Bill Gates famously said, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." Whether as an excuse to remain lazy or work smarter, not harder, this is arguably one of the most cited Bill Gates quotes ever. Sure, hard work pays off, but it isn't always necessary. When it comes to getting the job done, it's usually the final result that matters. How you got there isn't really as important.
When someone on the AskReddit community asked, "What's a real-life example of this [quote]?" people jumped on the thread to share examples of working smarter, not harder, from their own life experiences. Ultimately, this Bill Gates quote on lazy people means that if the job quality hasn't worsened (even if it didn't improve), why strain and overburden yourself? Arguably the best work advice one can give is to work smarter, not harder, where you can and save the efforts for more important things.
Below, we've compiled some of the best examples of how to work smart, not hard, that people have left in the thread. Do you follow this work advice? Have you ever been in a situation where working smart has paid off? Let us know in the comments!
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"Worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer. Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants each day. Put together a back of the napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss. That system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now. I did automate myself out of the job and had to find another eventually.
Couple years later got my engineering degree. I’m convinced Engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier."
"My brother gave my oldest nephew 10 dollars a week if he did all his chores with out needing to be told or complaining.
One day he gets home early from work and sees. The neighbour kid tossing a bag in the trash. He asks him what he is doing and the kid says he gets 5 bucks a week to take care of a few chores.
My nephew outsourced his chores."
"When Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician and physicist was in elementary school (around 1784), his class was assigned the "busy work" task of adding all the numbers from 1 to 100 (1+2+3+4, and so on). This usually kept the class quiet for half an hour or so. Seven year-old Carl was sitting quietly with the correct answer (5050) while the rest of the class was just starting, so the surprised teacher asked him how he came up with the solution. He replied that he added 1 and 100 and got 101. Then he added 2 and 99, and got 101, 3 plus 98 = 101, and so on. He realised there was a pattern of 50 pairs of numbers with each pair adding up to 101. And 50 x 101 = 5050."
"I remember reading about a Texas airport that had a high rate of complaints from people who had to wait a long time for their luggage at baggage claim. The solution: Assign a further away Baggage claim for the same flights. People walked longer, but complaints went way down since they didn't have to wait as long."
"I had to take a basic video production class in college. I needed one of the character’s voices in a scene, but the character himself couldn’t be in the shot. I didn’t want to take the time to record audio separately and try to put it all together when editing. So I told the guy to just go stand behind a column that was in the shot and talk a little louder. It worked perfectly and stunned my professor that I was able to do such a complex task. Then a classmate asked me how I did it. Had to come clean in front of the whole class. My professor was equally stunned at my ability to work smarter not harder.
I got an A."
"I don't know if this is a true story, but kind of fits your request.
There was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste. One year for some reason there ended up being an unusually high number of empty boxes being shipped out. So in order to stop that from happening the head of the company hired a couple engineers to develope a system to catch any empty boxes so they didn't get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them.
The engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount the system would stop and a worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again. The person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately. And right from the get go the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to near zero.
The head of the company wanted to go see the system in action so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line. Very confused as it wasn't hot he asked the plant manager why the fan was there. The plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an empty box so they just hooked up a fan to blow the empty boxes off the scale before the system recognised it was empty and shut everything off.
So laziness led to a more efficient (and cost effective) plan."
"I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.
On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.
From that day everyone did it my way."
Me, one time I asked my boss "seriously, why do you always toss me the difficult tasks?" and he replied "because I know you'll get it done quick so you can be back on reddit."
Yea, i once read a coment that i found hilarious, " if having to choose between a perfectionist and a lazy worker, i Will always choose the lazy One, because he's gonna find the fastest way to do the job and then lazying around, wille the perfectionist Will take a lot more time to do the same thing "
"Years ago, as a student, I got a job stocking shelves. The guys were carrying the heavy boxes, put them on the floor and bend each time to pick up the items to put on the shelves. I was maybe a light 100 pounds (woman) and carrying the boxes was just killing me physically. So one day I had an idea. I put the box on a old desk chair and rolled it around. No more carrying and no more bending! Funny thing is that, instead of doing the same thing, most of the guys called me lazy and kept carrying the heavy boxes. Just to prove how strong they were.
Now they have special rolling carts to do the job."
"I have an herb garden in a planter on my balcony with a water reservoir that needs to be filled. I have an air conditioner in my room with a water reservoir that needs to be emptied. There's an overflow valve on the planter so it can't be overfilled and they're roughly the same height.
I went to the hardware store, bought a long enough tube, and there's now a syphon running between them so that my air conditioner waters my plants and I no longer have to fill or empty any water."
"In 1927 my grandfather started his new job at Dupont on a Friday. His first assignment was to separate out a chemical that was suspended in another chemical. He was handed a beaker of the stuff to work on. Since it was late on a Friday afternoon, he did nothing with it, just stuck it on a shelf and went home. He came back Monday morning to discover that the chemical had precipitated out and was sitting on the bottom of the beaker. He showed this to his new boss, who decided my grandfather was a genius. This process (doing nothing to the suspension) became the first of my grandfather's 47 patents."
