Are you a lazy person?
Do you struggle to get stuff done? Everyone’s been there before. Sometimes it’s just so difficult to find the motivation to get all of the things done.
Maybe you’re overworked, dealing with a medical issue, or you’re just burned out. Mustering the energy when your tank is on empty can be near impossible.
But wait a minute… did you catch what we said there? Maybe you’re overworked, dealing with a medical issue, or you’re just burned out?
You see, laziness isn’t always as clear-cut as it seems. Being or feeling lazy doesn’t make you a terrible person. It just makes you human.
But still, we need to find the motivation and path toward our success. No one else is going to do the work for us.
So, how can you stop being lazy and start making a success of your life, whatever that means for you? Well, you can start by eliminating these 15 unhelpful behaviors.
1. Spending too much time thinking and not enough time doing.
It’s good to plan the route you want to take toward success. The problem is that too much planning can be a bad thing.
Laziness may not be a lack of motivation or desire; sometimes, people just get too wrapped up in their own thoughts about the thing. They spend all their time thinking, planning, planning more, and thinking more. This is called “analysis paralysis.”
The secret to breaking through this is to stop thinking and start doing. Make your initial plan, and then start doing it.
The problem with too much planning is that it assumes you can foresee every hurdle you’re going to face. You won’t. You don’t know what you don’t know. All you can do is face those unknown obstacles when you finally run into them.
You have to be confident that you are smart and capable enough to find solutions to those problems when you do experience them. And you are.
2. Making excuses to not get the job done.
Excuses will derail your progress if you let them. You can always find a reason to not do the work.
One common way for people to procrastinate is to “wait for the time to be right.” Well, guess what? There usually isn’t a right time. You can end up waiting for years for all of the stars to align before finally doing what you know you should be, and the opportunity could be long gone.
An excuse is flimsy reasoning to not do the work.
But what about a reason? Sometimes we can’t do the work because there are additional circumstances that are preventing us from acting. That’s fair and reasonable. Sometimes it’s another person who isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes it’s that you don’t have enough information or resources to accomplish your goal.
These things are fair and valid. Instead, stop making excuses that keep you from moving forward with your duties and goals.
3. Surrounding yourself with unmotivated, negative people.
There’s a saying that goes, “You are the five people you spend the most time with.” It’s pointing to the influence that our friends and family often have on us.
People have a difficult time moving against the flow that they find themselves in. For example, suppose you surround yourself with negative people who never want to do anything or improve their situation. In that case, it’s much easier for you to shrug off your own progress and just be lazy with your friends.
However, surrounding yourself with people who have goals can help you create a support network to keep everyone on track.
Being around negative people who are content with slacking off is not the way to get things done.
4. Getting mindlessly drawn into bad habits.
Do you live in the present? What does it even mean to live in the present?
It’s not complicated. To live in the present means, you are actively choosing what you are doing in the present moment, rather than being pulled along or acting out of habit.
For example, let’s say you spend a lot of time on social media. You scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, and the next thing you know, it’s two hours later. Did you actively decide to scroll social media for two hours? Or was it something you just mindlessly did out of habit because that’s just what you’re used to doing?
That principle applies to many things. People waste hours mindlessly playing video games, binge-watching shows, scrolling social media, or just doing nothing because that’s just what they do. It may not even be bringing them pleasure, peace, or relaxation. It’s just what they do.
Don’t be pulled along by your habits. Make active choices. And that doesn’t mean that you have to completely give up these things. Just be mindful of how you spend your time. Maybe you want to play a video game for an hour and then get out and exercise. Or maybe you put a show on in the background while you clean up your living space.
Actively choose how you want to spend the precious limited time you have. You don’t get more time.
5. Not protecting your personal space.
You need to ensure there is a clear delineation between your work and your personal life. Mobile phones have made this much harder because so much of the world assumes that you should always be reachable. That is anxiety-inducing and a gross intrusion on your personal space.
Do not install work-related apps on your personal devices. Do not use your work devices for personal reasons. Do not work off the clock or take work calls off the clock. Take your vacation, personal, and sick time if you are lucky enough to have it. Maintain separation from your work.
If you must have a phone and your workplace is not providing one, go buy a burner phone from any big box retailer or one of the many convenience stores that carry them.
6. Trying to accomplish things that don’t align with your personal strengths.
Frustration is a powerful demotivator. Why waste time trying to accomplish something that you’re just not good at? Why set you heart on a goal that doesn’t really align with your personal strengths?
You can make the pursuit of your goals all that much easier by leaning hard into your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses.
For example, let’s say you want to get fit. However, you don’t know much about nutrition or eating healthy. Now, you can teach yourself plenty of that information through the internet. However, it might be easier to just see a nutritionist and have them help you develop a meal plan to learn the basics of eating healthy. Talking to a professional can save you a lot of time, money, and energy, which you can then put toward your goal.
7. Letting perfection stand in the way of completion.
Perfectionists often undermine their own success by not settling for good. Instead, they spend far more time agonizing over specific details, trying to hammer out every tiny thing until it meets their criteria of perfect.
But perfectionism isn’t always that simple. Sometimes perfectionism is an anxiety response. By focusing on perfecting the project, the person can excuse themselves from actually completing it.
After all, a completed project is something that can be picked apart, put under a microscope, and judged. A lot of people just aren’t comfortable with that. So instead, they always have a little more work to do. This one little thing needs tweaking. “If I just keep working on it! Then it will be perfect!”
The truth of the matter is that nothing is ever perfect. And even if you do produce the most perfect thing in the world, other people may not appreciate it the way you do.
