Why I like lazy people

I like lazy people.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, especially if you run a company. We’re taught almost the opposite. Work hard. Wake up early. Stay busy. Go the extra mile. Never be lazy.

Somehow, being exhausted has become a badge of honour. If you’re answering messages at midnight, taking calls all day, working weekends and sleeping four hours a night, people assume you’re serious about your work.

I’m not convinced.

I think some of the best people I’ve worked with are lazy. Not lazy in the way we usually mean it. They don’t avoid responsibility. They don’t disappear when there’s work to do. They don’t spend their day doing nothing.

They’re lazy in a much more useful way: they hate doing unnecessary work.

And I love that.

The person who asks “why?”

Imagine someone has a task that takes 30 minutes every day. They’ve been doing it for six months. You tell them to do it again tomorrow.

Most people will simply do it. Maybe they’ll complain. Maybe they’ll get faster at it. Maybe they’ll find a shortcut. But eventually, it becomes part of their routine.

A lazy person looks at it differently. “Why am I doing this every day?” And then:

• Does this actually need to be done?
• Can it be automated?
• Can I do it once instead of every day?
• Can someone else do it?
• Can we remove this step?

That chain of questions is worth a lot. Because sometimes the best way to become more productive isn’t to get better at doing the work. It’s to eliminate the work.

I didn’t really understand that distinction when I was younger. I used to think productivity meant getting more things done. Now I think productivity is often about figuring out which things shouldn’t be done at all.

We have a strange relationship with busyness

I think we’re addicted to visible effort. We like seeing someone work.

A person sitting at a desk for eight hours feels productive. A person who spends two hours designing a system that removes ten hours of work every week can look like they’re doing nothing.

That’s the strange part. The second person may have created far more value, but their work isn’t as visible. There’s no dramatic typing. No endless Slack messages. No spreadsheet being updated for the hundredth time. No “I’m so busy” status. Just a system quietly doing what it’s supposed to do.

I think this is one reason good operations are hard to appreciate. When operations work well, nothing exciting happens. Things just move. The right person gets the right information. The task gets assigned. The reminder goes out. The report gets generated. The client gets an update. The invoice gets sent. The problem doesn’t happen, because someone already fixed the process that used to cause it.

Good operations can look boring. That’s usually a good sign.

The first time you automate something

One of my favourite moments is automating something that used to annoy me. Automation isn’t magic. What I like is that it changes the question.

Before

• How can I do this faster?

After

• Why should I be doing this at all?

That second question is a much better one.

Suppose a team spends five hours every week preparing a recurring report. You could train them to make it faster. You could build a better template. You could give it to another person. Or you could spend a few hours building a system that generates most of it automatically.

The last option doesn’t make you look productive today. But it changes every week after that. Five hours saved this week. Five hours next week. Five hours the week after. The return compounds.

That’s why I’ve started thinking about laziness differently. Sometimes laziness is just a desire to reduce repeated effort. And that’s basically the foundation of automation.

The best kind of lazy person is slightly annoying

I like people who ask annoying questions.

• Why do I have to fill this in?
• Why are there three sheets for this?
• Why do I need to send this manually?
• Why are we checking this every day?
• Why can’t the client see this themselves?
• Why are we waiting for someone to remind us?
• Why do we need a meeting for this?

These questions can be irritating, especially when you’ve done something the same way for years. But they’re useful, because every unnecessary step is a small tax on the organisation.

One unnecessary form isn’t a big deal. Neither is one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval or one manual update. But put them together across a team, across a month, across a year, and you’ve built an entire department around maintaining friction.

That’s how companies become slow. Not because everyone is incompetent, but because nobody questions the process any more.

A person is not a system

If something depends on one person remembering to do it, it probably isn’t a process yet. It’s a habit. And habits are fragile.

Someone goes on holiday. Someone gets sick. Someone gets busy. Someone forgets. Someone leaves. And suddenly the whole thing breaks. Then everyone asks, “Why didn’t they do it?”

Maybe that’s the wrong question. The better one is: “Why did the system depend on someone remembering?”

