Edition 22 - Working Hard & Smart

Welcome back to edition 22 of Linx Media’s Weekly Newsletter

In just about anything in life it's common to hear , "Work Smarter, Not Harder." While this is true to an extent, the reality is to be successful in anything you need a balance between both hard work and smart work. You can’t have one and not the other — they're complementary forces, and feed from one another.

At Linx Media, we believe in a cyclical approach: a rhythm of working hard followed by working smart, and then repeating the cycle.

1. Work Hard First

Whether your in business or even just starting a new hobby, especially at the start of whatever you’re doing, your not going to know EXACTLY what you need to do, so you need to do LOTS. Your goal should be volume. As Many reps of whatever your doing as possible, this is where you fail the most, but more importantly learn the most. For a solid period of time you should solely focus on hammering your ‘rough’ action plan, deep in the grind, literally just working hard. The start is not about being perfect, its about effort. Its about showing up, working and learning.

2. Reflect & Analyse

After a season of hard work, you have to switch gears. This is where working smart comes into play. You need to take a step back and analyse all the hard work you have just done. What went well? What didn't? It’s critical to analyse what you do always. Why do you think footy teams watch all their games back? Why Professional chess players analyses every move they make in each match. Without analysis, you’ll find yourself blindly running in circles, putting effort into the wrong things.

3. Adapt and Improve

After reflecting and analysing your hard work, you should have learned a lot about whatever is you have started. This is where working smart comes in - now having more f an idea of what works and what doesn’t, you need to reformulate your plan of attack and improve it around what you have learned. It’s quite obvious but we’ll say it anyway, you new and improved plan should be heavily weighted to what you now know works and you should have cut most of, if not all of what you now know does not. Now you can get back into the grind with a more targeted and effective game plan.

4. Go Hard Again

With an updated plan, its back to working hard. Getting lots of those targeted reps in. This part is simple, its the exact same as the first step accept now you have a better plan to follow.

Final Thoughts

You can work incredibly hard at the wrong things and make little progress. On the flip side, if you're constantly overthinking and searching for the "perfect" way to do things, you might never take enough action to get anywhere. Both hard work and smart work are crucial, and the trick lies in knowing when to apply each.

For us, we have found the best way for us is be in the constant cycle of working hard, analysing what we’ve done, give ourselves feedback, improve our game plan, get back to it, and then its just rinse and repeat.

Until next week,
Linx Media