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 some dots and present something to the world that made people go, “Yeah, alright, that’s good.”
Not in the office. Not after my seventh back-to-back meeting. Not following 10 hours of putting slides together.
A lie-in.
That’s strategic laziness in action. And the beauty is the research backs it up entirely.
What the apparently idle already know
A 2015 study led by Todd McElroy at Florida Gulf Coast University that went viral found people who preferred deeper thinking tended to be less physically active, prompting headlines globally about lazy people being smarter.
You could say that people perceived as “lazy” frequently develop more efficient ways of completing tasks than their harder-working peers. In other words: Lazy people find the quickest way to do something so they can get back to doing nothing. Absolutely gold, when you think about it.
A 2022 study by Paul Green, assistant professor of management at the University of Texas, found that workers who took strategic breaks and allowed for genuine downtime had better problem-solving abilities and higher long-term productivity than those who worked continuously. An employee perceived as lazy can operate in a similar way, resisting low-value work by instinct. They simplify. They avoid the quicksand of overthinking and decision paralysis that busier colleagues wade through daily.
Before the researchers caught up, Henry Ford understood this well. The story goes that when a consultant questioned why in 1930 Ford paid $50,000 a year (around $900,000 in today’s money) to an employee who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk, Ford was direct: “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2 million . . . and when he had that idea, his feet were exactly where they are now.”
Remember that next time you put your feet up.
How to actually do nothing (without feeling guilty about it)
The irony is that in an era where we most need strategic laziness, everything is conspiring against it.
With AI supposedly coming for everyone’s job, return-to-office mandates gathering pace, burnout and stress levels rising and organizations increasingly obsessed with monitoring output, people are working harder than ever to prove they’re worth keeping. More emails. More visible hours. More meetings nobody actually needs. Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index called it “Productivity Paranoia,” the leadership obsession with monitoring remote workers that ironically makes everyone less productive.
When people are worried about being seen to work, they stop actually working. They attend meetings they’re not needed in. They respond to messages instantly regardless of urgency. They perform busyness instead of doing the job.
Being strategically lazy is not about avoiding that big bit of work that is genuinely important. It’s simply about choosing what’s worth your energy and letting go of the rest. Here’s what that looks like practically.
Build a genuine “do nothing” slot into your day, 15 minutes of actual nothingness. Not scrolling. Not a podcast. Not a coffee while checking Slack. According to attention restoration theory, developed by the environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, prolonged focused work depletes the brain’s directed attention system. That’s the part working overtime in meetings, solving problems, and keeping track of your mental to-do list. After a while it gets tired, and you hit the mental fatigue wall. The antidote is—shock horror—rest.
If 15 minutes sounds indulgent, try going outside, finding a clear view of the sky, and looking up. No cross-legged meditation required. Just let your gaze wander. This is what researchers call “soft fascination”—a state of relaxed, diffuse attention that allows the brain’s default mode network to activate. That’s the part linked to insight, imagination, and problem-solving. It’s also the part you’ve been suppressing since 8 a.m.
Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop trying to solve it and let your brain ruminate on something else entirely.
So, the next time you find yourself drowning in a sea of tasks, don’t be afraid to take a moment to do nothing, stare at the sky, and give your brain the break it deserves. Those little “mental vacations” might just be the secret ingredient to boosting creativity, solving problems, and feeling a whole lot less stressed.
And who knows, like me crafting a genius book launch idea from my bed, someone could ask you where you got your amazing solution from and you could legitimately say, without a smirk, the sky.
