Basic Trope: Working hard for the purpose of being lazy.
- Straight:
- Brian's Spanish homework is batch of simple "conjugate and insert the missing verb" problems that would take him 15 minutes, but Brian instead spends hours writing a computer program that looks at the sentences and inserts the correct verbs automatically.
- Brian has a test on Friday. Practising for it would have taken a couple of hours, a day at the very most, but Brian instead spends an entire week analysing different methods of cheating, trying to find an effective one that also minimizes the chance of getting caught.
- Exaggerated: Brian writes programs every time he gets any homework. This includes a very complicated program that writes full essays for him. And it works well.
- Downplayed: Once when Brian got some maths problems, he found a general solution that required use of vectors and trigonometry. Solving the problems one by one using simple geometry would have been possible and easier.
- Justified:
- Brian really likes programming, and he wants to enjoy his homework, even if it means that it'll take much more time.
- Brian has Complexity Addiction.
- Brian's team is working on a English-to-Spanish (and vice versa) program, the homework is a unit test he's running at home.
- Inverted:
- Brian loves working hard to the extent that he procrastinates so he will have to work quickly.
- Brian's motto is "Let's get this shit over with."; he believes in getting work out of the way quickly and with as little time and effort spent as possible.
- Brian does something manually when an automated solution would be far less work. For example, when he needs to lots of arithmetic calculation, he does it by hand despite the fact that using a computer program would save lots of time and effort.
- Subverted:
- Brian writes programs that do the work for him. Because he's a programming genius, they actually save him time.
- "Constructing a Rube Goldberg Device that feeds the cat? Don't be silly..."
- While for the current set of 45 problems it added '6 minutes per problem', most of it was dev-time, so for future problems of this nature it will save 14 minutes per set.
- Double Subverted:
- Until he starts finding many bugs that need fixing.
- "I'm going to build a robot that does it!"
- said future problem sets never materialize.
- Parodied: He calls his programs "Overkill", "Unnecessary Slave Thingy", etc.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes Brian does this, other times he doesn't.
- Averted:
- Brian doesn't work hard for being lazy. For instance, he can be an ordinary Ridiculous Procrastinator.
- Brian eventually no longer finds avoiding work to be worth the effort, so he bites the bullet and does the job.
- Enforced: "How can we show that Brian is a Teen Genius?" "Maybe we can show that the class's homework is so trivial to him that he can make something that does it completely automatically?"
- Lampshaded: "Brian, wouldn't just reading about the grammar and doing the exercise normally be so much easier and take so much less time?"
- Invoked: Elise encourages Brian to do this because she wants him to waste his time.
- Exploited: Daniel finds out that Brian spends a lot of time working with his overly complicated solutions to his problems. Meanwhile, Daniel steals Brian's friends.
- Defied: "I'll do the homework the boring way, then I'll do some programming that I truly enjoy."
- Discussed: "Those maths problems are probably trivial for someone like Brian. I wonder if he'll find some weird and overly complicated way of solving them."
- Conversed: "Brian in that series is supposed to be smart, but he could save himself a lot of trouble by doing those things normally."
- Implied: Brian finishes his homework faster than usual when his computer crashes.
- Deconstructed:
- Brian does this with every task he's given. He doesn't have time to do everything this way, and has to skip some tasks. This takes its toll on his grades, his social life, or both.
- Brian does this regularly for the homework, so when it's time to take the exam, he doesn't have a good understanding of the material.
- Reconstructed:
- Brian invests so much time and effort into "labor saving devices" that he ends up creating a number of useful inventions that actually do make life a little easier for him... not to mention, makes him a mint when he files the patents. (Or at least, it would, if he could ever be bothered to do that.)
- As it turns out, the amount of effort it took to make the "lazy solution" required enough understanding of the subject material where he understands it better than he would have by simply doing the homework as intended.
- Played For Laughs: Brian looks at the clock and realizes that he has spent more time writing the program than doing the homework properly would have taken. He still hasn't got the program to do anything useful, but thinks he can fix it in a shorter amount of time than doing the homework would take. The same thing happens 20 minutes later. A week later, this cycle still hasn't ended.
- Played For Drama: Brian is lazy because he spends all of his energy manipulating and browbeating other people into doing all of his work for him.
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