Proactive Laziness: Why is laziness a good thing?

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!