If you’ve found yourself stuck in a rut, questioning your habits and yearning to exit your lazy era, you’re not alone. So many of us want to be in our productive era, we just don’t know where to start.
Well, I’m here to tell you where to start. So now more excuses! It’s time to get your life together and that starts with taking a honest look at your routines, habits and narratives.
Where you are now
Take a good look at your daily life. What have you been doing with your time? If you’ve been procrastinating, try to get to the root reason why. This is a time for self-awareness, but not a time for self-condemnation or shame.
Please do not confuse taking time to rest for being lazy. You need time to rest, it’s absolutely essential. So, be honest, are you truly being lazy? Or is it possible that you’re being too hard on yourself?
Take a look at how you’re actually spending your time during the day and week. It might be that you are expecting way more of yourself than you can actually achieve. Do you actually have time to complete all the tasks you want to complete?
Time tracking can be tedious, but it’s one of the most accurate ways to get an idea of where your time is going. The first key to managing your time well is understanding where your time is going.
You want to set a timer or alert to go off every hour so you can make a quick note about how you spent the past hour.
Trying this exercise is also likely to surprise you about where you are actually spending your time. As people, we tend to be pretty bad at estimating how long something will take. But how can you accurately schedule your day if you don’t know how long it takes to get things done?
Foundations for change
Making lasting change goes so much further than just planning. You need to adjust your mindset and ultimately your identity. What do I mean by that?
It’s not about going to the gym to achieve a specific weight; it’s about adopting the identity of a person who prioritizes their health and goes to the gym regularly.
It’s not about saving money so you can have a particular amount; it’s about adopting the identity of a person who makes mindful decisions about their finances.
The narrative you have about yourself is so important. You’ve got to stop telling yourself that you’re bad at the things you want to improve upon. When it comes to any kind of personal development, you need to break free from the negative self-talk.
If you continually tell yourself and reinforce how “bad” you are at something, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s important to reframe the thought into something more positive like, “I am a beginner, I am learning and growing in this area.”
One of the keys to lasting change is to be making changes from a place of self-love and not self-hate. We all have both strengths and weaknesses. Work with your strengths and weaknesses, not against them. It’s important to embrace yourself, flaws and all.
Stop the sabotage
Why is it so easy to spend money when you know you should be saving it? Why is it so easy to break your diet even when you want to lose weight?
Because one of the biggest reasons we sabotage ourselves is due to ‘present bias’. This cognitive tendency over-values the immediate rewards and under-values delayed gratification. I mean of course no one really wants to wait for the things they desire..
Too often we are the ones sabotaging our own progress because we want it NOW. The truth is that instant gratification often has long-term consequences.
If you want to achieve something meaningful, it usually requires time and effort. Lasting change doesn’t just happen overnight. Start to think about future you, more than you do present you. What would benefit future you the most is usually not the same thing that would benefit present you. But if you want long-term benefits, you have to be willing to sacrifice those short-term perks.
That isn’t the only way we can sabotage ourselves and our productivity though. Things like not getting a good night’s sleep, multitasking, not having boundaries and scrolling will all try to keep you firmly within your lazy era.
Habits to Exit Your Lazy Era
Fix your sleep schedule: There’s a big difference between being lazy and being tired. Getting enough quality sleep is so important for your body and mind. Consider developing a night routine to help ease your body into a state of rest.
Learn time management: Time is one of those things that can slip away from you when you’re not paying attention. It can be easy to get sucked into things, like scrolling on our devices, and end up wasting way more time than we intended to. Even if you aren’t good with it now, you can learn how to better manage your time to be productive.
Get in movement: You don’t have to go workout at the gym to move your body. Even just a simple walk can help boost your creativity and energy levels. It pays to get active. Beyond the physical benefits, movement gives you plenty of mental benefits as well.
Reward yourself: Celebrate each and every achievement and goal you reach. It doesn’t matter how small it is. Taking the time to acknowledge and pat yourself on the back will help you stay motivated to keep going.
Stack habits
You want to exit your lazy era, so of course you want to start developing new non-lazy habits. A great technique for adding new habits to your routines is to stack them next to something else you already do. The easiest way to explain this is just to give you a few examples:
If you already drink coffee every morning add to that – you’re going to drink your coffee and you’re going to read 10 pages of a book.
If you already make your bed in the morning add to that – you’re going to make your bed and then you’re going to sit on your made bed and meditate 10 minutes.
Or since you probably already take a shower every day add to that – you’re going to repeat positive affirmations while you take your shower.
Stacking new habits to ones you already have helps to makes them so much easier to remember. That helps you to be more consistent, which is the key to making any habit stick. Combining two activities can also help maximize your productivity.
First, figure out where you’re spending your time. Then you need to adjust your mindset, stop the negative self-talk, and adopt a new productive identity. Then figure out how to stop sabotaging yourself and put in the work.
Don’t expect to exit your lazy era over night, this is about conscious growth. Transformations rarely happen over night and that’s ok. Be patient with yourself!
You’re not just leaving your lazy era behind, you’re about to update your life to a new and better version!
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