For example, consider writing. A writer sits down and wants to create the perfect story. They develop the perfect story arc, execute their grammar flawlessly, edit the story down, and tweak it to be in line with their perfect vision. Then they release the thing they wrote, and their audience hates it. How can that possibly happen? It’s simple. The writer and reader are two different people with two different sets of expectations.
A writer can create a technical masterpiece. It can be a slogging bore of a chore to bother reading for anyone who isn’t into technical masterpieces.
Life is no different. Your perfect may mean nothing to anyone else because they just aren’t that interested in your perfect.
8. Relying solely on willpower to get things done.
Willpower is powerful tool that can help you push through the bad times. However, it’s not a good idea to solely rely on willpower to make the bigger goals happen. Willpower can wax and wane. You may be fired up and all ready to take on the world today; but tomorrow you may find yourself exhausted and unable to do the work.
That’s okay.
That’s your brain telling you that it’s time to take a break. You don’t have to have an iron will to get things done and accomplish your goals.
9. Letting fear of failure stop you from trying.
Are you afraid of failure? Many people are. They aren’t actually lazy; they are just afraid of being made to look foolish or of not succeeding, so they don’t even try.
But, here’s the secret. Successful people fail all the time. They succeed because they don’t necessarily look at failure as the end. It doesn’t have to be. It’s okay if something doesn’t work out. But, what are you going to do with that information? Are you going to throw in the towel and say, “Alright, I failed. I give up!”
Or, are you going to take that failure as a lesson in what doesn’t work and pivot to another approach? A failure doesn’t have to be an end if you don’t want it to be. Sometimes a failure is just an obstacle putting you in a better direction for success.
Failure isn’t a dirty word. But, of course, that isn’t going to stop negative people from treating it like one. Ignore those people. Why do you care what people who don’t support you think? They are irrelevant.
10. Setting vague, non-specific goals.
Goals are a fantastic way to build motivation, but only goals that you can actually measure and achieve. Vague, unmeasurable goals have the opposite effect and make you more likely to fail, or give up.
For example, let’s say you want to lose some weight. “Losing weight” is a non-specific goal that is hard to set a successful condition to. A measurable, achievable goal will be a smaller goal that will bring you closer to the ultimate goal of losing more weight. It would be more like: “I’m going to lose weight by not consuming more than 1800 calories per day for the next 30 days.”
That’s a specific goal that provides an actionable way to attain the overall goal. It’s much easier to find motivation and get the job done when you have a specific plan to reach success.
11. Ignoring the importance of the small things.
People often forget about the small things because they’re so focused on the big dream, the end goal.
But the interesting thing about the small things in life is that all of the bigger things are just a composition of that small thing. For example, many smaller moving pieces go into earning a degree. You have to apply for the school, maybe relocate, attend and pass classes, study, do projects, and much more.
Small things can help provide you with motivation when you’re feeling blasé about your life. Accomplishing smaller goals (usually) activates the brain’s reward circuits, providing dopamine and endorphin boosts as a reward for doing well. Use that to get yourself moving toward the things that you want to accomplish.
12. Letting yourself get overwhelmed because of poor time management techniques.
Many people don’t do well when they have a massive project hanging over their head that is absolutely going to need several hours to complete, but man, where do you start? If you’re not using an effective time management technique then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Managing your time helps to break the day up, keeping your mind fresh and motivated. You don’t want to spend all day staring at a computer screen, burning through the hours just to try to get this thing done. That just leaves you exhausted and spent at the end of the day.
So instead, create space within your day to work and not work. Create habits and routines that will give your brain downtime when you need to rest.
13. Rewarding yourself for completing tasks with counterproductive things.
“I’ve been sober for 30 days! I’ll drink to that!”
“I haven’t smoked for 2 weeks! I deserve just one cigarette!”
“I’ve done an hour’s work, I’m going to reward myself by logging off and watching Netflix!
It sounds ridiculous, but people do it all the time. Unfortunately, it’s not helpful and can cause you to fall back into unhealthier habits.
14. Thinking resting is the same as being lazy.
Stress plays a negative role in our ability to function as people. Of course, a little stress isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes it’s good to have the disruption. But regular, consistent, long-term stress can have a starkly negative impact on your mental and physical health.
By the time you actually get around to resting, you no longer have the time or the energy to keep up with the stress you’re experiencing.
Taking the time out that you need to make sure you don’t become overworked, overwhelmed, and burned out is not lazy. It’s sensible.
15. Being inefficient with your time because of poor planning and scheduling.
Sometimes a lack of productivity can come from poor planning. It’s hard to get everything you need done if you are constantly chasing around responsibilities and putting out fires.
It’s much easier to meet your goals when you have time set aside to address them. It means you don’t have to deal with the start and stop nature of general work.
Email is one major time and productivity thief. For example, let’s say that you’re working on a project. An email lands in your inbox, so you have to stop your work, shift your focus to the email, answer the email, and then get back into the project you were working on. That can easily turn into 5 or 10 minutes of inefficiency per email. Now, if you work in a job where you are getting 10 emails a day, that’s a whole lot of lost productivity and wasted time.
One way to manage that communication style is to pick a set time (or times) in the day to check your mail. Do it in the morning, at lunch, and/or before you go home. That way, you can spend the rest of your time focusing on your actual work.
Finally…
Laziness is a complicated subject. It’s rarely as simple as the shameful thing that it’s meant to be. For most people, laziness is actually just being tired or needing lifestyle changes. An inability to get things done may point to a medical condition that features fatigue or tiredness for other people. Many mental health conditions can cause exhaustion to a point where the person struggles to function consistently.
If you are affected by chronic laziness and can’t seem to put a finger on why, consult with medical professionals. It may not be as simple as, “I just need to get back to work.”
Be kind to yourself and to others. People don’t generally want to do a bad job or miss out on opportunities. Laziness is not something that most people choose.
