The Paradox of [My] Laziness

There happens to be somewhat of a direct relationship between laziness and efficiency. I discovered that my "laziness" actually pushes me to become efficient. It forces me to become creative, learn things, and discover newer, better, and faster methods of performing a task/set of tasks.

The Project
For example, I have a number image files in which the default name that was given to it when it was imported was IMG_0001, however, I would like to rename the files to ..."Beach Week 0001" etc. It would be quite painful to manually rename each files individually. Therefore, it got me thinking...there has to be a faster way of accomplishing this task. Of course, it's just my luck that at the time I learned the power of "scripting". I'm ashamed to say...I never knew that you can write a single page of code and have it automate tasks for you.

Scripting
When I learned of about automating tasks through scripting, I discussed my small 'project' to the script master. He uses groovy, utilizing the JVM. Anyways, I cranked out some pseudo-code for him in java. And within a few days, he wrote a groovy script that did exactly what I wanted it to do! The other awesome thing was that it was able to rename my files WITH SPACES!!! Even the script master had to ask me how that was possible...since apparently in batch scripting, it doesn't allow you to rename files with a space, you must provide an underscore instead. Groovy is very similar to Java...and I have programmed in Java...Stringing Strings for aesthetics was an "important" part when i first learned Java.

The script master, actually got me really into scripting because of his interest in scripting and how he views it as a hobby instead of a painful task. Although I have yet to write my own script....I hope to someday. I just need to figure out where and how to start writing simpler script.

WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER...!
Back to the original purpose of the post, the search for efficiency is a result of "laziness" or at least my desire to optimize productivity and increase my time's worth. This way, I can do more activities and learn new skills as I let my script automate the tedious, pointless, yet much needed tasks. Unfortunately, laziness has a bad rep. perceived as unintelligent, a ripoff, cheap, an undesirable trait, and while that's true for many; for me, it's not that. I don't want to do work (actually, I'd rather do things that interest me)...but since work is somewhat inevitable, let's try to do as little work as possibly while still completing your chores on time and with at least no less than satisfactory results!

The Tradeoff
Of course, the tradeoff here is that if you don't want to put in the manual abor, then you must compensate (or at least usually) with mental power.


In short,..... WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER!
I don't do it to line others' pocket or for business "others" ..I do it for myself, my family. Plus I enjoy finding better, faster methods of completing tasks #1 because then it allows me to do other activities and #2 I learned a new skill by finding that faster and newer way.


I should probably write a post on how I set up groovy, java, and setting the environment paths before I forget, heh!

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness"
-The Social Nerd