"Give A Hard Job To A Lazy Person And He Will Find An Easy Way To Do It" Best Examples (r/AskReddit)

bill gates said i will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it what's a real life example of this i was working as a stock boy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12-pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one on my first day i just placed the 12-pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it in the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment from that day everyone did it my way start of lockdown my nine-year-old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home one day left him at the laptop doing his maths while i made some dinner with my three-year-old daughter walked into the living room with his dinner to find him asking the alexa all of his math questions worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer daily tasks included manually watering fifteen thousand plants each day put together a back of the napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss that system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now i did automate myself out of the job and had to find another eventually couple years later got my engineering degree i'm convinced engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier my brother-in-law spent a whole summer trying to figure out how to fix his sagging deck at the lake which he could in theory crawl under and jack it up it would have been a tunneling project it's a 60 x 60 area all along to x6 boards massive i sat there long enough with enough beers in me to come up with the idea of just cutting a square out of the sagging area about three feet x three feet jacking it up then re-screwing down the boards he paints the thing every spring with a roller in a house so it's not like the square cut shows up he thought i was a genius i was just lazy i had a math teacher that actively encouraged his students to be as lazy as possible defining lazy as actively searching for ways to do as minimal work as possible his logic was that the way math is now it could always be simplified and still work the same someone just needs to be lazy enough to find that i was a paid intern at a large company during one summer back home from college my work 95 consisted of using sap import to excel clean data and generate reports occasionally create some tool someone needed in the first two weeks after getting a hang of my responsibilities writing all the excel formulas needed and basically automating 99 of my work i was chilling i went from actually working from 9-5 to maybe one hour tops a day finding importing cleaning and reporting usually took hours but with all the formulas it took two minutes of clicking i then helped the other cool intern get his set up so we could both just chill we could take two hour lunches paid for by the company and nobody said anything cause we were just getting so much more done than the other interns ofci helped for special tasks when asked but those were simple 20-minute tasks building something in excel overall was the easiest stress-less internship of my life the clerk was asked to bring 145 white papers into the office he doesn't want to count the papers manually so he printed 145 blank sheets and took them in it took me like three months but i automated a data pipeline to extract data clean it up and spit it out in an excel or pdf format to one of our clients i walked over to shoot this with the lady who handles my client and gives me tasks and she told me we make 40k of them every month for that automated job f i need to go start my own business when carl friedrich gorse the famous german mathematician and physicist was in elementary school around 1784 his class was assigned the busy work task of adding all the numbers from one to one hundred one plus two plus three plus four and so on this usually kept the class quiet for half an hour or so seven-year-old cal was sitting quietly with the correct answer 5050 while the rest of the class was just starting so the surprise teacher asked him how he came up with the solution he replied that he added one and 100 and got 101 then he added to and 99 and got 101 3 plus 98 101 and so on he realized there was a pattern of 50 pairs of numbers with each pair adding up to 101 and 50x 101 5050. when i was in college i had a job at an italian fast food place with a reputation for its breadsticks they came in frozen and needed a bit to thaw so we'd take a giant 3x 4 foot aluminum baking sheet spread them out in a single layer with no spaces and cover it with a plastic bag then leave it sit in the walk-in overnight the next day you'd have to get a pair of tongs and move each stick to a new tray turning them over then cover the new tray with the bag and let them sit on racks for a couple of hours before brushing on the garlic butter sauce this was tedious enough that you'd usually be ready to brush the butter on the first tray as soon as you turned the last tray i was given this task for the first time one morning and just did not want to deal with it i realized if i put the second tray upside down on top of the first one then turned it over and took the first tray out i got exactly the same results blew the boss's mind when i did the three-hour job in about 15 minutes i was given a zero dollars and five cents hour raise if i need directions i'm not asking a man with one tooth i'm asking a man with one leg cause he definitely knows the easiest way to get there yup if there's a shortcut that one leg def air knows where it is you won't be hop in fences neither i plug clocks in at midnight so they're already set trip the main fuse in the house at midnight to do all the appliances to lol eating dinner out of the pot so there's fewer dishes to wash an older company had a person dedicated to data entry which boiled down to copying and pasting portions of