Peter Taylor’s short book takes a deliberately provocative title and spends its hundred and fifty-odd pages defending it. His “lazy” project manager is not idle but selective — someone who has worked out which fraction of project activity actually determines the outcome and refuses to spend equivalent energy on the rest. The subtitle promises you can be twice as productive and still leave the office early, and the argument is that the two are connected rather than in tension: exhaustion is usually evidence of effort spread evenly across things of very unequal importance.
The core argument
The foundation is the Pareto principle, applied unusually literally. If roughly a fifth of what you do produces most of what matters, then the defining skill of a project manager is identifying that fifth and being comfortable letting the remainder receive proportionally less attention. Taylor’s contention is that most project managers know this in the abstract and behave as though they do not, because visible busyness is rewarded and selective effort looks like negligence.
His structural metaphor is that projects are thick at one end, thin in the middle, and thick again at the far end. The front end — scoping, stakeholder alignment, risk identification, getting the plan genuinely right — deserves disproportionate effort, because decisions made there constrain everything afterwards and are ruinously expensive to reverse. The back end — closure, handover, capturing what was learned — deserves effort because it is where value is actually realised and where organisations habitually give up early. The long middle, if the front end was done properly, should be a matter of monitoring rather than heroics. The manager who is constantly firefighting in the middle is usually paying for insufficient work at the start.
Around this Taylor arranges advice on delegation, on managing upward, on the political work of keeping sponsors engaged, and on communication as the project manager’s primary output. He is emphatic that risk management belongs in the front-loaded phase and that most project crises were foreseeable.
Key ideas
- Productive laziness. Deliberate, informed selectivity about where effort goes — presented as a discipline, not an excuse.
- Thick, thin, thick. Front-load the planning, protect the closure, and expect the middle to be comparatively quiet if the ends were done well.
- The 80/20 project. A small minority of tasks, risks and stakeholders drives the majority of the outcome; find them explicitly rather than assuming.
- Delegate properly or not at all. Handing over responsibility without authority is worse than doing it yourself; Taylor is good on this distinction.
- Communication as the job. The project manager’s real product is shared understanding, and most of it should be brief, regular and boring.
- Manage the sponsor. Upward engagement is treated as a first-class activity rather than an overhead.
Who it’s for
Best suited to someone new to project management, or to an experienced practitioner who wants a short, cheering read that reframes selective effort as a legitimate professional stance rather than a guilty secret. Taylor writes lightly, uses anecdotes and jokes throughout, and the book can be finished in an afternoon. The thick-thin-thick model is a genuinely good mental picture and has stuck with a lot of readers.
The honest assessment is that there is not much here. The central insight is one idea, and it is not a new one — the Pareto principle applied to projects, dressed in a catchy label. Experienced project managers routinely find the content obvious, and a common complaint is that the substance would fit in a long article, with the rest made up of anecdotes, filler and a fair amount of positioning for the author’s speaking and consultancy work. There are no frameworks, templates or methods of any depth; it will not substitute for a proper text on the discipline. Take it as an enjoyable perspective correction rather than an education, and it earns its short reading time.