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Quote of the Day: Are You Lazy?
“They say I’m lazy but it takes all my time.” — Joe Walsh, Life’s Been Good to Me So Far
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” — Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Heinlein’s quote had an early effect on me. In the story of the lazy man from Time Enough for Love, I came to appreciate the idea that if one did less work and accomplished more, that was a good thing. Productivity, or “finding easier ways to do something” is a huge driver of improving life for the whole human race. At my company at least, it is being supplemented by the question, “do we even need to do that?” We will see how that goes.
And I would say that a good boss is a lazy boss. As a servant leader, the measure of success is getting the job done, period. And it should be the team that does it. There is activity required of the leader, but as a lazy leader, one helps the team solve the problem but does not solve it for them. See Jon Gabriel’s post from 2017.
As far as Joe Walsh’s line goes, it is one of my favorite lines from a favorite song.
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Published in Group Writing
The whole time travel plot was strange, to be honest.
Its the main reason I haven’t reread the book, despite the plethora of great quotes it contains.
Capital investment takes time. In the beginning, the fixed costs are greater than the variable cost but over time, variable costs will decline.
that is the goal
I have mostly just reread select sections. His reminiscences are short stories or short novels on their own.
I don’t know that I’d agree it’s “lazy men” making the progress, but in my patent law career of protecting inventions, I have noticed that many of the inventors are people who are convinced there is an easier way to do some task they are working on.
Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerographic copying and printing was a law clerk who was tired of hand-copying text from law books, and knew that the then-existing wet photographic copying techniques were messy. So he then spent many years developing a dry photographic copying technology. A lazy person would not have spent that effort. But the desire for an easier way to copy is what drove him.
Clearly, the use of “lazy” is provocative. But it is meant to contrast against the people who (the best examples in my company that I know of are in finance) who perform the same long-hour efforts in Excel every month to close the books and then claim they have no time for your project to automate or eliminate the work with a new system. They don’t even hire the backfill that you budget for in the project.
I think in this case “lazy” also includes “confident.”
Perhaps there is a better word….
I remember in first or second grade we were reading a book about a lazy boy, who, when told to cut some wood, out of laziness strung up a saw to tree limb which waved in the breeze. When his mother came to scold him for lying back all day, he showed her a stack of cut wood. That story always stayed with me. I don’t think it would be written today.
I know I’d prefer to spend nX times more effort to automate a repetitive task than to perform it over and over.
That’s why my billing rate is many times other consultants in my field: I don’t want to make a career out of my clients. I want to fix things and get the hell out of Dodge.
When I was in big consulting I learned that I sold more work by not doing work that didn’t need to be done and not charging for it. With the client’s best interests in mind, one does better.
And by Dodge, do you mean McCormick and Dodge? ;-)
At my high school, our goal is to have our students do more of the work. That is, less lecture time, more time for students to engage with the texts, tasks, and figure things out. My job is more of coach: provide guidance and feedback.
This spring while teaching remotely, I did this and sent my students off zoom to do their work while I left the link open to answer questions. So there I sat, prepping a class while my students worked off line. The occasional question would come and I was there to guide them. It felt so weird to sit and to wait for a question. I felt unproductive. Yet, my students’ work was very good.
This Friday I meet my new students via Zoom. I have an icebreaker planned. Oh, I pray, all goes well.
Relationship building without face-to-face contact is hard. In my mind, that’s a central challenge in this work from home environment. The other challenge is the lack of casual interaction. No one runs into another in the hallway. All contacts are scheduled or at least initiated. There is no spontaneity.
Off topic, perhaps a separate post.
That’s one thing tools like Slack are for. You can have a casual channel that allows some spontaneous conversations.
It’s not the same, but it’s an improvement on relying on Zoom.
Unfortunately, it’s not private from management. But they need to stifle that impulse and leave well enough alone.
Have you hear about Microsoft Workplace Analytics? That is definitely another post.
This may behind a paywall: https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce
Too many words to describe little (which tells me that whoever wrote it is neither an engineer nor a *spit* waste of space “data scientist” (“Hey I can’t be bothered to organize our data so simple SQL works against it, but pay me $250K and I’ll write a bunch of custom R or Python every time anyone has a question.” I hate those guys.).
I’ve been working from home for 20 years. I actually hate going to clients who insist on daily meetings.
Tell me what you want done and I’ll make it happen. If I have issues, I will… Wait for it… Ask for assistance.
I’m, believe it or not, a grown-up who does not need to be babysat.
I need a manager who resolves problems, not a supervisor who creates them.
/rant off
I am deeply, shockingly, irredeemably lazy to the core of my being. I am grateful every day that so many people are actually driven to achieve things, since I’m not contributing all that much. Joe Walsh is my spirit animal.
I’m too lazy to comment on this thread.
A risk with adolescents is that a back channel (slack) that I would open up could become an area for bullying. My students are generally well-behaved but many do not understand about everything on the internet is forever.
Management can monitor all Slack channels (they’re paying for it) so bullying could be dealt with very quickly.
Slack is actually pretty cool.
The use of “he” is what used to be proper grammar for a person of undisclosed sex. Frankly, I can live with using either “he” or “she” when describing a person of unknown sex . . .
Well stated!
This is a much bigger category than it used to be.
Be that as it may, male bosses are usually better (speaking as a female boss myself, who currently has female bosses).
For some reason, “it” is not a popular choice.
I apologize for not seeing this sooner.
I suppose our 2 IT guys could manage Slack they’re pretty busy right now w/ the high school going online on Wednesday. The elementary & middle schools go online this coming week. They’ve had a very busy summer implementing Canvas, server upgrades, preparing the freshman class MacBooks plus k-5 iPads. And that’s only what I know of; there’s most likely a bunch more. Maybe I’ll enquirer about slack in October.