data from text files into spreadsheet and formatting into a report the person originally doing this job spent a full 40 plus hours week doing it but was not very computer literate when they retired the company hired someone with actual skills the new hire convinced management to let her work remotely after getting up to speed on the job the first week at home was spent automating the entire job the remainder of their multi-year tenure with the company was spent doing whatever they wanted save the 10-15 minutes weekly to run their program and to answer the odd email here and there all while getting paid full salary and benefits they actually had to add in a few errors now and then to make it seem realistic worked in a local adult education center one of my main tasks was to make calculation about how many people enlisted for a course how many of them got discounts unemployed for example how many men women age etc that was needed to calculate upcoming courses fees etc that was my only work there and i hated it this was in early 90s so pcs were a thing in our offices but i had no idea how to write a program or use a database to use this informations lucky as i am our center had an interesting policy when you want to educate yourself you can attend that class for free and when it's during the work time then this is work time as long as my supervisor is okay with that she was so i spent three months studying database structures scripting coding etc i told my tutor what i want to do and he helped me to write a script that grabs all necessary informations from the courses database copy that into another database and then i went crazy and wrote code that was insane i implemented what-if scenarios thanks to filters at the end i was able to do my work that needed six hours a day within 15 minutes i mean before that it took for example an hour to have all the necessary informations to have a how many unemployed single-parent women does it need to make the costs of that course even i had everything back then now you want statistics how many single-parent disabled foreign women at the age of 80-90 are needed for the next two years to keep the ornithology course running sure no problem clickety click done after that i started the pc in the morning grabbed all the data ran my script was done within 15 minutes and then read the book i brought from home at the end of the day i gave my supervisor several dozens of papers statistics predictions etc and said that was a lot of work and went home my supervisor was super happy with me because i did so much more now and was super effective i worked goods in for an aircraft manufacturer as a summer job at university parts would arrive we'd open them and key in all the details into a terminal that bit was long-winded i discovered the terminal keyboard has assignable shortcuts and set up a bunch of them for all the boilerplate such that keying in an item was about six key strokes saved myself and my workmate house every day which we would spend pranking each other other warehouse staff and staff at other sites back in high school a lot of kids used to walk through his park to get home to school a portion of the path went into the woods because it was just quicker than walking the actual trail at one point in the walk through the woods you had to go up this small but tedious hill nothing major but it took like 10 seconds of hard work to go up it you couldn't go around because one side was a small cliff to the creek below and other side had dense trees one summer a bunch of us got together and decided to just dig through that hill to make it flat it took like 14 of us three good days to get through it it was a hard three days but it was definitely worth it save 10 second of hill climbing every morning and afternoon 150 plus days of the year and it wasn't just us but hundreds of other kids who took the same party every day sometimes you need to put in a lot of work so your future selves can enjoy the easy way out i was invited to my friend's yearly apple picking it was a full day of apples and kids and filling a truck for cider i'm lazy and suggested we make the process more efficient with tarps on the ground we managed in two hours what historically took all day we didn't even get to the picnic lunch essentially i ruined apple picking walkie-talkies in every job i've ever had these things make your day far less labor-intensive if used correctly at work i go through parts and apply two different kinds or tape and two different kinds of weave i have finally got the rhythm down and now i do each part individually and apply everything at once everyone else goes through an entire order just applying tape then goes through it again to do the weave i asked to use the big table in the back of the shop and just put all the tape and weave tools there and do the parts all at once normal rate for an 8 hour shift is 1 200 but i can manage 1 800 in a day going at a nice steady pace i knew a guy who had a low level data reporting job he had several daily weekly work responsibilities including a bunch of reports that needed quite a bit of tweaking from raw data to finished product but like i said low level we didn't find out until way later but he had set up macros for each of his major responsibilities where he could once set up he'd just run the macros to do his work but then he'd smartly hold off on delivering the reports until just a little before the deadlines he'd hit every assignment and was seen as reliable he also would complain about the workload so people would leave him with that work i doubt he did a full hour of work a day after he set up what he did eventually he left the job 4-1 with better pay but damn did he work lazy also he was smart not to reveal until the end because had he told them about it he would have gotten a pat on the back and would have been given a whole other workload on top of