So you want to work smarter not harder – who doesn’t? Most of us would like to use our time more efficiently. The question is how to work so that you become more productive while also making time for the strategic work that will help you stand out and take your business or career to the next level.
But it’s not just a question of how to work smarter not harder. It’s also about how to think smarter. What you need to learn is how to think like a blue ocean strategist in your career.
Why is it important to work smarter not harder?
Approach your work strategically and you’ll reap rewards sooner than you think. By applying the right tools and mindset to your problem you can achieve more while reducing your costs. You can create more time, and eliminate fatigue, increase efficiency and eliminate boredom. In other words, with the right tools, you’ll discover how to work smarter not harder.
Blue ocean strategy offers a set of analytical tools and frameworks to shift you from red oceans of competition to blue oceans of new market space. Countless businesses, organizations, and even governments have applied blue ocean strategic logic to leave the competition behind and create value.
We’d like to introduce you to a blue ocean tool called the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) grid, created by renowned strategy professors at INSEAD, Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, ranked # 1 Management Thinkers in the World by Thinkers50 in 2019.
This blue ocean tool forces you to think about what you should eliminate and reduce in your work and what you should raise and create to have more time, achieve greater accomplishments, and get noticed. What you eliminate and reduce in your approach is just as important as what to raise and create when thinking about how to work.
How to work smarter not harder – a blue ocean approach
We applied the ERRC Grid to show you how you can work smarter and achieve better results rather than putting in more hours that don’t get you anywhere. Here are some blue ocean strategic tips on what you might eliminate and reduce to save your time and what to raise and create to achieve a quantum leap in value.
What to eliminate
– Stop getting distracted by social media
Answer this truthfully – how many times during a typical workday do you pick up your phone to scroll through your Instagram feed, check your LinkedIn or watch a TikTok video? It might be more than you think. According to some estimates, Americans check their phone between 50 to 150 ties a day! It may look innocent but if you add it up, it will take up a significant chunk of your time – time you could spend learning new things that would make you work smarter not harder. If you were to eliminate all your time spent on social media in a day, what could you achieve instead?
– Don’t look to competition
Most organizations focus on competing with their rivals for a greater share of existing demand. They think up all the ways they can outperform their competition. But the irony is that focusing on gaining competitive advantage leads to imitation, not innovation. The more you focus on benchmarking the competition, the more your strategy will look like your competitors.
But if your competitor has more resources than you, no matter how hard you work, you have no way of beating them. Focusing on competition blocks your creativity and keeps you locked in the same way of competing as everyone else. You need to work smarter.
Blue ocean strategists don’t focus on benchmarking or imitating competitors. Instead, they focus on how to make the competition irrelevant. They focus on creating an offer so compelling that anyone who sees it or tries it can’t help but rave about it. Stop focusing on competition and start looking at what the mass of buyers actually values.
What to reduce
– Reduce time spent on existing customers
Most organizations focus their efforts on existing customers, trying to understand their wants and needs. But this strategic thinking leads to finer segmentation and greater customization of products or services to meet the customers’ specialized needs.
Blue ocean strategists think differently. As a Blue Ocean Strategist, you focus your efforts on noncustomers rather than customers; that is, people who currently are not your customers but who might be.
Understanding your noncustomers and identifying their pain points is the first step to unlocking new demand for your product or service. Ask yourself – do your existing customers keep you focused on what is rather than on what could be? Finding noncustomers and converting them into customers will increase the size of your business and gain you accolades. Read our “Customers first? How about noncustomers first?” blog to learn more about the concept of noncustomers.
What to raise
– Increase your reading time
This might sound counterproductive as reading takes time but studies show that there is a close relationship between vocabulary and personal, professional, and intellectual growth.
Educational research has discovered that your IQ is intimately related to your vocabulary. The more extensive your vocabulary, the better your chances for success whether it be moving ahead in your professional career, growing your business or achieving intellectual potential.
But don’t just learn new and unrelated words; you will most likely forget them if you don’t use them. Learn them in context by reading the books, articles and thought leadership in the area that interests you. Those who are most successful or draw the highest salaries also have the most extensive vocabulary.
