Lazy, or just efficient?

Paul Johnson, the prolific historian who recently published a concise biography of Winston Churchill, once met the great statesman, when Churchill was old and Johnson was young. "Mr. Churchill, to what do you attribute your success?" asked Johnson. Churchill responded, "Economy of effort. Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down." I thought of this story over the weekend when in the course of a conversation with my wife I made the observation that I am lazy.

"You're not lazy!" she exclaimed, reminding me that I manage to hold onto a decent job, I help out around the house to a (generally) satisfactory degree, and I even occupy many of my leisure hours with meaningful activity. She was of course thinking of the dictionary definition of lazy: "disinclined to activity or exertion," and I suppose by that standard she is right. I am certainly no workaholic, but I am not afraid of a little exertion.

But modify the definition with a qualifier--"disinclined to unnecessary activity or exertion," and by that revised definition I am proud to consider myself lazy. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that this kind of laziness is going to come to be seen as a virtue in the 21st century, as computing power continues to increase and the information stream turns into a river that threatens to drown us all who are trying to keep up.

Laziness is not yet mainstream; busyness is still the norm, and many people aspire to appear even busier than they are; this is because of the American tendency to equate busyness with importance. Indeed, my laziness probably limits my career prospects: I work for a big company, and the politics of big companies require one to excel at certain superfluous activities: face time in meetings that decide nothing, preparing reports and analyses of data that don't directly contribute to decisions (but do contribute to a perception that one must be busy), PowerPoint presentations to other groups in the company to explain graphically how busy one has been. (It is the grown-up version of your high school History teacher who demanded a 20-page paper on the Boston Tea Party. What if I can tell the story well in 15 pages? or 12? or 10?) Parkinson's Law is alive and well: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

The lazy person fights a lonely fight against this pattern of measuring inputs, and instead shifts the focus to outputs. The question for a lazy person is not "How much work am I doing (regardless of outcome)?" but "What is the minimum amount of input I need to provide to achieve the desired outcome?" Laziness does not mean always do the minimum acceptable; it means do as little as possible to achieve the desired result, which might still be a very high standard. Churchill attributed his success to economy of effort, and yet he still accomplished more than most of us would even dream of, and to a very high standard.

But in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, laziness will deliver distinct advantages. Lazy people learn to discern the important from the merely urgent; this skill is invaluable when sorting through an email inbox that seems to refill more regularly than the miraculous jars of water that Jesus turned into wine. A lazy person is not afraid to say no to activities that don't support the goal; again, useful in work environments filled with cross-functional teams with no clear boss and no clear mandate. Finally, lazy people are efficient; they are constantly looking for a better way to do routine tasks, to free up time for more meaningful pursuits. In organizations that are trying to do more with less, this expertise can set one apart. Remember the old adage: "Want to know the best way to do something? Ask a lazy person."

Laziness involves certain challenges, however. First, one must be very thoughtful and clear about objectives. I believe much of our day-to-day busyness is merely activity that we use to avoid being honest with ourselves about what we need to or want to do. Second, if you work at a conventional company, you may have to accept a certain diminished career outlook, at least until your company recognizes the virtues of laziness for its bottom line. Unfortunately, many companies still like face time and frenetic activity, rather than actual results, as a signal of importance. And finally, you have to have a plan--what are you going to do with the time you free up by being more efficient? Are you interesting enough to have a life outside of work? Less work on any one project should mean you can work on more projects. If instead less equals less, then you have reverted to the traditional definition of laziness, and that is not a good place to be.

So join me in shedding the fear of being called lazy. Embrace economy of effort! Take back your time! Don't let the pervasive culture of busyness lead you to the trap of measuring your inputs instead of your outputs. Remember that what you do is more important than how you do it. Take Thomas Jefferson's advice to writers that the greatest skill is that of "never using two words when one will do" and apply it to all areas of your life.

Be lazy!

The Best Gift

The holidays are a fading memory now, and I'm not sure if the arctic cold that seems to have gripped the entire country will preserve those memories a little longer than normal, or freeze them out as my mind focuses instead on getting to the next warm place as soon as possible. Just in case it is the latter, I'd better get my holiday thoughts written down now.

