What to do if you’re lazy ✨ productivity tips

So chances are you're watching this video either on your phone or laptop instead of doing something on your enormous to-do list. In the back of your mind, the thoughts, I don't want to do anything. I'm so tired. I'm bored. I just want to take a three-month vacation. keep bouncing around in your head. And whenever it's time to actually start doing things, you work for three minutes and then end up back on your phone or just doing nothing. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that just never seems to end. For a long time, I was determined to find the answer to my laziness, the solution, the hack, the secret. I was sure that somewhere in a self-help book or on YouTube, there would be an answer to my problem. And after lots of reading, I thought, okay, maybe my problem is fear or lack of confidence, lack of direction, lack of tangible results to keep me motivated, no purpose, lack of motivation, a big wire goal, perfect routine, a perfect plan. The list goes on and on. And I thought that once I overcame these things, everything would be easier. When I would get into the right mindset or the right state of mind, find my reason for living, have the perfect routine and plan written out, then I wouldn't be lazy anymore. Everything would be effortless. I would just be constantly working towards my goal and ride off into the sunset on a white horse and living my happily ever after in a castle. Okay, maybe not that, but you know, you get the idea. And then everything would fall into place. Wrong! Well, at least for me. Unfortunately, I ended up having to throw that idea out of the window and the answer ended up being a lot more simple. Speaking of simple, today's sponsor, Identity, helps simplify the internet and organize everything you do online in one place. So multitasking can degrade productivity and too much clutter can distract you from your work. So Identity helps by putting your most used tabs all in one place and helps you sort the websites or tiles into easy to access categories. So now all you need to do is choose a category and click on a tile to launch the website you want to go to. And the organization system helps you focus on your most important tasks and have all the most important websites that you use a lot in one place. So for instance, you can make a separate category for your school and education related resources and have everything right at your fingertips. And you can also make to-do lists on the side that integrate tiles. So as you knock down your list, you can go to each page that is required for that specific to-do item. Overall, Identity helps you organize your digital life in a very aesthetically pleasing way and consequently helps you combat laziness and also feeling overwhelmed when you have 100 different tabs open. So if you want to check out Identity, be sure to click the link in my description box to try it out. So after lots of self-reflection, I realized that my laziness applied to literally everything in my life, not just the hard things like health goals or work goals, study goals, etc. So suddenly I realized, why is it so hard for me to just clean my rooms regularly or change into something other than my pajamas when I'm home? In fact, why am I so lazy that I even procrastinate on painting my nails or doing a self-care night, things that I actually enjoy? I'm definitely not terrified that painting my nails will result in me accidentally burning them off or a bubble bath. So then why am I so lazy? How are other people so uber productive and doing a million things a day and releasing four albums in the past two years? T-Swizzle. And I'm just here being a lazy slob on the floor in my room and I haven't done anything on my list of things to do in the past three days. SOS. Send help. Please. And yeah, I theoretically understand that if I take tiny steps today, I'll reach my goal eventually after a million days, right? But the problem is, when it comes down to it, I don't actually feel like doing the small steps I need to do right now. There's always some kind of excuse. Right now, I'm tired or I'm bored or I just really do not feel like doing this. But I'm sure tomorrow I'll feel better and do it, right? So long story short, after years of torturing myself and trying to find the magic key, I did not find it. I still struggle with laziness. However, what I did find was the answer to my problem. And that answer is that everybody is lazy. Even T-Swizzle. So let me explain. This is me and you. And this is Newton's first law of physics. Newton's first law states that every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. Why do I sound like the productivity fairy? I do not know. This tendency to resist changes in a state of motion is inertia. So in other words, the laziness that I feel, and again, this is not related to mental illness or depression, health issues, burnout, etc. The reason I only get energy to do things last minute when I'm panicking and freaking out is because laziness is normal. It's not weird. It's not something that's strange or wrong with us. It's just part of being an animal. It's part of being alive. The best example of this is my cat. All my