I promise there is a point to my contrarian thesis. I’m teasing out a phenomenon that is responsible for many wonderful and innovative tools of modernity.

Consider Stan

He gets the same email every Friday with a log of the week’s new customers. He has been dutifully hand-copying that info into a spreadsheet for 8 years.

He soldiers on contentedly, mechanically. It doesn’t bother him. He feels no malcontent. He is at peace and patiently persists.

Don’t be like Stan.

Meet Phyllis

Phyllis on the other hand, an equally hard worker in another department, has also been getting the same email for years.

The difference is, she has a healthy streak of what we might term “malcontented laziness.” That is to say, she sees the world as-it-is and wishes it were different.

She gets irked copying these emails line-by-line. She does it, and plods on but knows this isn’t how things should be. She’d much rather spend that time doing something else, anything else.

One day she’s had enough and spends a few hours figuring out a way to automate this mundane task.  With a clever combination of merge tags, Zapier, and a heavy doses of Googling…she succeeds! Phyllis skips merrily around her office. Her laziness and malcontentedness has just been the catalyst for redeeming dozens of hours over the next year. The world becomes a better place.

Be like Phyllis.

Efficiency means you’ve redeemed time that could be spent on something else.

Maybe it is relaxation, freeing mindshare, entertainment, building relationships – maybe it is time you can spend on the tasks that matter. It is this phenomenon that can redeem the oftentimes harmful attribute of laziness.

Now, it seems obvious that is only marginally better if Phyllis just replaced that time with cruising her Facebook feed.

The wise entrepreneur harnesses the impulse, crafts a solution, and fills the resulting time gained. They work on improving their business or themselves but the gains aren’t squandered.

Don’t be too hard on the impulse of laziness. Much like fear or anger, these negative attributes can be harnessed to do amazing and wonderful things.

Identify it and then make it work for you. Doubly ironic.

If you’re feeling some “malcontented laziness”, this is something my company,LimeCuda helps solve for businesses by leveraging the web.

We love helping businesses redeem time with better web processes, automation, and clever technology integration. I’d be happy to chat with you about your laziness.