Working smarter is most of the time better as working harder

I thank Nyqii for accepting my challenge.In this round I’m going to argue why working smarter is most of the time better than working harder. Argument 1: history The most basic need of every human is food. But food doesn’t grow on trees (1). You have to work on farms to get your food. So let’s look at what percentage of the population works in the agriculture sector: (2) As the graph shows, about 65% of the American workforce worked in the agriculture in 1840. But through the years this dropped to about 1% in 2000. So what caused this drop? In 1840 the farmers had simple tools. They still plowed with those old-fashioned plows that have to get pulled by animals. But through the years the farmers started to use better tools like tractors, sprinklers and greenhouses. Tools like that helped farmers to produce more food with the same amount of effort. Therefore fewer people had to work in the agricultural sector. This is an example of people working smarter. After all, the farmers started to realize the old resources they had (the plows that got pulled by animals) just weren’t good enough anymore. They started to invent better tools (like tractors). There are also many examples in other sectors. Like how we switched from paper letters to e-mails, which get delivered faster and are cheaper to deliver. Argument 2: the 80/20 principle The Pareto-principle, AKA the 80/20 principle, states that roughly 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes (3). It’s hard to grasp at first, so here are some examples: In 1989 the richest 20% of the population earned 82.70% of the income (3) 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers (3) Fixing the 20% most frequently reported bugs eliminates 80% of the errors and crashes in a given system (3) 20% of the patients use 80% of the health care resources (3) And now a detailed example: A firm with the goal of making as much profit as possible was operation in 15 different segments. It analyzed all 15 segments and concluded that 6 segment represented 26.3% of the sales & 82.9% of the profitability, 6 segments represented 57% of the sales & 45.5% of the profitability and the remaining 3 segments represented 16.7% of the sales & -31.4% of the profits (they made a loss). The management decided to focus more & raise sales effort on the 6 segments with a high profitability, focus less & raised prices on the 6 segments with a medium profitability and decided to sell two of the segments where the firm was making a loss. The third segments where the firm was making a loss was still growing, so the management decided to make sure it becomes profitable as fast as possible. It was quite a reorganization, but in the end the firm managed to get more profit out of the same resources it had (4). So, how does all of this connect to working smarter? You only have a finite amount of resources and it’s possible to get more out of those resources by focusing them only on the best uses. There’s no need to make more hours. You can get more done with the same resources after you found out which 20% of the inputs lead to 80% of the outputs and get more of those valuable inputs. Like how the firm in the detailed example decided to focus more on the segments that gave 82.9% of the profits and reduced focus on the other segments. These two arguments back up my claim that working smarter is most of the time better than working harder. I now hand the debate over to con. Sources: 1) Wait, it does. But you probably get what I’m trying to say 2) https://www.farmbooster.com... 3) https://en.wikipedia.org... 4) Example taken from http://www.amazon.com...