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
A teacher once said to me, for acting antisocial: “if you keep pushing people away: one day, they’ll just leave you alone”
I wasn’t doing it for attention. I’m very glad to be largely left alone now. It’s great.
Intellectually lazy. And if you sat there doing nothing and didn’t figure that out, and still to this day haven’t figured that out…
I had a similar problem.
Once, in school, i did all my homework fast. We had a week to do it, i handed it in after a day only. The teacher saw that, thought i’m very interested or that they give us too little homework, and then increased homework for me and everyone else. I learned not to do things quickly. It will only backfire.
This is the way.
Don’t procrastinate the work…just procrastinate the turn-in.
This way, you can feign being busy and be done at the same time! Nobody needs to know that you’re done. That means you can slack off right up until the last possible second, completely stress-free.
If you start showing your hand, they’re gonna start expecting more from you. And what will you get in return? Maybe an extra 0.5% on your raise? Nah brah. Keep it. 0.5% on 100k is $500/yr. Is less than $10/wk…after taxes, they barely bought you a coffee every week.
By all means…work at a medium pace while you’re new. Don’t want to get caught while you’re still green. But once you’re comfortable in a place…
I would also be completely confused and offended for the rest of my life if a teacher had said something like that to me
Its because teachers hate the idea that a smart student isn’t enthusiastic about the topic they’re teaching and that they’d do clearly what is their bare minimum and then mentally drop out. Its insecurity.
I had a ton of teachers like this.
My music teacher was pretty angry that I clearly only picked the subject because I didn’t want to take art or PE.
I wasn’t there due to any passion for it, did the absolute minimum, and the only way it’s affected my life is that I keep thinking about how annoyed he was.
I was grateful that my teachers were chill with this
I’d finish my math work while the teacher was still explaining it to the class, and just start reading a book. Teacher was fine with it because I was a good student and got good grades.
Rant incoming
Although I do have one particular gripe with that teacher unrelated to any of that. Question was how far was a person in a pool from the life guard on a life guard tower. I found the hypotenuse, moved on to other questions. Got marked wrong so I brought it up to the teacher, and her explanation was that she wanted the distance from the person to the tower (the BOTTOM of the tower???) under the logic that you wouldn’t just float on up in a straight line to the life guard. First of all, the question was specifically worded as distance from person to life guard, NOT travel distance. Secondly to the BOTTOM of the life guard tower??? You wanted that value, not even the added distance of the length to the bottom of the tower and the length to climb the tower???
If you asked me how far away a plane in the sky is from me, and I answered 5 feet, I’d look like a damn idiot.
I kind of wish I pushed her on that question harder. I kind of just thought “good lord she’s out of her mind” and sat back down because it had little to no impact on my grade. But I have lived years being pissed about getting that question wrong, I simply cannot move on from it.
That was a poorly worded question, and a not so bright teacher. I’d be pissed too
Similar rant. In the second grade our teacher (FUCK YOU MRS MURRY) had drawn the orbit of the Earth around the sun and was telling us that because it was elliptical and that’s why we had summer; the Earth was closer to the sun and the sun was warm.
She basically drew an oval on the chalkboard and put the sun smack in the center. It didn’t make any sense to me so I kept asking why there weren’t two summers in a year if an orbit was a year and the earth passed close the sun twice…
It wasn’t until the 3rd or 4th grade when I got a hold of an illustrated astronomy book that showed our titled planet and explained the seasons.
don’t worry random-internet-person, I just graded your answer and found that you were correct and that other person grading you was wrong.
so you know, you can move on now?
Could be worse. I once received a Saturday detention for “defiance” because I pointed out a mistake the teacher had made on an algebra problem.
In 2nd grade I decided one day to just complete my entire 2nd grade math book because it was easy for me at the time. Their solution was to force me to go into a third grade class for math but I quit because it meant I lost one of my recesses and thought that was bullshit. Honestly, surprised no one followed up and forced me to go back at any point. I just stopped going and no one said anything.
This could be a nice lesson about the taxicab metric and the Euclidean metric, but that doesn’t seem like the intention.
Reminds me of one of my elementary school English teachers. We were all given a blank hardcover book and had to make a story with illustrations. Mine was called “The Loose Kitty”. Every page basically had the kitty on the loose in different areas of a city, running into other animals that had some rhyming. I spent so much time with the art, proofing it, etc. This teacher took hard red ink and strikes through loose and put “lost” ON EVERY PAGE. I tried to tell her no it is loose because EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK related to being “on the loose”. Nope. Got like a C- on that thing.
