| Laziness and Efficiency |
[Jul. 21st, 2007|07:33 pm] |
(an article taken from my offline notebook)
Laziness is just a way of making more work for your self. At the least, it is a misunderstanding of efficiency - efficiency is not to employ the least effort to gain the greatest effect, but to aim for the greatest effect and spend an amount of effort that neatly achieves that effect.
If you phrase it the second way, you are not prone to thinking of 'what is the minimum effort' first and fitting your goal to that, rather it promotes thinking of goals first. Otherwise, the amount of effort you put forth tends to become a compromise between greatest effect and least effort (ie. becomes inefficient)
Why should you consistently aim for the greatest effect, when this may increase a lot the amount of effort required? Because actions are largely gambles, and a very sound principle in gambling is to, if betting at all, always increase the amount of your bet. Mathematically, assuming that the return from a successful endeavour is worth more than 1.0x the value of the effort put into it, increasing the amount of effort will consistently compensate for any earlier failed tries, both numerically in value, and in feeling. The only necessary guarding principle is efficiency (eg. it is not efficient to put forth more effort than your body can safely withstand) |
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