"The clerk was asked to bring 145 white papers into the office. He doesn't want to count the papers manually so he printed 145 blank sheets and took them in."
"An older company had a person dedicated to “data entry” which boiled down to copying and pasting portions of data from text files into spreadsheet and formatting into a report.
The person originally doing this job spent a full 40+ hours/week doing it, but was not very computer literate. When they retired, the company hired someone with actual skills. The new hire convinced management to let her work remotely after getting up to speed on the job.
The first week at home was spent automating the entire job. The remainder of their multi-year tenure with the company was spent doing whatever they wanted save the 10-15 minutes weekly to run their program and to answer the odd email here and there. All while getting paid full salary and benefits. They actually had to add in a few errors now and then to make it seem realistic."
"My boss put my name in for leading a project group shortly after I joined the company. I had no experience whatsoever about project managing yet he still demanded that I lead the group of 12 people.
All way smarter guys (tech background, these guys are like magicians for me) and with way more time at the company.
I’m a business guy who’s too dumb for balance sheets that’s why I’m in HR (and because I quite like the field the most).
So we started the first meeting, I asked for everyone’s plan, experience and ideas, gathered the different pros and cons, cross checked with the budget we had, put on a time frame with milestones to reach (around 6 months), put in valuable people to consult at different steps. Why did I do that? Because I like organizing stuff and keep everyone on the same page and delegate to-dos.
Got promoted because of the success of the project.
I asked my boss why he put me in for it since I never done anything like that. He said because I complained in the first week that most of the work has way too wonky structure, no clear guideline and this could be improved heavily if we just take some time into it. And because I hated talking to others if I had questions and I wouldn’t get a clear answer (like: ask 10 people the same question and you get 15 different answers). In the long run this would make us way more efficient and keeps everyone on the same page.
All because I hated disorganised work."
"I had a manager in my twenties who detested the fact I turned a two hour process into a fifteen minute process. It exposed how much lazier he was compared to me because when the higher ups learned from other people at my level that I created the program, they took me aside and told me he took credit for it. They asked me how I felt about that.
I told them what decisions they make regarding the manager's character is their decision. Just put yourselves in my shoes and consider it from that angle.
They did nothing and I took the concept to a competitor who invested the money into making the program more robust and proprietary. My name was line one on the patent and trademark documents and I did well enough to semi-retire at 45.
I credit Lee Iacocca for the inspiration. He went through a similar problem with higher ups at Ford and his answer was to take his brain to Chrysler who would value it."
"Every year in the Canadian winter, powerlines would fail due to the weight of the snow. It took many days to build up enough to break a line so they employed a team to walk the routes and shake the poles to loosen the snow.
One day they saw a bear shaking the poles and realized that if they could get the bear to do it they wouldn't need to walk the route.
So they gave one guy a bucket of honey and he'd walk the route painting the sides of the poles with honey to attract the bears. It worked for a few more years But this still takes a lot of time to do.
So then they had the idea of flying a helicopter along the route with a trained sniper with honey paintballs that he'd shoot the poles with.
On its maiden flight the helicopter passed the lines and the downdraft blew away all of the snow.
The flights continue to this day but without the sniper."
"At my last job, a truck suspension shop, we did inventory every December and it was someone's job to count all the washers and screws of every size.
It was my first inventory and I casually mentioned that they should just weigh 10 screws or washers, then weigh them all and divide the weight to get the count. Everyone looked at me like I had given them the key to the universe.
Counting washers and screws went from a day or two, to just a an hour."
"My ex-boss gave me an excel sheet. 124.000 rows excel sheet. Had all the company customer data per row - twice. In some of those duplicates there was an error. She needed me to go over the list one row by row to check for mistakes and mark all the faulty entries I could find. Through 124.000 rows. She wanted me to do that using the arrow-down key and my mouse.
I thanked her. I sat down. Invested half an hour into Google. Copy pasted some parts of this formula, then some parts of that. Finally I had figured out the formula. I double clicked the tiny rectangle so that the formula gets applied on all rows. Worked like a charm.
I stood up, got myself a coffee, talked to some colleagues. Then I went to my boss. She had anticipated that I would need 3 days for this task. When I was back less than an hour later, she thought I hadn't understood the task or maybe a follow up question. I will never forget the expression on her face when I told her I was done. There were 6 faulty entries."
"Start of lockdown, my 9 year old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home. One day, left him at the laptop doing his maths while I made some dinner with my 3 year old daughter. Walked into the living room with his dinner to find him asking the Alexa all of his maths questions."
"Years ago while working at my uncle's warehouse there was a monthly shipment of double doors with the frame built in. These doors were so heavy that it was a five to six man job to get them off the truck and walking them though a narrow enough hallway; this process could kill 2 hours of sales because the place had a crew of ten men and with 6 being needed it was known to avoid shopping there on those days.
Have no idea how long they did this but on the second shipment when I started; I got one of those rolling boards that mechanics use to go under cars and told the guys to place it on top.
I turned a 6 man job with 2 hours to a 2 man job that took 30 mins."
"I had a math teacher that actively encouraged his students to be as lazy as possible, defining lazy as actively searching for ways to do as minimal work as possible. His logic was that, the way math is now, it could always be simplified and still work the same, someone just needs to be lazy enough to find that."
