Grind the axe first, or saw the wood first

Grind the axe first, or saw the wood first

A young lumberjack went into the forest and started logging. On the first day, he overfulfilled the task of 1 trees. The next day, he worked as hard as before, even harder than the first day, but only cut down eight trees. After the third day, although he worked hard every day, the trees he cut down every day were gradually decreasing. An old worker saw his hard work and reminded him, "Why don't you stop and sharpen your axe?" He replied, "no time, I'm busy cutting down trees!" "

in the above case, chopping wood is the problem we have to solve in our daily work, and the axe is the working ability and working method we have when solving problems.

The Analects of Confucius, Wei Linggong, said, "If a worker wants to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools." If you want to achieve good results in the workplace, you must have excellent working ability, make complete preparations before "chopping wood", and raise all your abilities. When the right time comes, you can firmly grasp the opportunity.

There is a phenomenon in the workplace. Although the company recruits many new people every year, and these people also have good educational background and internship experience, the status of old people in the department is generally difficult to shake, and the efficiency of dealing with problems is much higher.

With the rich work experience, the old employees will be more confident in the face of problems, and will not hesitate to look back and forth like those who just entered the workplace. But this is not the fundamental reason why the old employees can survive. Rich experience can certainly make the old people in the workplace more skilled in handling things, but the fundamental reason is that they already know how to sharpen a sharp axe when they are constantly dealing with problems. Compared with new employees, old employees may not have an advantage in academic background, but they deal with enough problems, and their working ability and working ideas are more than one level higher, which is the key to their career.

Just like the young lumberjack in the case, many people only pay attention to what they are doing, but not to scientific and reasonable methods and tools, so they may not be able to achieve the desired results.

Therefore, before entering the big forest of the workplace, you must understand one thing: bring an axe sharp enough, and if it is dull, sharpen it in time.

The efficiency of cutting wood is getting lower and lower. There is a high probability that there is something wrong with the axe itself and the work efficiency is getting lower and lower. There is a high probability that there is something wrong with the working method. Therefore, the most important thing in the workplace is not work experience, but the correct working methods.

No matter how complicated the work is, there are always suitable methods to achieve the best results. Generally speaking, these methods need to be verified by predecessors or unanimously recognized by everyone.

Take the mind map commonly used in daily work as an example. Many people are not familiar with the usage of mind map before entering the workplace, or they don't have many opportunities to use it, but no matter what occupation they are engaged in, mind map is one of the most commonly used "axes" in the workplace.

Before using a professional mindmanager (such as Xmind), you can actually draw it with a sketch. You only need to prepare a piece of paper and a pen to start making mind maps.

1. Draw the center of the mind map

Draw the problems that need to be solved in the middle of A4 paper, such as the projects that need to be completed immediately and the annual summary. It doesn't need to be too specific, but people who look at this picture need to understand what problems are to be solved.

2. Draw the main branch of mind map

Mind map

The main branch of mind map diverges from the central map. If there are markers with different colors, you can also mark different stages or different aspects with different colors.

For example, if you want to make a brain map of a project, you can mark the things that need to be completed in different stages of the project, from the project initiation and bidding to the project acceptance and completion. When you list the main branches, you will find that the previous complicated work suddenly becomes very clear, and some things that need attention can also be written on A4 paper in the form of keywords.

3. Expand and complete all the mind maps

With the main branches, this only sorts out the main context of the problem, and it is not a complete mind map. Next, continue to decompose after the main branch, and decompose the main branch into smaller parts.

In this process, you can continue to add keywords until all the main branches derived from the central diagram are filled, which is considered as a complete mind map.

From the simple example of how to do mind mapping, we can see that before doing a specific thing, if there is a scientific working method to guide the next work, the work efficiency will be greatly improved.