When you think of laziness, most of the connotations are bad. Hard work is a virtue in our culture. Much as we talk about work-life balance, we don’t expect people to shirk their work responsibilities—just not to overwork.
Even the concept of “quiet quitting,” in which people put in the minimum effort to fulfill their job responsibilities, is looked at with some skepticism. We’ll grant people a lazy weekend, perhaps, but not a lazy Wednesday.
Yet, if you are going to be effective at work, you need to harness the power of laziness.
In the past, I have written about the dangers of putting in too much effort on tasks. The most successful people manage what authors John Payne, Jim Bettman, and Eric Johnson called the “effort-accuracy trade-off.” That is, in general, the quality of your work gets better the more time you put in on that task. So the trick in life is to put in exactly as much effort as a given project needs to be acceptable and no more. Otherwise, you’re spending more effort on something than is needed.
That’s where laziness comes in.
If you have never done a poor job on a project because you put in too little effort, then chances are you’re spending too much time on everything, because you haven’t tested the boundary to find out whether you could have gotten away with less effort and still done acceptable work.
If you’re lucky, you have been testing these boundaries since you were a kid—dashing through some school assignments and getting bad grades so that you could learn which kinds of things required your best effort. But if you’re new to finding the efficient frontier of the effort-accuracy trade-off, there are a few things to keep in mind.
First, you need to find safe ways to be lazy. Don’t just dash off a presentation or report and see what happens. Ask knowledgeable people. Talk to your supervisor about your desire to get more efficient and ask questions about how much effort you ought to put into particular projects you’re working on rather than guessing.
Second, learn from the people around you. You probably aren’t the only one searching for the ideal way to trade off effort and accuracy. Your colleagues may also be figuring this out. Watch what they’re doing. There will be times when they do less work than you think they should and “get away with it.” Learn that. It means you’re probably working too hard. Of course, you may see them put in too little effort and get burned. Pay attention to that, too.
Third, when it doubt, aim for a B-minus. A lot of people have a tendency toward perfectionism. They don’t want to release something to their boss or to a customer or client until it is perfect. That can lead you to continue to polish projects long after you have ceased to make them noticeably better.
Tell yourself that you’re just trying to get a B (or perhaps a B-minus)—nothing that will shatter your work GPA, but something good enough to get a conversation going.
One reason why shooting for a B-minus is great is that you often put in effort perfecting aspects of a project nobody cares about but fail to consider something that a client, customer, or supervisor thinks is crucial. As a result, you have put in too much effort—and most of it was spent on elements that were not crucial.
By sending out your B-minus work, you’re getting feedback on which aspects your intended audience really cares about. Then, you can revise and fix what actually matters and turn that initial effort into an A.
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