How to Stop Being Lazy – An Effective Way to Fight Laziness
There is hardly a person on the planet who doesn’t have a goal. Yes, it’s absolutely true. Whether or not he puts an effort into realizing his life goal, is another story. But you wouldn’t ever find someone who doesn’t want to something big, something adventurous, something exciting about his life. Someone who is content with a painfully mediocre life is practically a myth. But getting off your leather couch and devising an implementable strategy to achieve your life goal, that’s what creates all the difference between the successful and the ordinary people.
It is understandable that putting your blood and sweat into being motivated, passionate, and active in terms of achieving your life goals isn’t always an easy task. After all, who doesn’t want to just sit around through the whole day watching their favorite show on Netflix with a hot or cold beverage depending on the personal preferences? Think about it, if you could just quit your job and spend the rest of your life in the Maldives with an amazing view and a calm, peaceful, and non-tiresome life, would you want to avail that?
But here’s the thing, life doesn’t work that way. For the most part, there are only two options before you. Either, you have to divorce your laziness and a long-held habit of procrastination to actively work towards your ambitions, or you can kick back and be content with a mediocre or even meaningless life. If you identify yourself as someone from the former category and you have decided that it is time for you to unlock your true potential and get over laziness once and for all, then you have landed on the right page.
Getting over laziness and procrastination is a game of psychology. The answer, therefore, lies in an in-depth study of psychology as well. Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to go through the books by yourself. We’ve done it for you and have extracted the top 5 strategies which can fix the issues of excessive laziness and procrastination for you in hopes of putting you on the right track to achieving your goals. Being a victim yourself, you already know what laziness is and how has it been ruining your life lately. So let’s not waste any more time and dive straight into the tips that can help you climb out of the laziness trap and be motivated and inspired to achieve your life goals.
Give Yourself A Shorter Target
To understand why this tip is going to work like a charm if you are looking forward to overcoming laziness and procrastination, you have to focus on what is it that is making you lazy, in the first place. More often than not, the amount of time that you know a particular task is going to take is a turn down for the majority of us that prevents us from even beginning. Say, for example, you have to write a report that you know is going to take a few hours for sure. The anticipation and intimidation of working on it for hours is what is stopping you from getting it over with.
Therefore, giving yourself a shorter target is like tricking your brain into believing that it won’t take a lot of your time. Believe it or not, your brain is just that innocent to fall in the trap that you lay for it. What’s important to realize is that you only have to trick yourself into starting. Once you are in the flow, you would easily be able to get the report done without being excessively lazy. In order to do so, you can tell yourself that you will only work for around fifteen minutes on the task. Put an alarm for fifteen minutes and give yourself the challenge to focus on the task for fifteen minutes straight without any kind of distraction to see how much you would be able to get done in these fifteen minutes.
As mentioned earlier, once you start, it’ll be that much easier for you to continue working even after those fifteen minutes. Even if the motivation still fails to find you, you got something done for sure. Now you can give yourself a new target of the next fifteen minutes with a challenge of beating the amount of work that you did in the previous fifteen minutes. It’s more like turning it into a “gamified” experience for yourself where you are playing against your personal best score while each of the next fifteen minutes intervals gets harder than the previous one.
Start With The Simpler, More Interesting Tasks
As mentioned earlier, getting over laziness and procrastination is a matter of pulling yourself out of the vicious cycle and just starting with a task at hand. Once you can convince yourself to at least start, you will eventually be able to get the flow which will lend you a hand in getting your tasks done in a timely fashion. In order to accomplish that, psychology tells us that it is a commendable idea to always[restrict] keep the easiest and the most interesting task for each morning of the day. This will ensure motivation and inspiration, to begin with, your daily tasks in the morning. Once you are working on a simpler and interesting task, you already get the flow of working and will find it easier to continue with the rest of the daily tasks without excessive laziness or unnecessary procrastination.
Again, as you can see, it’s all a game of mind. If it knows that there is a difficult task at hand, it will likely to trick you into being lazy and procrastinate as much as you can. On the other hand, if you can trick it into starting with a simpler task, you can prepare it better to tackle the difficult ones in a timely fashion as well. In other words, your morning routine has a lot more to do with your performance for the rest of the day than you would think. If you start your day with motivation and energy, your performance throughout the day will send out a vibe of creativity and productivity as well.
