How often do you think of yourself as being lazy? Is it only in the early hours of the morning, when you can’t bring yourself to get up right away and snooze your alarm a couple of times? Or is it every time that you fail to meet a deadline, or only just barely make it and promise yourself next time you’ll start sooner only to do the same mistake again?
Let’s be honest, everyone feels lazy once in a while, it’s only human. You can’t be super productive all the time. But if it’s not an occasional thing for you, but instead a constant struggle that’s impacting your life and wellbeing – here’s a couple of things you can try to do to stop being lazy.
1. Find The Root Of The Problem
There’s a reason for everything. Maybe you’re being lazy and procrastinating because you’re burned out and overworked and literally don’t have the energy. Then you really need to take a day or two off or just take a vacation and try to relax. We’re not made to work all the time. Or maybe you’re being lazy because you don’t actually want to do whatever it is you think you should do.
2. Make A Pro And Con List
To really be motivated one has to figure out for sure if they actually need to do something and what benefits they will reap from doing it. A pro and con list usually helps out a lot. If the benefits outweigh the cons – put that list on some visible surface in your home and it’ll motivate you to do whatever needs to be done.
3. Be Realistic With Your Time
Everyone likes to think they can do a lot in a short span of time, but the truth is we all tend to overestimate the amount that we can get done in a day. And severely underestimate how much time each task will take. So try to time yourself doing things so you know how much time exactly what takes and can plan your day accordingly in the future. Make sure to include realistic breaks too, there’s no way you can work for hours, take a 15 minute break and be back to work.
4. Start With Baby Steps
Often the most difficult thing to do is to start doing something. For example if you want to start running, going out for a long run might be daunting so you never go. But if you start small it’ll be easier. For example go running for just 5 minutes if your goal is to start running. With time you can increase that and before you’ll know it you’ll be running half marathons.
5. Break Up Your Goals
Having high standards and big goals is admirable, but again, it can be quite intimidating. For example if you want to write a book – you can’t just set the goal to “write a book”. It’s best to break it down to “write a page every day”. And then you’ll have a book in a year.
6. Prioritize Morning Tasks
If there’s something you absolutely need to get done by the end of the day – do a small art of it in the morning. Don’t put it off until evening or think that you can do it all in one go at lunch. Just do a bit of it in the morning and you’ll be way more motivated to finish it.
7. Cycle Short Bursts Of Work With Rest
For some of us it’s hard to stay focused for long periods of time. Doing a full hour of work without a distraction can be really difficult. So try switching things up. Plan to do 20 minutes of solid work and then take a 10 minute break. Then back to work. This way you’ll work 40 minutes out of an hour but it won’t feel like that long.
8. Remove Distractions
If we’re talking about work on a laptop – block social media while you work. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb mode and leave it charging in a different room. These things will really allow you to focus on the task at hand.
