Larry Wall, creator of Perl, famously said that laziness is one of the three main virtues of a programmer. Being effectively lazy is highly useful for ICs as well as for leaders. An organization with a culture of healthy laziness can actually cover ground faster.

The Danger of Not Being Lazy

People who aren’t lazy can end up being more trouble or become dangerous for the organization. That’s because they are always ploughing ahead. Not having the healthy friction that laziness adds means they rush into action, sometimes too fast.

They often end up unconsciously using busywork to compensate for not thinking hard enough about a better approach to going about something. Connecting their self-worth with pure production and hustling, they confuse the means with the end. Healthy laziness helps us do the right things and increase impact-per-engineer.

That’s how we see engineers who run to solve something every time, as opposed to those who are sick of it and want to solve it just once. Or leaders who are happy to play the role of heroes, rather than lazily making sure things work well so they can sleep through the night without being interrupted.

How Healthy Laziness Looks

Here are some examples I’ve recently seen with clients where we got dramatic improvements in culture and efficacy rather quickly. Hopefully, these will help paint a mental picture and inspire you.

Checklist-Burners: This was the case where a couple of senior engineers were doing the “responsible thing” by noticing that there was an area with recurring errors. They started working on a newly improved process and wanted to create an agreed-upon checklist that everyone would have to use when working on that area. Good intentions, no doubt. However, when the CTO and I gave it some thought, we came up with a suggestion to render the process irrelevant. Rather than create a process that would have to be adhered to from here to eternity, we asked the team to codify it so that no one would need to remember to do it. Yes, it’s a bit more work now, but it’s the lazy solution in the long-term.

Credit-Avoiders: A startup has gotten into the habit of looping in the engineers for different POCs for prospects, doing a lot of routine work every time, and is fast to enable the pipeline to move forward. They were lauded by the CEO for making that possible. Nevertheless, a couple of senior engineers defaulted to being lazy. They decided to create a tool that made it possible to handle 80% of these customizations without involving engineering. They decided to pass on the constant pats on the back.

Healthier Prioritization: And let’s finish with an example that’s purely about leadership. A VPE was spending a lot of time tackling the prioritization and reshuffling of work whenever things came up. Lazying it up, a few clear swimming lanes were created, making it almost obvious where most things ought to be routed and what the prioritization shift would come at the cost of.

Of course, we should add to that all those who look at coding tasks and leverage AI to do it not just faster, but better. For example, those who are tackling a “long tail” situation and with AI can rapidly support many of those. I’d write some more, but I’m getting lazy.