It's all a matter of experience

[snopes]

There is a story I heard once — probably apocryphal — about what they did in Detroit on the automobile assembly line. Whenever they had a particular problem spot on the line that was difficult or extra tedious, they would put their laziest worker at that station. Within two days he would have the problem fixed some way or another so that he had time to read the newspaper between operations.

http://www.goletavalleyvoice.com/cgi...gi?article=696

[Wolf333]

We used to call this "constructive laziness." If you spend a little more time to do it better right now, it gives you more time to goof off later.

My best personal example is a certain ECM system on which I used to work. The tech data had the tests set up in a specific order, so that troubleshooting a failure on a given test was made easier because the preceding tests have already passed. Unfortunately, this led to quite a bit of redundancy - test A passed, change setup for test B, then use the same setup for test C that you used for test A and so on and so forth.

Our solution was to really dig into the books and learn exactly what each test was doing, paying close attention to all of the test equipment as the tests were running (the tests were automatic, but you could still see everything that was being measured). This way, we could run all of the tests that had the same setup in a series, instead of going in the proscribed sequence. This save at least an hour for each system test.

I worked this system for 10 years. 20 systems getting tested 4 times per year over that period is 800 total operational checks. That's 800 hours!