Stop Carrying Rocks: The 3-Step Lazy Assessment That Saves 10+ Hours a Week

The hardest-working person in the room is usually the most inefficient.

Early in my career, I wore “busy” like a badge of honor. 12-hour days. Hundreds of emails. Constant Slack pings. I looked productive. I was actually drowning in manual friction.

I’d get lazy because I was overwhelmed. And then I realized something: laziness is a virtue — if it forces you to build a system.

The goal isn’t to be the person who can carry the most weight. The goal is to be the person who builds the cart.

The Friday Lazy Assessment

Every Friday, I run a 15-minute exercise that consistently saves me 10+ hours the following week. I call it the Lazy Assessment. It’s three steps, and you can do the first one right now.

Step 1: The Hate List

Write down the 3 tasks you dreaded most this week. Don’t overthink it. What made you groan? What did you procrastinate on? What felt like a waste of your brain?

For most people, this list includes some combination of: invoicing, data entry, scheduling, report generation, list management, or manual follow-ups.

These aren’t just annoyances. They’re signals. Your frustration is pointing directly at the processes that need to be automated or eliminated.

Step 2: The Click Count

Pick one task from your Hate List. Do it one more time. But this time, count every click, every tab switch, every copy-paste.

If the task requires more than 20 clicks, it’s broken. Not “could be improved” — broken. Twenty clicks means there are at least 3-4 handoffs between systems that could be automated.

I did this with my own invoicing process last year. 34 clicks to generate and send a single invoice. It’s now 2 clicks: review and approve. The system does the rest.

Step 3: The Kill Rule

For each task on your Hate List, ask one question: “If I stopped doing this entirely, would we lose money?”

If the answer is no — delete the task. Stop doing it. You’d be surprised how many things we do out of habit that produce zero value.

If the answer is yes — automate it. If it drives revenue but you hate doing it, that’s the clearest possible signal that a machine should be handling the repetitive parts while you handle the judgment calls.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A cybersecurity client of ours had a 3-person team spending 12 hours a week compiling compliance reports from multiple data sources. They hated it. The Click Count was astronomical. But they couldn’t kill it — compliance is non-negotiable.

So we automated the data aggregation, formatting, and initial quality checks. The team now spends 2 hours reviewing and approving reports instead of 12 hours building them. That’s 10 hours a week back — 520 hours a year.

They didn’t need a massive digital transformation. They needed someone to look at the Hate List, count the clicks, and build the cart.

Stop Optimizing Things That Shouldn’t Exist

The biggest trap in business operations isn’t doing things slowly. It’s doing unnecessary things efficiently. Before you try to speed something up, ask whether it should exist at all.

Run the Lazy Assessment this Friday. Write your Hate List. Count the clicks. Apply the Kill Rule. You’ll find at least one task that’s either ready to die or ready to be automated.

Build the cart. Stop carrying the rocks.

Need help building the cart?

Our AI Assessment is the full version of the Lazy Assessment — a 75-minute deep dive into your operations that delivers a prioritized automation roadmap. Free, no strings attached.

Schedule a Discovery Call Here