I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most motivated or disciplined person. I don’t think I’m an unusual in saying that my motivation tends to come in fits and spurts, in waves or seasons of high and low energy. I always used to find this cycle discouraging – each period of high motivation felt like I was turning over a new leaf and becoming a disciplined person, and as my motivation flagged, I had to dejectedly realize that I’m actually just a bad, lazy person!
I think all of us are familiar with this cycle, whether it’s over the course of a day, a week, a month or a year. Most of us have New Years resolutions we optimistically set in January, only to have flagged on by March – some of us don’t even bother setting them anymore, after a few too many ‘failures’. But really, it’s worth noting that a lot of New Years goals are poorly planned, based on unrealistic expectations of how far motivation will carry us – which isn’t very far. Discipline has to carry us the rest of the way, a top-down control which some of us certainly have in greater amounts than others. I put myself in the latter camp – I’m certainly not naturally self-disciplined, and even when I try to diligently practice discipline, I’m very far from perfect. Never far from my ideal self is my degenerate little goblin-self, the one who wants to do nothing but drink beer, play video games, and sleep in.
The first important insight, however, is that there are options for people like us, those who may lack some of the efficacy to keep up the grind day in, day out – as admirable as that quality is. By recognizing the reality that for most of us our motivation comes in waves, with highs and lows, we can be strategic about how we make use of these seasons of our life. There is some good evidence that indicates that our dopamine system – the neurochemical responsible for motivation – tends to behave something like a wave pool, with highs often coming with corresponding lows. In fact, many people are even prone to feelings of depression after strong dopamine highs (such as graduations, project completions, having a child, etc) while our system reasserts equilibrium. We can also think of motivation like a fire – sometimes the fuel is stacked high and the fire is blazing hot, but as we all know, it can’t stay that way for long, and you really should be careful if you want to cook a meal over that inferno anyway. Manic motivation can sometimes lead to us putting far too much effort into something that will yield a bad return – I’m sure we all know somebody who jumps madly from project to project, or devotes hours of effort to work that could have been done far more effectively with a little planning. Some of the best use for a good fire is keeping some nice hot coals burning away at all times – so let’s talk about having coals on the fire.
Making plans
“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.” – Abraham Lincoln
Okay, maybe Honest Abe had six hours, and spent four sharpening his axe. Or maybe Abe didn’t say it at all. What matters is the principle here. You might take the same nugget of wisdom from Ecclesiastes:
“If the ax is dull, And one does not sharpen the edge, Then he must use more strength; But wisdom brings success.”
There are many times when even lifting a finger to initiate anything feels like lifting a boulder. Even if you fear that you may never have another burst of energy again, you almost certainly will. One good night’s sleep, sunny day, or landmark like a birthday, a new year, or the start of a season, will jog you out of your slumber and give you some juice – you just want to make sure you can use it well when you get it. A failure to plan is a plan to fail, but a failure to act is a sure failure too. You don’t want all of your energy burned on planning so that you can’t actually materialize anything when it counts, so it pays to have these plans ready in advance.
Planning can be a tried and true method of procrastination, and procrastination is what our lazy phase is phenomenal at doing – so use it. Even when you feel like a slug, it’s often possible to materialize a to-do list, or a list of projects you want to start. Even if you do nothing, coming to grips with what needs to be done is a vital step in ensuring you don’t waste your active time acting on unproductive things.
Start with a brain dump. Just grab a pencil and a piece of paper, or open up a word document, and with no structure required, write down everything that comes to mind that needs doing. Bike tires need fixing? On the list. Still gotta do your taxes? On the list. Sit there for a few minutes and just let it percolate. Once you’ve written it all down, you can begin to make sense of it. When it’s all in your head, valuable mental energy is wasted just trying to keep it there – so make a list, and rely on it.
So you’ve got your to-do list – big deal, right? We’ve all written to-do lists and found ourselves doing none of them. Here’s what I recommend thinking about when you’re feeling lazy:
- Are there any things that are quick to initiate, but may require a long wait after initiating? These things are great tasks to check off when you feel like you can lift at least a finger, and it can stop you from hitting a roadblock when you actually get some juice. Sometimes a 5 minute email or filling out a form can turn a useless day into one that will save your ass a mountain of work in a week or a month.
- Do you have all the necessary tools to do the job? If not, can they be procured? If doing your taxes is already a pain in the ass, you don’t want to find out the day before the deadline that you still need to ask your employer for a form they neglected to give you, or having to drive around trying to find something at the store that you could have had delivered a week ago.
- Are all the tools readily accessible? If not, make sure you collect them somewhere where you can get them quickly and easily the moment the desire or need strikes. Get your documents together, or make sure you know where your actual toolbox is, if you need to hang a picture.
- Is this a routine task? Can it be automated, re-organized, batched, or otherwise made more efficient?
- Is your space organized? Don’t sap your precious motivation with exasperation or frustration trying to find the one thing you need.
Make hay while the sun shines – how to use your energetic time
If you, like most mortals, have good days and bad days, it just makes sense that we use our good days as best we can, and mitigate the negative effects of our bad days. We’re likely all familiar with those rushes of motivation we get during New Years, where we start putting into motion all the things we want to do for the year. Just because you taper off a few months later, rather than carrying that energy forward until December, doesn’t mean you failed – as long as you used that burst of energy wisely. How? By initiating things that will keep you accountable, and creating systems that will make it easier even for your lazy self to keep doing it in March. During your good days you should plan based on a standard for your lazy self, and if you exceed that standard, good for you. One good use of high motivation is ordering your space – making sure that you can quickly and easily get started on anything you intend to do, to take that agonizing price of initiating action out of the picture on those days you really don’t feel like it.