Did you get a favorite gift this year? My friends and family were once again abundantly generous. I will be looking smart in my new clothes, and I received enough interesting books to keep me reading for months. My in laws added a touch of class to my office life with an attractive set of desk implements--including a cool desktop telescope, with which I can watch for attacking rival bankers from my sixth-floor office window. For me, it was a typical year of material blessing at Christmas.

But one of our tenets at Present Tense Living is to seek to be rich not in things, but in REM: relationships, experiences, and memories with the people in our lives. With that in mind, I must declare that my favorite gift of the year was not a thing at all: it was time. I got to spend nearly two full weeks with my family, including my brother and parents, in Phoenix. The trip was a blessing of time well spent, and not just because of the warm weather. I played in the pool with the kids; took morning jogs while the rising sun painted the desert sky; lingered over the table with my parents and brother, catching up on personal news; showed my kids the Grand Canyon for the first time, and watched them delight in throwing snowballs into the abyss; and walked with my toddler as he chased desert bunnies across the sidewalk. We had a grand time, and oh how hard it was to return to freezing Atlanta.

In short, it was two weeks of doing nothing, but it meant everything to me. There were no schedules to keep, no pressures to be productive, no rushing around to do more in less time. We were simply there, enjoying each other's company, and delighting in the gift of time. We built relationships, shared experiences, and created memories that will last long after our last Christmas gift has been consigned to the landfill.

If only we could capture a little of that feeling in regular life! The ability to set aside the quotidian cares of existence for just an evening, or a weekend day, would do wonders for our psyches, I believe. Perhaps my new year's resolution should be to pick one evening a week to do nothing, or to have no purpose, other than to spend time with my family. If we all agreed to do it, maybe we could capture a little of that holiday magic throughout the year--what an enduring gift that would be.

Would you take a year off?

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about a bewildering choice made by several elite Yale Law School graduates last year to pass on an offer to take $80,000, plus benefits, plus student loan payments, to defer for a year starting as Associates at the elite Cravath law firm in New York.

Ashby Jones, who writes the Journal's Law Blog, points out some reasons why a student might choose to go ahead and work: the offer was optional, and the full-time pay is double the deferral offer; the students have been trained to do something and they want to get on with doing it; and, the types of people who thrive at top-tier law schools value structure in their lives, so a year with no structure or externally-imposed goals would be unthinkable.

But still. To me, the opportunity to get paid for a year off, before starting a job that is sure to consume nearly every waking hour for the first several years, seems a no brainer. Even now, mid-career, the idea of a sabbatical to pursue other interests for a year or so would be a welcome opportunity. I could write more, I could travel with the kids, I could be much more active for a year in church and charity work. I wonder if I would ever want to return to an office.

What about you? Would you take the money? What would you do for a year if you didn't have to work to support yourself?

Who Are You?

"What do you do?"

This is nearly always among the first questions we are asked (or that we ask) when we meet a new acquaintance. Appearance may form our initial impression of a person, but we want to know what they do in order to assign them a lasting place in our mental hierarchy. The answer conveys important social information about the person.

It signals their probable wealth, social status, perhaps the neighborhood they are likely to live in, and we may even project what we expect their house and car to look like. If I tell you, "I'm a doctor," your mind immediately places me in a certain size house, maybe with a sports car, probably with certain other status markers. If I tell you, "I'm a delivery driver," your mind immediately draws different conclusions.

We form these little judgments and opinions not only about the people we meet, but about ourselves as well. Anyone who works for a big company, unless you are a C-level executive, probably wrestles with self-image problems about his job. This is because big companies have splintered work into such tiny pieces that it is very difficult to describe what any one job is. Thus "Chief Financial Officer" is easy to understand, but "Financial Analyst in the Resource Evaluation and Recovery Group" conveys very little information to people you meet outside your company, and leaves them fuzzy about what exactly it is that you do. They therefore have trouble fitting you into their mental hierarchy. Is that better or worse than the friend they have who is an "Assistant brand manager for card processing products"? And if others are confused about our identity, then we get confused about our identity. This explains the people you meet who answer the question with a more general, "I'm in marketing," or "I'm in banking", which at least allows you to form a more clear picture of where they rank.

