Is laziness helpful in making people more productive? does it encourage them to seek less arduous ways of achieving the same output?
Well, certainly the opposite is not true Busyness is not a sign of high productivity. Too many people are busy but essentially unproductive – because they are either doing the wrong things or doing them in the wrong way.
Think about people like maintenance engineers – ideally we want them either doing nothing or carrying out planned maintenance – we do not want them working on breakdowns and emergencies.
So, perhaps we should encourage people to create more ‘idle time’ as a reward for improving how they carry out their own tasks