Yeah, when I worked in factories, I wanted to do better, just increase my numbers because I like improving. I looked up to the people who would be casually doing their job while doing way more output than I could and from that I could easily tell that there were better ways than what I was doing.

I got the best results from things like optimizing my foot positions to reduce steps, thinking about how objects needed to be oriented before I picked them up, finding areas where things could be parallelized (like only pack a part while the machine is building the next one), reducing context switches (like if there’s 5 stages, do a bunch in stage 1 before moving on to stage 2 so you spend less time picking up and putting down tools).

Once you’ve optimized the way you’re doing the work (work smarter), then you can add speed to it if you want it even faster (work harder). If you skip that first step, you can end up working your ass off only to still be embarrassed by the guy that looks like he’s half asleep.