And words are necessary to communicate your ideas clearly. By increasing your vocabulary, you’ll be able to express your ideas more precisely and impressively and that, in turn, makes you look and sound smarter. So if you ever wondered how can you get smarter or found yourself googling ‘how to look smarter in meetings’ consider reading more books. You’ll gain a different perspective which will help you work smarter not harder and will impress your boss. Not to mention that it make you feel personally more accomplished.
And since you eliminated time spent scrolling through social media, you have created this new time to read something at work, be it a Harvard Business Review article, or an article in an industry-respected publication related to your field of work.
– Focus on your differentiation
Can you relate to this person? “I work for an investment banking company; I graduated from the best schools; I work 9 to 5, and I want to get recognized to get ahead. But somehow I’m not getting chosen, I don’t stand out the way I want”. You might be among the best but if everyone around you is the same as you, then you don’t really have any point of differentiation.
The blue ocean shift process of moving from a red ocean to a blue ocean starts with understanding where you really are. Do you understand all the factors you compete on in your career and invest your time in? What you’ll most likely find is that you compete on the same factors as your colleagues and competitors so you’re really all outstanding in the same ‘me-too’ way, which means you won’t stand out at all.
You’ll then realize that if you don’t stand out but are equally competent to your peers, why should someone above you recognize you as so distinctive for that career?
So how you can work smarter not harder and make yourself stand out from the crowd? The next step is to figure out the new ‘value spaces’ you can move into and add value in a way your colleagues are not.
So ask yourself: What time-intensive activities that keep you in the rat race but add minuscule value can you eliminate? What activities can you raise that would make you unique?
What to create
– Gain creative competence
One way of working smarter not harder is to learn the key tools and frameworks of blue ocean strategy and blue ocean shift. The tools will help you achieve what Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne call ‘creative competence’.
Market-creating tools can guide you to ask the right questions at the right point in the process and to see the significance of the answers. Taken together, they build your creative competence and provide the structure and parameters within which to organize your thinking so you can conceive and discover what others don’t see.
Step-by-step, blue ocean tools will guide you through the central questions for opening up breakthrough value:
- How do you challenge the assumptions you hold regarding your business?
- How do you go about identifying the ocean of noncustomers to create new demand for your product or service?
- How can you create offerings that stand apart while simultaneously achieving lower costs? How can you make yourself differentiated among others?
What makes blue ocean tools and frameworks so powerful is that they are visual, which renders them easy to understand and apply, no matter what your level of education or creativity. Learn how to be creative systematically today.
Check out blue ocean tools and frameworks.
You will not only be perceived as ‘thinking smarter’ but your colleagues or boss will see you as a strategic thinker who can analyze problems and provide tangible solutions to challenges your company might be facing.
If you want to move up in your career or create more growth opportunities for your business, you need to start thinking and working smarter, not harder. Putting in long hours may make you feel like you’re working hard, but at the end of the day, it will drain you of energy and motivation, and leave your business or career in the same place as before. Think creatively about how you can work smarter by instilling a blue ocean mindset and using blue ocean tools and frameworks to help you achieve real results.
Do you want to take it one step further? See how other blue ocean tools and frameworks can help you work smarter rather than harder? Check out Blue Ocean Strategy or Blue Ocean Shift books and create a quantum leap in your business and life.
If you prefer to learn in an interactive way, then check out our Blue Ocean Sprint Online Course, a step-by-step guide on how to create your blue ocean using a blue ocean mindset, tools and frameworks.
Blue ocean-inspired ‘work smarter not harder’ quotes
Check out this selection of blue ocean quotes by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, the authors of the bestselling Blue Ocean Strategy book.
“The best way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”
“The buyer, not the competition, should be placed at the center of your strategic thinking.”
“Stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.”
“Value innovators refuse to let the competition set the parameters of their strategic thinking.”
“In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over.”
And if you need more inspiration, check out our selection of inspirational business strategy and innovation quotes that will motivate you to do your best work.
Work harder not smarter – meme
This simple picture is a perfect meme for how to work smarter not harder. Let it inspire you to redesign your approach to work and life.
