It's amazing how many people seem to either not see this principle or not value it — that if you try to do things a little differently, or put the initial work into setting up some system, that you can save yourself so much time and energy in the long run.

There's a tendency to default to "the way we do it" or "the way it's always been done".

I've always had such a strong intuition for when things are inefficient that the first part of every job I have is usually just trying to set up systems and remove the inefficiencies in the systems I'm being told to adopt.

And the good managers are always the ones open to letting me figure this out — try some new thing, fail, potentially waste time; the potential benefit or knowledge gained is always worth the risk.

The key is to be the right kind of lazy:

Regular lazy just looks at the energy required for the task and thinks "this sucks, how can I avoid doing this?" and then tries to minimise their energy expenditure from the start, thereby sticking with inefficient systems or no systems and expenditure a lot of energy over the long-run

Smart lazy looks at the same task and thinks "this sucks, how can I make it easier?" and then tries to improve or implement systems to make it quicker, less fatiguing or less costly, investing a lot of energy at the start, but minimising their energy expenditure over the long-run.

Not only do you save yourself precious time, you also do things better, and you get a lot of practice solving problems.