Proactive laziness is one of my mantras. People hear it and think it an oxymoron. How can you be both proactive and lazy? How can laziness be a good thing?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that doing nothing is a good thing, rather that laziness is a force that can be used for good!
We all want to be effective. We all want to get things done. How can laziness help?
Well, we also all want to be efficient, we want to do a job right the first time and we don't want to do boring, repetitive, unnecessary work.
Proactive laziness means doing a little extra work now to avoid having to do a lot of extra work later. It means automating, streamlining and designing to avoid spending time and energy on things later on.
I was talking to a colleague the other day about how laziness is the reason that I do things so efficiently. He dismissed this as me being self deprecating, saying that it was due to knowledge and skill. I struggled to correct his belief. You see, I do know some things, but often I came to know these out of need rather than interest. I would see a huge piece of work and think, I really can't be bothered doing that - how can I do it better?
This lazy approach has lead to me learning a lot. Occasionally there is no easier way, but not often. Some times the easier way actually takes more work, but that becomes a new technique, another tool in my toolbox that I can pull out and use next time I need to be lazy.
Recently I had just such a case. We had to upgrade a tool on a server. It would have taken 10 minutes to do this, but I knew this wasn't a one-off so I spent a few hours on it. Sure enough, when we then had to do the same to another hundred servers (and then another hundred and so on) it only took about 10 minutes to do them all, rather than 10 minutes each.
Through valuing and embracing an approach of proactive laziness you can do more with less effort and waste less time on boring stuff!
Sunday, 13 August 2017
Friday, 4 August 2017
Don't use it against me but...
I was recently talking to someone, and they confided something in me. They asked me to "Promise not to use it against me" and then shared that during a challenging part of their life, in their youth they had seen a "shrink".
I thanked him for sharing and said I had some similar experiences I wanted to share and asked him to PLEASE not use them against me and to keep it to himself. I shared the following:
Some time ago, I was suddenly in agony! I could barely get up! My sister took me to the hospital and the doctors gave me some pain relief, some medicine and I was fine, thanks to their help.
Another time my car broke down, it was on the motorway and I couldn't steer it at all. I had a tow truck come and pick up my car for me.
He looked at me, thinking I had gone mad, not understanding why I would share these completely irrelevant points with him, I suspect a little hurt that I was ignoring his own confession. He could not understand how my confession in any way related to his. He clearly wondered how on earth anyone would use this against me - it was so completely different to his own tale.
But was it?
I had a problem I could not fix. I sought the help of someone who could help. That person helped resolve the issue. How is this any different from his story?
No reasonable person would use my story against me. Why on earth do we as a society disparage and demonise mental health?
Is it because there is 'something wrong with you'? No one thought I was bad for going to hospital, and there was clearly something wrong with me!
Is it because 'you should do it yourself'? I would have received far more scathing comments and derisive looks had I tried to push my crippled car off the motorway on my own.
Is it because it is less tangible? I work in IT, most of what I do is working with information and ideas rather than physical objects. We have dozens of people we hire just to answer questions and help people with issues that you can't really put your hands on. Rarely does anyone call feeling embarrassed, they accept that it isn't their specialty.
I don't know why people demonise mental health, but I think a part of it is that people don't understand it, they think it is something to just get over. Sometimes, people can just get over it, just like I could have changed a tyre on my car, or taken paracetamol for a headache. Sometimes though, it's bigger than that and you need a mechanic, or a doctor, or a 'shrink'.
I thanked him for sharing and said I had some similar experiences I wanted to share and asked him to PLEASE not use them against me and to keep it to himself. I shared the following:
Some time ago, I was suddenly in agony! I could barely get up! My sister took me to the hospital and the doctors gave me some pain relief, some medicine and I was fine, thanks to their help.
Another time my car broke down, it was on the motorway and I couldn't steer it at all. I had a tow truck come and pick up my car for me.
He looked at me, thinking I had gone mad, not understanding why I would share these completely irrelevant points with him, I suspect a little hurt that I was ignoring his own confession. He could not understand how my confession in any way related to his. He clearly wondered how on earth anyone would use this against me - it was so completely different to his own tale.
But was it?
I had a problem I could not fix. I sought the help of someone who could help. That person helped resolve the issue. How is this any different from his story?
No reasonable person would use my story against me. Why on earth do we as a society disparage and demonise mental health?
Is it because there is 'something wrong with you'? No one thought I was bad for going to hospital, and there was clearly something wrong with me!
Is it because 'you should do it yourself'? I would have received far more scathing comments and derisive looks had I tried to push my crippled car off the motorway on my own.
Is it because it is less tangible? I work in IT, most of what I do is working with information and ideas rather than physical objects. We have dozens of people we hire just to answer questions and help people with issues that you can't really put your hands on. Rarely does anyone call feeling embarrassed, they accept that it isn't their specialty.
I don't know why people demonise mental health, but I think a part of it is that people don't understand it, they think it is something to just get over. Sometimes, people can just get over it, just like I could have changed a tyre on my car, or taken paracetamol for a headache. Sometimes though, it's bigger than that and you need a mechanic, or a doctor, or a 'shrink'.
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