The workforce is working harder and for longer hours than the decades before. For an average worker the net productivity is growing and workers aren’t taking home the benefits of that increased productivity.
Advances in communication technologies have also come with significant psychological downsides: The proliferation of smartphones and the associated increased expectations that we’ll always be online has helped to increase burnout, the boundaries between work and home become increasingly blurry. Instant group chats, the fastest replier to a chat, the always available hero is creating a unhealthy competition between peers as they strive for attention from their managers.
The end result of all of these factors is that you feel guilty in saying no to a task or guilty in taking the well deserved break.
A very straightforward metric to measure the burnout is to just check your PTO balance.
In reality, you’re probably doing the best you can, which is perfectly okay, afterall nobody wants to concisously go down the part of burnouts.
You’re doing more work than you might think
More work does not just more physical work, the lines of code, the documents you produce. There is a lot of background work which goes in many tangible deliveries we make as knowledge workers. This work requires analysis as well as building a justification for the decisions. It diverts attention from family time and disturbs normal routines. Even if it’s largely invisible from the outside, all mental activity has an associated physical cost. Scientists have observed that your brain adjusts its metabolic output when making decisions in response to the exertion of mental energy.
Every time your smartphone buzzes with a notification, it can trigger a cascading series of decisions: Do I check my phone now? Do I respond to this email now? If not now, when should I respond to this email? What should be my response? All these little decisions add up over time.
The number one cause of accidents is day dreaming, Even if you are not replying to a text or an email behind the wheel, the mental distractions caused by constant notifications is equivalent to not keeping eyes on the road.
Feelings of laziness are usually there for a good reason
When you’re overworked, you’re less effective, focused, and productive. Everybody needs time to mentally rest and recover.
You’ve probably been trained to think that feeling directionless or unmotivated means that there’s something wrong with you, and that if you just try harder, you’ll be able to push through. But rather than viewing these feelings as a reflection of something negative about your character, they should really be viewed as your body’s early warning system.
To make matters even worse, stress literally kills: chronic stress is a major contributing factor to the top six leading causes of death in the United States, including coronary heart disease and suicide, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that stress-related ailments account for about 75% of all doctors’ visits.
You can’t fix the problem of being overworked by working more, when what you actually need is to set boundaries and take the time to rest.
Laziness can help us find the most efficient path forward
Doing more work isn’t always a good thing, especially if you can accomplish the same task faster or with less effort by using an alternate approach. In some cases, it is better to have a retrospective periodically to analyze the tasks you did and could they have been done in a more effective way. Management studies indicate coaching, learning from others, pushing work down and feedback cycles help optimizing your workload rather than learning it the hard way by making mistakes.
There is also scientific evidence to support the benefits of doing less unnecessary mental labor. Idleness and letting the mind wander can lead to greater creativity and problem-solving: one study found that participants who daydreamed while performing a boring task performed better on a subsequent creative task than the control group and those who performed a boring task without daydreaming.
How to lead a productive lazy life
With all of this in mind, the benefits of allowing yourself to relax and embrace laziness are clear. This can be difficult to do since we live in a world that’s designed to keep us busy and distracted; even still, there are tactics you can use which can give you space to be lazy and relax.
Don’t be afraid of letting some things go: just because you can spend time and effort doesn’t mean that you need to. Not all inbound communication is equally important, but the notifications on our phones and in our inboxes are equally intrusive, which can make every message feel equally important, even when it isn’t. You might think that taking in and retaining every single piece of new information will make you feel more secure, but doing so can ultimately create stress commensurate with that amount of extra effort.
Napoleon reportedly had a unique way of dealing with his mail: He would only open a few letters which came from “extraordinary couriers,” and would simply leave all the rest unread for three weeks. His reasoning behind this was that minor, non-urgent requests would solve themselves, and that his time was better spent on the few tasks which truly required his attention. Depending on your situation, it might not be practical for you to leave your emails unread for three weeks, but the lesson we can take from this is that you can conserve your time and energy for what actually matters by strategically postponing demands on your attention.
Categorizing your inbox, filtering your notifications can help from technical side. On personnel side having regular one-on-ones with your team helps address the various type of attention seekers / entanglers from the team as they will get their well deserved attention during regular time slots. There are trainings on effective one-on-ones and time management which will help extract maximum “my” time for a most productive day.
One way to do this is by adopting better tools that account for human limitations and simplify the decisions that you have to make. Machines are good at performing routine tasks according to specific rules, whereas humans are good at creatively tackling novel problems.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to be kinder to ourselves and one another. It’s okay to need breaks; allow yourself the time that you need to relax and breathe.
Hard work is good, but not when it comes at the expense of the rest that we all need and deserve.