Most math is based on simplification and laziness. Multiplication is avoid counting144 individual eggs when you know 12 dozen boxes each has 12 eggs. Algebra is figuring out how many cartons you need to hold 4000 eggs instead of counting each egg as you put it a carton. Calculus is figuring out how many eggs will be laid this year instead of counting each egg and how many boxes you'll need.
"I knew a guy who had a low level data/reporting job. He had several daily/weekly work responsibilities, including a bunch of reports that needed quite a bit of tweaking from raw data to finished product. But like I said, low level.
We didn't find out until way later, but he had set up macros for each of his major responsibilities where he could. Once set up, he'd just run the macros to do his work, but then he'd (smartly) hold off on delivering the reports until just a little before the deadlines.
He'd hit every assignment and was seen as reliable. He also would complain about the workload so people would leave him with that work. I doubt he did a full hour of work a day after he set up what he did.
Eventually he left the job for one with better pay. But did he work lazy. Also, he was smart not to reveal until the end, because had he told them about it he would have gotten a pat on the back and would have been given a whole other workload, on top of maintaining those macros/etc. Dude milked the job, not the other way around."
"When I was about 7-10 years old my dad used to pay me to ‘self sit.’ Basically, instead of having to get a babysitter on short notice and then pay them like $100, he told me that I would get $30 if I stayed in my room and didn’t speak to my older sister for 3 hours. He then told my sister that she was the “babysitter” and she would get $30 if nothing bad happened."
"One of my favourite examples is Andy Kim. And I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't think Kim is lazy so much as a genius.
Andrew Youakim was a singer/songwriter who became famous under the stage name Andy Kim. He achieved success writting songs for bands like the Archies, possibly most notably "Sugar, Sugar." After his success he coasted for awhile until his record label dropped him for lack of output. At that point he created his own label and cranked out hits like "Rock Me Gently." When they saw this, the big record labels then bought his label under the assumption that they would then profit off of the songs he wrote and performed.
He then very shortly stopped writing songs and largely lived off the sale of his label.
Work smarter not harder."
"Worked in a local adult education center. One of my main tasks was to make calculation about how many people enlisted for a course, how many of them got discounts (unemployeds e.g.), how many men/women/age etc. That was needed to calculate upcoming courses fees etc. That was my only work there and I hated it.
This was in early 90s, so PCs were a thing in our offices but I had no idea how to write a program or use a database to use this informations. Lucky as I am our center had an interesting policy: when you want to educate yourself, you can attend that class for free. And when it's during the work time, then this is work time - as long as my supervisor is ok with that. She was.
So I spent 3 months "studying" database structures, scripting, coding etc. I told my tutor what I wanna do and he helped me to write a script that grabs all necessary informations from the courses-database, copy that into another database and then I went crazy and wrote code that was insane. I implemented "what if" scenarios thanks to filters. At the end I was able to do my work, that needed 6hrs a day within 15 minutes. I mean, before that it took e.g. an hour to have all the necessary informations to have a "how many unemployed single parent women does it need to make the costs of that course even. I had EVERYTHING back then. Now you want statistics how many single parent disabled foreign women at the age of 80-90 are needed for the next 2 years to keep the ornithology course running? Sure, no problem. Clickety-Click, done.
After that, I started the PC in the morning, grabbed all the data, ran my script, was done within 15 mins and then read the book I brought from home. At the end of the day I gave my supervisor several dozens of papers, statistics, predictions etc and said "That was a lot of work!!" and went home. My supervisor was super happy with me because I did so much more now and was super-effective."
"An engineer spent hours developing a program so they could start the coffee pot from their desk and not have to wait for coffee when arriving in the break room."
"When I was in college I had a job at an Italian fast food place with a reputation for it's breadsticks. They came in frozen and needed a bit to thaw, so we'd take a giant 3x4ft aluminium baking sheet, spread them out in a single layer with no spaces and cover it with a plastic bag, then leave it sit in the walk-in overnight. The next day you'd have to get a pair of tongs and move each stick to a new tray, turning them over, then cover the new tray with the bag and let them sit on racks for a couple of hours before brushing on the garlic butter sauce. This was tedious enough that you'd usually be ready to brush the butter on the first tray as soon as you turned the last tray. I was given this task for the first time one morning and just did not want to deal with it. I realised if I put the second tray upside down on top of the first one then turned it over and took the first tray out, I got exactly the same results. Blew the boss's mind when I did the 3 hour job in about 15 minutes. I was given a $0.05/hour raise."
"Well I worked in a Graphics design studio as an intern. They mostly had me practice and do some basic stuff their head designers was to busy to do.
One was a real estate add. It had a few basic templates, but it was all kinds of scatterbrained. I would spend 5-10 minutes trying to find the right layer for all the pictures, and had to mess with way too much.
So I made copies of the files, and made one for each template. I labeled everything, made it so the images on top of each other wouldn’t clip into the lower ones like the previous did.. so on.. you could be in and out of the template in 2-3 minutes. Showed my boss the difference, and he had this face of “well..” he said the next day that if I was a graduate he’d hire me, because I was better than the people sending applications in.
