I am Always Late

Do you know that our good-old excuses are the worst enemies on the way to self-discipline and effectiveness? We always say to ourselves “I have no time for this now”, or “It is not the time for this”, or “It is a worthless waste of time”, or “I have no money for this now”, etc. The main idea of all these excuses is doing nothing. In other words, these excuses help us to justify our laziness and inertness. It seems that there’s nothing new in what I am saying now, but give it a thought: how many times a day you use these excuses…

For example, you want to start doing exercises every day and give yourself a word to get up 30 minutes earlier in the morning and exercise. In your mind, you start picturing how your body is becoming more fit and stronger, and you are set up for positive results and new exciting changes in your life. However, when the alarm rings in the morning, you start thinking: “No, why so early? I’ll stay in the bed for just 5 more minutes, it is so warm here.. Well, I’d better exercise in the evening…” And, when you come back home in the evening after hard working day, what kind of exercise can you think about? Especially when it is your favorite show on the TV…

This goes on and on day by day. Every time you have some important problems to solve and things to do which will distract you from making important steps on the way to your goals. We repeat to ourselves that “we have no time for this now”, and in many situations, this way we avoid positive changes. Sometimes we get really used to all these bad things in our life and we are not trying to do anything to change our life for better. I know a lot of such people who go on complaining about their life, but when I offer several solutions for their problems, they just say that they do not have time for that. Therefore, they avoid the things that can change their life for better.

This way, our excuses make us give up solving our problems, that leads to personal degradation, depression, psychological disorders and so on. Our problems multiply and turn into real troubles. What to do? How to get out of this circle? You should look for power in yourself. If you really want to change something in your life, you can always do that. You will destroy your obstacles and achieve your goals no matter what. Do not think that tomorrow (the next week or the next month) you will have more time and opportunities to solve your problem. It is only one of those good-old excuses. What can hold you from making at least a little step to solving your problem right now?

Do those little steps and fight against your laziness, your apathy, uncertainty, fears and hesitations. It is always easier to postpone and procrastinate, but your problem will not be solved this way. When we are trying to solve our problems and overcome obstacles, we develop and progress. If you have a problem, you always have power and means for solving it. When you overcome the obstacle and solve your problem, you are becoming stronger and more powerful. The obstacles we overcome give us power! Remember this all the time, remember that you are a strong person and remember that there is always the way out!

We all got used to the idea that laziness in any form is always something bad and negative, something we all need to fight against and feel embarrassed to demonstrate in public. However, there are always two sides of the same story, and there are situations when laziness should not be considered something shameful or embarrassing. Nothing is good in excessive amounts, as well as a habit to work hard. In such situation, using a little bit of laziness to calm down the urges to work hard without any rest will definitely have positive effects. Another type of healthy laziness is the one, which is supported by a good motivation. Fred Gratzon discusses the issues related to a motivated laziness in his blog, My Lazy Way to Success.

In his writing, Fred talks about two types of laziness. One is  a true evil, a type of laziness, when its owner tries by all means to avoid any possible sort of work which requires making some efforts. It is a basic form of laziness and it will never result in something positive or useful. Another is a good, healthy laziness of a higher level, which can always work for the good of its owner. Fred describes it as a tendency to “skillfully avoiding work“. In other words, such laziness results in looking for the ways of accomplishing everything by making minimum efforts. Obviously, knowing how to have the things done faster, cheaper, more effectively and with minimum losses of the resources should not be considered destructive.

Laziness is not always a bad thing which ruins people’s lives and creates obstacles for becoming reach or successful. You know so well that working hard is not the only factor which leads to success. It is not less important to be educated, talented, insistent and, certainly, lucky. “If correctly utilized, laziness is a one way ticket to great success“, Fred Gratzon writes in his blog. A healthy motivated laziness can help us learn to find the shortest ways to achieveing and accompishing the tasks that must be done. Therefore, transferring your passive, apathic and depressive laziness into an energetic, alert and skillfull laziness can be a great key to a personal success!

This time, my friends, let’s look closer at the main problem of the majority of us, Her Majesty Laziness. Nowadays, there are quite a lot of various techniques and strategies to assist people in fighting against laziness. They are available online or in a specialized literature. Once upon a time, while surfing on the Internet, I came across one interesting and very easy tactic to overcome my laziness. This technique really worked for me, and the most important fact is: it actually does not require any special state of mind, excessive enthusiasm or will power, any special preparation or knowledge. The tool I want you to try is something that can be easily done even by the laziest person on earth.

