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Openly and proudly saying “No, I don’t feel like doing that” can help free others to do the same in their own lives.
our lazy feelings are protective and instructive, and that our lives can improve a great deal when we decide to stop judging our desire for idle, “lazy” time and start trusting those feelings instead.
three types of people who tend to get pigeonholed as “lazy” in our society: depressed people, procrastinators, and apathetic people who don’t see the point
survey administered in 2018, over 30 percent of respondents agreed with a statement that depression is caused by having a “weak personality.”5 Our
In many cases, it’s essential that they be “lazy” in a few areas of life if they want to have the energy to stay afloat in others.
Procrastinators lack focus and ambition, and their work is done in a half-assed, last-minute way.
paralyzed in some way: by anxiety, by confusion about how to get started on a big, complicated project, or both.9
Procrastinators often get caught in a cycle of perfectionism, anxiety, distraction, and failure.
When someone seems completely apathetic, I don’t see them as a failure. Instead, I tend to think that they’ve been failed in some way.
I work hard to help my students see why the subject deserves their attention and time.
Sometimes people become apathetic because of depression or trauma.13 Other times, people turn to apathy after repeatedly being disenfranchised. Psychologists call this “learned helplessness,”
In so many cases, what we call “laziness” is actually a person coping with
a ton of challenges and attempting to set priorities based on their needs.
forty-hour workweek (which is considered quite reasonable and humane here in the US) is still probably too long and
The Laziness Lie has set us up to expect more productivity out of ourselves than is really feasible or sustainable. As a result, many of us live continuously on the edge of breaking down.
convinced that his problem was a lack of motivation or effort, not that he was taking on too many responsibilities,
cyberloafs many times per day, but it’s particularly likely to happen when someone has just finished an intellectually strenuous task or when they’re about to mentally “shift gears” from one activity to another.21 Research
Rather than sapping their productivity, taking a moment to cyberloaf helped these employees hit the mental refresh button so they could return to their work with renewed energy.24
employees who cyberloaf come up with more unique solutions to work problems.26
“lazy” is a sign that a person has worked hard enough and should just sit and be calm for a little while. Most of the jobs that humans perform require time for reflection, planning, or creativity.
When we ignore that impulse to recharge for fear of seeming “lazy,” we risk facing dire consequences.
On the organizational level, patterns of employee laziness can tell us a workplace is being mismanaged.
When a person has been stretched to their limit, they may start to seem flaky and checked-out. They might come in to work late or cancel plans with friends at the last minute.
Slacking off is a normal part of life; people require idle time in order to remain clearheaded and healthy.
By listening to this laziness, we can better understand our needs and construct lives that are truly worth living.
productive downtime the “incubation period.” Like an egg that must be kept warm and safe in order to develop into a healthy chick, the creative parts of our minds require safety, rest, and relaxation in order to produce unique ideas or insights.30
When we consciously make time for idleness and embrace our naturally lazy feelings rather than pushing them away, we can learn what matters to us, and which demands need to be dialed way back.
When we stop seeing laziness as the enemy, we can begin to feel good about that act of letting go.
“All of this helps me focus more on myself and my actual experiences rather than just on other people,” August says. “It helps me ask myself, How
am I doing? What do I actually want? Am I happy? If I’m not, does it still feel worth it to focus on these goals?”
Laziness Lie, giving up on an obligation can feel painful. Yet the more we learn to observe our own patterns and learn from them without judgment,
the more we can build authentic lives that actually allow us to thrive.
When we give our lives space for slowness, relaxation, and doing “nothing,” we can begin to heal some of our greatest wounds and to create lives for ourselves that are nourishing rather than exhausting.
Expressive writing seems to work because it gives us the opportunity to locate and listen to the vulnerable side of ourselves that we spend all day silencing.
felt less threatening to admit that I was sad or angry. Because I wasn’t constantly running away from those feelings, I was able to air them with significantly less shame.
Meditation is the most important place to start because it’s not intended to solve any problems. Like expressive writing and finding various ways to “do nothing,” it’s explicitly about abandoning goals for a little while, letting go of stress, and restoring energy and well-being in the process. Embracing laziness can have a revolutionary impact on our quality of life. When we stop measuring our worth by how many items we check off of a to-do list, we can finally begin to seek out the activities that truly matter to us.
rather than society’s “shoulds,” we feel a greater sense of authenticity. And when we savor our free time and work to move at a slower, lazier, more intuitive pace, we begin to repair the damage that years of overwork has done.
Overworked employees are often encouraged to police one another’s habits and to spread their shared misery throughout a department, creating a contagion of unwellness and bad boundaries.
Though many of us feel guilty for not being productive enough, the truth is that most of us are doing far more work than is healthy. We’re pushing our bodies and minds to the limit, ignoring the natural warning signs of tiredness and laziness, and encouraging others to do the same.
While at least 134 other countries have placed legal limits on how many hours a person is permitted to work,15 in the US there is no legal maximum, so the length of the workweek can continue climbing up and up.
it now takes the average worker just eleven hours to complete what would have been forty hours’ worth of work back in 1950.
“When Europeans go to work, they just do their job and then they come home,” she says, “and they understand about the importance of relaxation, that balance that you don’t always see in the United States.”
Europeans, who often have upward of twenty paid vacation days per year, American employees are lucky if they get ten to fourteen.
“vacation guilt,” which makes it hard for us to feel comfortable actually using those vacation days up.23 A survey by Glassdoor found that in 2018, Americans used only about half of their paid vacation days and let the remainder go completely to waste.24
in 2019, American Airlines was sued by New York City’s Department of Consumer and Work Protection for having punished and threatened workers who used their sick days.26
When companies fail to provide employees with adequate sick-leave policies and managers bully their workers into working while ill, the public health consequences are massive. Many sick employees spread the coronavirus to their coworkers and fellow commuters
The gig economy has arrived in full force, and it’s swallowed up the free time and brain space of every driven Millennial artist
To do good work, a person has to rest and find moments to enjoy the beauty of life.
Past the fifty-hour point, a person’s productivity declines very sharply; past the fifty-five-hour point, and a person is so unproductive and tired that they might as well not be at work at all.34
eight-hour workday is, in fact, unrealistic in many
