Magic is true! by photographer padawan

A brief explanation

Ok, so this is the second post in my Lazy People series and I’ve a title which is a contradiction in terms, so now I have to try and make this make sense. You ready for a little linguistic magic?

Last week I established that being lazy isn’t necessarily a bad thing and that it depends how you go about it. This time I want to talk about how being lazy does not prevent you from getting stuff done. So, linguistic trick number 1 goes like this:

“Lazy people are productive” becomes “Lazy people are productive (sometimes)”

See how the way you say a sentence can totally change it’s meaning? And hey presto, we can move on to the interesting part.

Being lazy as a default starting position

Being lazy is my natural state, which means that when given a choice between action and non-action, all things being equal, I will choose non-action. So yes, I’m disinclined to exertion. However, I will take action if all things are not equal. And in life, things are rarely ever equal.

All that a default position of non-action does is require that any proposed action be justifiable. This seems like a fairly sensible way to make sure that you don’t run around doing stuff that is a waste of time. So if lazy people only take action on the critical tasks, they must be super productive!

If only life were that simple, right?

Of course, I’m over simplifying to make a point. It’s possible to carried away at a task or set of tasks and keep going long after it stopped being justifiable, and it’s quite common for our ‘justification’ to either perform certain tasks or not to be biased at best.

In order to prevent such heinous corruption of the beautiful, pure essence of laziness I have a nice, neat, simple and very difficult solution: stay aware. Be conscious of your motivations and your reasoning. A lot easier said than done, I admit, but I would happily argue that this is true whether your default position be action, or inaction.

Tower Complete by teotwawki

But any action is better than none, no?

It’s true that common advice would say that doing something is better than doing nothing. In fact, I think I wrote exactly that in an earlier post. So I guess I need to explain a little more.

Whilst it is true that to get yourself moving, to get out of a rut and to start seeing some kind of results you have to take action, there are times when purposeful non-action is the best thing to do. To wait, see what happens, see what turns up for you and how you are feeling about a situation and then, once you have a direction to head in, take action.

You could spend forever waiting but that’s where the staying aware part comes in. If you remain aware of the situation then you will be able to decide when action is right for you and be ready to take it then, not waste time, energy and money rushing around getting nowhere but neither waste away watching life from the sidelines.

It’s a tricky balance – as I think most things in life are – but the more practice you get at balancing, the better you become and the easier and more automatic it will become. It works for training your body to do pirouettes and it works for training your mind to find the point between the two extremes where you can stay in a state of flow.

Next week I’m going to let you know how to use the above information to get a lazy person to do something. Then after than how lazy people can apply this themselves to learn skills like self-discipline (and even why the hell they’d want to!)

If you want to catch these you can subscribe to my feed.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Thoughts flitting through my head
• Kill the to-do list – a nice way to get stuff done
• Self discipline for Lazy People