Campfire #47: Success makes you lazy. And that’s good
Despite all the negative things with laziness, laziness can be beneficial if you know how to use it.
I run my solo freelance business for 13+ years. The past five years have been outstanding — I never had a shortage of work, collaborated with famous brands, and made an impact with my work.
In 2018 when I landed my first prominent ($10k) project, I thought I was on top of the world. I thought I figured out the formula for success. I felt that things would stay like that forever.
And they did! Until they didn't.
The problem with success is that it breeds bias.
I became too comfortable with my business and let my confirmation bias blind me to areas where I needed improvement. I ignored small red flags and convinced myself that everything would continue to be good or even improve.
My self-serving bias made me believe I deserved all the credit for my past years of success when in fact, there was a significant element of luck and privilege involved.
Those biases gave me permission to spend less time building new relationships and polishing the inbound work funnel. They made me less resilient to bad luck and timing.
Later in 2019, I lost most of my client base. But that just needed to happen.
See, the biases I had made me lazy. But laziness isn't that bad. People are usually called lazy when they can do something but they don't.
Despite all the negative things with laziness, it can be beneficial if you know how to use it.
You're probably familiar with the quote often credited to Bill Gates:
"I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it."
It's a great quote, but it's not Bill Gates. The original quote comes from a study by Frank B. Gilbreth Sr, who studied bricklayers.
He noticed so-called lazy workers eliminated unnecessary movement and reduced fatigue. He also discovered that the "best" workers were the most wasteful of their motion and strength. They produced a large quantity of good work, but it did not add up because they exhausted themselves.
So how can laziness be helpful to you?
Lazy people are entrepreneurial
Lazy people do not waste time on repetitive things. Most people's mundane routine work bores them to death. They have a solid drive to improve work processes. They must see results as soon as possible.
Activity to try: batch your tasks
Batching is the process of grouping all of the same tasks to be completed at the same time. For example, if I have three newsletter drafts, I will dedicate half of the day to writing. I'll finish all of the editing the next day.
Switching between tasks results in "attention waste." In his book "Deep Work - Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World," Cal Newport recommends focusing on one activity at a time. It takes some time for the mind to shift gears, but once you get used to it — your productivity will increase 10x.
Takeaway
This concept may disappoint you if you feel that writing should be a joyful, artistic experience completed in a single sitting. Batching resembles a Henry Ford assembly line more than a scene from "Shakespeare in Love." You will get more done if you perform all of the same tasks at the same time. Lazy or a genius?
Lazy people are inventive
Lazy people can put in tremendous effort to make their life easy. They will work hours on something that will save them a few minutes daily, so they can avoid walking a few miles.
Tobias Lutke, CEO of Shopify, for example, spent too much time on demanding clients and aimed to streamline their processes so that they could focus on important customers. As a result, he created an e-commerce platform.
"Here's a very real problem that is part of the kinds of problems that we need to make go away," — Tobias Lutke, Shopify, in The Motley Fool.
Activity to try: automate your processes
Many businesses have pre-configured Excel spreadsheets and want their data in that format. Most operations can be automated using formulas. Understand your pivot table, v/h lookups, and sumifs (instead of a data pivot, then v lookup, you can use a sum if).
Social media on many platforms is a huge time waster. Instead of writing a new social media post every time, utilize scheduling tools. Then, schedule all of your posts across various social media platforms.
Takeaway
The technology is already available. It may or may not take your job.
Be mindful of how your final result is presented: emphasize your findings rather than bragging about how much time you spent on it. You will either be given additional work or invent your way out of a job. Not to mention that no one admires an arrogant individual who spends all day reading Reddit.
Lazy people know when to relax
As the saying goes,
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Stress causes memory strain and is usually harmful to your health. A lazy person understands this by instinct. Lazy people know that completing tasks as quickly as possible is preferable. Then they'll have more time to unwind.
Activity to try: hire a virtual assistant
Tim Ferris, James Altucher, and Seth Godin all recommend hiring a virtual assistant. Pay someone else to handle the minor, repetitive duties, such as responding to emails or phone calls. It makes room for more vital work or gives you more time.
Suppose you don't want to hire someone to help you, good news for you too. You can choose AI to be your virtual assistant. In her video, Gillian Perkins talks about seven ways to use ChatGPT to get help with tasks like email, content ideas, client work, etc.
Campfire #35: How to use chat GPT as a freelance product designer?
Takeaway
If you can afford it, outsource ordinary parts of your work. It will allow you to focus on the tasks that produce the highest return. Examples are cleaning services, nannies, home-delivery food, virtual assistants, and gardeners.
Conclusion
What is the most efficient way to get from A to B? Three strategies for channeling your inner lazy person will also help you become more efficient:
Batch you work
Automate you processes
Hire a virtual assistant (or AI)
If you're seeking shortcuts, your brain tells you something isn't adding up. When something is wrong, your instincts tell you there must be a better way.
If you're always wondering, "Why should it be so complicated?" What can we do to make things easier? Then you are not lazy; in fact, you have the potential to be a revolutionary innovator in designing new systems.
Laziness has a negative reputation, yet it is unwarranted. You are, at heart, an inventor (or an engineer), and isn't that precisely what the world needs right now? To avoid wasting our limited resources, it is essential to re-imagine systems using an entirely different methodology.