Am I still sour about it 30 years later? Yes, I still loose my shit.
What a bitch! I never thought the comments in this post would raise my blood pressure
This one hurt for even me to read
to be fair she probably understood the concept of a kitten on the loose, but wanted to nudge you away from filling your book with innuendo without having to explain the concept of an un-tight and/or readily available vagina
Not all who wander are lost, bitch.
Sound’s like your an pour loster.
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 did a pretty similar thing in school. I was playing a LOT of World of Warcraft and I was in raiding guilds with consistent and long raid times. So I’d go out of my way to get as much of my schoolwork done ahead of time as possible. I’d eat in class so I could work on my HW during lunch, I’d get like a week ahead on any work that I was able to such as reading textbook chapters. All so that I could make sure I never missed a raid night.
Unfortunately this kind of all fell apart in senior year of HS. WAAAAAAY too much work to ever keep up, so I had to stop playing.
Unfortunately? I’d call that fortunate. Glad you made it out of WoW alive
I’m “lazy” in that same way and I always bring it up when I’m asked what my strengths are in interviews. I don’t like doing unnecessary work. I will be the one automating tasks and finding more efficient ways to do things while other people are wasting their time doing it the long way, purely because I want to waste less time on it.
My professional burden has been saddled with people who want applause for taking twice as long to less than 50% of the same amount. And those numbers are probably generous.
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.
I had a great manager a few years ago. Basically it was a manufacturing job. At the beginning of the shift(or near it) he would come by you and say something like “I need 150 devices done tonight”. Near the end of the shift he would come by and ask how many devices you got done.
As long as you got done the number he asked for he didn’t care. Take an extra 10 minutes on lunch? Having stomach issues and used the bathroom for 30 minutes? Take a personal phone call? Had a chat with a co-worker about how they got engaged this weekend? All perfectly acceptable, as long as you got done with the 150 devices. If a machine broke or some material ran out so you couldn’t complete it? Acceptable because it was outside of your control.
That said, if you didn’t get the number he wanted done but everything at your station was fine I’ll describe him with 3 attributes 1. Puerto Rican 2. Ex-marine 3. Drill Sargent!
Next few days he would be on you for every thing since you showed you couldn’t be trusted to do what was expected. He would check periodically that you were at your station. He would check every hour or so to make sure you were on schedule to get the required work done that day instead of just checking at end of day. This of course added extra work for him which he didn’t like. Do it too often and you had a not so nice “meeting”.
But… Do what was expected (almost always reasonable) and he left you alone. You didn’t have to watch a clock for exact minutes. It was assumed you were an adult and could accomplish what was asked without constant monitoring, until you proved you couldn’t.
Why the fuck would you do it any other way? A teacher once called me a minimalist, because I always did the bare minimum to not fail. I still don’t see that as a negative comment.
I see why you would be working as an electrician.
JK, I’m the same way. I’m fast and good at my job and that’s why I’m not cheap.
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 basically did the same, except I front-loaded all of the hard work into the first 18 years of my life.
Me not showing my work in math. Always getting the right answer, but not showing the tedious details.
I once had a teacher write “I have no idea how you got here, but this correct” on a test.
I’d forgotten some trig identity and derived the cosine law and then solved for all the angles with it to get the answer.
It was like that math joke where a mathematician is asked to boil water. The first time he takes the pot off the shelf, fills it with water, then puts it on the stove and boils it.
The next day he’s asked to boil water again. The pot is on the counter with water in it. He dumps the water out, and puts it back on the shelf, as that is a known solved state for boiling water.
So why memorize the formula we were studying when I could just solve more angles and then get the lengths.
Whelp, math is all about the tedious details
You’re correct, but it’s a bit rude to call them a whelp.
Whoops, didn’t intend to call them a whelp. Just stramge quirk of me talking (welp, should write it like this, without the h. Is just an abreviation of well)
Absolutely you smoke a little and suddenly you’re scrubbing the space behind the toilets and undersides of sinks.
This works, until it doesn’t. And then you can’t go back and find the mistake, and save time by both realizing the error part and not having to redo it all to get there.
I get it, I was bad about that too, but any form of writing improves the understanding of the concepts because it uses a different part of the brain that I think retains better than the one doing the thinking work.
Its like commenting in code. If you have good comments, it can help you find the error. No comments and gotta spend the time figuring out where it went wrong.
Yes. It’s like code comments.
We all do that, so understand your point.
All of us…
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 always pulled out that Mark Twain quote about giving extremely hard jobs to lazy people because they’d figure out the easiest way to do them.
