One thing bothers me about this whole WorkHard / WorkSmart / BeProductive meme: it focuses too much on "the competition".
I know my approach is heresy in these parts, but bear with me...
I understand that there's always some potential competition, but I choose to not pay much attention to it. The only thing I compete with is another version of myself in another universe. "What would that other Ed have done?"
And that's awfully hard to measure. I've tried all kinds of metrics to keep my projects going, but the only one I use now is how much progress I make each day on my most important task. Pretty subjective.
I have seen tons of good software and services and have done a lot of work deploying them. What invariably happens is that there is no solution for something the consumer wants, so that's what I write. I like to think, "If I had good competition, I would just go out and sell it for them. But since I'm writing something no one else has, I won't worry about competing with anyone but what I would have been."
This may sound a little silly, but it works for me. Provide something that no one else is providing and working harder or smarter than the competition suddenly doesn't mean so much. I just have to be a whole lot smarter and better than doing nothing at all.
I'm mostly with you on that one, actually, but some folks feel like the big bad Competition Vampire will suck their blood if they don't pound a timesheet through its heart, so I try to keep it to one major heresy per blog post. (For my next trick: you can work less and ignore the competition while running your software business on Microsoft Vista.)
Even if you're one guy sitting at home (hi, me) I recommend tracking productivity simply because using time more efficiently gives you more time to spend on things which are more important to you than, e.g., licking stamps. (No matter how good you are at what you do, and how much you enjoy everything you do, you have done one thing this week that was less important than all the others. Ask yourself: what could I have done to not have had to do that?)
There are two issues here: What you should tell yourself and what actually is.
I read a sports psychology textbook which quoted a study or studies showing that folks who concentrated on improving themselves and not worrying about the competition were winners. A long distance runner should care most about beating their own time.
But note that in focusing on themselves, they end up winning.
There are many areas of human effort. Some are more competitive than others. The post that this one claims to be refuting was specifically about competitive fields.
Surely we can agree that some fields are competitive? Then the question is, in these fields, where winners abound (people focusing on their own efforts), are outcomes actually improved by the principal or executive investing more work.
Although the voting patterns in this forum don't appear to agree, this is basically settled both in science and commonsense.
It almost appears that people are conflating the issue of whether it's a good idea from a quality of life perspective with whether it works. Those are separate issues.
I think those studies also say that spending time doing something without consciously trying to find ways to steadily improve is not of much use.
I think patio11 describes a process of always improving the $ / hour value of his efforts. Someone who puts in a lot of hours but does not consistently look for way to make each hour more valuable or productive is going to lose to someone following patio11's approach, I bet.
I know my approach is heresy in these parts, but bear with me...
I understand that there's always some potential competition, but I choose to not pay much attention to it. The only thing I compete with is another version of myself in another universe. "What would that other Ed have done?"
And that's awfully hard to measure. I've tried all kinds of metrics to keep my projects going, but the only one I use now is how much progress I make each day on my most important task. Pretty subjective.
I have seen tons of good software and services and have done a lot of work deploying them. What invariably happens is that there is no solution for something the consumer wants, so that's what I write. I like to think, "If I had good competition, I would just go out and sell it for them. But since I'm writing something no one else has, I won't worry about competing with anyone but what I would have been."
This may sound a little silly, but it works for me. Provide something that no one else is providing and working harder or smarter than the competition suddenly doesn't mean so much. I just have to be a whole lot smarter and better than doing nothing at all.