This used to be my mentality in regards to work for the majority of my early twenties. Turns out pretty much every job out there will give you more work to do if you are too efficient. Eventually it reaches a point where you have too much on your plate and start getting burned out fairly quickly yet you’ve set the bar so high that anything less than maximum efficiency is considered lazy.
My new method is to work at 50%-70% efficiency while at work and I take my time on everything I’m asked to do. I’ve worked my ass off for about a decade at various jobs and was only rewarded with more work. I’ll save my efficiency for the things I actually care about in my life.
I have a coworker that is currently in the situation I was in five years ago. He’s working late every single day and barely has any time for personal business because he worked too hard at the beginning to “climb the ladder” that he’s now overworked and miserable as more things keep getting piled on top. I was talking to him the other day and he was saying that he started working on the weekends because he has so much shit he has to do.
I learned that lesson in high school. Always more tasks if you finish any
My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I’m usually between 85-105%.
If I’m doing ~30 hours a week of work I’ve been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I’m probably in a pretty good place. I don’t tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I’m still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.
If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it’s the norm, the whole system has failed. I’m well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.
Exactly! Employers and managers typically won’t know either, unless they are micromanagers who track your every move. If this was a start up and doing more will have a big impact, then putting in more effort is justified. Med/large company? Nahhh
My HS football coach once called me the dumbest smart kid he’d ever met because I kept mixing up my assignments for each play. Highest GPA on the team…
Didn’t get my ADHD diagnosis until I was 39, lol
I used to sleep in my accounting class. Another student got offended and was like why doesn’t he just skip? My teacher said he comes in, gets straight As, he can take a nap if he likes.
See I use to do the same in history but I got an F. Loser
This was me in highschool, I was so bored of the pace we were going at, so I skipped a lot of classes, came in and aced tests, not with the correct answers they were looking for, but still correct. 🤣
This was me including the AP classes. Then I got accepted to a really good engineering school and got my ass handed to me because I never developed proper study skills.
This was me in engineering school as well. First 2 years were brutal because I’d never really had to study and things suddenly got hard and needed to put in some effort. I got through it but it was a much different learning experience than I expected.
It’s weird to think there might be people who had a different experience with engineering school.
I got through it too but I can’t say I ever developed the level of study skills that some of my classmates had. In the end I guess I developed my own study style which I guess I still use now almost 40 years later in my work career.
This was me in world history and chemistry. I napped and got woken up if no one else had the answer in the former, woke up after the lab was explained (that was just regurgitating what was in the lab sheets) then did the lab in the latter
Based
I suppose it could be a criticism of the quality of the work: i.e. you finish it quickly but it’s half-arsed because you were too lazy to take the time to do it properly.
Quick ≠ good
Quick ≠ bad
Yeah but if the work were bad, she probably would’ve included that in the criticism, because it’s a way better criticism
People often frame themselves the hero
People often argue using bad assumptions.
I had something similar in elementary school. There was an assignment given and something like 2 hours to do it. The reward was extra recess time. I saw the exercise knew I could do it quickly so I screwed around for about 1 hour and 50 minutes. The teacher saw this and commented on it. In the last 10 minutes I blasted out the assignment, handing it in when everyone else did. I received a passing grade on the assignment. The teacher stopped me anyway from getting the extra recess time because she didn’t like that I spent so little time on the assignment even though I completed it sufficiently.
I stopped trusting teachers for years because of that and so no reason to put in full effort when arbitrarily applied rules would take away the rewards anyway. That didn’t mean I didn’t put effort into learning, it just didn’t really care about scoring well or doing assignments. I’d do well on tests, but had low grades from simply not completing or not turning in homework. Occasionally I’d even do the homework if I was working on grasping the concept being taught, but I didn’t see a point of even turning those in many times even though they were complete.
I got the same insult as a child. I just thought “ah she’s stupid” and moved on and never thought about it until I saw this post
Me not showing my work in math. Always getting the right answer, but not showing the tedious details.
I basically did the same, except I front-loaded all of the hard work into the first 18 years of my life.
I struggled at math as a young kid because I hated doing everything the long way and showing every step. I got a mental math book that taught how to do longer form multiplication in your head. I could multiply 2-3 digit numbers in my head and just tell you the answer.
My teacher made me do it on the board in front of everyone and swore I was cheating somehow because if she couldn’t do it, a kid couldn’t either.
I was also reading Michael Chriton books in the 4th grade, and teachers thought that I wasn’t because kids don’t read books like that.
School was kinda annoying with how it would punish you for being anywhere outside of normal. Even if it was positive.
swore I was cheating somehow because if she couldn’t do it, a kid couldn’t either
because kids don’t read books like that.
School was kinda annoying with how it would punish you for being anywhere outside of normal. Even if it was positive.
This 100x. I taught myself how to read before going to first grade. The reward was being isolated in an empty classroom for a lot of first grade when others were learning to spell. Well there was one other kid, but she didn’t speak. She had been taught by her extremely strict parents to read before school. They had like 7 children and were horribly strict. This girl starter crying once when she got what’s equivalent to an A-, afraid she was going be yelled at at home.
There was a special class for anyone below average. But dear me, if you were above average no you weren’t, because that’s just rude.
Doing any work I was given faster than other didn’t result in getting more challenging work. It just resulted in getting more of the same boring shit I’d already shown I know very well.
