He was talking about factors under your control. So I guess you have to decide whether you think you can get significantly smarter, which I don't. You can learn more, but that takes time and should be considered part of working, of course. Even if you can get smarter, that would also presumably take work and the more of it you did the smarter you'd get. What we know for sure is that you can't just wake up today and say, hey, I'm going to make decisions that are twice as good as yesterday.

And if working smarter means things like automating tasks, that also doesn't quite make sense. Of course you should automate tasks. Working harder doesn't mean being stupid. It means you should spend more of your brain time working toward your goals. If you free up time by automating some stuff, that gives you more time to be working on (including automating) something else.

Yeah, I was borrowing from the old expression "work smarter, not harder".

Smarter in this context means bringing our intelligence to bear on the issue of workflow and how we go about doing our work. I wasn't meaning to imply that it means we need to literally become smarter.