How To Stop Being Lazy

Conquering laziness isn’t about action, but rather pre-meditated action.

👊 The Punch List:

• Americans blow $27.8 billion dollars a year by being lazy.

• 40% of people have experienced financial loss due to procrastination.

• Laziness is simply procrastination out of control.

• From new euphoric drugs, to addictive social apps, your productivity is increasingly under attack.

3 Tactics to Stop Being Lazy

Understand Your Motivations

This simply means knowing what makes you tick and why. You have to know where you get your motivation from and learn to exploit it. Most people are either extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated. Some people will die to win a competition, while others work hard to prove things to themselves. Know which one you are.

This works because when you brute force your way into doing things you end up being wildly inefficient. And you’re bound to slow down or quit. It’s like trying to swim up river. Rather you should be learning to use your unique motivations to work for you. That’s how the best do hard work for long periods of time.

Real world examples include taking up a sport to stay fit, if you’re competitive and extrinsically motivated, or keeping a weight loss journal if you’re intrinsically motivated.

Kill Your Addictions

This simply means finding the things you feel you have the least control over continuing or stopping, and cutting them out of your life completely. Addictions are anything we have seemingly limited control over but feel irrationally compelled towards. While all addictions aren’t considered “bad”, nearly all addictions make it harder to rationally decide and commit to things.

This works because addictions are often huge time suckers. It doesn’t matter if you’re addicted to smoking, porn, or over-eating, they all will drain valuable time you can use to be focused and productive. Also, choosing to do hard work or indulge in an addiction is always a losing proposition. When you remove indulgent addictions from the equation, tasks become easier to start.

Real world examples include choosing to stop scrolling through TikTok every night and instead reading, or rather than sports gambling, playing more sports.

Use Defined Actions

This simply means only choosing to work on things that have defined actions and tasks that are clear. You should always take the time to define exactly what actions you need or want to take in any given work session. Break all goals down into milestones, and those milestones into baby step tasks that can be done in a days work.

This works because defining your tasks into clear directions, makes things more approachable but also faster and easier to tackle. The majority of time on projects is wasted on figuring out what exactly needs to be done. This inherently makes people more inefficient and indirectly lazy because it prohibits real work and progress.

Real world examples include instead of “work on my book”, saying “outline the chapters of my book” or rather than “clean today” putting “sweep the hard floors”.

The over-arching message is that laziness isn’t about action at all costs. Laziness is often a problem that starts in the mind. Because even a physically unable person, that truly wants to do work, isn’t lazy. Laziness is “I can, I should, but I won’t.”. That’s a mental problem.

Take the time to assess your inactivity for the core issues. Ask yourself, “What are the roadblocks, fears, or limiting beliefs stopping you from the progress you desire?”. Then let your motivations work for you, kill all the bad addictions, and only use defined actions. That is how you strategically beat laziness from the inside out.

As WIPs, there will always be negative little voices trying to stop us from pushing forward. I almost gave in to my own little voice recently. But if we attack laziness directly like the cancerous plague it is, our progress will be infinite and impactful!

In progress,

Tim