In short I made an overly complicated/unorganised thing the opposite, and my boss was actually sad he couldn’t hire me."
"We had to hold a thermometer in water in chemistry class. It probably was only 20 minute experiment but your arms get tired after a couple minutes and you can’t let the thermometer touch the bottom of the pan or it won’t get an accurate reading. So instead of sucking it up and just holding the thermometer, my lab partner built a contraption out of lab books and paperclips to somehow hold the thermometer in the water without it touching bottom.
It was the stupidest looking thing you would ever see in a lab class and our professor even walked over and said “if it looks stupid, sounds stupid, but it works, then it isn’t stupid.” My lab partner and I joke that he wasn’t talking about the contraption but the intellect of my lab partner."
Isn't there a piece of equipment in your lab that does exactly this - holds the thermometer up? We had it in our labs in uni, and those things haven't had new equipment since the 80s...
"Water is super lazy and will literally find the easiest way to go anywhere every single time."
The last time it flooded really badly here the water from the swamp started crossing the road to get to the ocean...so I kept mentioning to people...if the water doesn't have an outlet, it's gonna make one....sure enough a week later, the water created two channels and destroyed the roadway. Millions in repairs could have been avoided if they had reacted quickly and created outlets.
"My greenhouse's watering system. I would spend an hour per day watering the garden. 30 hours per month.
So for $50, I setup a PVC watering system in a few hours. Now I just turn on the spigot and watch while I smoke a joint."
"I was invited to my friend’s yearly apple picking: it was a full day of apples and kids and filling a truck for cider. I’m lazy and suggested we make the process more efficient with tarps on the ground. We managed in 2 hours what historically took all day. We didn’t even get to the picnic lunch. Essentially, I ruined apple picking."
You "added efficiency, increased production and reduced processing time to a crop harvesting process"....that's one for the resume right there.
"Eating dinner out of the pot so there’s fewer dishes to wash."
"My brother in law spent a whole summer trying to figure out how to fix his sagging deck at the lake which he could in theory crawl under and jack it up.
It would have been a tunneling project. It's a 60x60 area all long 2x6 boards. Massive. I sat there long enough with enough beers in me to come up with the idea of just cutting a square out of the sagging area about 3ft x 3ft, jacking it up then re-screwing down the boards. He paints the thing every spring with a roller anyhow so it's not like the square cut shows up.
He thought I was a genius. I was just lazy."
"Polymerase Chain Reaction. PCR changed bio and medical sciences more than any other breakthrough in modern times and it came about because a scientist wanted to surf more so he figured out how to do a full-time lab job in just a few hours a week. Love him."
"I'm a video editor. I stumbled across an auto subtitle software as it's such a boring and time-consuming part of the job. I haven't told anyone as I still charge by the hour."
"A few years back my sister was doing some hardware testing and validation. She was working with a bunch of excel tables. When she found out that I was doing some automatic xls creating/editing for my job she had me create a script for her job.
2-3 days of eye-killing boring work done in 20 seconds.
She kept it a secret for a while. The worst task became the best task.
She eventually shared it with the company as there were many others that did a similar job. And then she got promoted.
In conclusion her laziness helped with her promotion."
"I asked my husband to take out roughly a dumpsters worth of trash. He spent about an hour building a sled out of the trash, and took it out in one go. Laziest man I've ever met."
"I worked in a library scanning incoming books into the system. This required a lot of transferring of piles of books from one station to another. My work mate constantly called me lazy because I would not get out of my chair while doing this job. I don't know how many times I had to explain (a) that's what wheely chairs are for, and (b) I was at least three times as fast as her at the same job and this was in part because of the efficiency of not getting up out of my chair every two minutes."
"This is a case of ask a lazy person for a solution to handling their work;
I got sent out to California on a fact finding mission about the marijuana growing industry (years ago) to see if there was a market for the sort of A&C work we do (automation & controls). I set up meetings with some of the local growers and met with them, discussed their outdoor grow operations.
Their biggest complaint was having to go to the grow sites to do various tasks associated with maintaining the crop.
I asked them; "If we could provide a system that could allow you to manage those operations remotely from home, would you be interested in buying it?"
Every single guy was like "yeah, if I can do it from bed while smoking a spliff I'd be totally on board for that, that's like my dream come true!"
So it turns out some of the automation that was developed for that industry was marketed to the inherent laziness of stoners who have an entrepreneurial spirit."
"Anyone mention the dude who turned a ship's course because the sun was in his eyes?"
"I personally use the "talk-to-text" feature on my phone to get it to write essays for me... I just talk about what I want it to write and then tweak the grammar errors later. Work smarter, not harder"
"Back in high school a lot of kids used to walk thru his park to get home/to school. A portion of the path went into the woods because it was just quicker than walking the actual trail. At one point in the walk through the woods, you had to go up this small but tedious hill; nothing major but it took like 10 seconds of hard work to go up it. You couldn’t go around because one side was a small cliff to the creek below and other side had dense trees. One summer, a bunch of us got together and decided to just dig through that hill to make it flat. It took like 14 of us 3 good days to get through it.
