33.7. Laziness

Laziness manifests itself in several ways:

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so that you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Larry Wall

• Deferring an unpleasant task

• Doing an unpleasant task quickly to get it out of the way

• Writing a tool to do the unpleasant task so that you never have to do the task again

Some of these manifestations of laziness are better than others. The first is hardly ever beneficial. You've probably had the experience of spending several hours futzing with jobs that didn't really need to be done so that you wouldn't have to face a relatively minor job that you couldn't avoid. I detest data entry, and many programs require a small amount of data entry. I've been known to delay working on a program for days just to delay the inevitable task of entering several pages of numbers by hand. This habit is "true laziness." It manifests itself again in the habit of compiling a class to see if it works so that you can avoid the exercise of checking the class with your mind.

The small tasks are never as bad as they seem. If you develop the habit of doing them right away, you can avoid the procrastinating kind of laziness. This habit is "enlightened laziness" the second kind of laziness. You're still lazy, but you're getting around the problem by spending the smallest possible amount of time on something that's unpleasant.

The third option is to write a tool to do the unpleasant task. This is "long-term laziness." It is undoubtedly the most productive kind of laziness (provided that you ultimately save time by having written the tool). In these contexts, a certain amount of laziness is beneficial.

When you step through the looking glass, you see the other side of the laziness picture. "Hustle" or "making an effort" doesn't have the rosy glow it does in high-school physical education class. Hustle is extra, unnecessary effort. It shows that you're eager but not that you're getting your work done. It's easy to confuse motion with progress, busy-ness with being productive. The most important work in effective programming is thinking, and people tend not to look busy when they're thinking. If I worked with a programmer who looked busy all the time, I'd assume that he was not a good programmer because he wasn't using his most valuable tool, his brain.