Laziness gets a bad rap and deservedly so.  Of course, we, ourselves, are never lazy.  No…  Never…

But we know other people who are lazy.  They procrastinate.  They only do the minimum work necessary to stay employed (quiet quitters).  Or they do the easy work and avoid the hard and useful work needed to move the company forward. 

But there are three kinds of lazy that leaders need to embrace.

Long Term Lazy

Long term laziness involves looking for a way to complete a task with the least amount of work overall.  This usually consists of us doing all the hard work upfront to get everything set up right and in motion, allowing us to do much less work on the back end. It also consists of taking on uncomfortable tasks (such as firing an under-performing employee) now rather than dealing with the consequence and extra work that the employee’s under-performance will cause in the weeks and months ahead.  As author Jack Canfield writes:

Do the hard-easy.  Do the hard things now to have the rest of your life be easy.

Finding Shortcuts and Ways to Do Less Work

This type of laziness involves spending time to think through how a task can be simplified, streamlined, or automated.  This allows us to get our work done with the least amount of work.  As the British Management Consultant, Richard Koch, writes:

The determination to find a much better solution involving much less effort is the highest form of laziness.

Avoiding Low Impact / Low Priority Work

If there is no high impact / high priority work to be done, we need to be “lazy” and just do nothing.  There is a saying in Lean production, “don’t just do something, stand there.”  This encapsulates the idea that it is better to do nothing than to create more work and complexity (for ourselves and for our teams) by doing something that is not important or is a distraction.  This is especially true for leaders who can overwhelm their teams with unimportant and mundane tasks just so that the leader can feel like he or she is doing something.  Historian Ben Hunnicut show that this tendency to be busy has deep roots:

In the Middle Ages, the sin of sloth had two forms.  One was paralysis – the inability to do anything – what we would see as lazy.  But, the other side was something called acedia – running about frantically.

Conclusion

By practicing these three types of laziness, we can get our work done more efficiently, saving time and mental energy for relaxation or to come up with improvements and/or new insights and opportunities.  Famed science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, sums up the benefits of these good types of laziness:

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.