Be lazy

In my last post I put forth a principle (“see manipulability”) for thinking of ways to make things better. In this post I’m going to put forth a principle for helping people, which is this: be lazy.

I don’t mean for that to be taken at face value. I’m not saying people should avoid hard work and sit around all the time. What I’m saying is that we should always be looking for ways to produce the same results with less labor. That right there is pretty much a dictionary definition of efficiency, but efficiency is such an overused term these days that few people give much thought to what it actually looks like.

If you were to go into almost any professional environment in America and ask the people there if they are efficient workers, I doubt you’d get a single “No.” You might get people saying the company is inefficient, but they’d most likely blame it on another department. Everyone believes they themselves are efficient, in the same way everyone believes they themselves are smart and funny. But what most people call “efficiency” is really just laboring intensely. They think being efficient means moving fast. 

Real efficiency, though, is finding a method to make a two-hour job take 30 minutes. And without breaking a sweat in that 30 minutes, which is an important criterion. You might break a sweat in finding the method, but that’s okay. You’re working hard on a short-term project to make a long-term process a piece of cake. Laziness is the best driver for finding this kind of efficiency.

I’ll give an example from my life, which is what got me thinking about all this to begin with. Yesterday at work I built something that’s going to save all of us a nice chunk of labor. Every time we prepare a call for papers (each member of my department does about 40 per year) we have to format the text for our database. This involves stripping a Word file of its formatting and then applying formatting markups (similar to HTML) that our database can read and then display in proper format on our website. 

It doesn’t take a huge amount of time, but it’s tedious and just—broken. We have to take text that already looks the way we want it, unformat it, reformat it—just to get it looking the way it did to begin with? 

It seemed like there must be a way around this wasted effort. So I built something in Excel that will take text copied directly from Word and convert it into the markup code we use, which can then be copied and pasted directly into our database. It runs on a few formulas that look at the Word formatting and replace what we don’t want with what we do want. Now a job that used to take 10 minutes takes about one.

When I showed this to my coworkers, they were very pleased with me. I’m saving them a little bit of time and, more importantly, a lot of tedium. Boring tasks are demoralizing even if they don’t take that long. You’ll put them off if possible.

The thing is, though, I wasn’t really trying to help my coworkers. I was just trying to find a way that I personally could do less work. My little Excel converter is something I would want for myself even if I had no coworkers at all. It’s helping make my life easier. And then, incidentally, it does the same for others.

That’s why I say “be lazy” is a good principle for helping people. Don’t think about what others need. Think about what you need. What problems and time-sinks do you have that need solving? What in your life should be easier? Find a solution and let everyone else in on it. You are not unique. Any tedious or laborious task you face is surely faced by others. If you want out of it badly enough, you’ll discover a way to get everyone else out of it, too.