Work smarter, not harder

There are times we all just want to get over with a task, which we know we will repeat, but still, prefer to do it the long way just to get the results. Below is one of my favourite pictures on this topic. It is clear that if we stop for a second, look back, and observe the situation, we can find an easier way to proceed further which we can re-use.

In the previous weeks, I conducted some experiments and was very excited to see the results and compare them with some examples in literature. The easiest way was to copy the results, paste them into excel and plot a graph of my interest. I filtered and worked on the data like this for almost 4 weeks. During these 4 weeks, every time I had to change or check something, I needed to open each excel, and remember the exact things I needed to conduct. Even though the latest version of excel and new computers are capable enough to handle thousands of lines of data, it was freezing very often that I had to close the task or give it some time to recover.

Last weekend, I was just very exhausted from going back and forth in different sheets (at home I do not have a second screen) so I decided to take the time to just write a Matlab code. I worked with Matlab for many years (in the following posts I will write about my weird relationship with Matlab) and knew that I could do what I wanted to do with some effort and few google pages. One other thing great about Matlab is that you get a free version if you are a student, and there are thousands of things that can be done with it.

It took me less than half an hour to write the code, import data, plot and filter. Yes, 30 minutes vs probably 6-8 hours (in total with re-plotting filtering, selecting relevant data etc). This was a great way to prove that I should just think about what would be the most efficient way, each time I have something to do.

What are your smarter ways to work more efficiently?