It was a hard 3 days but it was definitely worth it. Saved 10 second of hill climbing every morning and afternoon, 150+ days of the year. And it wasn’t just us, but hundreds of other kids who took the same party every day. Sometimes you need to put in a lot of work so your future selves can enjoy the easy way out."
"It took me like 3 months, but I automated a data pipeline to extract data, clean it up, and spit it out in an excel or pdf format to one of our clients.
I walked over to shoot the stuff with the lady who handles my client and gives me tasks and she told me we make 40k off them every month for that automated job.
I need to go start my own business."
"One of my favorite stories from my youth was "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail".
I got fed-up with hand writing itemized sub-orders at work, so I set up a spreadsheet that you can just fill out. Then I got tired of having more than one program open, and not being able to search within & among those order sheets (at least not automatically, or easily), so I'm having our FileMaker guy integrate it into our greater ordering & invoicing system.
I was frustrated at the pointlessness of sorting a giant pile of paper invoices from an unpaid stack to a paid stack every month, so I just use the accounting software to keep track.
I became so irritated with having to fill out a multi-page, printed spreadsheet for every single order (sometimes just one item, two pages in [and frequently, there would be those pesky itemized sub orders]) that I condensed the items into "most used", put them all on one easy to read sheet, and encouraged my co-worker to simply write out the more uncommon items at the bottom.
Basically, I hate busy work, and paper invariably leads to busy work. I have tried to reduce the use of paper in our office, but have not been entirely successful.
We have to have written order forms available (because sometimes the orders are coming in too fast to be able to type it all quickly & correctly), and have to keep some paper records for things like Organic, FDA, and USDA audits - but all in all I'd say my absolute hatred of filing has reduced busywork here by at least half."
For those interested, you can find the story in the book "Time Enough for Love" by Robert Heinlein.
"I used to work in IT doing tech support for the employees. We didn't have a process for keeping track of what programs and hardware each employee PC used.
So if someone had to replace a PC you had to remote into their old one to get their programs, shared folders, and hardware. If their old PC died you had to hope they knew what they needed.
I made an easy single page sheet to track the user, the PC specs, programs, and hardware they use. Now you just need to copy what is on the sheet when setting up a new computer"
"I used to animate graphics for those LED signs at certain popular fast food chains. There would sometimes be a library of 80-120 6 second videos that need resized or scaled down.
I figured out how to make a system macro that memorise some of my mouse clicks and keyboard strokes and it automated a previously 4 hour task into something I could hit one button and start sketching out ideas for other projects."
"My wife and I have a chore list. I now am tasked with vacuuming which she gloated about not having to do because it is so time consuming. I bought a Roomba and now the house is cleaner than ever and all I have to do is press a button on my phone."
That is not efficiency but having enough money to buy that. I would also buy it but I can't afford it and have thresholds for every room
"I read several years ago about a timber company that had a college kid working there for summer. They decided to give him one of the lowest-skilled jobs, which was to wear waders and stand on the logs that were floating in the collection pool/lake and count them for inventory. The student, being lazy, hired a helicopter to take an aerial shot of the lake, printed the picture, and counted the logs in the picture. That is how they do it from now on, and they have the photo as proof of the count."
"I was a (paid) intern at a large company during one summer back home from college. My work 95% consisted of using SAP, import to Excel, clean data and generate reports (occasionally create some tool someone needed). In the 1st 2 weeks after getting a hang of my responsibilities, writing all the Excel formulas needed, and basically automating 99% of my work, I was chilling.
I went from actually working from 9-5 to maybe 1 hour tops a day. Finding, importing, cleaning, and reporting usually took hours but with all the formulas it took 2 minutes of clicking. I then helped the other cool intern get his things set up so we could both just chill. We could take 2-hour lunches (paid for by the company) and nobody said anything cause we were just getting so much more done than the other interns. I helped for special tasks when asked but those were simple 20min tasks building something in Excel.
Overall, was the easiest/stress-less internship of my life."
If you enjoy doing this kind of thing, look into data engineer as a job. It pays extremely well because the job pays for itself. When you reduce 800 hours of work down to 40, the company is now paying one person twice as much to do 20 times as much work. If the company can have 1 sales guy handle 20 times just as effectively, the sales guy makes bigger commissions and the company has a lower payroll.
"I was once set to test a certain piece of equipment on a ship. The test involved attaching the unit to a reader, then run loads of command line commands. Then, one would have to make a copy of all the text, copy it into word and save it as a (real crappy looking) report. There was HUNDREDS of units, and they needed to be testet several times a year. We did about 20-30 a day. It would take several weeks to finish.
I didn't know coding at the time, but always wanted to learn it.
Within two months, I had made a program, even with a GUI (to spot faults with ease, instead of having to actually READ the reports). The program could read three units at a time, and would automatically create a smooth pdf report and save it on our server, named with serial number and date.
The job was now to attach three units, then wait for about 3 minutes, detach and attach new ones. Basically 30 seconds work, 3 minutes break. I could now test all units in a day, though I would typically spread it out over a couple more days.
When I left the company, I left the program on the test computer. I got an email from an ex colleague a few months later, saying they were using the program on several ships now. There wasn't any manual for the program, of course, but it was so straight forward that it wasn't needed."