The trouble with all of this is that it means we form opinions of our acquaintances on gross generalizations and summary stereotypes about only a portion of someone's life. We may summarily dismiss very worthwhile people because "he works for the government" (stereotype: he's lazy) or "she's an accountant" (she's boring). When we turn these generalizations onto ourselves, we fall into the trap of defining our entire persona based on our work. While it is true that most of us must spend more time at work than doing anything else, it should not naturally follow that therefore work is the most important thing in our lives.

I work in an industry, finance, which has undergone constant change and upheaval over the past ten years. I have seen many co-workers laid off in restructurings and reorganizations, and even was displaced once myself. In my experience, the ones who are most resilient through the process are those whose self-identity consists of much more than what they do. When they ask themselves the question, "What do you do?", the answer is "I'm a painter," or "I'm a mother," or "I'm a biker" first, after which comes a job to make money.

Who are you? Yes, your career is important, but it will come to an end some day, perhaps at a time of your choosing, or perhaps at a time you don't choose. If you let your career define you, then that day will be the end of you; not your physical death, of course, but you will be adrift in the world, unsure of who you are, like a teenager trying to figure out where to fit in. Don't let that happen to you; be an interesting person, defined by a host of activities, relationships, and interests--in addition to a career.

Try this the next time you meet someone: don't ask them what they do. Instead, ask "What did you do last weekend?" or "Where are you going for vacation this year?" If they ask you what you do, answer first with a hobby: "I play guitar, and to make money I'm a banker." The conversation that follows should be much more interesting than "So how's work?", and it will teach you to value other people, and yourself, for who they are, not where they work.

Waste Not, Want Not

It was a sad week for my extended family as we gathered in Charlotte to lay to rest my cousin Amy's husband, Mike. Only 45 years old, he died from malignant melanoma barely three years after it was first diagnosed in one of his toes. He leaves behind my cousin and their three teenage children.

In the funeral sermon, Amy's brother, Steve, recalled a prayer offered by Mike this past January after learning the cancer had spread throughout his body, and having been given 9-12 months to live. "Lord, help me not to waste my cancer." It was a selfless prayer; recognizing that he was going to be unable to escape his fate, Mike sought some useful purpose for his cancer. By all accounts he found one, using the months he had left to spend lots of time with his family, reconnect with friends near and far, and to inspire others with God's love the best he could to all he met. He did not waste his cancer.

I am impressed with Mike's attitude and inspired by the example he set. Too much of my daily life is spent wanting something: a promotion, more pay, a bigger house, a better car, a nicer TV, more time, etc. All that focus on wants makes contentment hard to come by, since I am always noticing what I don't have. Wants create more wants in a never-ending cascade of greed and envy. As Epicurus wrote: "Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with little."

But as Mike demonstrated, the key is to take what you have and do the most you can with it. Sadly, Mike didn't have nearly as many days on this earth as any of us would want; but he made the absolute most of the ones he did have, and the world is a better place for it. He did not waste his days, and in the end he did not need any more days to have had a full life. Waste not, want not.

Don't waste your life. Don't waste your job. Don't waste your spouse, your kids, your friends, your money, your time. Use what you have to live a full life, today, and every day. Be defined by what you do, not by what you want. Wants will never fully go away, but they need not control our lives. Don't take for granted, or waste, the opportunities and blessings you already have, and perhaps the wants will seem less important.

Waste not, want not.

The Return of the Sun

After seemingly weeks of interminable rain in the Atlanta area, we were blessed with a sunny day yesterday. The sight of the sun after so long brought out the poet in me, so with apologies to all serious poets, I share with you:


The Return of the Sun

It was just when I knew
the heavens would never appear blue
during the day again,
my life to be spent in the rain
getting wet, drying off, getting wet.
I was resolved to my fate
when on a cold October morn
a bright yellow orb appeared, shorn of
the cloudy halo of many days passed.
At first thinking I was deceived
by a light in the trees, I walked out
under the green canopy and found,
in the gaps between the fading leaves
and the sturdy branches, that
there was not just sight-giving light
but life-giving warmth!

