Why being lazy is a superpower

There’s an art to doing nothing and I have spent years trying to perfect it. Some people master the violin, others train to run marathons. I have dedicated my early forties to the delicate balance of achieving maximum results with minimal effort. In fact, my entire second career as an author and coach, which started in my late thirties, was born out of a need to declutter and have and do less. I have nothing, literally, to thank for it. Choosing when to be lazy, or strategic laziness, as I call it, could unlock your best work yet, without it looking like you’re just seeking justification for a lie-in. In our fractured, preburnout or postburnout brains, we must allow ourselves to be perceived as unproductive for a while without feeling guilty about it. The concept of “strategic laziness” is all about remixing the “work smarter, not harder” line we all know but find so difficult to do. Being okay with a sprinkle of laziness and rebranding it for its benefits is the ability to recognize that not everything needs 100% of your effort all of the time. By prioritizing the right tasks, ditching the wrong tasks, and conserving energy where possible, you can optimize your time and still achieve incredible results. The best idea this year had come from my bed I recently launched a book called Relentless: The Power of Doing Less in a Workplace That Demands More. But as much as I’d love to tell you about it, I’m going to tell you about the launch event instead. It’s equally good. The event gave people permission to do nothing. It was an hour blocked out in people’s calendars with no agenda, no Zoom link, and nothing to turn up for apart from themselves. Industry leaders, professors, and people considerably more intelligent than me called it “absolute genius.” My publisher said it was the best book launch they’d ever seen. Handy. The source of that idea? My bed. A lie-in created the conditions for my brain to connect som