A PRODUCTIVITY MOTIVATOR AND MENTAL HEALTH PROTECTOR

I will never forget the look on her face. It was senior year of high school and my desk neighbor in Accelerated Physics class, Jami, stared at me in wide-eyed bafflement. I had been out sick for the past week, so I didn’t know about the day’s exam. Mr. Brandt offered to let me take it another day.

“Nah, I’ll take it now.” Scheduling a makeup seemed like a pain in the butt.

Even better than Jami’s face that day was the look she gave me two days later when, handing the tests back, Mr. Brandt announced that I had high-scored it and bequeathed me the coveted prize. (In this case, a tuning fork, for our unit on sound. He was into that kind of thing.) She was equal parts shocked, impressed, and jealous. I was entirely thrilled.

It was hardly my only academic success in high school. I always did well – big fish in a little pond – but I remember this achievement particularly vividly. It took me some years to figure out why and even longer to realize that what sat underneath the thrill was a superpower to be harnessed. That superpower? Laziness.

Laziness Gets a Bad Rap

I’m guessing laziness doesn’t crack your top ten list of superpowers. It’s not exactly idealized in pop culture. There’s no Captain America of Lazy. In fact, on the Superpower Wiki, I was able to find several characters – from Charmed, Power Rangers, Ultraman – with the opposite power, Sloth Inducement. Laziness’ poor reputation is nothing new: according to the Catholic Church, that totally infallible source, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, so it made somebody’s top ten list! What gives?

I contend that our language fails us. There are two important concepts at play here that we tend to describe interchangeably. The first is about the presence or absence of interest. On one end of the spectrum, I’d put words like ambition, motivation, purpose, intention; on the other end, we have apathy, indifference, even aversion … but not laziness. Putting my cards on the table: apathy is not a virtue and if we think of laziness as a synonym of apathy, it’s not a virtue either. The second concept is about the inclination or disinclination towards exertion. Words here include hard work, industriousness, and strain. This is the laziness I mean, the preference to work as little as possible.

We can be forgiven for comingling these concepts. After all, the Venn diagram of these ideas manifesting in real life is almost a perfect overlap. Those who are ambitious tend to be hard-working. And those who are totally lacking in motivation tend to sit on their butts all day. But if we can recognize them as two concepts, we can start to see a small sliver of non-overlap – let’s call it ambitious laziness – and this is where some real magic happens.

When I crushed that twelfth-grade physics exam without studying, I found myself in this sliver. I’d achieved something great (well, great-ish) with minimal effort – not one more erg expended than necessary – and it gave me a total high. Chasing that high has led me back to “ambitious laziness” over and over again and my career, my life, my well-being have benefited.

The Benefits of Ambitious Laziness

To be clear, I’m not just saying that laziness, when coupled with ambition, isn’t the bad thing conventional wisdom (and religion) makes it out to be. I’m saying that the lazy flavor of ambition is better than the hard-working variety. The reason, keeping with the theme, is physics … more specifically, astrophysics. Or, in lay terms: there are only 24 hours in the day.

Ambition means doing more, impacting more, influencing more day after day. For the first two decades of our lives, we generally do that by working harder. An infant has nothing but time; they sleep away 2/3rds of it! School starts with kindergarten, still half-day in many places, most of it play. Homework doesn’t really show up until middle school, getting tougher and longer as we age. By high school, we’ve thrown in some extracurriculars, employment, social obligations. It works because our bodies naturally grow to need less sleep and because somebody else – curriculum designers, our parents, teachers, government regulators – are setting limits on our behalf. We’re not bound by the hours in a day.

Until one day, we are. Our responsibilities, our chosen undertakings have grown to the point where the rotation of the Earth becomes a problem. It happens at different points for different people; some hit it in high school, others make it well into their twenties. But regardless of when, we are faced with only four options:

• Sleep less. The first lever most people pull, high schoolers need 9+ hours of sleep, but average only 7. College students need 8 hours, but only 4% get it. It is well-documented that performance suffers under sleep deprivation, so even on a short-term basis, this may be doing more harm than good.

• Focus to the extreme. Drop hobbies, exercise, minimize family obligations. Train your attention on exactly one thing and do it to the fullest. This seems to work for some. But most aren’t cut out for such narrowness – mental health suffers, and regrets pile up.

• Sit still. Give up on your ambitions; accept that you’ve achieved as much as you can. Some might actively choose this, but it seems many more are forced into it, unable to figure out an alternative.

• Get smart. Figure out how to do more with less, what matters and what doesn’t, where you can cut corners and where you shouldn’t, what you need to do and what you can let someone else do. You can’t create more than 24 hours, but you can squeeze more out of them.

Now you can start to see the downside to being hardwired for hard-working: it draws you to the first two options (sleep less and extreme focus) with option three (sit still) the all-too-frequent outcome. But, if you’re lazy? Then, number four might well be the place you start. Laziness is a productivity motivator and a mental health protector.

An additional benefit accrues once you become a people leader, particularly in fluid industries with high talent mobility: laziness is a talent magnet. Ambitiously lazy managers seek the smartest way to do the work on behalf of their entire team. They rarely dump a pile of commands on a direct report, opting instead to focus the effort and minimize waste. Naturally, this draws in high performers who, in a virtuous cycle, make the bosses job easier, too.

Find Your Lazy

If you are built to be a hard worker, all is not lost. You, too, can find your lazy. Here’s how:

• Challenge your mindset. You are probably in the habit of rewarding yourself for your hard work, for holding your ability to work harder than others as a point of pride, for putting as much mental emphasis on what you did as what the result was. Break those habits. Reward yourself, instead, for the outcomes and for doing just the right amount of work to get to them.

• Pause and plan. Rather than just jumping into a familiar task, proceeding with the well-worn grooves you’ve established, take a minute to ask yourself two questions: (i) what is the “good enough” outcome I’m after, and (ii) what is the easiest, dumbest way to get to it?

• Make iteration your approach. Rather than going straight to a full approach, start with the easiest solution then make it better incrementally until you reach good enough. For example, if you have a 3-month project, begin with a Day 1 answer. It’s probably not very good, maybe not anything more than a wild guess, but it took almost no effort and is certainly better than nothing. Then, turn that Day 1 answer into a Week 1 answer. Define the work you can do in a week to make it materially better and focus on that. Then make it a Month 1 answer, etc. Not every task is well-suited to this approach – there are cases where iteration is less productive – but it’s fewer cases than you think.

• Do experiments. The hardest part of ambitious laziness is not being quite sure of where the “good enough” bar sits. It can be learned, but only if you give yourself opportunities to do so. Create those opportunities; choose low(er) stakes circumstances to experiment with working less. For example, a check-in with a boss you have a solid relationship with is a great opportunity to try out the simpler version of an analysis (or to omit the analysis altogether!). Worst case, you do it after the check-in and have learned something about what’s important. Best case, your boss doesn’t even ask you about it.

Embed these in your life and you, too, can reap the benefits of ambitious laziness. It will take some effort, but this is the kind of effort that is absolutely worth it.