A crash course on effective laziness.

I feel quite lazy to find the best intro to this piece, I’d just lazily get to the crux of the matter. The writing of this article even took a lazy approach from the title (which I got from a book I read five years ago and which best expresses my ideas), to the proofreading (which was done by my close friends), and down to the publication (lol) because I didn’t have much time and also because some were just beyond me.

I remember attending an executive orientation by someone I’d refer to as brother, since then his instructions about managing time and getting things done have remained with me. Amongst other things he taught that day, the power of delegation stood out for me. People need to learn to work as a unit to get stuff done and learn to delegate various tasks to others. If there is anything I learnt so far in my little experience in leadership, it is that you don’t need to do all the work, rather you need to just learn the art of delegation and watch people do the tasks while you coordinate, thereby boosting their self-confidence and also getting adequate rest for your body (since you are no machine). Anyone who has ever tried this approach, would find that it pays to be LAZY, because it gets the work done faster, saves energy and one could use the rest of the time to watch Iron man make that snap that sends the mighty Thanos packing.

It is sad that we rather find ourselves in a generation where people are made to believe that working independently at all times, is a show of self-will, strength or other abilities. This, however, is only a partial truth and leads to unhealthy competition as well as low productivity. Due to this mind-set, hidden deep within people, they tend to feel ashamed and insecure whenever the need arises to seek help and this leads most often to a failure of some sort. Those who eventually do, do it as a last resort, after trying multiple obviously wrong options which could prove detrimental to their health, career, finances, spirituality, family etc. Strong-willed people suffer from this too and sometimes they get the required results, but in the long run they tend to make mistakes; except if they are as Malika, the Warrior Queen; some even go to the extreme by (consciously or unconsciously) seeing everything as a competition.

I have learnt(and still learning) to stop competing with people but rather to learn from them and reduce the probability of failing and trying again when there is someone to guide. This underlying laziness has saved me strength for more important things.

It has been said of successful people, that they focus on the important things while leaving the trivial issues to others through delegation and teamwork. This can be referred to as being smart but I choose to call it effective Laziness-Laziness with a purpose. For instance, why would I take the struggle to understand a difficult topic when I have a friend that could explain it to me in minutes? Or why would I struggle to do something all over again when it has been done by someone else? Like it is said in programming, if the wheel is not broken don’t fix it!!!

As a programmer I love doing things from scratch, this enables me to learn the fundamental technology and this has helped me in my career so far. To be honest, I have also learnt the hard way that not everything needs to follow this approach, some need you to save the time and resources it takes to start from scratch and just use a tool already built by another lazy programmer (which must have been duly tested by the community) to get the work done faster, better and up to date with industry standards, never reinventing the wheel since it is not broken!!!.

Finally, everything depends on your ability to know when to be Lazy about issues.