maintaining those macros etc dude milked the job not the other way around i know a guy who did this but he revealed it the company shared the macros with all the employees it made everyone's life easier but they also got an increased workload the company made a lot more money and this guy made none of it he didn't even get promoted that's why i haven't said a word i did this and who was the first one laid off in 2008 when the economy tanked the dude who didn't do anything but maintain the completely automatic system i got a call about two years later that the server i had set up crashed and they couldn't recreate the process i never returned a call and guess who went out of business shortly after any good guy will find a way to automate his job so he can sit around browsing reddit i left my last size admin job and the next guy called me and asked how i was doing the work of three people he was going through the daily playbook and was so far behind i asked him if he was going through the manual playbook or the automated playbook as i had left both on my desk evidently my former boss had taken the automated one to do the work in the interim and never told the new hire about it bingo the fact that you left two manuals is very kind of you though one of my favorite stories from my youth was the tale of the man who was too lazy to fail i got fed up with handwriting itemized suborders at work so i set up a spreadsheet that you can just fill out then i got tired of having more than one program open and not being able to search within among those order sheets at least not automatically or easily so i'm having our filemaker guy integrated into our greater ordering invoicing system i was frustrated at the pointlessness of sorting a giant pile of paper invoices from an unpaid stack to paid stack every month so i just use the accounting software to keep track i became so irritated with having to fill out a multi-page printed spreadsheet for every single order sometimes just one item two pages in and frequently there would be those pesky itemized sub orders that i condensed the items into most used put them all on one easy to read sheet and encouraged my co-worker to simply write out the more uncommon items at the bottom basically i hate busy work and paper invariably leads to busy work i have tried to reduce the use of paper in our office but have not been entirely successful we have to have written order forms available because sometimes the orders are coming in too fast to be able to type it all quickly correctly and have to keep some paper records for things like organic fda and usda audits but all in all i'd say my absolute hatred of filing has reduced busy work here by at least half me i ought to make sure all the time at work to make daily routine jobs more easy i write manuals with screenshots with arrows indicating where to click or where to fill in what whenever i write a manual i assume that whoever reads it is a complete idiot so that whenever customers call for the same questions again i just send them to the online manual i created no need to type it out again by email or explain it again by phone does alexander and the gordian not count a complex not that according to prophecy was to be undone only by the person who was to rule asia and that was cut rather than untied by alexander the great to be fair imagine you are the priest and this guy just cut your knot and he is holding a very sharp sword and has a large army outside but you dispute the legitimacy of his way of solving it no but i would roll my eyes very heavily probably psy too wasn't that the same dude who liked a guy living in a barrel yeah the barrel dude was called diogenes who was a philosopher who was famous for founding the school of cynic philosophy he gave up all of his possessions apart from a barrel and a small bowl which he drank from he was famous for jacking of in public and when alexander the great visited him and asked him what he could do for him diogenes response was that he should move because he was blocking the sun years ago as a student i got a job stocking shelves guys were carrying the heavy boxes put them on the floor and bend each time to pick up the items to put on the shelves i was maybe a light 100 pounds woman and carrying the boxes was just killing me physically so one day i had an idea i put the box on a rolled desk chair and rolled it around no more carrying and no more bending funny thing is that instead of doing the same thing most of the guys called me lazy and kept carrying the heavy boxes just to prove how strong they were now they have special rolling carts to do the job screw lazy screw strong i would have copied you without a second thought earlier you don't get bonus pay for having an aching back the entire miscellaneous kitchen tools section at bed bath and beyond i don't need an avocado slicer or a lemon squeezer or an automatic chopper dicer but lazy old me definitely puts them to good use ironically these things were not created for lazy people originally but for people with disabilities and also very busy restaurant owners this unfortunately a lot of these products have to be marketed like time saving devices and convenience gadgets to justify production which is what led to a lot of the weird product memes like sure you can make fun of a little claw tool that helps you put on your socks without bending over but elderly ill and disabled people sure are glad that till exists my brother gave my oldest nephew ten dollars a week if he did all his chores without needing to be told or complaining one day he gets home early from work and sees the neighbor kid tossing a bag in the trash he asks him what he is doing and the kid says he gets five bucks a week to take care of a few chores my nephew outsourced his chores i tried doing that as a kid and got a slap on the back of the head it was just my dad and i we both hated doing