"Walkie Talkie's. In every job I've ever had these things make your day far less labor intensive if used correctly."
Regarding using them correctly, the biggest problem is people holding them too close to their mouth, and people yelling into them. Overloading the microphone won't make your speech easier to understand at the other end.
"I had to carry groceries into the house when I was a kid. I didn’t want to make multiple trips, so I tied several bags to the belt loops on my pants to do it in one trip."
"I'm doing it right now, automated data cleaning in Python. My coworkers don't know about it, so something that takes me 10 mins at most takes them 2 hours."
"According to facebook parents: people that carved a sphere out of a stone block and rolled it instead of pushing it like the other dudes."
I saw that meme. Problem with the analogy are the people who ordered that cube and got a ball instead. I don't like Karen customers either, but I don't want to discuss with the mailman why I ordered one thing when he could much more easily have transported something completely different. "Yes, Pete, you're very smart, but I need a table, not an air mattress!"
"My friend applied for a job at company that works on autonomously driving systems for cars. During the interview he was asked whether likes cars. His answer was that he absolutely hates to drive. He got the job."
"In my teens, I started working at a local grocery store and was hired in the Deli/Bakery Dept. Every morning 1 person made salads, 2 people brewed the fresh gallon sweet tea and 2 people created/prepped the deli counter ready-to-go meals. One week we had a bad flu case hit us and we were severely short on staff.
I grabbed a grocery cart and started brewing tea. While it brewed I made the salads. Instead of taking each gallon of tea to the other side of the store 1 at a time I would place them in the grocery cart and continue brewing and stacking till the cart was full (Because fuck walking back and forth). Usually, by the time it was full I was finished with all morning prep and was able to help the cook make breakfast and prep for lunch. The manager saw this and turned it into my full job in the morning. Unfortunately for my co-workers most were then 'let go'. I only knew of 1 who was lucky enough to be moved to another job in the store. I ended up leaving shortly after due to the backlash.
TLDR; I did the job equivalent of 5 people by being able to multitask with only a shopping cart and accidentally ruining others' jobs."
When interviewing prospective employees, I ask them if they can cook a 4 course meal. This gets to the heart of time management. Too often, when people say they are good at multitasking, they mean 'actively' doing many things at the same time: doing multiple things poorly. Not like you were doing.
"I have a massive exercise to do at our year end (accountancy). My work previously got checked by another manager who spent over 3 weeks going over the data. Eventually she got shifted to another department and that workload fell on me, basically self audit and then present the data to the actual auditors. My previous manager was absolutely bad at Excel. I didn't let on but I did all the audit on a separate file using simple (but out of the way) formulas. Not only did I reduce the task from 3 weeks to basically real time checks (no time) but when I was told that I have to perform that exercise every month my job became a doddle. I didn't let on that everything was automated by sumifs, indexing, max values and range checks. Living the dream. (Sorry if I rambled on.)"
"I worked with a guy, Ethan, who unfortunately was kind of scapegoated for the failure of a project so was let go but he was definitely capable. A year later the company I worked for was sold off and eventually shuttered. While looking for new work I spoke with a recruiter who had also worked with the Ethan and he mentioned how he got was trying to find him a new position too as he had a contract job to digitise and update old mechanical drawings to the companies new software. Apparently he wrote a bunch of macros and set up a work flow and was able to complete the work within a month even though the contract was for 6 months. The company let him go since the work was done and had no intentions of keeping him on."
"I created mainframe automation so that if there was a problem, I would get paged in my boss’s office where I played DOOM for hours on end. Oh and browsed newsgroups. Yes, I’m old."
"I am presently printing and wiring a safety switch that will disable my lathe when the chuck key is removed. It is a rule that the chuck key will never be in the chuck whilst any other activity is occurring other than tightening the chuck. Whilst I have never yet forgotten to remove the key, I decided that to ensure it is never left in the chuck, the machine will never start with the key removed from the switch."
"Before it was shut down entirely, I was able to privately tour the coal power plant in Southeastern Virginia. At one point in the tour, the guide told me to watch out for a cord on the floor. The cord ran to a small, window air-conditioning unit that was duct-taped to a vent. Supposedly, one day the plant began to overheat, and the plant would have to be shut down in order to repair the malfunction. There are emergency reserves for situations like this, but the plant was overheating faster than they could switch it over. Someone at the plant had just purchased the ac unit, and had it in the back of their vehicle. The ran and grabbed it, plugged it in, and pointed it into one of the vents. The amount of cool air it produced was enough to not only offset the overheating, but to also re-regulate the system, so instead of repairing the issue, they just fixed the the ac in place, and let it run continuously until the day the plant shut down."
"SPL in Scouts, doing a trail clean up. Quite a large amount of larger limbs, and thinner trunks. Like eye aspens or w/e, they’re called.
We had a big boi, even for a teen, talking over 6ft and over 200 at the least. He was the type to only carry one thing but use two hands because he was self-pronounced as lazy.
Put him on the assignment of limb and trunk removal. He used a timber hitch and would clear the trail 3-4 limbs or trunks at a time. He loved it because he “just had to tie a knot and walk...” and freed up 3 more scouts for other work
We made the great pace."
