The Art of Being Lazy
My team is hiring two Senior AI PMs. I posted on Xiaohongshu (小红书).
It did well — 243 likes, 250 saves, 66 comments. Within two days, 22 resume emails landed in my inbox.
That’s when I realized: sorting resumes is soul-crushing work.
Open each email. Download the attachment. Some are PDFs. Some are .doc files. One is a JPG screenshot. One came as a QQ file-sharing link that expires. Another was a NetEase cloud attachment that didn’t open the first time. One person sent theirs three times before the attachment actually went through. Then you open every single one, extract key info, and compile it into a format your hiring manager can quickly scan.
22 of them. Half a day, gone — if I do it by hand.
I didn’t want to do it.
Laziness is underrated
I think the word “laziness” is severely underestimated in AI conversations.
People talk about AI transformation in grand terms — “reimagining workflows,” “organizational enablement,” “digital transformation.” But the real force that makes someone actually use AI to change how they work? One word: lazy.
This is annoying → I don’t want to do it → Can AI do it? → Oh, it can → Done.
That loop ran multiple times this afternoon. And each time, it went a little further.
From “sort these for me” to a live website
It started with a single sentence to my AI agent: “Scan my emails and organize the resumes from the past two days.”
It connected to my Outlook, searched with multiple keywords, found all resume emails with attachments. Then it read every resume — five were scanned PDFs it couldn’t parse, so it installed OCR tools on its own and extracted them anyway. The output: a clean HTML report, 22 candidates, grouped by target role, one card per person.
That was already enough. But then I got lazy again: “Instead of sending a file to the hiring manager, can we just put it online?”
So it built a password-protected website, deployed it to Cloudflare, set up server-side authentication, and blocked all search engine crawlers.
Then I got lazy one more time: “More resumes will come in later. Can I refresh this with one click?”
So it wrote a refresh script and packaged it as a reusable skill. Now I just say “refresh resumes” and it scans my inbox, detects new files, OCRs them, updates the report, and deploys — all automatic.
See the pattern? Each step happened because I was lazy. And each step made the next time even lazier. That’s the virtuous cycle of automated laziness.
Smart laziness
Looking back, my total “manual effort” this afternoon was two things:
- Download email attachments to a folder (the API can’t do this yet)
- Type one deploy command in the terminal
Everything else — reading emails, parsing resumes, OCR-ing scanned documents, writing HTML, building a website, configuring security, fixing bugs, deploying — the agent did it all.
This is the art of being lazy: not doing less, but not doing what shouldn’t be yours to do. You handle judgment and decisions. AI handles execution.
Every “I don’t want to do this” thought is an AI transformation waiting to happen.