I could’ve been one of those kids who go to college at 14, but nooooo. I just learned to avoid work and hide my skills
I’ve always been like this. I power through all the work (school, chores, etc.) just so I can have the free time to do nothing. My ultimate goal has always been to clear my schedule so I can decide what to do with my time.
I think I overdid it. I retired at 38 years old and I’ve now spent the last 4 years sitting around my house with all the free time I can imagine.
Dude how tf did u manage to retire at 38 and have a house? Like u must be literally a millionaire.
I wish I was a millionaire. If I liquidated all of my assets, I might have about a million… But in liquid cash, I’m a low thousandaire. 😅
I joined the US military at 18 years old; I literally left for basic training 2 weeks after I graduated high school. After 20 years of service, you qualify for an official retirement if you so choose.
So at 38 years old, and after suffering through one Trump presidency, I decided it was time to grab my benefits and get out before he somehow got reelected again. It was definitely a good time to leave; it seems that Pete Hegseth has ruined what remaining integrity the military had. I couldn’t serve in today’s military.
Anyway… I joined back when the US military offered a pension. So even though it went away 7 years before I retired (replaced with a 401K-type program), I was grandfathered into the old program because I wouldn’t be able to serve long enough to build up a proper retirement savings. So I now get 50% of my former military pay in my bank account every month for the rest of my life. It’s not much money, but I’ll never starve or go homeless.
On top of that, the military broke me (mentally and physically), and I was quite literally limping my way to retirement. I was walking with a cane at the end of my service, and the only reason they didn’t medically separate me is because I was close to retirement and didn’t need my legs to do my job. I was an IT professional, so I mostly sat at a desk all day.
When I retired, I had enough approved medical claims with the VA that they gave me the coveted “100% Permanent & Total” rating. So I get a lifetime monthly pay from the VA that’s twice the amount of my pension, plus free medical and dental for the rest of my life.
My wife served too, but she only made it to 12 years before they medically discharged her. She was too broken to continue serving and she somehow also qualified for that rare 100% P&T rating. So she gets the exact same VA pay and lifetime benefits as me, just no pension for herself.
So with all that passive income, we don’t really need to work anymore. Granted, we’re not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. But we have enough to pay the bills and live comfortably right now. We did have to sacrifice our minds and bodies to earn it, but we’re not so disabled that we can’t get out of the house and live a little. We just can’t be as active as we used to, which is fine. We’re both introverts, so we don’t mind sitting around the house most of the time. It helps us not drain our bank account.
Oh, and I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed away, so we have a house on 6 acres of land in the countryside. My state gives huge property tax deductions for 100% disabled veterans, so we’re paying practically nothing in taxes to live here. So we’ve also managed to dodge the housing crisis.
We’re actually helping the mother of a friend of mine who can no longer afford her city apartment (after her house was foreclosed on when she was 95% done paying the mortgage!). So she’s living with us for a while, until her son finishes building her a retirement hut on his tiny sliver of land in Hawaii. If he’ll ever get there; he’s also living here until he can afford to move to Hawaii and build his own small hut on his land.
We’ve been pretty fortunate, despite the disabilities. But it is a shame that we had to sacrifice our bodies just to get the kind of benefits and security that a lot of European countries have. We need medical reform bad.
Heck, I’m dreading the day when Trump decides to gut the VA and take our benefits. I’ll have to go back to work if that happens, and I’m not looking forward to dealing with the job market. One of my friends has a finance degree from Harvard and even HE has been job hunting for over a year now! He applied to just over 100 jobs before he got a single callback… and they didn’t hire him. It’s rough for everyone now.
TL;DR - The military broke me and my wife. We’re both 100% disabled according to the VA and earn just enough in pay and benefits to not need to work anymore. And I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed, so we have a place to live without dealing with rent or a mortgage
Damn, what a crazy story. Thx for sharing it.
My dad did this to me once when I was a kid. I was helping bring in the groceries and was carrying as much as I could (which was a lot, but obviously not more than I could handle) and my dad told me it was a “lazy man’s load” that pissed me off pretty badly. I was helping dickhead. I can’t remember almost anything from my childhood, but I’ll never forget that shitty comment.
That’s so weird. Even today I try to get as many grocery bags upstairs as I can in one go, because who wants to bother with the back and forth if they don’t have to? There’s an art to managing six bags of heavy groceries across your arms, a relief that I can get all the cold and frozen things put away sooner, and the natural reward of being able to move onto another activity more quickly. I fail to see what’s wrong with being efficient with chores and errands.
I used to sleep in class. But only after doing all of my work. I had ONE teacher who agreed that as long as the work got done, and I wasn’t disturbing anybody else, she would let me sleep.
~Of course she was a first year teacher, so she probably didn’t know better.~
I assume it depends on the quality of the work actually done, versus the quality that using the allotted time would have allowed. Scantron test? 100 is 100. Essay question (or particularly a term paper) that’s nice enough but not very thorough? Maybe the teacher has a point.
I was also absolutely told this by at least one teacher, and in my case they weren’t wrong.
I was also absolutely told this by at least one teacher, and in my case they weren’t wrong.
Can you provide evidence to your point without having to listen to a 3+ minute song?
I could, but that feels like way too much work.
Thats fair.
I’ve said for years that efficiency is just high functioning laziness. So long as you got the job done and done right or to your best ability, you did it perfectly no matter how long it took you. If you have time to spare, that is your time to do with as you please. Fuck anyone that says it is your responsibility to maximize production after your requirements are met.
