Posted by john on September 17th, 2006 — Posted in Cures For Laziness
The first step to solving any problem in your life is to admit you have one. This concept was made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and has helped millions of people recover from alcoholism.
However, laziness is different from substance abuse because, while AA says you’re powerless to get over your alcoholism, you can become motivated and overcome your sloth. My life is proof of that, and your life will be too as you keep coming back to this site to work through the program.
Recognizing your laziness is crucial. You cannot recover from a problem unless you first realize it exists.
This is the toughest step for everybody who tries to improve themselves. You see, psychologically there’s a natural inclination for people to think they’re special.
So it’s time to drop the ego and realize the pain that laziness has caused for you. Once you’ve pinpointed the problem, you can get moving and get results!
Here’s another good quote from Ben Franklin from The Way to Wealth (1758) that shows how bad of a problem it is to be lazy…
“…sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of, as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting, that The sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that There will be sleeping enough in the grave, as Poor Richard says.”
Question: What specific failure has laziness caused in your life? What goals has it prevented you from reaching? For example, did it cause you to lose a job? Did it cause you to gain weight? To keep smoking? In my own life, laziness caused me to flunk out of school, then start a business that failed because of my lack of motivation.
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Posted by john on September 16th, 2006 — Posted in How To Be More Motivated And Productive
“Where was I?”
That’s the most unproductive thing you can say, according to researchers cited in this Yahoo! Finance article on multitasking.
You see, humans are terrible at doing more than one thing at a time, even though most of us think we’re good at it. But when we multitask, two things happen:
1. We get less done.
2. The quality of what we do is lower.
There’s a resumption cost of several seconds every time you get back to task that got interrupted. You get into flow again, and–whammo!–you switch to some other task and get hit with more resumption cost. As you’d imagine, this lost time adds up.
That means it’s faster to do one thing at a time instead of trying to multitask.
The other problem with multitasking: you make more mistakes, and the quality of your work declines.
“Multitasking doesn’t look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition,” says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It’s almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality.”
MIT researchers found (by doing MRI scans on brains of test subjects) that it’s impossible for the brain to think about more than one thing at a time. Net result: more emails you forgot to proofread before hitting “send,” more mistakes on the paper you wrote, and more careless errors on your client’s project.
Multitasking can be such a temptation. As an entrepreneur, I struggle with it myself. It’s easy to have a lull in a task and then say to yourself, “Gee I wonder if I got any email.”
But now that you know that you can do things faster and with fewer mistakes if you do one thing at a time, you’ll resist that temptation and stay focused. Just that one change can be worth thousands of dollars in increased productivity.
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Posted by john on September 14th, 2006 — Posted in The Pain of Laziness
Laziness is your mind short circuiting. Here’s why…
Working toward your goals and achieving them brings you long term happiness. But in the short run, the primitive part of our brain that wants to move away from pain and toward pleasure kicks in.
Study after study has shown that activities make us happy. An article from the USA Today titled Psychologists now know what makes people happy, archived here, has this to say:
Life satisfaction occurs most often when people are engaged in absorbing activities that cause them to forget themselves, lose track of time and stop worrying. “Flow” is the term Claremont Graduate University psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheeks-sent-mee-hi) coined to describe this phenomenon.
People in flow may be sewing up a storm, doing brain surgery, playing a musical instrument or working a hard puzzle with their child. The impact is the same: A life of many activities in flow is likely to be a life of great satisfaction, Csikszentmihalyi says. And you don’t have to be a hotshot to get there.
“One of the happiest men I ever met was a 64-year-old Chicago welder with a fourth-grade education,” he says. The man took immense pride in his work, refusing a promotion to foreman that would have kept him from what he loved to do. He spent evenings looking at the rock garden he built, with sprinklers and floodlights set up to create rainbows.
Teenagers experience flow, too, and are the happiest if they consider many activities “both work and play,” Csikszentmihalyi says. Flow stretches someone but pleasurably so, not beyond his capacity. “People feel best when doing what they do best,” he says.
This brings us back, though, to how easy it is to be lazy. Biologically, our brains (like the brains of any other animal) want us to have pleasure and shrink from pain, with the least amount of effort.
So in order to get going — to achieve that satisfying state of flow — it requires an initial burst of special effort to get past that short circuit in your mind. But after that, you’ll feel a deep, long-term bliss.
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