Not all laziness is created equal.

The good kind of lazy.

• Taking the time to figure out ways to automate repeated, tedious tasks.
• Put enough margin in your life to recover.
• Schedule space before and after meetings to think, plan, and process.
• Take a day-off. Schedule nothing. Respond to nothing.
• On said day-off, turn off work email. Use an “out of office” message — just to make it very clear that you will NOT be responding to their email.
• At the risk of sounding redundant, don’t respond.
• Delegate tasks that are urgent, but not all that important to you.
• Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.
• Think and act in terms of systems.
• Stop multi-tasking. Work on one thing at a time.

The Bad Kind of Lazy

• Cutting corners to save time (leaving someone else to spend the time you saved to fix said corners).
• Failing to take the time to read and to learn.
• To use the cliché “work smarter, not harder” as an excuse for avoiding hard work.
• Using electronic devices to pretend like you’re working.
• The soul-sucking kind of lazy that’s a result of boredom and lack of challenge.
• The other soul-sucking kind of lazy that’s a result of trying to do work that doesn’t matter (or at least doesn’t matter to you).
• Putting work off. Now, to meet deadline, you have to work all night and need your team to work all night.
• Ignoring tedious tasks, until they’re piled high. You must now spend two days doing tedious tasks.
• Not planning enough margin before vacation (or the weekend, or a day-off) to tie up all loose ends — now you get to work on vacation (or the weekend, or your day-off).

Sometimes what seems like lazy is actually difficult and important work. What appears to be strenuous work is lazy (and unnecessary). There’s a lot less stress in life when we learn to differentiate the two.

Most “bad laziness” is the result of a failure to plan.