Organised people are lazy. No question about it in my mind at all. There – I’ve said it.
Surprised?
You shouldn’t really be – you see I’m not being rude here at all – after all I count myself amongst the organised (most of the time at least!), and being lazy is good when you look at things more closely….
What is lazy?
The definition of lazy is as follows (according to Google):-
Taking explanation 1 from here – lazy is “unwilling to work or use energy – and that’s my reasoning behind calling organised people lazy.
Organised people are lazy because they don’t want to have to expend any extra energy than they absolutely have to.
Even Albert Einstein said something similar:-
Organized people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.
Organised people take it upon themselves to create systems that work for them in their lives that take away any unnecessary stress/effort/time/money etc… they may otherwise be expending unnecessarily.
Let’s use an example:-
The case of the lost keys!
An unorganised person may lose their keys regularly. Doing this means wasting at least a few minutes every day looked for them, or worst case having to spend money and time to get the locks changed or new keys cut etc…. – all because the keys hadn’t been put where that person knew where to find them.
On the other hand, an organised person may have experienced losing their keys once or twice and were unwilling to expend the energy and stress looking for them again, so created a specific place for those keys. Going forward it would therefore take seconds to put them there, and seconds to find them there when needed again.
The organised person wastes less energy overall – so can be thought of (given the definition above) as lazy.
Are you lazy?
Now I don’t know about you – but I hate to waste my time and energy on things. If working out ways to not have to have such waste in my life means that I am lazy – bring it on!
If I can find a way to get things done faster, or even not at all – then I will.
I will organise things so that they work more effectively with as little effort as possible.
So let me ask you a question – are you lazy as well?!
But how can you be lazy if you have to spend time creating great systems?
Yes, of course it takes time to set these systems up – so you could argue that organised people do spend time and energy on things and are therefore not lazy at all – but I will stand by the title of this post by saying that the time spent setting up the system and maintaining it will be a fraction of the time spent on that item when the systems are not in place.
Using the example of keys above – it may take half an hour to set up a place in the house for your keys – to find a suitable hook/container and clear a space. It may then take a few times of using it for it to become second nature – but if it saves you even 5 minutes a day from now on searching for your keys that’s a huge saving over the course of the next few months.
So – get organised – and be lazy!
Just think what else you could spend your saved time doing once you are more organised – you could get even more done, or just sit back and enjoy some down-time.
Well deserved laziness – just a thought! …