Procrastinating for survival

Everyone will remember their parents shouting on them for being lazy sometime or the other. Is procrastination really evil? I am going to present a completely different angle of being lazy. I will stretch myself and say being lazy is one of the main reasons you will succeed.

While designing a communication protocol stack I realized how precious each CPU cycle is, every time unit spent in parsing the message will hit your overall capacity and bring the peak system processing down. So the way out I choose was to be lazy, don’t parse anything till it is necessary.

Almost everyone who is connected to web has heard about DOS (denial of service) attacks. This is kind of attack is based on the premise that system under attack will not be able to handle high load. If the system is lazy enough then it can survive such an attack longer than others [1].

Even the budding entrepreneurs will agree that being lazy (about expansion) in their initial years helps. Don’t do anything on the periphery until it becomes necessity (the very defining attribute of a lazy person).

In the software domain it is said “Don’t fix if it isn’t broken” and all of us know there no software which can not use some fix. This is nothing but procrastination.

I think being lazy is good as long as you can be selective about it.

[1] It does not mean the system will not be affected by the attack, it will just withstand longer. And this strategy alone can not protect your system.