memes

I did that, but on the ride to school.

Just reminded me what Pareto Principle was and now I have business school PTSD. Thanks.

This was me in highschool, I was so bored of the pace we were going at, so I skipped a lot of classes, came in and aced tests, not with the correct answers they were looking for, but still correct. 🤣

Based

I see you also had Mrs. Anz for computer class.

Damn does your family still remind you of it 30 years later and are you me?

6? You were a year behind already! ;)

Quick ≠ bad

Yeah but if the work were bad, she probably would've included that in the criticism, because it's a way better criticism

Do just enough work to avoid getting fired.

I used to try to smash through everything as quick as I could. I would've told you I was just quick and efficient but I think the reality was I was usually tired or hungover or daydreaming about whatever thing and just didn't have the attention span to do a good job.

I've been self employed for the last 10 years or so, which means extra efficiency on my part doesn't reward anyone else.

However, during that time I've become a lot more methodical and diligent. I am consistently accurate. Basically because I need to own any oversights, which can be very costly, I make far fewer.

I actually started getting more recognition when I started producing 60-70 % or less instead of 120 %. It was like management thought that, if my tasks took longer, it was probably because I was very thorough and the task was very difficult, even though the end result would be the same. If I solved a task in 1 day, instead of 5 days, they regarded the task as easy instead of me being good. The slower i worked, the more applause I got from my manager... But, he was also an idiot... But, i wouldn't be surprised if this was a pattern in other companies as well.

My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I'm usually between 85-105%.

If I'm doing ~30 hours a week of work I've been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I'm probably in a pretty good place. I don't tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I'm still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.

If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it's the norm, the whole system has failed. I'm well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.

Exactly! Employers and managers typically won’t know either, unless they are micromanagers who track your every move. If this was a start up and doing more will have a big impact, then putting in more effort is justified. Med/large company? Nahhh

I learned that lesson in high school. Always more tasks if you finish any

Are you sure you don't mean asocial?

“Antisocial” doesn’t mean “introverted”

Yeah like I've never actually had enough of this solitude people kept threatening me with

Out of curiosity, how old are you now?

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.

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...