The famous scholar Archimedes is claimed to have said ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.’ This wasn’t just an expression of his understanding of physics, but a statement about the power of the individual to change the world. Every day we are bombarded with messages from our employers, our peers, our spouses, our parents and the media that we should be on a path of goal oriented personal advancement. We’re supposed to be useful, prosperous and busy, but what about the value of laziness?

Laziness gets a bad wrap. It’s seen as an insult, a sin, a mark of a person who has given up, but I think that it deserves more consideration before you accept the conventional wisdom. There are plenty of reasons why we should embrace laziness and some of the rewards that come with it.

The most obvious advantage to laziness is avoiding the crap that you don’t want to do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something menial, or a demand placed upon you by someone else, there are hundreds of things that we’d rather not do, but still go through with due to a feeling of obligation. When you apply a bit of laziness to these problems you end up finding one of three things. You find an easier way to deal with the problem, someone deals with it on your behalf, or it turns out that the problem simply wasn’t worth dealing with.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then procrastination and deadlines are her passive aggressive sisters. Apply enough laziness to something and eventually you reach the point where something must be done, but it’s usually then that you are at your most creative and come up with the best ways to deal with whatever you’ve been putting off. You find short cuts, improvisations, smarter and easier ways to get things done, or at the very least, a burst of energy that lets you get rid of the problem in one go rather than slaving over it.

The second possible outcome to a bout of laziness is that someone else deals with the thing you’d been ignoring. Sometimes you’ll have to organise that and outsource it, other times someone else will take it off your hands of their own volition. Either way, your laziness has given you more time to do what you wanted to do, and everything that had to get done was finished as well.

The third outcome, and one which occurs with remarkable regularity, is that if you manage to allow your laziness to ignore something that’s on your to-do list long enough you find that it didn’t really need doing. No-one comes asking for that TPS report, you realise that things aren’t worse if you allow the status quo to remain, and in the meantime you’ve been able to focus on more important stuff.

When you think about it, what so often gets labelled as laziness is actually a highly tuned ability to automatically prioritise the demands on our time. This is a skill that people spend an inordinate amount of money and time trying to learn. Of course they label it ‘productivity’, but the basic tenets are the same. It’s all about identifying what we’re willing to forego in order to achieve the things that are most important.

Too often we say yes to more things than we have the time or resources to do properly, we end up stressed and our performance suffers. Why do we do this when so often we know that we can’t possibly take on another committee, another project or another responsibility with the workload that we already have? Are we afraid of being accused of not being team players, of not being committed to our community, or, worse still, being lazy? But what do we actually end up contributing when we’ve stretched ourselves too thin?

One of the most important skills that we can learn is one of the foundations of laziness; being prepared to say no. The first step is being able to identify for yourself the things that you’re not going to do, to look at all of the things before you and decide what you’re prepared to set aside to make sure that you have enough attention to devote to the things that you feel are important. This doesn’t have to be world changing stuff, it can be as simple as ignoring office wide emails from the person who perpetually complains about the dishwasher in the lunch room and the chain of replies that inevitably follows, and using those few extra minutes to read a really good article someone recommended on twitter. The day that one of these emails contains something important you’ll hear about it anyway, meanwhile you’re less frustrated and you’ve learnt more about things that interest you.

The second step is the hard one, that’s where you say no to things that other people want you to do. You’ll probably start out saying yes to everything, because that’s what you think is expected, then you’ll either stress yourself out, or give up and let one of the three laws of laziness run its course. But eventually, as you refine your laziness, you’ll begin to see which things don’t fit in with what you want to be doing, and you’ll learn to avoid agreeing to do them in the first place.

When you manage to commit to this kind of laziness what you’ll perversely find is that you start getting more meaningful things done, and you’ll do them better and enjoy them more.

Embrace your laziness, use it to make sure that you’re doing more of what’s important to you instead of trying to fulfil someone else’s ideal, or solve someone else’s problems. While Archimedes is off moving the world, put your feet up and find something better to do, he’s going to move it anyway.

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Dave Gaukroger provides a cautionary example for others. He continues to believe in quaint ideas like social equality, personal accountability and the power of indy pop music. Dave writes regular media commentary for Crikey’s Pure Poison blog http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/ Follow Dave on twitter: @dfg77

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