
Links for this Post:
10 Ways to Make Laziness Work for You by Leo Babauta - FreelanceSwitch
The Lazy Way to Success a book written by Fred Gratzon and illustrated by Lawrence Sheaff 
Laziness is a human condition which until quite recently often was the victim of bad press. More recently, those who set the trends in personal development have been rethinking laziness. The most recent example is the article linked above by Leo Babauta.
Babusta is noteworthy for his Zen Habits and Zen to Done which I posted about recently and which many of you wrote to tell me you enjoyed.
In the post cited about, Babuta gives you ten ways to make laziness a positive force in your life. I will not list all ten here, you can visit his page for that. Here is one of the 10:
Be productive to avoid doing something. Now turn that concept on its head. It’s an idea called Structured Procrastination, and written about much earlier by Robert Benchley in a great article called Getting Things Done from 1949. The basic concept is that in order to avoid doing something difficult, you’ll do a bunch of other things instead. A lot of those other things might also be important too, so you’re being productive because you’re too lazy to do the most important thing on your list. So, to implement this, put one really hard task at the top of your list, and a bunch of other important stuff below it. Now, tell yourself you really must, must get that first task done right away. If you’re feeling lazy, you’ll do the other stuff on the list instead. Now, when more important stuff comes up, the first item of the list gets pushed down and will get done.

If you wondering about the graphic at the top of the post, it is from new book, The Lazy Way to Success written by Fred Gratzon and illustrated by Lawrence Sheaff"
which celebrates what they call the, " . . . paradigm-shifting concept . . . 'Smart Laziness . . .You can download a sample chapter of the book in PDF format by clicking here and saving or opening the PDF.
Gratzon says in the book:
It is a great tragedy that nearly everyone on earth has bought into the idea that hard work has value. As a result, nearly everyone works hard. But, instead of becoming successful, nearly everyone gets exhausted, and stressed, and financially strapped. And many of those people get physically, and/or emotionally, and/or socially, and/or psychologically sick.
You would think that people would have figured it out by now that hard work is not the answer. Unfortunately, no one has and nearly everyone continues to blindly sacrifice time, and freedom, and health, and family life in an attempt to get money. They never reach their goal. Why? Because the hard work formula is a fraud, that's why!
Fortunately, one magical day when I was blithely avoiding all forms of work, I realized that no one has to give up freedom to be successful. I realized that you can avoid work and be successful at the same. In fact, I saw that avoiding work was actually the secret to being successful.
Actually Barbauta and Sheaff were not the first human philosophers to extol the virtues of laziness. The Chinese Philosopher Lao Tsu whose book the Tao Te Ching is the second most translated book written (after the Bible). It was also his only book but a runaway bestseller.
It was a short book but one of the things he said was
In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.
Note: From translation by S. Mitchell
For people like myself who always wondered why they were so lazy, this stuff provides inmportant answers.
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