I'm Trying to Be Lazy Forever

I'm one of the laziest people you will ever meet. I'm not confessing. I'm bragging.

Laziness is a virtue. I'll put it at full strength: laziness is at the heart of all innovation.

What is a tool for?

Think about what a tool actually is. A machine, a method, a piece of software. What is it for? Getting the same result, or a better one, with less effort. That's the whole definition. Nobody ever invented a tool so they could work harder for the same result.

I've bucked hay at a feed store, a thousand bales in a day. Anybody who has done that understands the motive behind every machine that ever moved a bale. Somebody looked at the job, didn't want to do it again tomorrow, and refused to accept that this was simply how it had to be.

That refusal is laziness. We just give it a nicer name once it works.

The one condition

Laziness on its own doesn't produce anything. The lazier you are, the better an innovator you are, provided you care about quality.

If you're lazy and you don't care about quality, you just do a shitty job. That's the cheap way out, and there's always a cheap way out. Do less, accept worse, call it done.

If you're lazy and you do care about quality, the cheap way out is closed. You won't do more work, and you won't accept a worse result. That leaves exactly one door: find a better way. You have no choice but to innovate. It's the only way to keep the quality, have more time, and do less work, all at once.

Laziness isn't the couch

People hear "lazy" and picture somebody on a couch who never wants to do anything. That picture is too small.

Nobody wants to have to work for their money. That doesn't mean we don't want to work. There are things I love doing that other people would call work. I don't consider them work. They're the things I'd do anyway. I want more time for them. What I don't want is to grind my ass off to make a buck.

So laziness, the way I mean it, has a direction. Less of the work you don't want to do. More of the work you do want to do. And time left over to do nothing at all, because rest counts too.

How I actually do it

So how do I avoid that? Two ways. I build things that make money for me. And when I'm already doing something for money, I build things that make that work take less work.

My wife and I run our business on software built for exactly the two of us. It saves us about 120 hours every seven weeks between us, and it does the work more reliably than we were doing it by hand. Buddy has written about it. That software exists because I didn't want to keep doing the job the old way, and I wasn't willing to do it worse.

The catch, and the part people skip, is that getting there costs time. I have to invest more time up front. If I invest it intelligently, it opens up time on the back end, and having more time is what I actually care about.

If you do things the lazy quick way, you actually end up with less time. The quick way has to be done again tomorrow, and the day after, forever. The better way gets built once.

That's the difference between being lazy right now and being lazy forever.

Peak laziness

I absolutely choose times to be lazy. There's always more work I could do. Sometimes I say, to hell with it, I'm having a scotch and playing video games. Nothing wrong with that.

The rest of the time, I'm thinking about the bigger version. What would it take for me to sit there with a scotch, watching Netflix, while my AI is doing the work?

That's peak laziness. That's what I want.

The real problem

Laziness isn't the problem. Being dishonest about your laziness is the problem.

The dishonest version only thinks about the moment: what's the laziest thing I can do right now? It skips the investment, takes the cheap exit on quality, and calls the result good enough. Then it has to do the same work again next week, and it calls that being busy.

The honest version admits what it wants, which is to do less of what it doesn't want to do, and then does the hard, slightly boring work of making that true. It cares how the result turns out, so it can't cheat.

I'm not at peak laziness yet. It's going to take time to get there.