A certain specific type of laziness - the “I’m tired of doing this every time, so I’m going to buckle down and take three times as long to never do it again” type, can serve people very well in a number of fields, particularly computer programming.
I move heavy things around in my shop by myself using the mantra of “Stubbornness and leverage.” F’rintsance, I had a 10 foot tall steel tower that needed to be stood up, I used a furniture dolly and a ceiling winch. A long lever can make things easy, especially a motorized lever.
I’ve had moments where I’m on the couch, with my feet up on the coffee table, watching TV, and I’ll wonder what else I’ve seen that actor in. My laptop is on the coffee table right in front of me, but I’d have to lean forward to reach it. So I pull my phone out of my pocket and look go to IMDB on that instead.
I once lived in a trailer, with heat provided by a 60-pound propane tank. Changing an empty propane bottle was not difficult, but it was a nuisance. The trailer also had a gas range. I very rarely cooked, but as long as the pilot lights on the stove were lit, I knew I had enough hot water to take a shower.
There have been several times where I’ve been like, “So, is this part of the feature really necessary for first release…? What did the customer actually ask for, again? Because doing it this way is a pain in my butt.” And sometimes she listened.
Of course sometimes we have to go back and ‘finish’, but often we don’t.
Oh, that reminds me of a house I once lived in. My housemate and I wanted a beer tap in the kitchen, but it was a flight of stairs up from the driveway into the house. You could go directly into the basement from the driveway, so we decided to put the beer fridge down there and run a beer line up to the kitchen. Carrying a keg up a flight of stair really sucks. We had running hot and cold water and cold beer at the kitchen sink.
When I was working as an interpreter/teacher many years ago, I didn’t want to hang up all the students’ jackets and coats, so I just stuck them on the air intake of the nearby big HVAC and they adhered to the grill by air suction.
Which I now realize was bad for the HVAC, but oh well, I was 15 at the time.
I gather that if you want to use this tactic to give you paid relaxation time, then you want to be a server system administrator. Automate enough stuff and you end up basically ‘on call’ for the occasional actual emergency even during work hours. Bonus points if none of your bosses ever swings by in person to see what you’re up to as long as nothing goes wrong (as might happen if you work nights).
For me, doing it right the first time usually resulted in the work being more fun, since the boilerplate was taken care of early so more time was spent on the less rote parts of the job.
Back in the olden days, my TV didn’t have a remote but the VCR did. I built a circuit board with a photo transistor to detect the power LED on the VCR and turn on the TV.
It may be a fake Bill Gates quotation, but it’s a real Frank Bunker Gilbreth quotation. You might recall Gilbreth as the father in Cheaper by the Dozen (the book and original movie, not the awful knock-off starring Steve Martin). Gilbreth’s efficiency ideas made a big impact on me and later helped me in various jobs I had.
Here’s one of my lazy-efficient tricks: If I use a spatula instead of a spoon to stir sauces, puddings, soups, or anything that needs constant stirring, I find I can cover more surface area with fewer strokes.
Fake quote or no, variants of it constitute an old, old adage in computer science. The idea is that, faced with any repetitive manual task involving the manipulation of data, it’s the “lazy” programmers who will quickly find a way to automate it. Which is a backhanded way of saying that “laziness” in a bright person leads to labour-saving creativity.
Back in my day, the perfect paradigm for this involved TECO. TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) originated at MIT and became a popular text editor across a broad line of DEC computers. Those were the days of command-line interfaces, and TECO had rather cryptic commands consisting of single characters and combinations thereof. But it was extremely powerful in that complex series of commands could be created, nested, iterated, and executed conditionally – i.e.- it was really a programming language, not just an editor. And the test of a Real Programmer™ was whether, given anything more than two or three instances of the same kind of edit in a body of text, you would do it manually, or whether you would write a clever TECO macro to do it for you (=“lazy”).
To this very day, I still have a PC version of TECO on my desktop computer, and to this very day, I still sometimes use it to do the occasional complex text editing task that’s practically impossible to do any other way.
I learned that if I rub my dogs belly and then slap it a couple of times, I can rile her up so that she runs around me like a, er, Lunatic, for minutes at end, thereby getting her to run quite a bit while I’m sitting on my ass.
