彭蒙惠英语：聪明工作之道(3/3)
Working Smart
聪明工作之道(3/3)
Working Smart
Forget multitasking and long hours—there are better ways to increase personal productivity
Work in parallel
When you multitask, you do many things at once. Bad idea. But you can find ways to arrange work so many things are happening at once. Good idea. If you are collaborating with a colleague on a report and writing a marketing plan, first draft your report and send it to your colleague. While she’s reviewing, you get to work on the marketing plan. Work moves forward on both at the same time.
While we all work this way to some degree, a little thought can find golden opportunities for parallelism. Delegation is a great tool here. When you delegate a task, it keeps moving while you’re working on something else. Just make sure you are delegating to someone with the time, tools and resources to do the job. Otherwise, you’ll find the task coming back to bite you.
Combine and think
You can get very creative in how you use these principles. A partner in a new private equity firm wanted to buy and run a company. To speed things along, he got very clear on the criteria to disqualify a deal as quickly as possible. His ability to quickly weed out the duds ultimately led to a deal that’s showing gains of $170 million in 13 months. If he hadn’t streamlined his low-leverage activity so he could reach his high-leverage goal, he would likely have invested in one of his earlier, not-so-great deals.
Working faster, identifying you 80/20 opportunities and using opportunities for parallelism all take thought and planning before you reap the rewards. So your highest-leverage activity is taking regular time reexamine and tweak how you work. Give it a shot. You’ll be happier, you’ll get more done, and you’ll get to see your kids for dinner. And that’s what I call working smart.
Specialized Terms
Golden (adj) 绝佳的 advantageous
Parallelism (n) 双轨进行的状态 the condition in which two things are happening at the same time
Dud (n) 无用的废物 something that has no value
Vocabulary Focus
Delegation (n) giving a particular task to someone else to do
Streamline (n) to improve effectiveness by making the way activities are performed simpler
Tweak (n) to change slightly, especially in order to make more effective
Discussion Question
To work in parallel needs delegation, but how to make sure your delegation works well?
Extra Exercise
1. Translate the following sentence into Chinese, ‘If he hadn’t streamlined his low-leverage activity so he could reach his high-leverage goal, he would likely have invested in one of his earlier, not-so-great deals.’
2. According to the recording, complete the following sentence ‘A jack of all trades …’
（责编：fanfan2008）
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