Lara Meade

Successful slacker sounds like a contradiction, but I see this everyday. We all havea slacker coworker who shows up a little late every day, fills out paperwork incorrectly, and is constantly asking you to cover for her. But all of your supervisors say great things about her, she seems to get the most interesting projects, and drives a better car. We hate her and want to see her fail, and,admittedly, a little bit jealous of her. Let’s call her Shmelanie (no particular reason). This week I started paying closer attention to my slacker coworker to see what it was about her that made her so successful.

Shmelanie is a newish administrative assistant to an executive producer in our company. Though she’s always late, she comes in before her boss, so she never gets in trouble for it. Her expense reports are either late or incomplete, but the only one who really ever notices is our accountant. When she asks her coworkers to help her out, she’s delegating menial tasks. Shmelanie has learned what’s important to her boss and our supervisors and excels at those things, and lets the filler fall by the wayside.

Her boss needs her calendar to be perfect and values her ability to coordinate and organize events, and Shmelanie knocks it out of the park at all of those things. She double checks her boss’ calendar, and, to my knowledge, has never made a mistake or double-booked anything yet. When her boss was visibly stressed out because her daily calendar was jammed, Shmelanie made it clear that she wanted to start spacing out meetings, and have at least one day a week that was light. Her boss thought she was a f-ing genius for that suggestion.She coordinates wonderful dinner parties and networking events-which brought her to the attention of all of our supervisors.

What I’m trying to say is she has flawless time management skills and pays attention. Shmelanie prioritizes the projects that our supervisors find valuable and will notice. She gives less precedence to silly things like accounting reports and punctuality-things very few people will even note.If Shmelanie’s boss valued punctuality, I have not doubt she would be in at 845am. If her boss found the expense reports to be the end-all, they would be immaculate.

I’m a perfectionist, so I try to do everything impeccably. Because of my obsessive personality, I spin my wheels on things that don’t matter. Successful slackers have learned a valuable lesson: work smarter not harder.