The lazy work twice
I’ve got years of experience with that saying. I’ve heard it since I was a kid. And the truth is, I am lazy. Don’t get me wrong. Laziness has its perks. It teaches you lessons you wouldn’t learn any other way. It pushes you to solve problems nobody else would bother with. But in excess it paralyzes you and holds you back.
I’ve always had a resistance to repetitive work. Repetition is my biggest enemy. When I run into a task like that, it’s easy to procrastinate and let things slip. Washing the dishes. Making the bed. Doing the homework. Watering the garden. To deal with this without losing my sanity, I learned early on to focus on what genuinely can’t be ignored and cut out everything else.
My first jobs were at real estate agencies. It was no different there. The repetitive work was the hardest part. But since the consequences of inaction were different, I started finding creative ways to be lazy. I built macros in Excel and Word to do the repetitive work for me. I built complex (for a real estate agency) data extraction schemes to produce control reports. And I created standards and templates to churn out inspection documents and the like. It was fast to produce something decent, and with each iteration I refined my “system” to produce better results.
By the time I got to the tech industry, I already had a master’s degree in laziness. My head already thought in those patterns, templates, systems, frameworks. It was easy to be productive without much effort. It was even easier to build solutions for problems nobody else even saw. Like a task that always takes an hour to finish. Or a report that needs data pulled from a bunch of different systems. Automating effort and simplifying processes was already second nature, and I capitalized on it a lot.
But everything in excess is poison. In my personal life I became a victim of my own laziness. Some things are repetitive by nature. There’s no way to strip something down without compromising its purpose. Working out. Learning a new skill. Keeping a relationship. Starting a business. In those cases, there’s no shortcut. The repetition is the action. Delegating the action to something or someone hurts the results. The laziness that suggests shorter paths is the same one that makes the journey longer.
Luckily, there’s nothing new to learn. The only thing to do is reaffirm the focus and ignore the laziness. One step at a time.