There's
a big difference between working hard and working smart - and that's where
technology comes into play.
As humans, most of us spend over 30% of our
life at work. And when we transmogrify into mules, donkeys and dogs at the
workplace, the number increases alarmingly to 50%. Spending half our lives in
the office is bad enough, so why make it worse by working hard as well? The problem
is, most of us don't know the difference between working hard and working
smart.
This is explained better by ‘Gates Theory
of Diminishing Productivity’, which states that 20% of all employees spend 80%
of their time staring at Windows Office while the other 80% spend 100% of their
time staring out of their office windows. In other words, what you choose to
stare at determines how hardworking you are.
One of the first steps to making your boss believe
that you’re the man is by making your presence felt in conference rooms, during
brainstorming sessions, meetings and presentations. What you need to do is spew
jargon until it impresses the right people. Just google for ‘bullshit generator’
- and you'll be surprised at the sheer volume of bovine droppings present
online. So how do these corporate poop creators work? By stacking three columns
of words, of which the first set could be actions, the second, descriptors and
the third, systems, for instance. So, at your command, the site pulls out a
word randomly from each column, puts them together and magically creates
phrases for you to fling around, like ' mesh best-of-breed architectures',
'integrate user-centric paradigms' or 'disintermediate enterprise
supply-chains'. If you’re in IT, there are sites that specialize in jargon that
might interest you, like 'beta-test authentic APIs', 'capture peer-to-peer
blogospheres' and 'share semantic tagclouds'.
If you need something a bit more pompous to
suit the environment, go for sites that create entire statements, like 'Double-digit
throughput increase impact compliant market opportunities reaped from our
organic efficiency gain, whereas the clients enhance the situational paradigms'.
A statement like this has enough bullshit to power you to the corner cabin. If
you are in HR and have the unenviable job of handing over titles to a million minions,
("Make it fancy and impressive or we'll leave - CTS is hiring") opt
for sites that can generate job titles. Fancy designations like Customer
Usability Associate, Dynamic Quality Representative and Forward Assurance
Architect are sure to leave your employees in such a state of euphoria that you
won’t have to give them a raise.
Besides the conference room, another key location
in your office where appearing busy and seeming productive helps is your
workstation. A simple but effective way to do that is by downloading an Excel
sheet screensaver that will make it look as if you are busy working on an Excel
file whenever your computer is idle, which is probably the whole day. If you
can't download the file because of admin restrictions, fear not. You could make
it more authentic by converting your existing Excel sheet into a screensaver – check
out any of the zillion websites available for this purpose.
So the choice is really between what
Garfield says and what Garfield says. You could go with the former President of
the United States, James A Garfield, who said, "If the power to do hard
work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it", or concur with
Garfield the cat who believed, "Hard work never killed anybody, but why
take a chance?" If you believe in the latter, you’re in luck - technology
is right here to give you a helping hand.
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