6/13/12 Wonderful Wednesday - Work Habits and How to Improve Them

Wonderful Wednesday- because it is wonderful to set out to work as if what you are doing will survive beyond your years.

In last week's Wonderful Wednesday - work habits post I talked about working smarter instead of working harder. Today I will discuss one way we can work smarter. We need to treat each job, each task we do as if it is important and the results will stand the test of time. When we think that we are working with something unimportant, petty and small, we give it little attention and don't care how things turn out. For example, when we blow our noses into a piece of facial tissue, we don't pay a lot of attention to the process. We don't care about the results.

When we know something is temporary we don't care what happens to it. We don't see a reason to put forth our best efforts with it. We don't take care to protect what we are working with. On the other hand, when we know something is permanent, that it will last or  must last for a long period of time, we are careful. A person working at her dream job will go to work each day and do the best possible job because she want to keep the job. A president who is concerned about her legacy, will take special precautions to make sure the work she does, the memory she creates is favorable.

This is not a new idea. When we were children, many of us had teachers who told us we had better have good behavior because our misdeeds would be placed on our permanent records. This made many of us put on good behavior because we know we should want our permanent record to be good and mistake free. So today, we must work as of the behavior we have will be made part of our permanent record.

This means when we work, we must treat each task as important. We must work as if the result of the task will form the opinion people of import and power till have of us, because it does. If we act as if each job is a place where we will work for the next 20 years, we will try to get along with our co-workers because since we will be there for a long time, we want that time to be pleasant. If what we do was going to be written in history books and studied by school children for the next hundred years. we would do a good job so that our reputation in perpetuity would be strong and positive.

So the point to be thought about today is, work like the job and the tasks are part of our permanent record. So the question for you this Wonderful Wednesday is what have you been treating as temporary that you will now treat as permanent?