No one wants to be known for their laziness, especially if it is the kind of laziness that results in deadlines being missed, project goals left unmet and bills not paid. However, there is a kind of laziness that is a good thing for any business. Imagine going into work and having all the tasks on your list done accurately and quickly, allowing you to leave on time – or perhaps even a little early. With a little productive laziness, you make this imagining a reality. Let’s take a look at how.
How Can Laziness Be Productive?
Think of it this way. If you want to do as little work as possible, but still want to meet all your targets and not actually get fired, then the logical thing to do is to find the easiest and quickest way to do your job so you can get all your tasks completed in as short a time as possible and without having to exert yourself too much.
However, make sure that you are thorough as well as quick – if you have to go back and double-check things, you are only making more work for yourself. Productive laziness looks like different things to different people: to a chef or cook, it can mean clearing up and wiping down as you prepare dishes, to supermarket workers it can mean filling shelves completely – right to the back – so that the task only needs to be done every couple of days rather than twice a day; and in management it can take the form of scrupulous training and artful delegation.
Why possessively cling to jobs like banking, ordering, merchandising etc, when you can train your employees in your policies and floor plans, then sit back and let them get on with it, overseeing it all benevolently with a coffee cup in your hand?
Isn’t Laziness Always Bad?
Laziness has something of a bad rap, but that is mainly because it usually comes along with incompetence, inefficiency and letting people down. If you can work out a system of laziness in which you can be as indolent as you like while still providing efficiency, competence and meeting expectations, you will find that accusations of ‘laziness’ fall away, and you will be complimented instead, for your lateral thinking, cleverness and time-and-motion excellence!
Should I Put Laziness on My CV?
Probably not in those words! But all the skills that you use in achieving your lazy ambitions (less work, less effort, same results, no need to redo anything) absolutely should be added to your CV, where they will look something like: ‘actively made changes to streamline efficiency’; ‘maintained consistently high standards of work’, and ‘thorough and careful detailing’. It is catchphrases like these that executive headhunters will be on the lookout for, and will – in many cases – actively be searching for. This is because productive laziness results in a more harmonious and less frenetic work environment – which in turn promotes employee loyalty, reducing turnover and the attendant costs.
There is no part of any business that cannot benefit from productive laziness if it is implemented and used correctly: why not sit down and work out how your least favourite tasks can be streamlined and made more efficient? You will be pleasantly surprised at how relatively easy it is to make unpleasant, time-consuming chores a little nicer to do!
