How I, a Lazy Person, Get Things Done

Don't do Keto

I wrote last week about how tired many of us are.

I am a tired person. And I don’t really mean physically tired. I used to be literally physically tired all the time. For most of my teens and twenties I remember consistently feeling like someone had injected lead into my legs. Walking was a chore. I went to the gym and played sport but always felt like I might fall asleep mid-sprint. My prevailing experience of school was just battling as hard as I could not to fall asleep at my desk.

After about fifteen years of this I thought it might be a good idea to ask my doctor about it. Turns out, definitely not normal. One extremely uncomfortable night sleep in a sleep clinic later and a doctor I never saw sent a report to my GP. I was told that I stopped breathing something like twenty-seven times an hour during sleep.

Now, I wear a very sexy sleep apnea dental guard and, I’m pleased to tell you, I am no longer physically tired! At least, not excessively so.

Still, I am tired in a general sense. Weary. I guess you would call this laziness. I don’t know if it’s my neuro-divergence which makes most every day interactions very mentally taxing, or a learned laziness from years of actually being tired. Maybe it’s my privileged background which signals to me that I’ll never really have to face the consequences of complete burnout. Or maybe I’m just genetically pre-disposed to find long bouts of work difficult.

Bottom line is, I am lazy.

I also have big dreams.

I want to be a world class fantasy and science fiction author.

I want to run a successful business.

I want our podcast to do well.

I want to be in excellent physical shape.

For most of my life, I just assumed I would never be able to make a good go of most of those things. I was too tired. I was too lazy.

But, over the last five years, something’s changed. I have started to get stuff done.

How?

The only place I ever really saw any success before the age of 28 was at university. This was an accident.

In second year I accidentally discovered that, to finish an assignment and get at least a distinction, you had to read and understand six academic articles, and make an original analysis of one to two passages of a primary source. You obviously also had to write and edit the thing. This took, in almost every case, about twenty hours.

12 hours to read the articles, four hours to write 1500 words based on your reading, and hour hours to polish it.

The thought of doing 20 hours of work in one go was terrifying to my tired brain (there’s basically nothing that could make me pull an all nighter short of a direct family member’s life being in danger; at which point, it’s probably 50/50). I learned to work backwards. 20 hours meant 171 minutes a day over the course of a week.

Thus, the distinction machine started rolling. I had the formula.

Two and half hours a day of work seemed manageable to me. It was an amount that, for a few assignments a semester, I could easily fit into my schedule. If I had paid work that day, or a few classes, I could probably still manage 2-3 hours. At least for those four weeks at the end of semester where every professor likes to set their due dates.

It made what was initially a terrifying, monolithic task, easy. Manageable.

Am I really lazy, or am I just honesty?

I don’t want to be one of these people who pretends to be busy all the time. I don’t want to pretend that zoom meetings and email are productive. I think so much of modern work is accumulating “busy-ness” points so you can tell other people how hard you’re working.

As a lazy person, I reject this.

I do work that needs to be done, as it needs to be done.

I break all my big goals into small, manageable chunks and take regular action on them. I do the actual task, and am honest about how long it takes me. I refuse to brag about my hard work at parties.

I don’t boast about grinding away on my novel. I proudly admit that I spend about an hour a day working on writing (the average is probably closer to half an hour). And that that produced four novels in five years almost without trying. Honestly, it was so manageable I feel like it was cheating.

I don’t spend hours editing out podcast because I think it’s a waste of time and just a way to pretend you are a hustler (sorry Liam).

I don’t reply to emails the same day I get them, or even the same week sometimes.

I’ve lost thirteen kilos in the last thirteen months. It sounds like a lot but it was done so languidly, so easily, that I never felt hungry, didn’t restrict any food groups, and barely noticed I was losing weight. In fact, I was often full and satiated. Most people hate the idea of “only” losing one percent of their body weight a month on a diet. But to do it any faster is to one, make things unnecessarily difficult for yourself, two, increase your chance of rebounding, and three makes it more likely you’ll lose muscle mass.

I literally couldn’t tell any difference in my body day to day or week to week. Only month to month. When people ask me about it, I am quick to tell them that it required almost no willpower.

I remember seven or eight years ago when everyone in my crossfit gym was doing Keto. I jumped on the bandwagon and lost eight kilos in four weeks. I did a dexa scan before and after. Seven of those kilos were muscle. Seven!!! That’s not just fucking pointless, it’s actively bad for you. And I was starving the whole time. But man was it hardcore and got me a lot of respectful looks when I turned down bread at parties.

I actually did push myself a little too hard in the gym recently. It’s part of what led me to the exhaustion described in my previous article. I decided I needed to be a tough guy and push every set to failure. So stupid. I lasted eight weeks then had to take two full weeks of deload. I am telling you now that I should not have pushed myself to the limit.

The keto lifestyle

I think so much of hustle culture is like that keto diet. We grind as hard as we can, thinking we’re losing fat, but all we’re doing is losing muscle.

I am never afraid of goals because I know that, when approached sensibly, taking into account my laziness, most big goals are actually lots of small goals, performed regularly.

Laziness is beautiful.

It is an acceptance that you don’t have unlimited time in your day. It’s an acceptance that you would really rather not be stressed and tired if you can help it. It’s the realisation that you can’t actually pull all nighters regularly and not burn out. It’s meeting your body where it’s at, and giving it the grace and the tools to accomplish things in its own time. It’s understanding that small actions taken regularly are much more powerful than big gestures.

It’s an even simpler and kinder version of Cal Newport’s concepts of deep work and slow productivity. It’s like a cross between those and Katherine May’s Wintering.

It’s the realisation that most of what society tells us to do is either busy-work, or ineffective junk-volume.

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Enjoy this article? I wrote a takedown of perfectionism a few weeks ago that you might enjoy.