"The way Linux went about protecting accounts from brute force guessing passwords. Since those attacks rely on trying a gazillion passwords, they just added a delay between each try. Effectively limiting the number of different passwords you can try in a reasonable time frame.
Since then it's the de facto way of going about it."
"Had a job that we recorded values in tables on an excel sheet. Lots of them. And, when the year rolled around, someone would need to copy the tables and re-enter the dates for all the end of weeks again. Then add/remove weeks from each month's tables. Since every year's calendar is different. Well, I hated the idea of doing this every year, so spent the next week or so teaching myself (with the help of many youtube videos) how to do more advanced excel scripts. Now we have a template that you can enter the year into the very first a1 block and it automatically formats all the tables and inserts all the correct dates. And, while that initial time investment hasn't really entirely been paid back yet, I haven't had to manually format it in almost 10 years. And never will."
"Our 3-year-old niece is learning how to count. When asked how to get to the number 10, instead of counting all the way, she said "5 and 5." We were all blown away at how smart she is to think of it that way."
"IT is the king of this. We have set up scripts to do tons of tasks for reporting and data manipulation automatically. We have been using one macro program for years that works flawless most of the time. It can recognise windows and screens and you can tell it to do about anything. Its called Macro Express. Way back in the days when Farmville was big on Facebook, you had to harvest these fields, and if you found a pineapple field, you could make bank. It was a grid of squares and you had to click each square to harvest it, and sometimes other players would jump in and start harvesting too. I wrote a macro on a hot key that when i found a full field to harvest, it would take the mouse cursor, move and click every single square in the grid, so once it was claimed, no one else could harvest it. It would click the entire grid in about 5 seconds, where if you were doing it manually, it would take you about 30 seconds. I've also used it for voting websites before they implemented measures to only allow one vote per IP address. You can do all sorts of things if you want to put in the time to perfect your script."
"I guess you'd have to find the right kind of "lazy person" because truly lazy people wouldn't do the task at all."
"At work, I go through parts and apply 2 different kinds or tape and 2 different kinds of weave. I have finally got the rhythm down and now I do each part individually, and apply everything at once. Everyone else goes through an entire order, just applying tape, then goes through it again to do the weave.
I asked to use the big table in the back of the shop, and just put all the tape and weave tools there. And do the parts all at once. Normal rate for an 8hr shift is 1200, but I can manage 1800 in a day, going at a nice steady pace.
Edit: I can get 1800 going at a steady pace. I've done it before. But I usually dont. Most days I go slow and relax, purposely only making 1300-1350 or so parts. It's just enough over rate to get my incentive bonus.
And, thanks to being a "hard and fast" worker, the uppers leave me alone at my big table in the back. They look the other way when I have an earbud in one ear, and they don't notice that I scroll reddit or read a lot.
Edit: I can't say what products we make, they're too recognisable and googling it would reveal where I work and live."
"Back in my IT consulting days working at an MSP, we had a client with about 180 users who needed new PC's prepped and ready to go for a round of new hires when they were expanding their workforce. They were adding 40 employees and thus needed 40 workstations prepped. I was assigned the ticket and my boss quoted them 80 hours of work (2h per PC).
The standard procedure my boss had set up back then was a 3 page checklist to run through for each PC, what software was needed for which group, reminders for installing update s since Dell workstations out of the box aren't always current with updates, and more. Basically it was a terribly long, arduous, manual approach to windows deployment.
So instead of following the standard procedure, I decided I was going to automate it all. The first 2 days unboxed 1 PC, prepped it with all the basic items needed for all workstations and then cloned it to another PC. Day 3 I built off of the first image i created which had some more specialized software for a specific subgroup of these new hires. Once that was complete, I was ready to deploy.
I configured the 'WDS' (Windows deployment server) role and had everything ready to go. I brought in a 24 port switch, hooked all PC's up for 2 rounds of 20 deployments, and on day 4, by lunch, I had all workstations complete. All the while my bosses kept checking in to see what was up and why I only had 2 PCs prepped as of the end of day 3. After lunch on day 4, I called to check in and informed them the job was complete. Their response was to have me just hang out at the clients office for the next week or so which gave me a decent amount of downtime back then to work on things I wanted to."
Imaging is great! I remember going out on an NT rollout (back when Ghost was the only imaging option :) with a team for a weekend to do updates. Everyone takes their share and starts building with standard installs. I spend the day with people saying I'm still on my first PC. At that point I had my image and was doing in 4 minutes what they were each spending 90 minutes on.
"Basically every invention in the last 100 years is an example of how to accomplish a task with much less effort. The automobile being the first one that comes to mind."
Nearly every invention, period. A cart moves a heavier load than a rider or ten, a harvester is more efficient than a dozen farmhands, a gourd/bottle is better than bare hands, a bow and arrow reach further compared to a knife.
"A computer algorithm arranged my work driving route. It looked at the physical location on a grid without considering roads, rivers, etc. Just direct distance. It was godawful, lots of unnecessary cul-de-saving, stuck on one-way trips with a ton of deadhead travel back, etc. There was no rhyme or reason, a giant looping circuitous mess that drove past stops, returning to them later, and doubling back everywhere.
