Laziness is a Virtue

As counterintuitive as it may sound, an envisioned future where you can just be 'plain lazy' can actually be a strong motivator for action in the present.

Late 2008, on a cold winter night in Seattle, I would have my headphones plugged in to listen to a conference call and I would be furiously typing on my laptop taking verbatim notes. I wasn’t supposed or told to do this. But I had a reason.

I was managing a large account at that time. The team working with customer was distributed in two different locations in India and they worked directly with the customer with not too much intercommunication. As a result, there were gaps in how we served the customer – things that could have been resolved locally in a few minutes with a phone call took a day or two. And of course, this kept me awake till late at nights (literally). I was bugged with the status quo and the lack of quiet (lazy) time I anticipated in future.

I had to change things. So I setup a weekly call with teams from both the locations dialing in and providing update on their activities, challenges, initiatives etc. This, by itself, addessed a fair bit of issues. However, I was still noticing that action items were not being taken, commitments made were forgotten, those who missed the calls lost the entire context etc. That’s the time when I decided I would take copious notes of the call, highlight the action items and share with all team members. The meeting minutes would typically go out within minutes of call being completed. There was no excuse for any team members (present or absent) to not notice the action items (I would call them out in BOLD) and to fudge ignorance of what was discussed in the call (since the minutes were almost verbatim and couldn’t be denied – if some had issues with the notes I had taken, the onus was on them to correct and sometimes they did which I gladly acknowledged).

Within few weeks, I had replaced cycle of daily calls and escalations with an hour of call once a week where I was fully attentive, alive, and active. Now I could use the lazy time available with me for whatever I wanted. I used the extra time for running and volunteering, and you can use it for whatever you deem the best. Even today, my endeavor towards the three Es (1) Energized Team Members (2) Excited Team (3) Extraordinary Plays is for the same reason…to give me lazy time ??

What can you do today to give you lazy time tomorrow?

Word of Caution: As with any leadership principles you read about in biographies/books etc., just applying them in isolation is very dangerous. Same is the case here. The intent here is not to actually be lazy but to free up your time that can better applied towards other, more meaningful activities.