How to Overcome Laziness at the Workplace? – Part 2
Read Part 1 before you start:
4. Allocate Fun Money
“What do we work for?”
When I asked this simple question, the answer was, “to fulfill our responsibilities so that we can get complete satisfaction out of our human life and go to heaven…blah…blah…blah.”
Stop it! I felt like screaming, “why don’t you hit my head with a hammer!”
We both know it was not the correct answer.
I guess the quick answer has got to be “to make money!”
“Money for what,” I asked.
“To spend, of course,” was his reply.
“Spend on what? And why?”
“To spend on our needs and wants,” he answered. “By doing so, we achieve happiness.”
The question now becomes, “do we really have control on what we are spending?” Let us see:
Most of our paycheck will go towards paying utility bills, credit cards, healthcare, mortgage, school fees and day-care expenses, most of which we cannot control. How many of us really feel happy when spending our money on things like these? How many of us smile while paying our bills?
So what should one do with the remainder of their paycheck? Savings? or Investments? We might be hopefully anticipating that one shiny day we get a pay raise and we will have plenty of money to spend. Unfortunately, the pay increase will happen just as the expenses increase, and then we’ll never get to spend any money on ourselves.
The answer to the original question has got to be, “we work to make a living.”
Then, how can we expect ourselves to wake up in the early morning and be enthusiastic about going to work for making money which we cannot ever spend on ourselves?
Our human minds will never commit to anything without expecting to get something out of it.
In order to get real happiness from the work, we have to set aside some money from every paycheck that we can spend for our own fun and enjoyment. Taking 5% of a paycheck as “fun money” may not really hurt as much as one might think. People are capable of adapting to their means, even with 5% less in the paycheck.
One can then do or buy something fun and enjoyable with that money. Take the family to dinner or the beach, or buy a book, some sports equipment or some electronic gadget.
This will encourage us to be more committed to the workplace as we are realizing the immediate benefits of our work.
It’s not the money that creates the excitement; it’s the freedom of spending our own money.
Laziness tends to disappear as fun starts to appear.
5. Don’t be a Pusher
If you play any sport, you would have already guessed what I am going to talk about. The pushers are the type of players who don’t like to see the ball in their side of the court. They don’t hit the ball hard, don’t spin or not even play any tricks.
“So, what do they do?”
They just push the ball again and again to the other side of the court until their opponent gives up.
Pushers are very common in most workplaces and take a big part in creating a lazy work environment.
When the pushers are given any work, the first thing that comes to their mind is how to avoid or postpone it. They immediately try to push it to other people or other department(s) by finding a fault or by raising a question in the given work.
The other department or person will generally take a few hours, if not days to reply depending on his interest and convenience. If the other party is also a pusher, they will do the same thing as the first pusher, pushing it back into other court with another question.
After receiving the reply, the pusher will never look back into the problem for quite a few days. They again simply hit into other court with another question then, sit back and relax. This kind of pushing back and forth will continue for quite some time without any progress.
It looks like everyone is waiting for others interaction. It may appear to be lot of activity, but actually the work got stalled here. In technical terms this situation is called a “Dead Lock”. The pushers will never be able to finish their work in the allocated time frame or accumulate more work that eventually gets to their nerves at the last minute.
“How do we prevent ourselves from being a pusher?
Taking ownership of the work will help us not to be in the pushers loop.
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
- George Bernard Shaw
When we receive any work we have to carefully check if we can do it alone or if there is anything that really needs help from others. When we refer it to others, we have to make sure that we clearly specify the time frame and our ownership. If other people know our dead lines, there is a less chance for them to ignore it or bounce it back to us. If the other people are not responding, we need to make sure that we follow up with them in order to get out of the “dead lock” situation.
“Who do you think is the happiest person when the job is done? And who will get most of the credit?”
I think “It’s the one who took the ownership of the job.”
6. Automate Everything
During the confession of my work day as I discussed in Part-1, I realized that most of the work we do everyday is manual and routine.
So, it’s obvious that we don’t get much fun when doing this kind work so, it makes sense that we procrastinate.
We always need to have a change in our routine to get excited about something and that change should be an effortless one. Our brain always tends to resist the routine and manual work which results in nothing but laziness. In order to overcome laziness, we need to automate all the routine work.
Of course, it is obvious that we will go through some pain when brainstorming for the automation ideas but, once it is done, it’s just as simple as “pressing the button”.
In the recent world, virtually anything can be automated. It just needs us to go onto the Internet and look for the readymade solution. We also have to make sure that, we have some auditing mechanism in place in order to track if anything goes wrong.
So, let’s overcome laziness and start working on the process that can simplify and automate the work environment.
I can still hear someone whispering …
“How can we automate “pressing the button” ?
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- How to Overcome Laziness at the Workplace? – Part 3
- How to Overcome Laziness at the Workplace? – Part 1
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