Are You Truly Lazy or Just Procrastinating?
You lay in your bed, staring at the ceiling. You take a deep sigh as the disappointment sets in. You were supposed to finish your 1500-word research paper by today, but instead, you just spent the last hour and a half on TikTok. How could you be so lazy?
We’ve all experienced this to some degree. Work is hard and unenjoyable, and it often takes a lot of willpower just to start. Sometimes, our laziness gets the best of us and we prefer just to do nothing.
But where is the line between laziness and procrastination? Here are the signs that you may not be lazy but just procrastinating.
1. There Is Too Much Ambiguity
Having ambiguity in a task is a major reason you may be struggling to start your work.
Say you wanted to write a blog post. But what should you write about? When should you finish it? How long should it be? Should you have many small sections or just one big section?
All of these questions lead to ambiguity, and ambiguity leads to stagnation.
So instead of being confused about where to begin and what you should do, set specific goals for yourself and outline your task in detail. This may require some work upfront, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run stalling because you don’t know what to do.
If your job is to write a blog post, start by identifying what your blog topic is going to be about. Then, give yourself a deadline, preferably within the same day, to complete your article. How long your blog post should be and how many sections you should have is really up to you, but you must set a specific requirement so that you can talk in-depth about the topic without boring the reader.
What’s important isn’t that you make every requirement perfect on your first attempt, but that you have a specific set of goals and that you stay consistent with those goals.
The opposite of ambiguity is specificity.
2. You Have Too Much Time
The second biggest cause for procrastination is having too much time which creates a lack of urgency.
To solve this problem, set a specific deadline for when you want to finish your work. If there is already a deadline set but it is too far away or the project is too big, set a sooner deadline to complete one part of the project.
By doing this you will be able to break up your work into parts that you can hold yourself accountable for. Also, it will relieve some of the stress of completing everything at once.
Once you have a specific deadline set for your project, it’s time to actually get to work. My favorite strategy is to start a timer and work until the timer ends. This way, you will know exactly when you should start working and how long you should be working.
I recommend setting the timer to a maximum of one hour because that is time you can focus the best without getting tired. After your timer ends, feel free to take a break and relax.
Procrastinating because you have too much time can be solved by creating urgency in your work.
3. You Have A Poor Work Environment
“I really have to get started now,” you say to yourself. You open your laptop to begin working but you glance over at your desk and see your phone. “Just a few seconds won’t hurt.” A few too many minutes in, you hear your baby crying. “Well, I need to go take care of this first.” And just like that, your work is on the back burner again.
Having a poor working environment is detrimental to productivity. With constant distractions from our phones, family, and colleagues, it has become so much harder to stay focused.
To stop yourself from getting distracted before you even start, you must clear your desk and work in a private, uninterrupted space. If you have a home office, use it solely for a workspace and nothing else. Otherwise, use a table outside of your bedroom and away from the common spaces to prevent people from coming to you frequently.
With a proper work area designated for work and work only, you will be able to enter a state of focus much easier once you enter that space.
So don’t try to force yourself to do work in an environment full of distractions and other responsibilities. Make your life easier and reduce the willpower it takes to get started.
4. The Work You Are Doing Is “Hard”
Sometimes, the work you must do is challenging and you are not willing to work on it.
Some tasks are inherently harder than others. Reading a book is harder than watching a YouTube video even if they talk about the same things. Writing an essay is harder than reading example essays because you must have active input.
When you recognize that the work you must do is difficult, break it down into bite-sized pieces so that you can manage the task better.
For example, if you are a programmer and have a big programming project to complete, break it up into groups of functions to complete on separate days.
This way, you will not only have a specific job to complete that day but you will also feel better about your progress rather than trying to finish it all in one day.
The Ultimate Solution: Getting Started
Getting started is the hardest thing to do for any procrastinator for all of the reasons we talked about. And when we repeatedly struggle to get started, we start to mistake our procrastination for laziness.
So the ultimate solution to stop procrastinating is to just get started. That is much easier said than done, however.
How I like to start any task is to just tell myself to work for five minutes. Either I set a timer to make it concrete or I just convince myself to get to work. No matter how bad the job is, anyone can do it for five minutes.
Once you have done it for five minutes, you are most likely going to be far enough into the work to want to continue working.
And if you can’t even do it for five minutes, tell yourself to just do it for 30 seconds. Sometimes, I have had to do this because, in my moments of least willpower, all I needed was to get the ball rolling.
You Are Not Lazy
Everybody procrastinates to some degree. Even though there are so many external factors affecting procrastination, we tend to only blame our one internal factor: willpower.
By learning how to control external factors, we can make it so much easier to get started on our work and to continue staying focused.
Remember, you are not lazy, so get up and get to work.
