It pays to be terminally lazy

> Some people have turned indolence into an art form where doing nothing reaps benefits

perform his best and to sacrifice everything.” Then a report flashed up on the news monitor which said that Richard Thaler, who just won the Nobel Prize for Economics, revealed the secret of his success: “Terminal laziness.”

His “default tendency of avoiding work” led him to focus only on the most intriguing puzzles, leading directly to his winning the Nobel Prize.

So there you have it. Your boss thinks you are a “work-shy waste of space suffering from terminal laziness” (the sort of phrases that used to appear in my school reports) when actually this is the secret of high achievement.

Top role model? My files have two people tied in first place, both from India.

Government engineer A.K. Verma stopped going into work in 1990, but wasn’t actually sacked for 23 years. The same thing happened to teacher Sangita Kashyap from Madhya Pradesh who was absent for 23 years of her 24-year career.

But I also have a soft spot for police officer Albert Muraglia, 53, of San Remo, Italy.

He lived in same block as the police station, so every day he would wake up, walk down to the time-clock in his underpants and check himself in to work. Then he would go back to bed.

Sometimes he was too lazy to even do that, and he sent his child, in her pajamas, to clock in for him.

Bonus lazy day tip: When your wife tells you to round up the children for dinner, just reach for the router and turn the WiFi off. The kids will appear like magic.