If you’re lucky, your goblin-self has at least had the decency to scribble down even a simple to-do list, something for you to quickly grab and run with. If not, well, you’ve got the energy now, so may as well start with that.
System building:
Having a good system in place can make the difference between success or failure when you’re actually executing. If you want to work out more, did you actually find a good regimen that works for you? Did you write it down so you remember it? Did you put that written note somewhere you can find without having to rifle through reams of scrap paper? Did you put your kettlebell next to your desk, or your running shoes at the foot of your bed? All of this can make a huge difference. Creating a fool-proof system for whatever it is you want to do is invaluable in getting reliable results. You should always be thinking how do I make this as easy as possible for my future goblin-self?
Personally, I rely a lot on a “Second Brain” in Notion for most of my systems – how I organize my to-do list, where I keep all my notes, where I do my writing, et-cetera. I’ve spilled plenty of ink about it, so you can find plenty more resources on my blog. This article can give you a rundown, too. In any case, the point here is that you have a task/knowledge management system that work for you in two crucial domains:
- Input – is it easy to put things into the system?
- Retrieval – is it easy to get stuff back out?
If input is difficult or annoying, you won’t use the system. Making things onerous by requiring tons of detail or precise storage in a series of arcane folders does not make for a good system. Many people make the mistake of focusing too much on keeping everything organized, and in doing so make it agonizing to actually use. If every time you add a task to your to-do list you need to meticulously organize six different fields, you’ll be less inclined to put things on that list.
That said, if retrieval is too difficult, you’ll never be able to use the system either. Lots of people throw everything in their phone’s notes app, but if your to-do list is spread throughout six different notes titled “notes”, how are you gonna consult it? Spend a little time to make sure that whatever to-do list you come up with, you can check it easily.
Passive Work:
Passive work is an invaluable way to be productive, even as a lazy person. Consider these two people:
- Jim is an artist. He makes commissioned, made-to-order paintings for customers.
- Rick is also an artist. He designs logos and sells them on shirts through a print-on-demand site, that ships them for him.
Of course both require active work to be done – Rick still needs to design logos. The difference, however, is that once Rick has a library of logos designed, and customers to buy them, he’s good. He can have an off day and sell just as many shirts sitting in front of the TV as he did sitting at his desk drawing. There is a lot of value in the work Jim is doing, and it might pay better too, but I propose that no matter what, Jim would benefit from finding passive means to supplement his productivity.
Writing articles is another example of a valuable passive project. Writing something (like this!) takes active work to do, but once an article is published, it becomes passively productive. Using Medium as an example, articles that I’ve written months ago are still out there, being read by others, generating a small, modest trickle of income. Even if I stopped writing at all for a month, they’d be there, working for me at no additional cost to myself.
Automation
Finding, creating, or improving tools or workflows is another great way to spend your time. Perhaps you spend an hour a day sorting your emails – it might take you a few hours to learn how your email settings work, how to set up automated rules to sort emails from your bank into your finance folder, from newsletters to the newsletter folder, from your weird aunt to junk mail, et-cetera, but once you have, your computer is working seven hours a week for you, free of charge. Attaining some basic proficiency in programming or scripting can pay dividends in creating tools to automate your digital life, until you’ve got a legion of little 1s and 0s as your employees! Or… Well, slaves, since you’re probably not paying them a cent. Whenever you’re doing a repetitive task, it’s worth asking – can it be automated?
Consider these three people:
- Jim keeps a record of all his spending in a pocket notebook. At the end of the month he goes through his pocket notebook, tabulates all his spending, and then calculates his expenses and incomes by category. He needs to update this daily and it probably takes him several hours of error-prone work at the end of the month.
- Sophie puts hers in a Google Sheets budget tracker she found online. She still manually enters each expense and income, but all of her calculations are automatically done by the spreadsheet.
- Dale has made a script that pulls all of his transactions from his credit card summary, or used a budgeting software that automatically syncs with his bank, to track his spending for him. He checks his report once a month for any anomalies.
The same job three different ways, and think of the amount of time and energy the Jim’s of the world might save. Jim might be more busy, but he’s not any more productive than Sophie or Dale. There is of course an upfront cost to configure an automated solution, but once you have it, it’s one less thing to worry about.
Waiting
The truth is that for many things, waiting is part of the gig. Applications need to be sent out, approvals need to be attained, emails returned, materials delivered. These periods of waiting sometimes feel like wastes of time, but these waits should not be considered unproductive if they’re necessary. During periods of high motivation, it’s far easier to be proactive – to send out emails you expect to take a while to be returned, to submit applications, to order deliveries. They will come back eventually, likely in a slow steady trickle, sometimes long after your initial spurt of energy has abated – but these things are now soft (and sometimes hard) commitments to follow through, sprinkled throughout the weeks and months to follow.
You might have days where even scribbling down a to-do list just feels like a Herculean effort. Some days, your inner goblin will be in full ascent, and you’re going to be parked in front of the TV watching your way through the Office for the third time. Or maybe you’ll just be sick, that happens too. The important thing is that if you’ve been strategic during your high periods, you’ve got coals on the fire. You’ve got passive projects churning in the background, deliveries waiting to arrive, or applications still pending that stupid little bureaucratic stamp. You’ve written down a list of everything you need to get done, and you’re fairly sure there’s not a nebulous ghost of a task on the edge of your consciousness that will ruin your life if it’s not done now. And when you do need to do a task, you’ve already come up with the best way to do it with the least amount of effort. This time is not a waste of time. Knowing that, and being able to just relax for a bit, is invaluable in and of itself. Don’t worry, something’s cooking.
