How to work smarter, not just harder

updated 5:38 p.m. ET Jan. 17, 2006

NEW YORK - Pity the guy who lost his job. But also pity the guy who kept his.

As companies run leaner operations with fewer workers, they’re asking more from those still employed. While the increased productivity makes companies more profitable, the greater demands on workers can leave many feeling overwhelmed, burned out and losing any work-life balance they may have had.

It’s no wonder, then, that there is increasing demand for time management training, both in and out of the workplace.

“A lot of companies don’t have as many people as they used to,” said Sheila Adler, who teaches time management for the New York-based American Management Association. “But there are many other time challenges that can be stressful.”

Adler ticks them off on her fingers:

• Information overload, thanks to barrages of e-mails, voice mails, letters and faxes.
• Changing priorities as companies reposition themselves.
• Stress from working long hours, missing kids’ activities.

“We need to teach people to work smarter, not harder,” Adler said.

That’s what drew Tammy Overcash to a recent time management course taught by Adler.

Overcash, 36 and the mother of two, works as a senior manager of finance for Merz Pharmaceuticals LLC in Greensboro, N.C. and is also four courses away from earning a master’s in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“The company has grown and my responsibilities have grown,” Overcash said. “I need to be more organized and meet deadlines by working efficiently and not stressing about it.”

Some of the ideas she’s collected already include a new paperwork system because “now it’s organized in piles,” suggestions for avoiding interruptions from colleagues and others when she’s working on a big project, and ways to better delegate tasks.

David Fagiano, chief operating officer of Dale Carnegie Training, a global management training company based in Hauppauge, N.Y., said he believes there’s been a permanent shift in the business world to pushing for higher worker productivity.

“You could say that’s a hardhearted way to look at it, but in the bloated ’80s, companies put so many people on payroll, added people willy-nilly, that they went under or couldn’t compete with foreign companies.”

At the same time, he added, some workers are making things more difficult than they need to be.

“Most people, including me, do a lot of stuff that doesn’t really make an impact,” Fagiano said. “It’s kind of there and you feel you have to do it, maybe because you’ve always done it.”

His advice is for people to take a hard look periodically at how they spend their time and purge tasks that are no longer necessary. At the same time, they have to be willing to adapt to changing work demands.

“Anybody who is inflexible in today’s work force should forget it,” Fagiano said. “Everything changes so fast that midcourse corrections are necessary. You have to be prepared to go with the flow.”

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