. Moreover, leadership may measure effort and hard work rather than output.
In fact, the nature of one’s job has a greater impact on one’s way of thinking and behavior than one can imagine.
You go to see, when just graduated, a school of the same major students, look similar, but after a few years, you will find that as long as contact with a person for a few minutes, listen to him say a few words, you can roughly judge his occupation.
Even more extreme, many years ago, I went to the production line to observe the production process because I had to help customers design the process. In the workshop with great noise and dim light, I watched the workers on the assembly line mechanically staring at the machine and waiting for the box to be changed. After several hours, I myself began to lose my responsiveness and sharpness.
Obstacle no. 2: No senior mentors.
As can be seen from the case at the beginning, excellent people like Google engineers also need experienced mentors after entering the company from campus.
However, many companies do not pay as much attention to the training of new people’s Work style as Google, and Work Smart is very high on the list.
They often only pay attention to teaching employees What (What things need to be done, What tools to use, etc.), but do not have How (How to do these things intelligently) and Why (What help these things have to the company, customers, What purpose to achieve), resulting in the smart talents of employees do not come into play, no sense of achievement.
Obstacle 3: solidification of thinking mode.
Some people, after working for many years, find the negative effects of the nature of their work and work environment and wake up and want to change.
However, the years when I step into the society from school are crucial years for the formation of my thinking and working style. If task-oriented, stress-type effort and dull working style are solidified in my brain, forming subconscious thinking, it is difficult to reverse.
I have worked with several people whose previous work experience was task-type and stressful. When I worked with them, I could feel their pain and struggle against their inherent thinking. However, not everyone could finally struggle out and break through themselves.
So when you choose a job when you are young, you are choosing not just a job, but a habit of thinking, a way of working, values and even a way of life.
What you work in, who you work with, and who you are mentored by in your first few years can shape the rest of your life.
Sun’s new book, Please Stop Ineffective Efforts: How to Get Ahead Fast the Right Way, is available on dangdang, Amazon, JD.com and other major platforms.
Email: [email protected]
This article is published by the author authorized by morning Reading class. Please contact the author for reprinting.
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