My paper examines changes in the conceptualization of, and the debates surrounding work, leisure and laziness in the last century of the Ottoman Empire (1839-1920), when the Ottoman state’s functions were expanding and modernizing. As a part of a larger project on the emergence and development of the discourse and practice of work, I investigated how the content of these notions changed and became social and “national” issues, and how their new meanings were played out on various levels and areas of society, such as in Ottoman state reforms, in the formation of political identities, and in cultural production, particularly literature. In this paper, along with an overview of reforms targeting Ottoman governmental bureaus in Istanbul examining the state’s attempts to order and reorder the work and leisure of its employees, I mainly focus on the cultural products (such as novels, popular magazines and political periodicals) of nineteenth-century Ottoman literati and intelligentsia. The issues of laziness and the wasting of time, which bore the stigma of hindering modernization and industrialization, were targeted not only by the state to determine the parameters of a good and productive citizen but also by various political groups. The members of opposing ideological camps employed these terms both in their opposition to state policies, and in their attacks against each other’s visions of modernity. The major publications of ‘Westernists’, ‘Islamists,’ and ‘nationalists’ show that a common social enemy of these groups was the popular habits perceived to inhibit productivity and promote laziness. However, although sharing the major assumptions of a modern discourse of work, all these groups formulated a different vision of what constituted modernity. Lazy, in its implications, became a political label that these different political groups used to denigrate each others’ approach to the reforms. The Ottoman novels provided a salient setting for the new discourse on work and productivity by creating ‘super-westernized’ anti-heroes and industrious heroes. The novels opened up new fields of negotiation and cultural struggle for their different conceptualizations of what constituted modern, who ought to be labeled useless for the ‘Ottoman nation’, and who were to be regarded lazy, idle and industrious. Thus, these concepts took divergent courses that were not intended by the state reforms. Constantly resisted against, defined and redefined through multiple perspectives of the historical players of the period, the ideas on idleness, laziness and work provide us keys to understanding the specificities of Ottoman modernity.