ChatGPT (or Claude or Gemini, I can never remember which now) thought this too whimsical for my LinkedIn profile. But I still like it, so I’m putting it here.
It seems to take an extraordinary amount of hard work to achieve the state of idleness to which I aspire.
I have five strategies to get to my desired laziness:
- Automation and technology. Ever since I started programming in my early teens, if I did something twice manually that was one time too many. These days I don’t do as much programming as I’d like but the same principle attracts me to cloud orchestration and DevSecOps.
- Focusing on delivering what users will actually use. The fastest way to eliminate work is to get rid of the 50% of stuff in the backlog that people say they’d like but that actually gives no value. Just ask Jeff Sutherland.
- Fewer meetings, fewer metrics. I’ll admit that I haven’t cracked the fewer meetings (pandemic anyone?) But since we implemented Objectives and Key Results a year ago, the number of my quarterly key results has dropped from 18 to 3. We’ve also implemented tools like Jira to automate the collection of metrics – doing the work gives off the signals needed to see whether the work is going to get done.
- Creating the shortest path between the idea in your head and the fingertips of the person who will turn that into code. I’m an executive; I don’t do anything useful – why would you talk to me? You should go talk to someone helpful.
- Finding simple enough solutions to business problems. Are you one of those people who can see through the nonsense and find the bleeding obvious? Or are you someone who dwells on the edge cases until all seems hopeless? I try very hard to be the former and, when I catch myself becoming the latter, I have learned to seek the counsel of wiser minds.