Project Lazy Newsletter | Issue 1 | 26th September 2025
Hello everyone,
We hope you have been keeping well. You are receiving this email because you had expressed interest in staying connected to Project Lazy and to receive updates about the project. We’re excited to share some of the things we’ve been working on recently, as well as a glimpse of what’s ahead.
We hope to send out updates like this regularly, but if at any point you’d prefer not to receive them, just reply to the email with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.
✨ Recent Highlights
1. Laziness Corner at the Insights Festival
In early July, Professor Katrien Devolder hosted a Laziness Corner at the Insights Festival, organised by Oxford’s Reuben College. Visitors, students, and staff were invited to reflect on their experiences with the label ‘lazy’. The response was encouraging—many visitors shared how the experience helped them reconsider their own relationship with productivity expectations and self-judgment.
2. Keynote Lecture in Zurich – When Slowing Down Creates Value
On September 13, at the annual European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) conference in Zurich, Professor Devolder delivered a keynote lecture on the value of slowing down. The talk questioned how speed and acceleration dominate healthcare research and demonstrated how slowing down can lead to more meaningful outcomes.
The collaborative ‘whiteboard’ that we created during our June workshop was featured in this talk, with participants' insights directly shaping the argument. Their call for 'support, not blame' and 'changing systems, not individuals' became the foundation for arguing that academia needs to support ‘slow’ researchers rather than simply expect them to speed up. The talk drew significant interest from clinicians and scholars in medical ethics.
A big thank you to everyone who contributed—and to those who supported us in spirit even if you couldn’t attend.
🌱 What’s Next
We’re pleased to share that we’ve secured another grant to continue developing Project Lazy. Our next community engagement workshop will focus on creative expression and lived experiences around productivity expectations. We’ll be in touch with more details soon.
In the meantime, here’s a thought to carry with you:
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
We hope you, too, can enjoy “things in themselves” and the art of simply being.
📩 Stay Connected
We’d love to hear from you—whether it’s a quote, a book, a film, or just a thought—that resonates with the ideas behind Project Lazy.
Your voices and insights will continue to shape this work in meaningful ways!
Until next time,
The ‘Project Lazy’ Team