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What do you really need to get ahead at work?

I get asked this all the time. The answer varies depending on the person, their goals, and my mood, but there’s one answer I’ll never give: “Work hard.” That’s not an oversight or a misstep. It’s very intentional.

Whenever I hear some public speaker or Silicon Valley personality talk about how it just takes hard work to really succeed, I can’t help but roll my eyes a little. I’m sick of hearing people talk about working hard, keeping busy, putting their head down, etc. We’ve become too preoccupied with “the grind,” and it’s actually bringing us down.

Of all the things you learned in school, chances are the right way to learn wasn’t one of them.

To make it through academic life, most of us opt for what psychologists call “massed practice,” better known as cramming: It’s Monday and your test is Friday, so you save studying for the night before. One four-hour session can nab you a passing grade, so why not?

Well, because that’s not how your brain likes to absorb information. You might remember enough to pass your exam the next day, but just a week or two later and the details will already be fuzzy, if not gone completely. Here’s how to do better.

If you’re constantly frazzled on the job, logging super-long hours with little to show for it at the end of the day, chances are good that you’re mismanaging your time. But the good news is it’s easy (enough) to reorganize your schedule and get back on a successful track, stat!

“There’s a lot coming at us: mail–and [all kinds of] paper in general–emails, texts, phone calls, bosses calling for help, deadlines, projects–it doesn’t stop,” points out Felice Cohen, organizer and author of 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (or More). No wonder so many of us get so behind and feel so exasperated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The answer isn’t to do more. “Not everyone can multitask, and most of us who do probably shouldn’t,” says Cohen. Rather, the answer is to do what you do smarter. And here’s how.

It’s no understatement that digital mediums have taken over every aspect of our lives. We check what our friends are doing on the glowing screens in our hands, read books on dedicated e-readers, and communicate with customers and clients primarily through email. Yet for all the benefits digital mediums have provided us, there has been a growing body of evidence over the past several years that the brain prefers analog mediums.

Studies have shown that taking notes by longhand will help you remember important meeting points better than tapping notes out on your laptop or smartphone. The reason for that could be that “writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clarity to the fore the information we’re focusing on,” according to Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and journaling expert. If that’s the case, and the analog pen really is mightier than the phone, it’s no wonder some of my colleagues have ditched smartphones for paper planners.

Let’s face it: Negative feedback on your job performance can be a drag. Who likes to be told that their work could use improvement?

Research published in the Harvard Business Review provides some interesting insight into receiving and giving such feedback. While managers by and large avoided giving negative feedback or praise, employees craved it. And they weren’t looking for platitudes, either—57% wanted corrective feedback versus 43% who wanted praise. Seventy-two percent said that corrective feedback could improve their job performance.

Still, it’s one thing to think about that in theory—and another to hear from your manager, “We need to talk about your performance . . .” If you do find yourself on the receiving end of negative feedback or criticism, here’s how to cope.

It’s hard to get anything done with all of the push notifications pulling us into other directions. You can find something else to do or think about at any given moment. But maybe the distractions aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s your willingness to be distracted that needs to be examined.

“Distractions are by-products of a problem,” says Kyle Cease, author of I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling In Love With Your Fears Can Change the World. “Something outside of you is pulling you away from yourself or a goal. But the distraction is actually on the inside, and what’s going on outside matches what’s going on inside.”

We invite distractions as a way to handle three internal struggles, says Cease.

Whether you're at the starting line preparing to compete for the gold in the 100 meters or you're trying to be at your most productive state--how you start often predicts the outcome.

Learning new things is an important part of career growth, and 87% of millennials say professional development opportunities factor into their job decisions, according to Gallup. Acquiring too much information, however, can be a problem, putting your career at risk of becoming stagnant, says Dom Price, work futurist-in-chief and head of R&D at the software development firm Atlassian in Sydney, Australia.

“In the digital world, we’re privy to an abundance of knowledge,” he says. “We believe getting smart means knowing more, but in fact, it is not. We’re not practicing what we know. The acquisition of knowledge is dangerous when you don’t practice it.”

In order to succeed, Price argues that you need to understand the importance of unlearning—identifying the things you know that you don’t have time to nurture, and then letting some of them go.

Be honest: How is your progress so far on those New Year’s resolutions you lined up just a few weeks ago? As January wears on and the cold, dreary weather continues for many of us, sticking with your resolutions can quickly start to seem more challenging than you’d expected–and sometimes completely impossible.

If you’ve made and broken countless resolutions in the past and are already struggling this year, don’t give up hope just yet. It simply might be time to take a different approach to your resolutions. Understanding a little bit more about how the brain reacts to rewards and motivations could make the difference between forming a new habit for life and giving into temptation or laziness after a few weeks.

Doctors use the “universal pain assessment tool” to measure how uncomfortable their patients are. It’s a simple mechanism made up of smiley (and sad) faces. At one end of the spectrum is “pain free,” and on the other is “unimaginable, unspeakable pain,” with “tolerable” and “utterly horrible” falling in between. It’s not terribly scientific, but the tool helps medical professionals download your pain data from a little chip in your brain, so to speak, making it one of the best and fastest assessments at doctors’ disposal.

We’ve all had those days: You’re under pressure to get things done, but you can’t seem to accomplish anything.

There is still hope. Here are a dozen strategies you can put to work immediately to help you salvage your day and get more done.

Summer isn’t known to be the season for high productivity. Unplanned absences spike, especially on Mondays and Fridays and before holidays. These days off reduce productivity by 36.6%, according to a survey in the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

But that doesn’t mean your company needs to suffer. Whether you’re fighting the urge to take a day off or picking up the slack from a missing team member, it’s a good idea to create a summer productivity plan. We spoke to six productivity experts who shared their best advice for getting work done during the summer.