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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Great at Work summary
Morten T. Hansen
How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More
Table of Contents
Great at Work
Summary of 7 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 7
Avoid multitasking and give individual tasks your obsessive attention.
It is still a commonly held belief that if we want to get more work done, we should put in more effort and work harder for longer hours. But the real trick isn’t about working harder; it’s about working smarter.
The first step to working smarter is to do less – which means: stop juggling multiple tasks and instead prioritize your work so that you’re dealing with one task at a time.
If you multitask and try to tackle a bunch of responsibilities at work, you’re bound to spread yourself too thin and waste both your time and effort. Since none of the tasks get your full attention, none of them will get optimal results.
HR specialist Susan Bishop learned this the hard way. She opened her own search consultancy in New York City, aimed at finding and recruiting the perfect candidates for media jobs. But in an effort to beat the competition, Bishop went outside her area of expertise to bring in all sorts of clients from many different industries. Bishop’s efforts were unfocused, and as a result, performance and profits suffered.
Even judges are not immune to the inefficiencies of multitasking.
According to a 2015 study of judges in Milan, those who multitasked and tried to handle a variety of cases at once were ultimately slower in processing those cases. The fastest judge spent 178 days on a case, while the slowest multitasking judge spent 398 days!
Now, instead of multitasking, you need to go further and obsess about the task that has your undivided attention.
Roald Amundsen knew a thing or two about the benefits of an obsessive focus. Back in 1911, the Norwegian explorer was in a race to be the first man at the South Pole. His competitor was the veteran explorer and Royal Navy Commander, Robert Falcon Scott.
Scott made the mistake of dividing his attention among a variety of transportation methods, including dogs, ponies, skis and motor sleds – all of which move at different paces. Scott also made the mistake of sending a dog expert to pick out his ponies, which resulted in a collection of 20 small horses that were all unfit for Antarctic conditions.
So Amundsen won the race, and he did it by focusing on one means of transportation: dogs. Not only that, he was thoroughly obsessed with finding out which dogs were best suited to the climate and terrain of Antarctica. So he immersed himself in research and reached out to the top experts.
In the author’s survey of 5,000 people, those who limited their focus but were still obsessed with their priorities performed better by an average of 25 percent.
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What is Great at Work about?
Great at Work (2018) explores the dynamics of individual work performance and gets to the bottom of why some people perform better than others. The author, Morten T. Hansen, provides ample evidence to disprove the fallacy that only those with innate strengths and amazing natural talent can give superior performances. Instead, Hansen lays out seven key practices that anyone can immediately start using to be great at work.
Best quote from Great at Work
The more items we attend to, the less time we can allot to each, and the less well we will perform any one of them.
—Morten T. Hansen
Who should read Great at Work?
- Leaders and managers
- Entrepreneurs
- Career-oriented people
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