1

"I knew a guy who had a low level data/reporting job. He had several daily/weekly work responsibilities, including a bunch of reports that needed quite a bit of tweaking from raw data to finished product. But like I said, low level.

We didn’t find out until way later, but he had set up macros for each of his major responsibilities where he could. Once set up, he’d just run the macros to do his work, but then he’d (smartly) hold off on delivering the reports until just a little before the deadlines.

He’d hit every assignment and was seen as reliable. He also would complain about the workload so people would leave him with that work. I doubt he did a full hour of work a day after he set up what he did.

Eventually he left the job for one with better pay. But damn did he work lazy. Also, he was smart not to reveal until the end, because had he told them about it he would have gotten a pat on the back and would have been given a whole other workload, on top of maintaining those macros/etc. Dude milked the job, not the other way around."

— daithisfw

2

"My brother gave my oldest nephew 10 dollars a week if he did all his chores with out needing to be told or complaining.

One day he gets home early from work and sees. The neighbor kid tossing a bag in the trash. He asks him what he is doing and the kid says he gets 5 bucks a week to take care of a few chores.

My nephew outsourced his chores."

— downvotedarksouls

3

"I plug clocks in at midnight so they’re already set."

— January 21st

4

"Years ago as a student I got a job stocking shelves. Guys were carrying the heavy boxes, put them on the floor and bend each time to pick up the items to put on the shelves. I was maybe a light 100 pounds (woman) and carrying the boxes was just killing me physically. So one day I had an idea. I put the box on a old desk chair and rolled it around. No more carrying and no more bending! Funny thing is that, instead of doing the same thing, most of the guys called me lazy and kept carrying the heavy boxes. Just to prove how strong they were.

Now they have special rolling carts to do the job."

–sonia72quebec

5

"Every year in the Canadian winter, powerlines would fail due to the weight of the snow. It took many days to build up enough to break a line so they employed a team to walk the routes and shake the poles to loosen the snow.

One day they saw a bear shaking the poles and realized that if they could get the bear to do it they wouldn’t need to walk the route.

So they gave one guy a bucket of honey and he’d walk the route painting the sides of the poles with honey to attract the bears. It worked for a few more years But this still takes a lot of time to do.

So then they had the idea of flying a helicopter along the route with a trained sniper with honey paintballs that he’d shoot the poles with.

On its maiden flight the helicopter passed the lines and the downdraft blew away all of the snow.

The flights continue to this day but without the sniper."

–GingerPenguin

6

"I was invited to my friend’s yearly apple picking: it was a full day of apples and kids and filling a truck for cider. I’m lazy and suggested we make the process more efficient by laying tarps beneath the trees and shaking the apples off the branches and onto the tarps below. We managed in 2 hours what historically took all day. We didn’t even get to the picnic lunch. Essentially, I ruined apple picking"

— IGHOTI97

7

"There was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste. One year for some reason there ended up being an unusually high number of empty boxes being shipped out. So in order to stop that from happening the head of the company hired a couple engineers to develope a system to catch any empty boxes so they didn’t get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them.

The engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount the system would stop and a worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again. The person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately. And right from the get go the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to near zero.

The head of the company wanted to go see the system in action so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line. Very confused as it wasn’t hot he asked the plant manager why the fan was there. The plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an empty box so they just hooked up a fan to blow the empty boxes off the scale before the system recognized it was empty and shut everything off.

So laziness led to a more efficient (and cost effective) plan."

–notgoodwithyourname

8

"The clerk was asked to bring 145 white papers into the office. He doesn’t want to count the papers manually so he printed 145 blank sheets and took them in."

–RinoSamuels

9

"Walkie Talkie’s. In every job I’ve ever had these things make your day far less labor intensive if used correctly."

— Juicebox1

10

"Does Alexander and the Gordian Knot count?

“A complex knot that, according to prophecy, was to be undone only by the person who was to rule Asia, and that was cut, rather than untied, by Alexander the Great.”"

— kthulu666

11

"The entire micellaneous kitchen tools section at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I don’t need an avocado slicer or a lemon squeezer or an automatic chopper/dicer, but lazy old me definitely puts them to good use."

–Razerdeathsubtractor

12

"When Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician and physicist was in elementary school (around 1784), his class was assigned the “busy work” task of adding all the numbers from 1 to 100 (1+2+3+4, and so on). This usually kept the class quiet for half an hour or so. Seven year-old Carl was sitting quietly with the correct answer (5050) while the rest of the class was just starting, so the surprised teacher asked him how he came up with the solution. He replied that he added 1 and 100 and got 101. Then he added 2 and 99, and got 101, 3 plus 98 = 101, and so on. He realized there was a pattern of 50 pairs of numbers with each pair adding up to 101. And 50 x 101 = 5050."

— i_think_therefore_i_

13

"I had to carry groceries into the house when I was a kid. I didn’t want to make multiple trips, so I tied several bags to the belt loops on my pants to do it in one trip."

–blenderstyle

14

"Eating dinner out of the pot so there’s fewer dishes to wash."

— jackrussellenergy

15

"Start of lockdown, my 9 year old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home. One day, left him at the laptop doing his maths while I made some dinner with my 3 year old daughter. Walked into the living room with his dinner to find him asking the Alexa all of his maths questions."

— SparkieMarkie1977