People Share 85 Instances Of Working Smart, Not Hard

"Worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer. Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants each day. Put together a back of the napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss. That system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now. I did automate myself out of the job and had to find another eventually.

Couple years later got my engineering degree. I’m convinced Engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier."

"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 neighbour 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."

"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 realised there was a pattern of 50 pairs of numbers with each pair adding up to 101. And 50 x 101 = 5050."

"I remember reading about a Texas airport that had a high rate of complaints from people who had to wait a long time for their luggage at baggage claim. The solution: Assign a further away Baggage claim for the same flights. People walked longer, but complaints went way down since they didn't have to wait as long."

"I had to take a basic video production class in college. I needed one of the character’s voices in a scene, but the character himself couldn’t be in the shot. I didn’t want to take the time to record audio separately and try to put it all together when editing. So I told the guy to just go stand behind a column that was in the shot and talk a little louder. It worked perfectly and stunned my professor that I was able to do such a complex task. Then a classmate asked me how I did it. Had to come clean in front of the whole class. My professor was equally stunned at my ability to work smarter not harder.

I got an A."

"I don't know if this is a true story, but kind of fits your request.

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 recognised it was empty and shut everything off.

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

"I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.

On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.

From that day everyone did it my way."

Me, one time I asked my boss "seriously, why do you always toss me the difficult tasks?" and he replied "because I know you'll get it done quick so you can be back on reddit."

"Years ago, as a student, I got a job stocking shelves. The 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."

"I have an herb garden in a planter on my balcony with a water reservoir that needs to be filled. I have an air conditioner in my room with a water reservoir that needs to be emptied. There's an overflow valve on the planter so it can't be overfilled and they're roughly the same height.

I went to the hardware store, bought a long enough tube, and there's now a syphon running between them so that my air conditioner waters my plants and I no longer have to fill or empty any water."

"In 1927 my grandfather started his new job at Dupont on a Friday. His first assignment was to separate out a chemical that was suspended in another chemical. He was handed a beaker of the stuff to work on. Since it was late on a Friday afternoon, he did nothing with it, just stuck it on a shelf and went home. He came back Monday morning to discover that the chemical had precipitated out and was sitting on the bottom of the beaker. He showed this to his new boss, who decided my grandfather was a genius. This process (doing nothing to the suspension) became the first of my grandfather's 47 patents."

"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."

"An older company had a person dedicated to “data entry” which boiled down to copying and pasting portions of data from text files into spreadsheet and formatting into a report.

The person originally doing this job spent a full 40+ hours/week doing it, but was not very computer literate. When they retired, the company hired someone with actual skills. The new hire convinced management to let her work remotely after getting up to speed on the job.

The first week at home was spent automating the entire job. The remainder of their multi-year tenure with the company was spent doing whatever they wanted save the 10-15 minutes weekly to run their program and to answer the odd email here and there. All while getting paid full salary and benefits. They actually had to add in a few errors now and then to make it seem realistic."

"My boss put my name in for leading a project group shortly after I joined the company. I had no experience whatsoever about project managing yet he still demanded that I lead the group of 12 people.

All way smarter guys (tech background, these guys are like magicians for me) and with way more time at the company.

I’m a business guy who’s too dumb for balance sheets that’s why I’m in HR (and because I quite like the field the most).

So we started the first meeting, I asked for everyone’s plan, experience and ideas, gathered the different pros and cons, cross checked with the budget we had, put on a time frame with milestones to reach (around 6 months), put in valuable people to consult at different steps. Why did I do that? Because I like organizing stuff and keep everyone on the same page and delegate to-dos.

Got promoted because of the success of the project.

I asked my boss why he put me in for it since I never done anything like that. He said because I complained in the first week that most of the work has way too wonky structure, no clear guideline and this could be improved heavily if we just take some time into it. And because I hated talking to others if I had questions and I wouldn’t get a clear answer (like: ask 10 people the same question and you get 15 different answers). In the long run this would make us way more efficient and keeps everyone on the same page.

All because I hated disorganised work."

"I had a manager in my twenties who detested the fact I turned a two hour process into a fifteen minute process. It exposed how much lazier he was compared to me because when the higher ups learned from other people at my level that I created the program, they took me aside and told me he took credit for it. They asked me how I felt about that.

I told them what decisions they make regarding the manager's character is their decision. Just put yourselves in my shoes and consider it from that angle.

They did nothing and I took the concept to a competitor who invested the money into making the program more robust and proprietary. My name was line one on the patent and trademark documents and I did well enough to semi-retire at 45.

I credit Lee Iacocca for the inspiration. He went through a similar problem with higher ups at Ford and his answer was to take his brain to Chrysler who would value it."

"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."

"At my last job, a truck suspension shop, we did inventory every December and it was someone's job to count all the washers and screws of every size.

It was my first inventory and I casually mentioned that they should just weigh 10 screws or washers, then weigh them all and divide the weight to get the count. Everyone looked at me like I had given them the key to the universe.

Counting washers and screws went from a day or two, to just a an hour."

"My ex-boss gave me an excel sheet. 124.000 rows excel sheet. Had all the company customer data per row - twice. In some of those duplicates there was an error. She needed me to go over the list one row by row to check for mistakes and mark all the faulty entries I could find. Through 124.000 rows. She wanted me to do that using the arrow-down key and my mouse.

I thanked her. I sat down. Invested half an hour into Google. Copy pasted some parts of this formula, then some parts of that. Finally I had figured out the formula. I double clicked the tiny rectangle so that the formula gets applied on all rows. Worked like a charm.

I stood up, got myself a coffee, talked to some colleagues. Then I went to my boss. She had anticipated that I would need 3 days for this task. When I was back less than an hour later, she thought I hadn't understood the task or maybe a follow up question. I will never forget the expression on her face when I told her I was done. There were 6 faulty entries."

"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."

"Years ago while working at my uncle's warehouse there was a monthly shipment of double doors with the frame built in. These doors were so heavy that it was a five to six man job to get them off the truck and walking them though a narrow enough hallway; this process could kill 2 hours of sales because the place had a crew of ten men and with 6 being needed it was known to avoid shopping there on those days.

Have no idea how long they did this but on the second shipment when I started; I got one of those rolling boards that mechanics use to go under cars and told the guys to place it on top.

I turned a 6 man job with 2 hours to a 2 man job that took 30 mins."