“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” -Walter Chrysler
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Jason co-founded 37signals back in 1999. He also co-authored REWORK, the New York Times bestselling book on running a "right-sized" business. Co-founded, co-authored... Can he do anything on his own?Read all of Jason Fried’s posts, and follow Jason Fried on Twitter.
Jason Fried wrote this on Jan 08 2008 There are 12 comments.
Dave! 08 Jan 08
No, he’ll just do a half-assed job…
Which explains a lot about Chrysler… :)
Noah Everett 08 Jan 08
@dave: funny and true.
It seems lazy and procrastination go hand in hand though.
Micheal 08 Jan 08
Or assign the task to someone already overloaded with work.
It’s counter intuitive I know. What happens is – the already overloaded person with work will find a quick way to complete the task, simply so that they can mark it off their list of todo items.
Amazing Rando 08 Jan 08
Similar to one of my own philosophies—efficiency through laziness.
Alejandro Moreno 08 Jan 08
I guess it should be assigned “to a lazy (but responsible) man.” :)
Justin 08 Jan 08
I also like to call this “working smarter, not harder.” I guess that makes me a lazy person but I hardly ever believe in throwing more WORK at anything, only more THOUGHT should be invested to reduce work output to the bare minimum.
scott 08 Jan 08
laziness is only one of three virtues: http://www.netropolis.org/hash/perl/virtue.html
Dave 08 Jan 08
I prefer Martin Fowler’s quote about laziness…
“I’m a pretty lazy person, and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.” - Martin Fowler
Icelander 08 Jan 08
Just like Larry Wall says: A good programmer is lazy, impatient, and proud. Lazy so they won’t want to work hard, just smart. Impatient so they won’t waste their time doing stupid repetitive tasks. And proud so they make their code the best that it can be.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
pol 08 Jan 08
lazyness as a change agent sounds powerfull. i’ll put my lazyest friend to fix my company. nice finding you, p
Matt Brown 08 Jan 08
I ordered a book from Amazon.com on how to beat procrastination….... still haven’t gotten around to reading it. True story….
WmD 09 Jan 08
I always called it being proactively lazy.
The idea is to have a conscious desire to do as little as possible, but still get things done.
This discussion is closed.