For example, years ago, I had a manager quit, who was working 12 hours a day. I had to pick up all his work. I completed it in 8 hours a day. Which is working smarter: Working Longer hours to complete a task because working more hours "looks good?" OR Being efficient?
I think we had the same manager~lol! I worked with this guy who would claim many hours of work, lots of it from home (I am an advocate of wfh, btw) but I always had to wonder about his claims of checking on the system in the middle of the night because after he left I would check the system and it was always just humming along. Very stable, which is what the clients wanted. He also always had us in a chronic state of emergency this or that, sort of fluffing up the importance of his work as well as the hours, from what I could tell.
If work is tedious, folks who can will figure out better faster ways to do things. Eliminate the inefficiencies, automate the stuff that has to be done but can be done by a program or script or machine. Even just documenting stuff can improve speed: document procedures which have to be done over and over rather than seat-of-your-pants it each time and take twice as long.
