The Art of Productive Laziness

Guest post from Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager

What is productive laziness?

‘Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.’ Robert Heinlein (1907 – 1988)

By advocating being a ‘lazy’ manager, I do not intend to imply that we should all do absolutely nothing. I am not saying we should all sit around drinking coffee, reading a book and engaging in idle gossip whilst watching the project hours go by and the non-delivered milestones disappear over the horizon. That would obviously be plain dim and would result in an extremely short career in management – in fact probably a very short career full-stop!

Lazy does not mean stupid. I really mean that we should all adopt a more focused approach to project management and to exercise our efforts where it really matters, rather than rushing around like busy, busy bees involving ourselves in unimportant, non-critical activities that others can better address, or indeed that do not need addressing at all in some cases. Science behind the laziness: being focused.

The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that for many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. This idea has the rule-of-thumb application in many places, but is also commonly misused. For example, it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem ‘fits the 80-20 rule’ just because it fits 80% of the cases; it must be implied that this solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases.

The principle was in fact suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran and it was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of property in Italy was owned by 20% of the Italian population. The subsequent assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.

So ‘20% of clients may be responsible for 80% of sales volume.’ This can be evaluated and is likely to be about right, and can be helpful in future decision making. The Pareto Principle also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: one might guess approximately that we wear our 20% most favored clothes about 80% of the time, or perhaps we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances, and so on.

The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, can and should be used by every intelligently lazy person in their daily life. The value of the Pareto Principle for a manager is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters.

Woody Allen once said ‘80% of success is showing up’ – I’m not so sure about this however. Rather, I believe that the 20 percent produces 80 percent of your results.

So, you should identify and focus on the most crucial items with the largest potential impact throughout your working day.

About Peter Taylor

Despite his title of ‘The Lazy Project Manager,’ Peter Taylor is in fact a dynamic and commercially astute professional who has achieved notable success in project management:currently as head of a PMO at Siemens PLM Software, a global supplier of product lifecycle management solutions. He is an accomplished communicator and professional speaker with City Speakers International.

He is also the author of ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ book (Infinite Ideas 2009) – for more information see www.thelazyprojectmanager.com.