I saw some research the other day about how visionaries and pioneers find the fastest ways to achieve their goals. This of course goes along with my firm belief that we can actually shortcut the process of getting commercial transactions done. The research led me to a young guy named Shane Snow and his new book SMARTCUTS.  I think you might want to check him out if you're like me, you really care about doing things differently, in the hope that different means faster and better.

I found his writings on, "How to use strategic "laziness" to dramatically accelerate progress." I first learned of the art of strategic laziness through another of my favorite authors, Tim Ferris. You might have heard of him and his books such as, "The Four Hour Workweek," which I've talked about in this column before. I think one of the reasons that I find this so interesting is that I have a deep seated fear of laziness. Seriously, I have a real problem. I'm the kind of person who must always be doing something to feel okay. I know I'm not alone; many of my friends also seem to have the same fear, although most don't talk about it. But all you have to do is search for adult onset ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and you will see for sure I'm not alone. Some people hold busyness as a virtue and I'm here to tell you that it's not a good quality to have, but being strategically lazy and strategically busy are!

I believe the key to strategic laziness is hating to do any work you don't have to do and loving to do work that gets you to your end result the quickest. It starts with having a philosophy that helps you do more with the time you have and with the least amount of effort. I've heard this thing called taking "smartcuts" and I'm all for it. In many ways it came from the world of computer programming and how hackers work.

But to understand smartcut, we must first learn a little bit about how computers work. Deep down you've seen and heard that essentially computer language is a bunch of 1s and 0s zeros with 1 meaning "on" and 0 meaning "off." This resulted in a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001, which then gave way to a better code, which could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h. This was a little less robotic and then ultimately gave way to a popular computer language called C, so coders could write in instructions like this: printf ("Hello World"), which again translate into 1s and 0s, and eventually turns on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, "Hello World." Whew! So when you fire up your computer and open up a web browser, you're working within a program, which translates your actions into code that another layer called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. 

So, why am I telling you this? Because it's these layers of code that let you work on a computer faster, and hackers find and build layers that allows them to multiply their effort. It's the same multiplication fact that can be applied to business and life. So you see, hackers are the ones bringing this to us; as a group of people out there who have learned that selective slacking has merit. But be careful...don't get strategic laziness and selective slacking mixed up with things like treading water. The key to selective slacking and strategic laziness is finding the least wasteful way to learn something, or "level up," which was best described to me by a friend of mine about 20 years ago. He told me that if he could put in 5% of the effort of somebody getting an A and get a C-, that I can take the other 95% of the time it would take me to get the A and invest it in something I really care about.  "I'll get the job done - I'll pass and I'll put most of my effort somewhere that I find more enjoyable and probably the people around me as well."  Genius!

Effort for the sake of effort is foolish. Busyness for the sake of busyness is also foolish. You have to have a basic knowledge of your skills and then strategically only give great focus to those things that interest you most and see how much more you can achieve without wasting any of your time on the mundane repeatable things that suck your time.  So question of the day, where can you turn the lazy button on so that you can focus on those things that get you where you and your company need and want to go? To get you started, I'm going to tell you one of the places I'm going to focus on; in selective communication. I'm going to be a little more lazy about informing everyone on everything. I know it's one of my issues, I love to be very inclusive in my communication so it'll be a difficult challenge for me. I look forward to hearing if you can come up with anything that helps you be more strategically lazy!