As small voices squealed under the canopy
I came to know something renewed:
The heavens are blue today, and with
my smile shining and my touch warming,
I will be like the sun.

BOOK REVIEW: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

American culture has come to equate busyness with importance. If you are busy, you must be important. And, conversely, if you are not busy, then you must not be important. Since we seem to accept without question the premise that to be important is good, we therefore create a lot of busyness, and work. As a result, our identities become wrapped up in our work. Think about the last time you met someone new at a party; I'll wager the first question asked was, "So what do you do?"

Indeed, we often act as if what we do is very important to the proper functioning of the world. Memos are crafted on weekends; emails are returned late at night; phones are dialed as soon as the plane's wheels have touched the tarmac, so that we don't waste a precious minute as we do our part to advance the part of Western civilization that is dependent upon the widgets that our company produces. We behave like the sharks in the ocean, that must never stop swimming lest they die, as we rush from one "important" task to another.

Alain de Botton does a marvelous job of slowly letting the air out of our egos about our work in his thought-provoking book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. The book is based on the premise that nearly all of man's activity amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Even 10 years from now, no one will know or care whether you get the Fitzsimmons memo to your boss by this Thursday's deadline. Or as de Botton observes:

If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis.

In this view, the self-importance that imbues so much of our daily work, that leads us to choke down sandwiches at our desk while we read reports, to travel half way across the country for a one hour sales meeting with someone we don't really like, and to waste countless hours in meetings talking about decisions that need to be made rather than actually making them, is actually a sophisticated form of self-deception, of coping with the fact that we are just tiny meaningless specks in the cosmos.

I know that sounds depressing, but don't let it put you off of this book, because de Botton comes to that conclusion after what I think must have been very enjoyable field work, visiting the practitioners of ten different jobs in a wide variety of industries. Among other pursuits, he spots cargo ships with avid hobbyists; walks the path of high-voltage electricity lines with an engineer; sits with a landscape painter; attends an aerospace trade show; and traces the 52-hour voyage of a tuna steak from a swimming fish in the Indian Ocean to a dinner plate in Bristol, England, in a photo essay that alone is worth the price of the book.

Along the way, de Botton finds much to admire in the work we do. A career counselor is humanely portrayed, a sort of minister in the secular religion of career. Accountancy is shown to be an important part of the modern capitalist system, if a bit of a boring job (about what I would expect). Logistics, especially, seems to fascinate de Botton, and he very compellingly shows it to be the under-appreciated backbone of modern consumerist life. Take that tuna steak, and think about it the next time you are at the market: only fifty-two hours after it was swimming in the Indian Ocean, the tuna had been caught, taken to land, filleted, packed, flown half way around the world, and trucked to a suburban grocery store. I won't soon complain about the price of fresh fish again!

There are many such products that we take for granted--that we expect to be available whenever we want them--without ever sparing a thought for the magic of the markets that have developed to bring them to us. As de Botton observes:

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have know the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools of their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid.....We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt.

Logistics is the enabler of this change, and a result of the change is the increasing specialization of our jobs. De Botton visits the offices of United Biscuits, a company of five thousand souls engaged in the manufacture of cookies and other sweets. We have all baked cookies in our own kitchens, and so understand that there is some meaning inherent in the work of a company baking them. But when that task is subdivided and spread across five thousand people and six manufacturing sites, does it still have the same meaning? Specialization has its benefits, especially in increasing productivity, but at what cost to our personal sense of meaning and accomplishment? Again, de Botton:

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks, or farmers--people whose labors can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.....we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like "Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits".....

But just when it may seem that de Botton's melancholy observations will outweigh his admiration for the work that people do, he makes what I find to be actually an optimistic conclusion: we puff up the importance of our work precisely because we do understand, at some level, that we are insignificant in the universe, that death is our only certainty, and that through our work we can take our minds off that ultimate melancholy thought. In other words, working is life because it takes our mind off of death. De Botton:

The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.....To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break'.....maybe all of this, in the end is working wisdom.

So yes, you are important. Yes, that memo has significance. Yes, your sales calls matter. Do your best at whatever it is you do, for in the end we are all dead. Therefore, live while you are alive!