Laziness and simplicity 0
Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
- Robert A. Heinlein -
In my opinion, laziness is misunderstood by those who do not feel it. When people are doing nothing, it’s often labelled as being lazy. Yet, this statement doesn’t automatically make the opposite true. Being lazy isn’t about doing nothing, it’s about doing everything you want to do in the most effective way possible. There’s a sort of challenge in finding the simplest way to do a task, finding new ways, broadening your horizons and in the end discovering the least time consuming, simplest and most effective vision.
This challenge hasn’t gone unnoticed by others either:
- Occam’s Razor: this principle says that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Meaning that the explanation with the fewest assumptions, is usually the correct one. Don’t assume too much, the simplest solution is most likely the one you’re after.
- KISS Principle, which stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Not implying that people might be stupid, but to remember that when you break down a problem correctly, simple solutions can probably fix it and anyone (even the average) would be able to maintain it, should something go wrong. Unnecessary complexity only leads to clutter and should, at all times, be avoided.
- Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. This principle states that, for most cases, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So, by just focusing on the most important 20% of the causes, you can handle 80% of the issues. This will save a lot of time and in some cases money.
- The Worse is Better Principle: the idea behind it is that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality. At some point less functionality (worse) is the better option in terms of practicality and usability. Try to only implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you might-one-day-could need them.
- Similar concepts can be found in Albert Einstein‘s “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”, Leonardo Da Vinci‘s “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” or Antoine de Saint Exupéry‘s “It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
We are trying too hard. We always want more and better things and for some reason we have ourselves convinced that these two go hand in hand. As a result, we tend to over complicate problems and lose too much time on things that were never important to begin with. Simplicity leads to effectiveness, effectiveness leads to saving time and effort and saving time and effort leads to laziness. “Be lazy” … if you can’t say it, you can’t be it 
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Do yourself (and everyone else) a favor and be lazy, go for the simplest solution!