cat does, no offense Arwen, I'm not trying to offend you and call you lazy, is sleep, eat, and occasionally walk three steps to fake hunt a squirrel and then miserably fail. But at the end of the day, she's not just running around randomly trying to build a six-pack, you know, become the best huntress in the world on her own because she doesn't need to. She has food. She has a place to sleep, my bed. She has everything at her fingertips, which in a sense is in a lot of ways like us. The school system, the work system, just the system of society in general, never really taught us to study every single day on our own. The thing that it teaches us is just to get by doing the bare minimum and have decent results, whether that's B's or C's or A's, and you'll get by. The thing that it doesn't teach us is to constantly do our absolute best every single day and not cut corners because we can cut corners a lot of the time. Also something else that the school system and society in general has taught us is to constantly react to outside stimuli. So we're not really in charge of our own lives, we're just reacting to everything that's happening around us. We're reacting to deadlines from teachers. We're reacting to requests from our parents to clean our rooms or to do the chores or to be home at a certain time. We've spent our entire childhood and teenage years being told by other people what to do with our lives. We're always reacting to outside stimuli and outside things, but then we're shocked when suddenly when we try to request something from ourselves, we can't get ourselves to do it. We're just like, why is my body not reacting to what I'm trying to tell it to do? Come on, go exercise for 30 minutes, it's good for you. And then we're just like, nope. The solution is to one, embrace your laziness and realize that it never gets better. Once you embrace the fact that no one's coming to save you, that there is no magical pill that will make you enjoy working all the time and give you the 24-7 motivation to be doing things. Hey mom, so um, so you've been doing laundry for over 20 years, right? Right. Okay, so it's a habit now, right? So you enjoy it, you know, it's part of your routine, it's easy to do, you know, stuff like that, right? Right? So the solution is one, to embrace your laziness and realize it doesn't get better, and number two is realize that the answer is willpower. I know that everybody has probably talked about willpower is important, self-discipline is the key to success. Unfortunately, just like all cliches end up being true, it is true. And it is very true that willpower is a muscle, and the more that you make yourself do something over laziness, the easier it gets. But it doesn't mean that you ever really stop dreading the thing, it's just you get better at overcoming your own dread, if that makes any sense. So let me give you a couple of examples so that this is really clear. So for instance, let's say my goal is to be able to deadlift 150 pounds, which is a big goal. I currently am completely out of shape when it comes to lifting weights, and the maximum I can deadlift is 20 pounds. So the thing is, if I come tomorrow to the gym and I decide, okay, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna deadlift 150 pounds, and I go over to the 150 pound dumbbell and I start trying to lift it, what do you think is gonna happen? Bad things. Bad things will happen. Not only will I not be able to lift the 150 pound dumbbell, I will probably rip my spine, or wait, I can't rip my spine, rip my back muscle things, and it's not gonna end well. You're a wizard, Estella. Wait, what? So what do we have to do to build our back muscles and our hamstring muscles and just all of our muscles to be able to lift 150 pounds? Gradually build up your ability to lift heavier and heavier weights until one day, many years down the road, there you are deadlifting 150 pounds. And it's the same way with willpower. So for instance, in the beginning, the maximum that you'll be able to get yourself to do is 10 minutes of cleaning your room a day. And at first, that's literally the only thing extra that you'll be able to do outside of all of your schoolwork and everything. But then over time, as you get used to making yourself do five minutes of cleaning a day, 10 minutes of exercise, it'll get a little bit easier to make it 15 minutes or 20 minutes. And that's pretty much how it works. Over time, you gradually get better at forcing yourself to do things that you know are necessary but you do not want to do. So that's the good news. The good news is there is nothing wrong with you. Again, this is not, I'm not a psychologist, I don't know you at all. So at least in my experience, the best approach is just accepting the fact that yes, I do not want to do anything other than sit in a corner and read books and drink hot cocoa all day long. That's my dream life. But alas, I have goals and I have people I care about and that I want to take care of, things that I want to do with my life. And I can't do that if I just let myself do nothing. Why is it so dirty? Stop. There we go. So cute. They're so fluffy and aesthetic. There we go. Look how glorious. They're moving so fast.