SMARTCUTS: An Introduction

Everyone has probably heard the saying “You have to spend money to make money”. After all, examples of this are all around us. You invest in an education to learn the skills you need for a career. You might take out a loan or buy specialist equipment to start a business. Or perhaps you purchase stocks and shares to earn dividends.

Yet despite time being our most precious commodity, we tend to overlook the fact that we often need to spend time to make time. What do I mean by this?

Well, you can’t create more time simply by hustling. Working harder, working faster, and trying to cram more into the day just isn’t going to cut it.

Instead, it’s that old cliché of working smarter. Sometimes this means prioritising our workload to only focus on the tasks that will have the biggest impact and setting other activities aside until later (or stopping them entirely). Other times, it may be intentionally planning to match our energy levels to the task at hand: if we know we get drowsy after lunch, this may be a bad time to work on an important paper, but perfect for a walking meeting.

Or the situation may call for a smartcut: investing a little time and energy now to reap the benefits down the road. Unlike a shortcut, there is no cutting corners or focusing only on short-term gains: smartcuts are all about long-term, continuous success.

For example, maybe you spend five hours at a training session, then an hour implementing what you learned into your workflow. You might have initially felt you couldn’t afford six hours away from work, but what if it saves you six hours a year—or more—for the next 20 years of your career?

Or maybe you grab a coffee with someone and pick their brain about a problem you’re dealing with. They’ve been there, done that, and have made mistakes along the way: they’re happy to share with you what they would have done differently. That thirty-minute coffee break just saved you weeks of head-scratching and potential stress.

Although there are no shortcuts to academic success, researchers and academics can harness the power of smartcuts to make things a little easier for themselves. 

Keep reading for examples of smartcuts, or download the free booklet at the end: