Why I want Lazy, ADHD Employees

At the start of my career I thought my managers lived at the office. They were already hard at work 8 o'clock when I arrived and long after I left. They would often stay at the office until 8 or 9 at night, which for me was a little intimidating because if they are doing that, what is expected of me? I thought “if this is what it takes to make it here I will never survive”.

Nevertheless I showed up and did my absolute best and as time went on and I started to understand the “why” behind all of my assignments and reports, it was then I began to realize something.. we did everything the hard way.

Once I understood the task I figured out how to automate some of my work and because of that I was able to take on much more than management expected. Soon they had passed off more of their work to me they were leaving at 6 or 7 o’clock (still later than they should, but an improvement). Fast forward a couple of years and I had taken over the department (not in a Napoleonic/Conquest sort of way, my direct manager left and her manager retired). My newly inherited tasks were soooo inefficient. In fact, there was one workbook done monthly that required roughly 4 hours of work to complete. I am far too lazy for that, and my attention span was gone before I started on this monotonous data entry.

So, for a period of about 2 hours I hyper focused on building a new worksheet that would allow me to drag and drop one block of data that would populate my entire spreadsheet. After a little testing and some minor tweaking I had taken a 4 hour job and turned it into a 2 minute task.

Many people want to be known as a hard worker and I get it, for generations a good work ethic was a cornerstone of good character, but working hard for the sake of working hard is just absurd. I work my eight hours and go home. By the standards of my parents’ generation, I am extremely lazy, but I get more done in those eight hours than I ever could have in 12 without constantly asking “is there an easier way to do this?”.

Sometimes there isn’t an easier way, but maybe just a better way. Or maybe there is something that isn’t being done that should? Missed opportunities are everywhere and its those people whose minds are constantly getting off track or distracted that will find them. These ADHD people, self-proclaimed or otherwise, have an amazing ability to think outside the box while doing their work. In fact, I think of them as Schrodinger’s people because, somehow they are thinking inside the box and outside of the box simultaneously.

These are the people who say “I will die if I have to sit for 4 hours and work on the same spreadsheet”, and it’s that attitude (with a good work ethic) that leads them to ask “what if I did it this way”. Not only do they say, “what if I did it this way”, but along the way they’ll ask “oh, what if we did that other thing like this?” or “I wonder if I could do this better”, or “what if Taco Bell served desert burritos with like a chocolate tortilla and some kind of ice cream inside and then instead of nacho cheese you could have hot fudge”

Okay, so maybe not all the thoughts will be helpful, but my point is it’s the “lazy” people that don’t wont to work until midnight and the “ADHD” people with nonstop creativity that make things more efficient and more innovative in the workforce.

As a manager I don’t want the “hard working” people that are going to give 110 percent. I want a team that does their absolute best to figure out how to avoid having to do all the work they have, but somehow get it done anyway and then ask for more because that is how we move forward as a business in 2023.