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Stop Giving Your Best Attention to Busywork
by Drew Robbins
3 min read
Be Present
"Be Lazy" sounds like a joke until you realize it points to a serious work problem. Better work depends on protecting attention from meetings, pings, and reactive overload.
You know the kind of day where the important document stays open in one tab for six hours while you answer messages, sit through meetings, and clean up other people's urgency. By late afternoon, the work that actually needs judgment gets whatever is left of you. That pattern can make you feel undisciplined when the deeper problem is how the day was built.
The World Health Organization defines stress as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation.” That matters because the foggy, irritated, mentally thin feeling you carry after constant switching is real. Your energy is telling the truth about the load, the pace, and the amount of reaction your work now requires.
Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic that collaboration is taking over the workplace. You can feel that in the extra check-ins, review loops, group threads, and meetings where ten people touch a problem before anyone has time to think clearly about it. The best hours of your day disappear into coordination, then you blame yourself for struggling to do meaningful work at 4:30.
This is where my favorite phrase "Be Lazy" gets serious. It asks you to stop donating premium attention to every request that arrives with a notification sound. It asks your team to question whether every meeting needs everyone, whether every draft needs one more round, and whether speed has quietly become more important than clarity.
The phrase also gets bigger than personal productivity. If your manager rewards instant response, if your team treats open calendars as availability, or if your organization keeps layering tools on top of already crowded days, your exhaustion is not a private weakness. It is a design signal. Better work comes from fewer handoffs, cleaner decisions, and more protected time for the things only a human mind can do well.
When you take "Be Lazy" seriously, you are choosing depth over reaction. You are protecting the part of you that listens well, notices nuance, and makes better calls. That helps you. It also helps everyone who depends on your judgment.
The opposite of busy in today's world is sustained, focused attention. It is deep engagement in activities that really matter to us, or in conversations with those we care about.
— Tony Crabbe, Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much
Where is your best attention getting spent right now, and what would change for you and your team if you stopped giving it away by default?
Try This
Mark one hour this week as protected time for the work that needs your clearest thinking, and remove one meeting, chat thread, or review step that usually cuts into it.
Notice What Happens
Watch whether the quality of your thinking improves when your best energy reaches the work that actually deserves it.
Share or Reflect
Name one team habit that keeps turning good attention into reactive labor, and write down the smallest change that would reduce that friction.
Keep Going
Each week, protect one more pocket of focused time and ask one more question about whether the work around you is helping people think or only keeping them busy.
If this resonates, share with your network to help more teams treat attention like a real condition for good work.
References
Crabbe, T. (2015). Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much. Little, Brown Book Group.
