Productivity Is a Trap: The Hidden Power of Lazy Thinking
Hard workers repeat. Lazy thinkers invent. That’s what moves the world's progress.
There’s a myth that productivity comes from doing more.
Filling every hour.
Proving how hard you work.
But here’s what I’ve learned leading teams.
The people who work the hardest rarely innovate. The people who work smartest rarely look busy.
And the ones who change everything?
They’re the ones a little bit “lazy.”
In the good way.
I had a girl on my team years ago.
Young.
Brilliant.
A professional shortcut-hunter.
She questioned everything.
Why are we doing weekly reports manually?
Why are we copying data between three tools?
Why are we reviewing the same thing twice?
Honestly… she annoyed the entire team.
In their eyes she was doing nothing, just complaining. They called her lazy and stupid.
But she simply refused to accept work that didn’t make sense.
One day she walked over to my desk.
“I rebuilt the reporting workflow,” she said.
“I cut it from three hours to twenty minutes.”
She wasn’t bragging.
She was confused why nobody had done it sooner.
That’s when it clearly showed to everyone.
Her “laziness” wasn’t laziness.
It was intelligence in motion.
A refusal to burn energy on tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Hard workers repeat.
Lazy smart workers reinvent.
Every major innovation in history comes from a lazy person.
Someone saying: “I’m not doing it this way. It’s stupid.”
Someone who was thinking how to do this easier, faster, cheaper.
Your gut knows this.
It resists pointless labor.
Sometimes it’s just your intuition calling out inefficiency.
People call that procrastination.
I call it genius.
So today take some GUT time to be strategically lazy.
That’s how you innovate.
Yana
P.S. I host a FREE Masterclass about how to build your $5k/month online writing business (it’s free for a limited time).