However, let me begin with talking about several myths connected with our laziness. To be proper, two of the myths, which do not allow many people understand better their laziness and start their battle against it. Here we go: it is supposed that laziness is an ineradicable personal trait. This is not true, because laziness is actually a special behavioral pattern, a habit, which certainly can be changed. Another myth is connected with the definition of laziness. We usually think that “Laziness is a condition when I am not doing anything“. This is so very wrong, because when we are lazing, we can be eating, watching a TV, listening to music, talking on the phone, playing a PC game, reading books, etc. etc. All of those are actions, and real laziness is the condition, when those activities start taking 6-12 hours a day and affecting our life. Therefore, laziness means being involved in quite useless activities (to some extent) for very long time.

Now, let’s get closer to the point. The tactic we are going to test has a certain mission: in order to beat laziness we can try not doing anything. Let’s suppose that you have something urgent or important to do, but you feel lazy to do that. It’s ok. First of all, let’s apply the strategy we were talking about before, and make a plan. You should schedule your activity, so take a piece of paper and write down on it, when you are going to start doing the task and for how long you are going to be busy with it. For example, “Today from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.” or “Tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.” The most probably, when the mentioned time has come, you start feeling lazy again. What actually do you need to do to fight with it?

Ok: when the scheduled time came, give up doing what you were doing before, get up from your place and stand in the middle of the room (standing is better than sitting or laying down, I hope you understand why!). Do not do anything and just go with the flow of your thoughts, until you start feeling like you are ready to start doing the task you planned to do. Not doing anything and just standing still is quite unpleasant and hard, so it will eventually come to your mind that you need to start doing your task. So, take your time for choosing from two alternatives: the thing you need to do, or doing nothing, From my own experience, I can tell you that the longest it took me to stand and wait for the inspiration to come, was 5 minutes. Hint: do not think about how complicated and long the task can be, just think about doing the first step. It’s like pressing “Start” button on your computer: find the way to begin, and it will be easier to proceed.

You can apply the same tactic in the situation, when you start feeling lazy in the middle of doing you task or assignment. Go back to the room and stand still doing nothing for a while. Believe me, very soon you will feel like being back to your task. This technique is applicable for any sort of tasks or activities, in any situation. And it’s advantage is: there is no need in making extra efforts or persuading yourself that you need to start working on something. Moreover, do not try to control your thoughts and just go with the flow. Most probably, inspiration and motivation will come soon. Good luck!

If you are trying to get rid of your laziness and change your life, it is very important for you start to value your time. Every day we are involved in hundreds of various activities, have a lot of duties, obligations, chores, entertainment activities and other things to do, so learning what we actually spend our time for could be very effective for us to estimate, how much of time is usually spent on unimportant and useless things. Knowing this will, undoubtedly, help us to maximize our effectiveness, avoid work overload, reduce stresses and achieve better personal and professional success!

My friend Carla is a secretary assistant, she works in a huge marketing company in Northern California and spends her time mostly in the office in front of her PC, answering calls or requests, and helping the employees with their daily routine. Once she decided to change her life, the first thing she did was writing down all her regular activities and how much time was spent for every each of them. She has been keeping records of every little thing she was doing for 7 days, including even going to the rest-room, and in the end of the ends, she summarized and calculated the total time for everything done. The results were really shocking for Carla.

She found out that she was spending 3,5 hours a week looking at herself in the mirror while doing make-up, fixing her hair or just looking at her face!! Another 3 hours were spent for idle drinking coffee, consuming doughnuts and chatting with her colleagues. 15 hours were spent for surfing Internet and chatting with her online friends (not too very useless activity though, but 15 hours is too much). More than 9 hours were spent for various relaxing activities in the office (reading magazines, checking out e-mails or playing PC games). Almost 7 hours were spent in some shopping-malls and markets while doing shopping for personal entertainment. Finally, watching TV proved to take about 10 hours of her time every week. Therefore, she realized that she actually had 48 more hours a week available for more effective and useful activities! Believe it or not, this little research really changed her attitude toward her personal time.

I know that some very conservative companies ask their employees to keep records of all their activities and submit such reports later on for the consideration of the top managers. Well, I personally think that it is too much, but it is hard to deny that this simple and effective technique can help to understand that everyone needs to value our own time. It really works for many people! Try it, do a little study of the way you spend your time, and you will definitely find out something to think about. And remember that knowing how we spend our time is only a little step ahead: the most important thing is to start feeling sorry and unhappy for every minute wasted… Our time and our life is in our own hands.

1. When you need to do something that is really important, you usually try to escape from doing that by finding something else to do that is not less important. Moreover, you start truly believing that new tasks are really more topical than the one you don’t want to do. If this situation is typical for you, you have to start working on increasing your motivation and boosting your self-control.

