Bill Gates is often credited with the quote, “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

It’s a great quote, but it came from Frank B. Gilbreth Sr. He studied the best and poorest bricklayers and stumbled on an astonishing fact; he could learn the most from the lazy man!  

He noticed lazy workers eliminated unnecessary movement and reduced fatigue.
He also discovered that expert workers were the most wasteful of their motion and strength.  They had the ability to produce a large quantity of good work, but they tired themselves out of all proportion to the amount of work they accomplished.

This is counter-intuitive to what we assume and expect!

Consider Tobias Lütke, CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify.  Difficult customers were consuming so much time that he got rid of them.  Now he spends more time focusing on valuable customers.  Lazy or smart?
Lazy people automate as much as possible.  Rather than tweeting throughout the day, they use a service like TweetDeck to schedule their tweets.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, observed that to be truly productive we must check email only once a day and outsource the small, daily tasks to virtual assistants, focusing on those tasks that generate the largest return.

As you examine the way you work, are you lazy or just really good?

The road is easier together,
Linda