Why "Work Smarter Not Harder" Doesn't Actually Make Your Business Easier
- Kayla Droog Consulting
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
"Work smarter, not harder" is one of those pieces of advice that sounds good in theory, but it may not actually be helping your business. It might even be making things harder unintentionally.
When you think of the advice, "work smarter not harder", what is it that you think of?
Do you think of:
Trying to find ways to make things faster and easier
Reducing the amount of time that you spend on certain tasks
Automating parts of your business
Ways to increase efficiency
None of these are bad. But sometimes working smarter not harder can actually just leave you exhausted and not make anything any easier than it was before.
If everything in your business feels harder than it should be, then it's not because you just haven't found the magical productivity hack that is going to change everything for you.
So let's talk about what's really going on and what you can do instead.
Why productivity advice like "work smarter not harder" is failing you
Productivity advice like "work smarter not harder" might be failing you and your business.
This is an example of advice that could be considered toxic productivity.
A lot of productivity advice assumes that:
We have a certain number of hours per day
We have a certain energy level per day
That our energy level, capacity, and availability remain fairly consistent
That we have the motivation and the executive function to follow through on things consistently
This kind of advice is part of optimization culture. It's part of assuming that you need to constantly be tweaking things for maximum efficiency. That there are always ways to make things better and that is the thing that we should be striving for.
There's not necessarily something wrong with that as a principle, but it's easy to take it too far.
There comes a point where it's not helpful to be focused on optimizing something if it means that we're not actually finishing the task or the project because we're getting so caught up in perfecting it.
If you focus on automating a whole bunch of things in your business or optimizing them for maximum efficiency, but the business that you started from was messy and chaotic and you didn't fix the chaos first, you are building those automations on a shaky foundation.
Those automations and efficiencies aren't going to fix the mess in the first place.
So now you're optimizing something that's unstable.
The real reason productivity tools & advice aren't working
This is the point where a lot of service providers tend to buy a new platform or maybe a course or a program. They might even outsource or hire some help. They bring in something that's going to put a band-aid on the problem rather than actually addressing the underlying cause.
For example, buying a new tool is not going to fix things if the real problem is that you're overwhelmed with the number of decisions you have to make on a daily basis. Those two things don't have anything to do with each other.
But it can be so tempting to think that the next shiny object is going to be the thing that's going to somehow magically make the difference for you.
Let's talk about the real problem that's happening here.
If you're looking for ways to increase your productivity, you might be thinking that you need things that are going to help you put more effort into your business. That are going to help you feel more motivated to get things done.
Maybe you feel like you don't have enough discipline or you're looking for things to help you improve your time management.
Again, none of these are bad, but they're probably not addressing the underlying issue.
If your business consistently feels harder to run than it should, the issue is that you are relying on a business structure that only works when you're operating at your peak efficiency.
It's assuming that you are operating at a certain level of time, energy, and capacity every day.
But the problem is, that level is probably based on your best day, not your average day.
What actually makes your business easier to run
So, here's what's actually going to make things easier in your business.
If this is where you're at right now, you don't need more efficiency or productivity hacks.
You are not the problem. You are not broken.
You don't need to overhaul your entire business in the next 30 days. Who wants to do that?
What's actually going to make things feel lighter and easier to keep up with is lightening the load.
Start from where you are right now.
Not your ideal version of you. Not your ideal version of your business.
Start where you are right now. If things are feeling messy and overwhelming, start there. Here are some things you can try:
1. Ask yourself: what are the open loops I can close right now?
This means you're not trying to keep track of so many tasks, projects, and ongoing things.
Having too many things that are open and ongoing is taking up a lot of space in your brain, and that's part of what's making everything feel harder.
2. If you're putting systems in place or you're adding a new platform or tool to your business, as yourself: is this something that's going to work for my real life bandwidth?
Not your ideal day. Not your ideal self.
Your real life. Your average capacity on a normal day or in a normal week.
3. Before you jump into thinking about things like automation or improving efficiency, you need to be clear on exactly what your business does.
This means set offers and pricing for things.
You need a set way that you do things every time.
And once all of that is clear and works and makes sense to you and your clients, that's when you now have a solid foundation that you can automate.
If you don't have a blueprint for how your business is supposed to function from day to day, automating it is only going to make things messier, because you're not going to have a road map to follow when you set up those automations.
They're going to be all over the place. They're probably not going to work together cohesively. This means you're just going to be jumping from urgent thing to urgent thing and hoping that automation is going to fix it.
The biggest thing that's going to help your business right now
The final thing that's really going to help your business feel easier right now is only trying to fix one friction point at a time.
A friction point in this case is something in your business that's overwhelming you or feeling way more challenging than it should right now.
This could be something like:
Feeling overwhelmed by the number of unread emails in your email inbox, to the point where it's hard for you to answer any emails at all
You have a backlog of overdue tasks in your client management platform, to the point where it is difficult for you to even log in
You're behind on one specific project and the longer you leave it, the harder it is to work on it. and feeling guilty and stressed out by it is preventing you from moving forward on things in general.
So figure out what that one main friction point is for you right now.
There may be more than one, but pick the one that feels the biggest, the heaviest, the most urgent, the thing that is being the biggest bottleneck and preventing you from moving forward on other things.
Just work on that one thing first.
This could look like setting a timer for 30 minutes and clearing out as much of the backlog in your inbox as possible, or doing as many of those overdue CRM tasks as possible.
Maybe it means just doing one thing on that project that you've been avoiding that's preventing you from moving forward.
It's not about the amount of time you spend on the friction point necessarily. It's about lessening that mental block that's preventing you from moving forward on that thing.
It's about making that thing feel smaller and more manageable, even if you don't get it completely finished and off your plate today.
So, if your business has been feeling harder than it should, heavier than it should, messy behind the scenes, these are the places that I recommend starting.
If your business only works when you're operating at 100% every day, it's fragile.
If you're looking for the exactly blueprint to build a business that doesn't depend on you being "on" at all times to function, that's exactly what we do together in my program, the Comfy Systems Club.
If you have any questions about making your business feel easier or avoiding toxic productivity advice? Leave a comment or send a message.
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