We are all lazy people. We love to procrastinate, we find comfort in sleeping, we idle away time as though it were a useless commodity, and we have all built our personal utopias where we do everything except work.

It’s perfectly natural to be lazy. I imagine that if it wasn’t for the deadlines and binding commitments that force us to do work, none of us would go back to those dungeons, aka campus or offices.

Thankfully though, we realize that laziness should be overcome in order for us to be successful and be useful to the society.

So, what to do to beat laziness and reclaim the lost inspiration?

Take action

If you don’t feel like reading, read. If you don’t feel like writing, write. If you don’t feel like doing exercise, do it. In short, action is the best motivation. The only thing that stops us from getting sucked into a task is not doing it, so do it now!

Take one bite at a time

Does the idea of taking your whole meal in one massive bite sound repulsive? Luckily, you can take it one bite at a time, enjoy it, and still consume the whole meal.

Likewise, if you try to do everything together, you lose motivation to do anything at all. Therefore, it’s best to split a bigger task into smaller ones and concentrate on only one part at a time. The less formidable the work, the more you’ll enjoy doing it.

Remove the distractions

When being lazy, we are often attracted to the distractions. Bloggers are found browsing others’ blogs when they are supposed to be writing theirs, and students are found watching TV when they should be studying. These are all distractions that serve no good purpose. If you remove the distractions, for example, by disconnecting from the Internet and by locking the TV room, you’ll notice that it becomes easier to get back to the work.

Find motivation

Why are you doing work? It is easy to forget the purpose of work with time. Remind yourself of how important your work is for you, for your personal satisfaction, for your life, family and so on. If you feel you are not clear about the purpose of what you are doing, it’s time to recap the goals you set down when you started.

Reward yourself

Discipline and schedules are all good and well, but do we want to become robots? This the very thing we dread and that is what leads us to lose motivation. You’ll be more enthusiastic to complete a task when you know you are going to reward yourself at the end.

We usually agonize over the fact that we are being lazy, yet continue to procrastinate for hours. It becomes difficult to get out of this condition unless we force ourselves to take action, which is, admittedly, the most difficult part. Though once we set about doing a task, the laziness disappears like a magician’s trick.

What is it that keeps you busy and motivated?