2. Our laziness likes the words “here” and “now”. Chronic lazy people rarely think about tomorrow and about their future, they mostly live in the present and care only about today. Also, they always give promises to themselves to start a new life, to do this and that, etc. etc… But tomorrow everything repeats again and again. If you can not do anything about your laziness, I can offer you, for example, to lay a bet with someone that you can do something special, something great and newsworthy. Maybe, this trick will open new horizons for you….

3. Do you know that our laziness needs some creephole or crawlway to sneak in on you? It can not come up at any time and any place. For example, if you are hungry for two days, you laziness will not stop you from looking for a meal. Or, if you have an exam tomorrow, you will most probably feel anxious and look through some textbooks or notes. Therefore, in order to win the fight against laziness, you need to set up very ambitious goals and give your laziness no chances to find that crawlway to approach you.

4. Many specialists tend to suppose that our laziness is an acquired individual trait that depends on the way our parents educate and bring us up.  However, if you were not lucky with proper education and training in your childhood, you can open your way to changing yourself. It is difficult, but if you really want to get better and achieve more success in your life, you must do everything possible and learn to struggle against the stream of laziness.

5. Always remember that laziness is very infectious. If you join a group or a company where everybody is lazy, there is no doubt that soon you will get buried in sloth, too. Try to do everything possible to avoid such groups and never model your conduct on lazy people.

6. If you are not an irresponsible teenager anymore, but your obscene laziness still overrules you, so you mostly do what you want and not what you need to do, you must have unconscious unpleasant impulses in your mind: hidden feelings of guilt and remorse. And, whether you want this or not, there is a certain war of motifs in your mind that results in growing feeling of uncertainty, discontent or unfulfilled opportunities. Do not let this all hang out, cos’ these things can cause certain psychological problems and traumas…

Sometimes I have a feeling that I can do more than I actually do. But when I try to do more, I have to face Her Majesty Laziness. Well, everyone knows what I am talking about. I define laziness as the situation when you know what to do and how to do something, but … you do not want to do this. Certainly, everyone has own idea about laziness. Moreover, everyone has own type and symptoms of it. Some of those are typical and some are quite individual.

•    Lack of willpower is one of the most frequent syndromes that cause laziness. Sometimes, even when everything is well planned and considered, your laziness can take over you and keep you from coming to the point for days, or maybe for months and years. In such case, it is very important to take action and at least begin doing what you planned to do: it can make you get focused on your task.

•    Lack of motivation is another type of laziness. Sometimes a person is not sure, why he or she has to do something, or he/she expects someone else to do this job. It is possible to fight with this type of laziness by increasing motivation. Think about the reward you will receive for this task and consider all the pros and cons. Also, remember that if your task is not properly elaborated and considered, only motivation will not be enough for completing this task successfully.

•    For many people, laziness is an important part of their lifestyle. Let’s see how everything comes about: a guy receives a task and starts thinking over the ways to complete it in a rational way. It takes some time and efforts, so people around him start thinking that he is lazy because he is not doing anything else but thinking. Finally, under this influence the guy also starts thinking that he is lazy, so he tries to do everything possible to change himself. Usually, it goes from bad to worse. However, in the end of the ends, when the deadline arrived, our guy manages to complete the task successfully and on time.

•    Sometimes our laziness is a drive to avoid responsibility. The roots of this problem go back to our childhood, when our parents used to protect us from the necessity to accept full responsibility or take the consequences for our deeds. This is one of the most dangerous types of laziness, which, however, can be cured.

•    Unless I be mistaken, it was Sigmund Freud who argued that laziness takes source from the drive of all human beings to seek pleasure. When we do something, we take pleasure from what we are doing. When we are lazing, we also take pleasure from not doing anything.

•    Some lucky people have so called “intuitive laziness”. They know very well what they need to do, but they feel lazy to do that. Later on it turns out that it was actually not necessary to do that. This type of laziness can save your time and efforts from doing useless things, but in many situations it is quite deceptive.

•    There is one type of laziness that has no negative nature. For many people laziness works as a defense mechanism for overwork. What I am talking about is: some people work so much and simply get tired of working hard all the time. They slow down and immediately start thinking that they are lazy, start blaming themselves for that and go into depression. But all they actually needed was a rest.

•    Many lazy people used to justify their laziness by saying “Laziness Drives All Progress”. Just give it a thought: is it our usual bottomless laziness, or our desire to do something faster and without spending much of efforts? Only such “creative laziness” can drive all progress. What progress can you achieve by lying on the sofa doing nothing?