“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” -Walter Chrysler
You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” -Walter Chrysler
Dave!
on 08 Jan 08No, he’ll just do a half-assed job…
Which explains a lot about Chrysler… :)
Noah Everett
on 08 Jan 08@dave: funny and true.
It seems lazy and procrastination go hand in hand though.
Micheal
on 08 Jan 08Or assign the task to someone already overloaded with work.
It’s counter intuitive I know. What happens is – the already overloaded person with work will find a quick way to complete the task, simply so that they can mark it off their list of todo items.
Amazing Rando
on 08 Jan 08Similar to one of my own philosophies—efficiency through laziness.
Alejandro Moreno
on 08 Jan 08I guess it should be assigned “to a lazy (but responsible) man.” :)
Justin
on 08 Jan 08I also like to call this “working smarter, not harder.” I guess that makes me a lazy person but I hardly ever believe in throwing more WORK at anything, only more THOUGHT should be invested to reduce work output to the bare minimum.
scott
on 08 Jan 08laziness is only one of three virtues: http://www.netropolis.org/hash/perl/virtue.html
Dave
on 08 Jan 08I prefer Martin Fowler’s quote about laziness…
“I’m a pretty lazy person, and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.” - Martin Fowler
Icelander
on 08 Jan 08Just like Larry Wall says: A good programmer is lazy, impatient, and proud. Lazy so they won’t want to work hard, just smart. Impatient so they won’t waste their time doing stupid repetitive tasks. And proud so they make their code the best that it can be.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
pol
on 08 Jan 08lazyness as a change agent sounds powerfull. i’ll put my lazyest friend to fix my company. nice finding you, p
Matt Brown
on 08 Jan 08I ordered a book from Amazon.com on how to beat procrastination….... still haven’t gotten around to reading it. True story….
WmD
on 09 Jan 08I always called it being proactively lazy.
The idea is to have a conscious desire to do as little as possible, but still get things done.
This discussion is closed.