Physical Exercise Can Surely Get You Going
If you think about it, the whole idea of laziness is premised on being lethargic with no mental or physical energy to be productive and get the tasks done for the day. If so, then there is a clear implication that if you are able to let go of feeling sleepy and tired, and make yourself energetic again, you would be able to get over laziness and procrastination with ease. Now, be honest and answer this, what is the first idea that comes to mind when you think of being energetic and active? For most of you, the answer would certainly have been physical activity.
Yes, you are absolutely right in thinking so. Physical activity has a myriad of benefits to offer in terms of your physical as well as mental health, a part of which is an enhanced capacity to overcome laziness. Physical activity like cardiovascular exercises or lifting weights in a gym enables you to get the blood pumping that starts to make you feel alive and optimize your energy and transforms your overall vibe into active and motivated. Keeping a slot open for physical activity in the morning to start your day with can help a great deal for you to feel fresh and energetic throughout the day.
What’s more, is that physical excursion has a way of stimulating the happy hormones which are known to restore your mood. This is also beneficial in fighting laziness and procrastination since you would no longer have to be grumpy about having to handle the daily tasks regardless of how difficult or complicated they might be. With a better mood on your side, you are all set to be creative and productive for the rest of the day.
A Change In Environment Could Just Be It
Did you know that your work environment has a lot to do with the kind of energy you will have to accomplish your daily tasks? Why do you think there are people who reserve a table in a peaceful café to work on the laptops? It’s no longer a rare sight to find someone with a computer in a park, closer to nature either, right? No, it’s not because they are overly reliant on the technology and are wasting their time on their computer systems scrolling Facebook or Instagram instead of appreciating the beauty of nature all around them. It’s primarily because they have discovered how being closer to nature can offer a remarkably better work environment that doesn’t only enhance their efficiency, but the overall energy to get things done as well. Try this experiment. Make a keen observation of someone who is working on a silent corner of a peaceful café or under the tree in a park. For sure, you would be able to appreciate their focus, attention, and the passion with which they work on their task at hand.
If the current environment is no longer working for you and it is getting harder for you to fight laziness and procrastination lately, it might as well be the time for you to try something different like working in an entirely different environment. You’d be amazed to see the kind of difference that your environment can create in an attempt to find your creativity and productivity back and making laziness disappear out of your mind and body for good.
Make It A Social Activity
Remember that for a lot of us, a major reason why we end up being a victim of laziness and procrastination is that we don’t have anyone else to accompany us in an activity. Man is a social animal and therefore, socialism can play a remarkable role in finding you a solution to get over your laziness.
Let’s consider it with an example. Imagine that you have been meaning to join a gym and start working out for a few months. But you just can’t help being lazy and procrastinate it to the next day all the time. You’re consistently telling yourself that you’ll go tomorrow, but tomorrow never seems to come. A simple solution for such laziness and unnecessary procrastination is to turn it into a social activity. Ask your friend or perhaps a colleague to accompany you to the gym. This has an added benefit of always having someone to push you towards your goals every time you find it hard to get up the couch and go to the gym. The majority of us are fine with letting ourselves down. But the idea that we’ll be letting another person down if we didn’t find the energy to go the gym has a greater potential to make us cringe and keep us motivated to be consistent.
Simply put, if you have a partner in crime, the chances of laziness disabling you from getting the task done are reduced to several folds.
Final Note
As you can see, getting over laziness and procrastination isn’t as hard as some of us would think. It’s just that we start to take it for granted and think of it as a part of us rather than an anomaly that needs to be fixed. Now that you have decided that you have to put an effort into fighting the battle against laziness, and we have put the weapons and ammunition in the form of these evidence-based strategies to overcome it, you are all set to unlock your true potential and divorce laziness and procrastination for good. Remember, you don’t even have to employ all of the aforementioned strategies at once. Start with a smaller target. Employ one of the strategies first, then move on to the second once the first one has become a habit, then the next, and so on and so forth until you can entitle yourself as a young, energetic individual.[/restrict]
