Laziness gets a bad rep, but there are benefits in doing things the easy way.
Why waste a ton of time on a task if there's a quicker way to do it? Freeing yourself from simpler assignments gives you extra time to get more important work done, or maybe even to give yourself a break.
Bill Gates once said that he always hires lazy people to do the most important jobs. His reasoning, as he put it: "Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." I can't help but to agree with his logic.
Redditor u/Slimer425 asked "What is the best real life example of a lazy person getting the job done", and people shared some creative and low effort solutions.
10. Simple tasks have simple solutions
"I once was a temp at a tiny office on a construction site in around 2003. I was only there for one day while the regular person was on some training.
They sat me down and told me that I just needed to copy all these numbers from one program to another. So I selected them, hit ctrl c and ctrl v. They stared at me.
Turns out about 60% of this woman's time had been spent manually typing numbers from one place to another."
9. Thank you, Excel formulas, for making math easier
Giphy
"Boss hated Excel to the point where he didn't want us using formulas because 'you can't trust them to be right' so we needed to 'do all the calculations by hand or on a calculator'
He would give me a spreadsheet once or twice a week that required lets say, 45 seconds to do, but maybe 7 hours by hand and he told me to 'go to starbucks or something and crank it out'
He thought that since I pasted as values and he couldn't see the formulas that I did it by hand when really I just did it in 45 seconds, sent an email on delay for 7 hours, and studied for the next semester."
8. Efficient boat crushing work
"Co-worker of mine had to get rid of a smaller junk fiberglass boat with no trailer. Our other co-workers are all telling him how much time and money he's going to need to spend to get rid of it, and he's just saying 'Oh, is that so?'
He took off one day, and sat down on his lawn with a cooler of beer. That day was garbage day. Inevitably, the trash guys roll up. He hands each of them a cold beer, and says 'Hey boys, got $50 for each of you if you help me out real quick.'
They fed the entire 12ft boat into the packer, crushing two feet at a time."
7. Being prepared for your customers is great
"I used to deliver beer. I did not like delivering beer. I may have ended up with 30 stops in a day, including deliveries that the customer would call in to our office for. I used to bring extra beer and blank invoices with me on the truck, to prevent having to drive back to my warehouse to deliver one keg to a place that I was currently across the street from. 7 years later, the driver of that route is still doing that."
6. In his defense, those are long books
"In high school we had to do four book reports every year. A friend of mine did his on each Lord of the Rings books and the Hobbit freshman year and turned in the same four book reports for the rest of his time in high school. You switched english teachers every year so no one ever caught on. I was never brave enough to try the same thing."
5. It's crazy that they were counting them all by hand
"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 one screw or washer, 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 few hours."
4. They should be running the whole store
"Worked as a cashier during the holiday season back when i was 16. The supermarket was selling drinks by the boxes and at that time, we only had barcode scanners that was at the front of the computer. No gun type scanners existed.
I was lazy and didn't want to carry boxes up to the scanner. So i politely asked my customers if i could carve out the barcode from their box to scan and keep. Some agreed some didn't want to but eventually i managed to amass all the barcodes needed. Labelled them and kept them in a file for easy reference."
3. Herding of the future
Giphy
"Herding yak with a drone takes the cake for me. They run from it, and oddly fear it. Which is surprising considering they have literally zero aerial predators. We only did it a few times because it really makes them uneasy, and doesn't treat them well. But it is very effective and easy, and you can herd them from over 1/2 a mile a way from inside the house."
2. The internet has all of the answers
"During my intern, my professor gave me line graphs made on paper and asked me to find the coordinates by drawing horizontal and vertical lines. It would have taken hours if not days.
I thought to myself - 'I couldn't be the first one who is lazy'. So I googled it, found this cool free to use software 'Web Digitizer'.
Step 1 - Scan the graph. Step 2 - Mark the X and Y axes in the picture. Step 3 - Grab a beer cause you got the the nicest graph that you couldn't have drawn by yourself in a million years."
1. Creating efficienciesÂ
"I work in finance at a large multinational corporation. I feel like a big part of our job is to just stop doing things and wait to see who complains. If someone complains, we keep doing it, if silence, then we call it a 'controlled drop' and put it on our performance review for creating efficiencies."