I spent the first weekend redoing it by hand, specifically to make it as efficient as possible so I could relax between stops to talk to clients casually or sit in parking lots. Before the pandemic added a bunch of new stops, I would take all the time I needed, a long lunch break, and still always made it to drop off ahead of schedule.
I'm exceptionally lazy. Past me did an hour of work on Google maps to save me hours and hours over the last two years."
Brilliant! I live on the opposite of Puget Sound from Seattle, yet maps still try to convince me that my closest store is on the other side of the sound, which requires an hour ferry ride.
"I work at a company which, despite having a 100+ employees, doesn't seem to have 1 that knows more then basics when it comes to computers. Due to the pandemic we've all taken up some chores to clock some hours. They've got me "re-typing" pdf read only files to a new word file. Thus far they haven't figured out you can just export a pdf file to .doc in acrobat. But my schedule is now 1/3 cleared to do "typing" work."
"I'm using my laptop to stream Netflix to the hotel TV. I didn't want to have to get up to browse shows, so I set up a remote desktop from my phone that is also acting as the hotspot."
"I didn't want to send hundreds of contracts to people, so I used the bulk upload function on this e-signature provider. Signatures came back quickly, and people were amazed by the turnaround time. A former colleague took credit for the lazy work I did, however. I already didn't like those people, and it made me despise him even more. I left that company since."
What is the personality component that allows people to think that taking credit for other people's work is acceptable? It is so common, but I have not yet learned it's name.
"I am 1000% this lazy person. Most of the reasons why have to do with making things easier via programming, but I also have some other examples: Graduated college with two STEM majors and never once did homework on a weekend or going out night. I was so lazy that I would actually do my homework once it was assigned so that I didn't have to re-look at the stuff we just learned in class. Made it so that I would barely have to study for tests, too.
I hate getting up and cooking 3 meals a day so I spend time on the weekend meal prepping instead. Saves so much time and money and makes it so that you don't have to get up early to eat or stop whatever it is you're doing to cook.
I think an important thing to note is that being lazy doesn't equal being a procrastinator. For me, being lazy is having multiple days a week where I can lay in bed and watch TV or sleep for like 12 hours. In order to be that lazy, I just stopped procrastinating and ended up with more time overall to waste however I wanted to."
"The entire miscellaneous kitchen tools section at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I don't need an avocado slicer or a lemon squeezer or an automatic chopper/dicer, but lazy old me definitely puts them to good use."
"I mean the original quote was made by Frank B. Gilbreth after watching "lazy" brick layers move more efficiently, so... that."
"In construction environments it's quite common to have a "soft" foreman/men underneath the actually person in charge. You basically find the individuals you know want to work their way up and give them components of the work and however many people they need - they'll do it because often times it means less physical work for them. You're still ultimately signing off on their work or settling debates/etc. which makes you the ultimate foreman or supervisor, but you know that you can assigned the task and they'll let you know when it's done and everyone is keeping the schedule in mind."
"I use to work at car dealership parts department and most repetitively strokes for the same product like oil changes and such. Made a keystroke shortcut.
Now as a forklift driver at a Costco I try to make sure there is something always on my forks going in or out of aisle. Unlike other drivers they don’t. That common sense though."
"So a company I worked for some years ago launched a new product. There was a very significant prize to the sales team that sold the most of this product. It cost approx $100 dollars at the time. I simply bumped the price of every product we had by $100 and gave the new product to every customer as a thank you. No one was the wiser and smashed the competition by a massive margin."
So... basically sold it to people who didn't ask for it without them even knowing or having asked for it essentially robbing them of $100 each? No. Shady. That's just wrong. :(
"A smart lazy person becomes adept at finding the easiest solution to problems. It's not always the best solution though. Sometimes you also need the engineers of the world to come up with a more complex solution that is a better answer, even if it's not the easiest."
"I hate taking a finished toilet paper roll downstairs to throw it out. Me just leaving the empty roll in the bathroom annoys my girlfriend so I developed this strategy when there was only a few sheets left, I'd start using sheets from a new roll and leave the old roll with sheets still on it. That way, she'd always be the one to finish the roll and have to take the empty one downstairs."
I drove my car to work one day. Had to go to the emergency room for a kidney stone and since I had been given morphine I had a friend drive me home. Next day, I drove my old truck to work. Now I have two cars downtown, how to get them home? I drove the car 1/2 mile (.8 km) toward home. Drove the truck 1/2 mile past the car. Walked back to the car and drove it 1/2 mile past the truck repeat until home. Thankfully my job and home were only 3.5 miles (5.6 km) apart.
These go to show you that efficiency is just a more refined form of laziness.
I drove my car to work one day. Had to go to the emergency room for a kidney stone and since I had been given morphine I had a friend drive me home. Next day, I drove my old truck to work. Now I have two cars downtown, how to get them home? I drove the car 1/2 mile (.8 km) toward home. Drove the truck 1/2 mile past the car. Walked back to the car and drove it 1/2 mile past the truck repeat until home. Thankfully my job and home were only 3.5 miles (5.6 km) apart.
These go to show you that efficiency is just a more refined form of laziness.
