A PINCH OF LAZINESS

Or the right sort of laziness

Hello hard workers,

Are you real hard-workers? Do you want to achieve more in your career? Think twice weather you have the right approach to do it.

You should ask yourself: what is success meaning for you and how do you measure it? Do you measure it just by the financial value (most of the people) or you consider recognition, respect and personal happiness as well? Do you strive for more because you believe you can do it, or because you are not happy with your current situation? A hard work will most probably help you achieve a lot, but will it make you happier? Will it help you achieve your personal goals?

More work or the right work?

Let us look at the right amount of work needed to achieve the goal. Where do you fit in the below scheme?

Let me guess. All of you are hardworking and intelligent. Right?

This segmentation in the graph comes from the Second World War where a brilliant German general created it to determine his officers’ duties and positions in the army. It is still valid today and widely used in the modern business.

In short:

Stupid hard workers are real troublemakers. They will make mistakes after mistakes and willingly will perform more work in a wrong direction. They will take always initiatives with no clear idea how to accomplish them. The advice is to reassign those people or to fire them.

Stupid and lazy are the people for routine duties. They will not take initiative and will perfume the tasks as they are instructed without putting too much efforts and thinking. These are the main workforce representing about 90% of the staff of an industrial organization. Today in the modern organizations they are also less and less valuable.

Smart and hardworking are the engine of the company. We all want to work with people who are both hardworking and clever. They work hard, accomplish a lot and know how to do their jobs with just few instructions. The ideal middle line managers, production managers where not a lot of decisions have to be made, but strict and more complex procedures need to be followed.

Clever and lazy. They are qualified for high leadership. These people insist on taking the time and space required to create, and to find new ways forward. They are always looking for simpler, easier ways to do things better.

So did you reconsider your position in that scheme above? Let me help you to be lazier in a smart way.

Laziness itself is not a virtue. But in right dose it can be the perfect ingredient of success. Laziness works exceptionally well when it is complemented with high intelligence and creativity. This is a combination that can make great leaders but also excellent experts. Those ‘lazy’ people place a very high value on their own time and having the freedom to think. They will not rush to execute the first attractive idea. The smart hard worker will do maybe ten times more work and lose a lot more time in order to accomplish the same task as the smart and lazy.

“Make the lazy work and he will bring innovation”

Some can be lazy and irresponsible. They will never make an effort to perform any task. Those people will ignore all the efforts and will drift with the current.

The good sort of laziness comes with feeling of responsibility and determination. To be determined to find better solution involving much less efforts.

One of the greatest Sci-Fi authors Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers) said: “Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

Some time ago, while I still worked in the sales, I was responsible for a large region of several countries for a product line. We were several regional managers for the several product lines we had. So every month we were receiving a detailed excel table from the headquarter accounting and the supply chain, with all the data from the region about sales by country and customer, orders, shortages and so on. It was a huge data base and we were losing like two days to extract the essentials, analyze the data and prepare the reports. I always had the feeling that there is something wrong in all that paperwork. I was known to be the last to deliver my data. One day I just locked in my office, opened excel and started pocking around with the idea to figure out how to optimize that process. The next day I had a fast and easy method to extract all the essential information we needed, analyzing all the data, with graphs and highlights. I was again the last but for the last time. Next month I delivered the reports in an hour where the others were wondering around with a cup of coffee delaying the paperwork with another 15 minutes. Soon all the office was using my tool.

My laziness with determination produced a tool that saved a lot of work and time but also delivered more accurate results. That’s what I am talking about.

The hard-workers (most of you probably).

You know the people don’t really judge you by the work you have done but by the results you have achieved. They may say: that guy works really hard. But they would also say: that guy performs great. We work hard in order to perform better but often the result is not what we expect.

An ex manager of mine used to tell me that I seem to not working compared to my colleagues, who were working their butts off. But he also told me once: “Unfortunately I cannot judge you as you are achieving more than the others and I don’t have any idea how, but I will prove one day that you are not productive.” This manager was from the hard workers and couldn’t bare the fact that I am working less while having better results. Soon after that conversation I left the company and found a new better job. As the results went down after I left he was fired. I found that I had become quite popular in my previous company. I got several calls from the high management to go back.

In reality I wasn’t working less. I was just avoiding doing useless work that would lead to no results. I had (and still have) some colleagues without a clue what to do, so they are engaging numerous activities with the sole idea, at least one thing to go right.

A common mistake of the hard workers is that they easily get stuck in a rut, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results that never come. Naturally they refuse doing new things as they need to stop and adapt, to lose time. Loosing time looks like a disaster for hard workers so they prefer to stick to the well-known routine tasks. Working hard, but not achieving the desired results leads to depression and often anger. Both are not factors of success.

Lacking of selectiveness is a pitfall of the hard workers and strength of the lazy.

A hardworking manager will try to dominate every project. He will put himself responsible everything. The more intelligent employees will feel undervalued by not receiving enough responsibilities and trust.

A “lazy” manager on the other side will involve everyone in the project. Everyone will feel important and contributing to the common goal.

Think about Richard Koch’s principle of 80/20. 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs. Can we determine that 20 percent in order to avoid doing the rest 80%? Maybe not but stepping back for a while and analyzing the situation may help up see the whole picture. So take your time to find the right 20% of useful work. Learn To Be Lazy!

#laziness #success #hardwork #lazyintelligent