Being lazy solves problems
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” This quote is often attributed to Bill Gates, but apparently it is from Frank Gilbreth Sr..
For better or for worse, I commonly am that person. About 6 years ago I worked on a migration at Microsoft. I was brought on board as someone just to do some mechanical moving of files, though curiously with the added requirement of some SQL knowledge.
The big problem? Edge cases. A project as large as this turns out to have a surprising number of edge cases. This combined with my laziness quickly began to tug on me after joining the team. For example, from time to time we would need to make a single update for one set of documentation but across 11 languages. The annoying part was that each language had to be synced manually. There was no way I was going to navigate through all 11 directories just to sync the content. The solution? Write a 10-line script that did it for me.
That brings us to today. I’m trying to stir up some new clients for a video company I’m working on, but first I need to build a portfolio. I do have existing work in a similar format, but it is in a different niche. Plus, it always looks just a little tacky if your portfolio is all videos of yourself.
Luckily, YouTube is full of people that will, at least hopefully, be happy to let me cut them free videos if I can also use them in my portfolio. After about 15 minutes of digging through YouTube search results, I realize I’ve underestimated the amount of chaff I’m going to need to winnow.
What if I were to build some automation to do the digging for me? Better yet, what if I were to have AI write the code to do the automation for me? Well, that’s exactly what I did. Within a few minutes I had a Python script that could dig through YouTube, filter and the add the results to the bottom of a google sheet. With a couple more iterations, I’m filtering on more dimensions and removing more chaff automatically. Now, I can rapid fire pull results from multiple search terms and move on to qualifying the leads. What was a process that looked more like can of worms with unpredictable ROI, is now a very predictable 2-hour block that produces results.
The moral of the story? To solve a problem, you first need to clearly articulate it, then start testing strategies. Use your laziness as fuel. There is an odd truth in my life that I would much rather spend 2 hours automating something annoying than to just do what is annoying if it takes 1 hour.
And with that I will end this post with one of my other favorite quote, from an unlikely source.
"I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer” - Martin Luther
Ryan