the dishes so they would stockpile it got to the point where he offered to pay me 20 dollars just to do them before i got around to it we went down the road to my aunts i ended up offering my cousin 10 if he would come over and do the dishes he accepted i wasn't allowed to to do that again outsourcing and child labor this kid's destined to be a nike ceo one day nephew it gotta start young well i worked in a graphics design studio as an intern they mostly had me practice and do some basic stuff their head designers was too busy to do one was a real estate ad it had a few basic templates but it was all kinds of scatterbrained i would spend 5-10 minutes trying to find the right layer for all the pictures and had to mess with way too much so i made copies of the files and made one for each template i labeled everything made it so the images on top of each other wouldn't clip into the lower ones like the previous did so on you could be in and out of the template in 2-3 minutes showed my boss the difference and he had this face of welsh he said the next day that if i was a graduate he'd hire me because i was better than the people sending applications in in short i made an overly complicated unorganized thing the opposite and my boss was actually sad he couldn't hire me i had to carry groceries into the house when i was a kid i didn't want to make multiple trips so i tied several bags to the belt loops on my pants to do it in one trip i'm doing it right now automated data cleaning in python my co-workers don't know about it so something that takes me 10 minutes at most takes them two hours according to facebook parents the airfare that can't do sphere out of a stone block and rolled it instead of pushing it like the other dudes an engineer spent hours developing a program so they could start the coffee pot from their desk and not have to wait for coffee when arriving in the break room my ex-boss gave me an excel sheet 124.000 rose excel sheet had all the company customer data per row twice in some of those duplicates there was an error she needed me to go over the list one row by row to check for mistakes and mark all the faulty entries i could find through 124.000 rows she wanted me to do that using the arrow down key and my mouse i thanked her i sat down invested half an hour into google copy pasted some parts of this formula then some parts of that finally i had figured out the formula i double click the tiny rectangle so that the formula gets applied on all rows worked like a charm i stood up got myself a coffee talked to some colleagues then i went to my boss she had anticipated that i would need three days for this task when i was back less than an hour later she thought i hadn't understood the task or maybe a follow-up question i will never forget the expression on her face when i told her i was done there were six faulty entries a year and a half later i enrolled into computer science at university where i will finish my undergrad this summer there's a repo on github containing code based on scripts that were used by a tech employee that his co-workers discovered after he left the company here's a summary of his shenanigans i don't know if this is a true story but kind of fits your request there was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste one year for some reason there ended up being an unusually high number of mt boxes being shipped out so in order to stop that from happening the head of the company hired a couple engineers to develop a system to catch any mt boxes so they didn't get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them the engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount the system would stop and the worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again the person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately and right from the get-go the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to near zero ahead of the company wanted to go see the system in action so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line very confused as it wasn't hot he asked the plant manager why the fan was there the plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an mt box so they just hooked up a fan to blow the mt boxes off the scale before the system recognized it was empty and shut everything off so laziness led to a more efficient and cost-effective plan every year in the canadian winter power lines would fail due to the weight of the snow it took many days to build up enough to break a line so they employed a team to walk the routes and shake the poles to loosen the snow one day they saw a bear shaking the poles and realized that if they could get the bear to do it they wouldn't need to walk the route so they gave one guy a bucket of honey and he'd walk the route painting the sides of the poles with honey to attract the bears it worked for a few more years but this still takes a lot of time to do so then they had the idea of flying a helicopter along the route with a trained sniper with honey paintballs that he'd shoot the poles with on its maiden flight the helicopter passed the lines and the downdraft blew away all of the snow the flights continue to this day but without the sniper typos and grammar fixed by uber third bird my green house's watering system i would spend an hour per day watering the garden 30 hours per month so for 50 i set up a pvc watering system in a few hours now i just turn on the spigot and watch while i smoke a joint 5g causes covered 19 epstein isn't dead redid his china's b peace out bs programming a lazy programmer will think all the possible ways of doing a single simple task so [Music] foreign

Channel: Best Posts & Comments

Views: 513,015

Rating: 4.9445729 out of 5

Keywords: r/ask reddit, r/ askreddit, best posts and comments, askreddit top posts

Id: FojtA-s8GoQ

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020