Almost as depressing as waking up on a Monday morning, groggily rummaging around for the piece of shiit phone that is blaring whatever tune you thought you would elicit the least amount of bloody rage, is then having to go to the house of toil. The place where your best self is channeled into surplus value, crying on in the inside and strategising how many ‘trips to the bathroom’ you can wrangle without boss man thinking there be problems there son. But behold, it is time to chill the feck out.
Being lazy at work is the full time job for a lot of us. But, it’s time to chill the feck out. Being lazy has been found to be legitimately scientific.
Oh brethren, it gets worse doesn’t it? You’ve managed to fly under the radar, pump out just enough of the daily quota, worked marginally to the time limits sets to enhance ‘productivity’. And then, from on high, looming and insidious: THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW rears its hateful, spiteful and all seeing eye.
The landscape looked bleak for those of us who don’t subscribe to the ‘bleed it out all for the man’ mantra at work. The good news is here, not another fluffy back-alley study, but a legit, from the people of the science realm study. To justify that being lazy at work might actually fecken work.
The study has soared from the beauteous valve of an NPR piece which looked at the phenomenon of those of us that “don’t seem to do much work at work” or just chose to efficiently allocate proportions of cognitive functioning to anything but the computer screen. The usual culprits of distracted focus such as Facebook, that bathroom break again and a favourite among the clan, the staring off into space are all listed. But! By gum! Those interviewed for the study spoke of distracted times being conducive to higher levels of creativity and imagination. Busy bee keenos spoke of learning lessons from watching slower working colleagues.
We would never leave you without some hard facts that can be lightly sprinkled into the less than chipper ambiance of the performance review meeting. The new study that was published in February’s issue of Nature saw agriculture professor Eisuke Hasegawa discover that aggregate laziness in ant colonies can actually bring about a stronger group – the less than productive ants served as moral support legends to the hard-working ants that burnt out.
20- 30% of the ants in the posse set their time to grooming or just lying around, but when the crap, why it needed to be done, they got their bloody groove on – quite the approach to a workplace procrastinator.
So you dawdle along to lunch, partaking of the larks swooping and lilting in that bright sky, chat with Gertrude about the merit of chugs vs. pugs and you stare into space, rejuvenate, because if that workplace matrix is good enough for the mighty ant. It’s good enough for us.
First seen on Vice.
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