I talk a lot, during the course of my work, about being lazy. Some people look taken aback when I say that. They think it's a terrible thing and they can't understand my pride. And other people nod knowingly. They get it.

They understand that there's good and bad lazy.

Bad lazy is not something to be proud of. Bad lazy misses deadlines, produces shoddy work, doesn't want to learn new things, and generally doesn't care. Bad lazy spends all day on YouTube or MySpace or Facebook. Bad lazy does things the same slow way over and over without ever wondering if there's a better way.

Good lazy is about wanting to do things faster and more efficiently. Good lazy tries to get to the root of a process to make that process easier to run. Good lazy sees a manual process and is dying to write a script to take care of it. Good lazy avoids using the mouse as much as possible. Good lazy collects keyboard shortcuts for every commonly used application.

My goal is to be good-lazy. Of course I have my bad-lazy days but they don't come very often. I find that becoming more proficient with a tool improves my attitude overall. I think it probably boils down to controlling your environment.

I inherited a process last year that came with two full pages of single-spaced instructions. It went on and on and on in this vein:

1. Run programX like this: "programX > outputX"
2. Open the file outputX
3. Delete this line
4. Delete this other line
5. Then delete this line
6. Then run this command: "sort outputX > outputX2"
7. Then run programY like this: "programY outputX2 > outputY"
8. Open the file outputY
9. Delete this line
10. etc etc etc
11. Finally end up with outputZ that you can actually do something with

This process was invented by a lazy person who either didn't have to run it himself or just didn't care how painful it was to execute.

I spent about 10 minutes looking at all of the different files at each intermediate step, then at the final output file and ended up replacing those two pages of instructions with something like this:

programX | egrep -v "Stuff I don't want" | sort | programY | egrep -v "More stuff I don't want" > outputZ

A process that used to take 20-30 minutes to run (and had to be done over and over) now takes less than a second.