By Eri Jancaj, Senior Business Manager, LMS365
Eri Jancaj helps companies train their employees by making learning fun and easy while using the Microsoft Teams and SharePoint tools.
Being referred to as lazy has often been something to avoid, especially in the business world. However, in my personal life and professional work, I’ve found that there are hidden strengths in having a “lazy” mindset, and many of these strengths I’ve been able to pass on to clients and customers to help them achieve more in their daily lives.
I’m sure like most of you, growing up and being seen as lazy was not something that felt particularly positive. I myself carried a negative view of the word for many years, and it is a perspective shift for me to begin seeing what my more languid tendencies offered me. I found that my lazy, idle tendencies actually gave me more peace than negativity.
You see, everything in our lives is fighting for our attention: our email inbox, our never-ending tasks list, our phones and their countless notifications, our social media accounts. When these tasks get overwhelming, we tend to feel unproductive or “lazy” when we don’t have the energy to tackle them all.
But once I started to listen to my “lazy” brain encouraging me to relax, slow down, and focus on one thing at a time, I found I was able to hyper-focus on a task and do it with the least amount of effort. That is what I like to call being “lazy”; where you get the same tasks done but faster because you’re more deeply interacting with it and understanding it.
I will always hire a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
Bill Gates
As I mentioned, I have found my own slothful dispositions to be extremely helpful in my personal life. And it looks like research agrees with me; common laziness has actually been proven to:
What many people quantify as laziness is actually their brain telling them to prioritize rest and slow down from what they are doing. This type of internal motivation to reset has a host of benefits for the mental and physical energy maintenance of an individual.
When shifting to a business perspective, many people can get uncomfortable with the idea that laziness can actually be good for their professional output and performance. However, the internal drive to simplify and make things easier has been shown to:
Really, being lazy is just a shortcut to finding more ways to be efficient, something that can always be seen as a strength in the professional workspace.
Laziness acts as a forcing function to make me think more creatively. It acts as an involuntary self-imposed constraint. Constraints combined with external pressure force you to think harder.
Shuaib Mohammad
Finding ways to be more productive so that you can get your tasks done faster is what I like to refer to helping people get “lazy” by getting to the important tasks and skipping the not-so-important tasks.
In my current position at LMS365, I work with clients to find learning solutions that fit their company needs and help them automate and streamline the often-daunting management tasks that come along with training.
The ability for a Learning & Development (L&D) professional to create a course, add content, and assign the course to a group of 1000+ employees in about 365 seconds is how I, along with our learning solution, save people time so that they can focus on other important tasks.
In my own team, my lazy tendencies keep me constantly driven to find easier ways to complete tasks, and I share these discovered efficiencies with my colleagues to help them maximize their time as well.
Not only does “embracing the lazy” save time and energy, but it also leaves more space for clients and colleagues to do more of what lights them up. One of my favorite things about leaning into laziness is that it helps make room for more hobbies and passions to be discovered and explored.
With so much fighting for our attention in this rapidly progressing world, a little bit of laziness can go a long way. By taking on a new perspective of what laziness really is—an unwillingness to use extra energy on non-critical tasks—we can begin to see how these idle habits actually help us focus on what is important, and what is worth our precious energy. And when you have systems and tools that can help you streamline your work and free up your valuable time for other things, why wouldn’t you use them?
Interested in learning more about my work and how I help others turn laziness into efficiency, I welcome you to connect with me via LinkedIn.
