Expand Your Philosophy: The Art of Strategic Laziness - Work Smarter, Not Harder

Learned Wisdom

1 Mar

Short principles for long-term clarity—and occasional epiphanies.

Without a smarter system, how long will you keep running in place?

“True efficiency isn’t working harder - it’s designing a system that removes barriers and frees you for what matters. Small inefficiencies compound into obstacles, so take time to eliminate them.”

Life often feels like a treadmill - constant motion, little progress. Success isn’t just about choosing the right tasks or making work interesting - it’s about designing systems that make progress inevitable. This isn’t about being lazy on the couch. It’s about designing systems that minimise effort while maximising results - true efficiency. All effective systems follow a simple, repeatable pattern. This principle is ‘meta’ - a pattern about recognising patterns. When you master it, life simplifies. To master effortless progress, let’s challenge two key assumptions.

The first assumption to combat is that you “don’t have time to fix known problems that are not your responsibility”. The issue with this is that if something is taxing you, and you leave it be, it will continue to take more from you than it gives. Every interaction with an unresolved issue adds weight, making life harder. The other part of this assumption is the “this is not my problem” element. If you don’t take responsibility for how you engage with a problem, you’ll keep reliving it. These things compound because life is not simply a single problem to solve. As more things are added and left unaddressed the problems mix and compound leaving you in the hole. So, what is the solution?

The key is to restructure tasks so repetition serves you, not drains you. What I mean by this is that when you bundle problems together into small, manageable patterns you can make things easier overall. Some common patterns can be seen through this example:

Problem: I need to drain a ball pit of its balls, I have a wheelbarrow I need to fill with the balls but it’s 10 meters away.

Initial Solution: I pick up a single ball from the ball pit, walk 10 meters, and place it in the wheelbarrow. Then, I turn and walk back and repeat this until the wheelbarrow is full – let’s say it take 60 trips. Solution Output: 60 trips of hard labour.

Improvement 1: You start by carrying 2 balls instead of 1 – in other words batching your trips. Solution Output: 30 trips of hard labour, more exertion over a shorter time.

Improvement 2: You halt your ball moving to instead bring the wheelbarrow closer, to only 1 meter away, thus, reducing the effort between steps making for faster transfer. Solution Output: 2 minutes to bring the wheelbarrow closer, over 30 trips saves you 90% per trip of the time you would have spent travelling (1 meter vs 10 meters per trip).

Improvement 3: Finally, you know you’ve got to do 300 more ball pit empties this year, so you take a few weeks to create a motorised conveyor that connects the ball pit and the wheelbarrow, increasing speed and making it so you don’t have to do much except oversee. Solution Output: 1 week of testing time, speed increased, personal effort minimised. All this reflected in the next 300 jobs saving countless hours, and you might have a saleable product.

Although the example is simple (and mildly ridiculous), the pattern remains the same in more complicated and complex examples. In most businesses these are called “workflows” and are the ways in which things progress from one phase of doing something to another. If you are new to this and don’t know where to start, consider the opposite - bottlenecks/barriers, resource limitations, and redundancy/duplication.

For each thing that seems like a pain in the arse, consider the question “what would this look like if it were easy?” - props to Tim Ferriss for that one. This is the concept of “leverage” where, when you apply a little bit of extra effort upfront, your process can yield disproportionate rewards. The reward is that with every subsequent improvement, you give yourself space and a better position in the form of money, effort, time, reduced errors, and increased outputs. To top it off, you look like a badass juggling the universe.

This is what people mean when they say, “work smarter not harder”. It is an invitation to apply a seeking mindset that looks to get the things done faster while retaining the quality of the output. If you are worried that people will see you succeeding and just give you more work, do it in secret first. Make yourself more efficient and create space for yourself in other places and in other processes. Eventually, you'll feel like an efficiency architect - your systems running smoothly while you focus on what truly matters. Once your systems are running smoothly, you’ll unlock more time, energy, and opportunity. So, start small - find one inefficiency, tweak it, and see what happens. What would this look like if it were easy? Test it. Tweak it. And most importantly, reclaim your time for what truly matters. This life, your life, is full of problems to solve and you never know, one small change can be difference between the life you have and the life you want.

🧭 The Compass of Curiosity - A Pause, A Question, A Shift:

If a game designer reworked your daily routine, what “power-ups” or “shortcuts” would they create to make your life smoother?
If you were to wave a magic wand, how would this problem be solved? Then, describe how the elements of the solution are, what elements can you steal and apply without your magic wand?
What bottlenecks in your daily habits drain the most energy? How could you experiment with small process tweaks to make them effortless?

🔥 Two Sparks to Light Your Thinking - Dare To Challenge The Ordinary:

Identify one inefficient task in your life and redesign it for effortless progress.
Track where most of your time goes - then ask, “How could this be easier?”