How to stop being lazy

Calling yourself lazy feels like a fact about your character. In the research there is no such trait to find. What psychologists study instead is effort: how people weigh it, when they avoid it, and when they go looking for it.

The clearest test of how people avoid effort comes from the psychologist Wouter Kool and his colleagues, who ran 6 experiments on it (Kool and colleagues, 2010). In the first, 43 people drew cards from two decks on a screen. Every card showed a number, and its color said which of two simple questions to answer about it: is it under five, or is it even?

The decks looked the same and nobody was told the difference. In one, the question usually stayed the same from card to card. In the other it kept changing, and switching back and forth between two questions takes more mental effort than repeating one. People were free to draw from either deck as they liked.

36 of them, or 84%, drew more often from the easier deck. Across the whole group, the easier deck took 68% of all draws. Afterwards, 12 people said they had never noticed any difference between the decks. 8 of those had still favored the easier one.

None of this points to a flaw in the people tested. The lean toward less effort showed up in most of them, including some who could not have chosen it on purpose, because they never saw that one deck was easier. If you drift to the couch and the phone after a full day, you are doing what the card players did. The useful question is what to set up so the drift lands somewhere you would have picked.

Motivation comes first, or so the common advice goes: lazy people lack it, and once it turns up the work will follow. The evidence runs the other way round.

The psychologists Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk worked with children who were far behind in arithmetic and had no interest in it (Bandura and Schunk, 1981). All of them taught themselves from the same materials. Some were given small goals close at hand, some a single distant goal, and some no goal at all.

The children with the near goals progressed quickly and mastered the material. They also came to feel capable, and grew interested in arithmetic, a subject that had held little attraction for them at the start. The distant goal made no measurable difference. The children did not need interest in order to begin. It grew out of small steps they had finished.

The effort paradox says the same from another angle: the value of effort builds while you work and after. Waiting until you feel like it means waiting for something that mostly arrives once you have begun.

1. Pick one thing. One thing, and no plan for a new life. The book, the course, the run or the portfolio: choose the single thing you most often tell yourself you were too lazy to do.
2. Set a start of 10 minutes. A start this short is the near goal from the arithmetic study, sized so that the cost you feel before beginning is almost nothing. Treat it as a floor: you can carry on, and stopping when the time is up still counts as a kept day.
3. Decide the moment ahead of time. For example: “When dinner is cleared, I sit on the couch with the book.” A plan that fixes when and where in advance is called an implementation intention. Across 94 tests, it made people more likely to follow through (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006).
4. Make the easy option the right one. The card players took whichever deck asked less, and you will too. So leave the book on the couch and the phone in another room, and the low-effort choice becomes the one you wanted.
5. Rest on purpose afterwards. Choose the show, the game or the call, and enjoy it. Nothing in this method asks you to give up your evenings.

If what you are dodging is one specific task with a deadline, the page on how to stop procrastinating is the closer fit. For turning a start into something you do without having to decide each time, see habit formation.

A good way to run this test counts those hours from what you already write or say about your day, with no timer to remember on the evenings you least feel like it. Most journaling apps keep the feeling of a wasted evening. They do not show how many hours it held, or where they went.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: the thing you meant to do, your phone, shows, sleep, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. A habit keeps its streak and a reminder for the start, and insights over weeks show whether the hours are rising.

Write my first day

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Or scan with your phone's camera.

For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The test compares you with yourself, a week at a time. It sets no target, because the right number of hours for a book or a course is yours to pick. All it asks is that each week holds a little more than the one before.

Here is how the four weeks went for the made-up example person, whose thing was a book after dinner.

Week one held 20m of reading across 2 evenings. By week four it was 4h 20m, on all 7 days, an average of 37m a day. No session in the whole month ran as long as an hour.

The misses are part of the record. A deadline and a dinner out cost two evenings in week two, and a bad day at work cost one in week three. Each time the next evening began with the book again, and each week still beat the one before. For holding a line like that over months, see self-discipline.

Ordinary evenings are what this page is about: free hours, a thing you meant to do, and a phone that got there first. A count of hours is the right tool for that, and for nothing more.

If you have felt worn out for weeks, or have lost interest in things you used to enjoy, talk to a doctor. A count of hours cannot tell you why that is, and the word lazy should not be allowed to stand in for an answer. This page reports what research found. It is not medical advice.

The survey figures link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics table under the chart. Every other research finding on this page links to one of these sources.

1. Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B. and Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(4), 665 to 682.
2. Inzlicht, M., Shenhav, A. and Olivola, C. Y. (2018). The effort paradox: effort is both costly and valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 337 to 349.
3. Bandura, A. and Schunk, D. H. (1981). Cultivating competence, self-efficacy, and intrinsic interest through proximal self-motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 586 to 598.
4. Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119.