Your Laziness May Be a Good Thing 🤔

Being lazy this summer may not be such a bad idea.

Hold on, hold on. Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. No, lying down on the couch and eating potato chips while watching Sunday Night Football will not improve your productivity.

When I talk about laziness in terms of productivity, I mean the mindset of accomplishing tasks in the most simple and easiest way possible without affecting the outcome.

So what is the difference?

To do or not to do.

That is the question…

What is True Laziness?

We have to be careful when distinguishing what is productive laziness and what is just lazy (aka. procrastination).

So what is true laziness?

In simple terms, it’s procrastination.

It’s when you know you have the work that needs to be done, but you don’t do it.

In other words, sitting on your comfortable couch, kicked back with a bag of popcorn and your favorite drink, and watching Netflix for the next 4 hours knowing you should be doing work.

That’s laziness.

So how do I not be truly lazy?

How to Not Be Truly Lazy

So the real truth with productive laziness is utilizing the mindset of:

I hate doing this work, it's boring. I’m gonna find an easier solution for me to complete these tasks with the same outcome.

For example, artificial intelligence helping you curate ideas for a creative project that would have taken you days or weeks to finalize.

So in simple terms, productive laziness is the act of finding other alternative solutions that will help you complete mundane and complex problems.

In order to get into this mindset, one has to actively think “outside of the box” and search for soluble solutions, without compromising the final outcome. — Dave

And this is perfectly acceptable!

In our current state of the capitalist world, not utilizing these tools and methods of thinking, will be detrimental to your work or business, especially how rapidly technology is developing.

So it’s fine that you have the urge to sigh when you see a huge workload. Think outside of the box and actively search for other effective solutions that will help you complete your tasks.

P.S., this doesn't mean you won’t be doing any work. It’s just helping you complete complex or tedious tasks faster and more efficiently.

The Benefits of Laziness

Mmm…streaming services 🤤

Better Mental Health

This is kind of a no-brainer. Less work = me happy.

But besides being more relaxed in the corporate world, productive laziness can actually boost confidence.

Think about it, if you’ve come across a huge workload that needs to be completed by 6 p.m. and it's lunchtime right now, you’ll be stressed and feel defeated.

But adjusting that mindset to be more lazily productive, finding solutions that work and help you complete the necessary tasks in a short timeframe will most definitely boost your confidence in finishing the task.

Faster Learning

Productive laziness does not only apply to make tasks and work easier, but it can also allow learning anything more practical.

Easier methods of approach are the pinnacle of productive laziness. It allows a more personal experience when it comes to learning something new.

Have you ever wondered why you sometimes could not learn anything in school let alone focus?

I’ve got an article that talks about “Psychological Tricks for Focus” if you’re interested

That is because school has not taught us a way to gather information more efficiently.

But no matter what, the best method of effective learning is to curate your own method of approach to information gathering.

That is where Productive Laziness comes in handy.

Thinking Long-Term Goals

With the tedious work being done for you, we can focus on more important things in life such as long-term goals and how we get to them.

“It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” — Epictetus

When we are in the environment of “Efficient Working,” (aka. Productive Laziness) our minds can gear towards a more critical-thinking mindset.

Critical thinking is essential in life. It’s everywhere in life actually. It’s how we read this article on a screen through this thing called the World Wide Web (what even is that?) that allows us to communicate and learn new things in the comfort of our hands anywhere we go.

“Critical thinking is not a single skill; it is a habit of mind, a habit of skepticism.” — John Dewey

Without the constant pressure of needing to complete these tasks from scratch, we allow our brains to be more fluid.

Fluid in a way that allows creative thinking, thoughts, and opinions to flow in and out without the by-product called stress.

Increase in Creativity

Less stress = More Fun = Happiness = More Prone to Creative Thinking

It’s a pretty simple equation.

Less stress from mundane or complex work with the help of Productive Laziness, will allow us to be more in this creative mindset.

For some, this creative mindset is essential in their work or life. But for the majority of others, it just decompresses us from day-to-day life.

It’s also a win-win solution.

Our creative thinking can derive into creative solutions that also symbiotically help us solve problems and complete tasks.

So overall, productive laziness once done correctly, can help a lot in our work, business, school, career, etc.

But what are the correct ways of Productive Laziness?

The Correct and Wrong Ways of Laziness

Isn’t it crazy there’s a correct way or laziness??

The Wrong Ways

Let’s get to the point. Here’s a list of the wrong ways of productive laziness:

• Watching entertaining videos when you know you have work to do.
• Scrolling through TikTok endlessly.
• Searching for solutions but not taking action.
• Overthinking too much.
• Not thinking enough.
• Doubting yourself.

The Right Ways

Now let’s list the right ways of productive laziness:

• Trying solutions out.
• Creating a personal productive guide (how YOU get things done your own efficient way).
• Knowing that you doing less work but with the same outcome as if you did more work, is not a bad thing.
• Creative solution thinking to solve problems with ease.
• Devoting your time to be more efficient and doing things that go along with your personal goals.

What if I can’t Focus?

Now what if you tried everything with productive laziness but just can’t seem to focus?

Well, lucky for you, I’ve written an article about that!

I got some Psychological Tricks to Focus Better if you seem that procrastination is not the problem, but something with the environment, the work itself, or maybe because you have ADHD. (I’ve also written an article about how ADHD can be a very productive tool to have.)

The Newsletter for Productivity & Positivity.

Thanks for taking the time in reading my article! 🫡

If you’re interested, I’ve created a Free Weekly Newsletter that talks more about staying productive and positive curated from professional studies at Harvard Medical School, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and much more. Oh, and also personal experience :)

We gather the knowledge, you get actionable examples. 📩

Stay Humble Peeps. Time is Precious. ⏰