94. You’re being lazy

it’s not what you think.

When you imagine someone being lazy you think of the floating slobs out of the movie WALL-E, or staying in all day doing nothing, or eating a ton of junk food. But what if I said that was a very narrow-minded view of laziness.

Do you think, ‘I’m not lazy I do a ton of stuff’… because I do.

This is the problem.

Upon reading Tim Ferriss’ book, ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ (I highly recommend), I realised busyness is indeed a form of laziness that is arguably worse than that of those people on sofas.

When you are too busy to do anything you are actually not in control of your life.

Being busy is a form of laziness- lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

If you decide that you are going to eat ice cream and do nothing all day, we might disagree with you. But if you follow through with that (however questionable it may be) you must be commended because you didn’t get distracted from doing what you said you would. But if you are constantly busy, you are deviating from the task at hand. You are not being purposeful.

A lack of time is simply a lack of priorities.

A helpful idea to remember here is ‘Parkinson’s Law’.

Work expands to fit the allotted time for its completion.

So here you can see that with laziness you are being too kind on yourself, giving yourself too much time, and not having deadlines.

I do this all the time.

Believing I have all the time in the world and cramming work right at the last moment.

This may work but not only is bad for longevity, consistency and quality of effort- it doesn’t allow you to properly rest.

Focus is hard but enables freedom of time due to efficiency increase.

When you don’t prioritise everything gets muddled into one and the fun stuff can never truly be enjoyed because you are wary of the work and the work can never be completed well because you aren’t focused.

The solution to the issue is discernment. Understanding what truly matters in your routines, removing all the excess, and focussing in short bursts to get the work done.

Very few of us are actually productive - we think we need to add things, have better processes, or buy that fancy programme. The reality is that adding is a much smaller part of the picture. Understanding the true desires of our life and implementing the routines to enable that whilst subtracting the distraction contributing to our laziness.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says so well,

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Now, understanding what laziness is- are you able to tackle it?