People forget. That’s normal. People make mistakes. That’s normal too. A good system accounts for that.

• If a task is important, it should have a clear owner.
• If it happens repeatedly, it should probably have a documented process.
• If it can be automated, automation should at least be considered.
• If it doesn’t create meaningful value, maybe it shouldn’t exist.

That isn’t about not trusting people. Good systems let people spend their attention on things that need judgement, creativity and actual thinking.

Don’t automate the wrong thing

There’s one important caveat. Automation isn’t automatically good. You can automate a terrible process and simply make terrible work happen faster.

That’s why I think the order matters:

1. Should we do this?start here
2. Can we simplify it?
3. Can we remove steps?
4. Can we standardise it?
5. Can we automate it?

Skip the first four and you end up with something I’ve seen many times: a 12-step process turned into a very efficient 12-step process. Congratulations. You’ve automated the bureaucracy.

The real goal isn’t automation. The goal is less unnecessary work. Automation is just one way to get there.

This is where operations gets interesting

This is a big part of why I’ve become interested in operations. I like problems where the answer isn’t simply “work harder”.

A delivery is late. Why?

Maybe the developer is slow. Or maybe the requirements weren’t clear. Maybe the client’s feedback came late. Maybe nobody owned the task. Maybe there were too many dependencies. Maybe the same information had to be entered in three places. Maybe the team couldn’t see the deadline. Maybe the process itself was broken.

The easiest answer is to blame the person closest to the problem. The more interesting answer is to understand the system.

That’s what I find fascinating. You can take an organisation that feels chaotic and slowly make it predictable. Not by making everyone work harder, but by removing friction. Clearer ownership. Better documentation. Fewer handoffs. Automated reminders. Simple dashboards. Standard processes. Better communication. Fewer unnecessary meetings.

And occasionally, deleting something completely. That last one is underrated.

“Can we delete this?”

I think this should be one of the most common questions in a company. Not “can we add another step?”, “can we create another spreadsheet?” or “can we set up another meeting?” But: “Can we delete this?”

Delete the report. Delete the approval. Delete the meeting. Delete the manual update. Delete the duplicate spreadsheet. Delete the notification nobody reads. Delete the process nobody understands any more.

Every company accumulates processes. Some were created for good reasons. Some were created because something went wrong once. Some were created because they sounded professional. And some simply survived because nobody bothered to remove them.

Over time, the organisation becomes a museum of old decisions. I think a good operator occasionally walks through that museum and starts throwing things away.

Lazy people force you to think about leverage

This is probably why I like them. A hard-working person can give you more hours. A clever system can give you more leverage. And leverage is what makes small teams powerful.

If ten people each handle ten repetitive tasks every week, that’s a lot of human effort spent maintaining the machine. Redesign the machine, and those same ten people can spend their time on harder problems.

You don’t always need more people. Sometimes you need fewer things for those people to worry about.

This matters most in small companies. You don’t have the luxury of someone whose whole job is maintaining a process that shouldn’t exist. You have to be ruthless about attention. Every hour spent on low-value work is an hour that can’t be spent on something that matters. And unlike money, you can’t get yesterday’s attention back.

So yes, I like lazy people

But not people who simply avoid work. There’s nothing admirable about leaving your responsibilities for someone else.

The kind of laziness I respect is different. It’s the person who sees repetitive work and feels slightly uncomfortable about it. The person who asks why. The person who builds the shortcut, writes the script, creates the template. The person who documents the process once so nobody has to explain it twenty times. The person who says, “Let’s not do this manually any more.” And eventually, “Actually, let’s not do this at all.”

Those people can look lazy. But they’re often doing something much more valuable. They turn repeated work into one-time work. They write down what used to live in one person’s head. Sometimes they turn a ten-hour job into a button.

I don’t think the goal of work is to prove how much of it we can tolerate. I think it’s to create something valuable while wasting as little human effort as possible.

So yes. I like lazy people. Especially the ones lazy enough to ask:

“Why are we still doing this by hand?”

Those are usually the people I want on my team.