I believe laziness in this situation should be defined as having adequate alone time to process your thoughts, rather than always being busy doing something all the time.

People whose work involves mainly analytical thinking tasks are often mistakenly perceived by public society as lazy while in fact they have always been working all this time, probably harder than most. It's only because the nature of their work is not physically visible to the naked eyes.

Quality decision can only be made after it has been given sufficient time to carefully analyze all the information and its available options. This can only be achieved successfully when people have plenty of quiet moments alone to really think about the specific problem. Those who are always busy doing something all the time rarely have this opportunity, they are always in a rush and don't have the habit to utilize the process or pattern required for analytical thinking. Just like how everything in life is a trade off, if you don't dedicate adequate time for thinking tasks, you cannot expect to formulate quality decisions.

I image that a simple test for "clever and lazy" is if you'd rather come up wit6h valid and constructive ways of or reasons for not having to do something rather than actually doing it.

Logistics. Finding the simplest and least resource-intensive way of accomplishing something. The laziest (and cheapest) and most clever person will come up with a solution that satisfies both requirements.

Additionally, a lazy person will take any chance at delegating even important tasks to subordinates. This is a good thing, because without delegation, the leader is the bottleneck. If someone else can do it, delegate. "Clever and diligent" people will try to complete the most important tasks themselves to ensure they get done right, thus creating a bottleneck.

I guess I constantly flip between diligent and lazy. That is, I consider myself lazy and love finding tricks to get the job done much faster or automate it away, but I have extreme problems with delegation. For some reason I'm pretty much incapable of asking other people to do something for me. I think it may have come from a mix of empathy and being extremely overprotective of my tinkering/thinking time as a kid. Whenever I consider asking someone for help, I feel like asking them to take the extra workload is infringing on their personal time, which is sacred.

>"Clever and diligent" people will try to complete the most important tasks themselves to ensure they get done right, thus creating a bottleneck.

This is the difference between me and my mom. She'll put off something for ages because she could theoretically do it herself, but I'll just hire someone else to do it after calculating the value of my time/opportunity cost vs hiring someone.

Recently, I got 3 tasks. I quickly redefined one task to be esentially equal to an other and one task beeing low priority. Got everything approved and found a library which could do the one remaining task. I wrote zero lines of code :P