Unleash your inner Creative Laziness!

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things”

— Robert A. Heinlein

I have a special talent it's called creative laziness, it's a strange skill because it's driven by the tentative possibility of not having to do something monotonously in the future by putting near herculean effort in right now.

Why would you be crazy enough to do this?!? Well here's why:
I hate monotonous tasks! They tend to:

• Have highly complex routines and rituals ;
• Are extremely susceptible to error and;
• Take up time that could be better utilised on more important things.

Example?

Well if I find I'm doing a task more than three times (Remind me to blog about my 3 time rule!) successively, I instantly think... "Hang on! Can't this be automated somehow?" and 99 times out of a hundred it can be with enough effort and a "Can do" attitude.

In fact yesterday I was doing some operations across multiple systems and it was the 3rd time I was doing this within 2 weeks, I instantly stopped because even though the operation only takes about 3-5 minutes then that's 3 to 5 minutes of me doing something that I could [read should!] be saving by automating the process.

So I set about automating the operation and it took me over an hour of writing, testing, optimising and fine tuning the script so it could all be run at the proverbial "flick of the switch", when it runs the entire operation completes in under 2 minutes.

You may say, "You fool! You invested over 60 minutes to save yourself a couple of minutes, what a pointless waste of effort, you should be put against the wall and shot! In fact where did I put that rubber hose!!!"

But wait! In my defense, yes I did put in all that effort, however it doesn't require any mental distraction to run the script over and over again, so I don't actually lose those 2 minutes in fact my input approaches near zero and the process can be easily delegated to someone else who does not need to have the high level skill or knowledge that the original process required, and those 2 minute savings start to mount up over time, and if god forbid I ever had to do that operation over 30 times I'll get back my hour!