August 24, 2009 at 04:59Laziness of IT-employees from a different angle: maybe this is not “laziness" at all?
On Habré a lot has already been said about the fight against laziness. I will try to tell my point of view. It differs from those published here, at least in that, in my understanding, laziness is not laziness, it is different. I really hope that it turns out to be original and there will be no repetition. To begin with, let's assume the worst: you are a freelancer (lazy, just scary) and at the same time a programmer.
How does “laziness” arise (I will continue to write without quotes)? In my free time from spitting on the ceiling, I thought a lot about this topic. :) And I came to the following conclusion. Laziness in itself is not a natural state; it can be caused by several factors that urgently need to be removed from life. Laziness ... It is rather apathy, unwillingness to do anything. She does not appear herself and does not pass herself. You can wait for her disappearance for months. And, here's the thing, if you try to fight it in the vein, as they say here, it will not help, because you are not struggling with what the problem is. More truly - as a rule, laziness too quickly grows into something more, you are lazy with the force of 10 minutes, and then something more global comes already.
So. The lack of apathy is based, in my opinion, on the presence of happiness. In other words, while you feel good and comfortable - there is no reason for “laziness” (apathy). Fighting laziness itself is the same as fighting symptoms - the disease will kill you anyway, just later.
1) "All life is work." When you wake up and the first thing you think: “I have a project (s), I need to urgently do it!”, This is not life. Everyone knows how the freelancer’s happiness (free time and free schedule) turns into his tragedy, when he burrows into projects at the very top, and only 3 hairs stick out on the surface of life. How it turns out is also not a secret - if you have scored a lot of projects or if you can’t cope or just got tired.
Need to defuse the situation. It is necessary to make sure that getting up in the morning, wiping your eyes, the only thing “urgent for a computer” does not occur to my head.
Decision:Firstly, I recommend not taking more than 1 project at a time, even if it is 100 rubles. Secondly, do not put off until the last minute, if not corny. Thirdly, you do not have to constantly sit at the computer and press F5 on the mailbox in the hope that the customer has sent something - go outside for a couple of hours. Experience has shown that these 2 hours can be spent in two states: 1. wait and worry, running from the kitchen and back, 2. take a walk and relax, meet someone. And the customer, in any case, does they lie to send something in 2 hours (and there are slow ones that you wait every 5 minutes, and they appear only after two days). Let the customer wait for an extra hour, and not you (but do not get carried away).
That is: love yourself more than work! Work is bread, but bread is not all life. You can always get bread in other ways, go to work as a loader, make your own project, change your profession, grow a garden and bake it yourself. Has such a thought crossed my mind? Have a quiet breakfast, wash, walk an hour, think about nature or have sex with your beloved. The main thing is to think that you need to respect yourself and love more than anyone else in this world (and believe me, if you don’t go too far, the employer is also more pleasant to communicate with a calm and rested person).
2) "I will not succeed."Sometimes it happens that the project is complex, the customer is nervous, and the contractor does not like himself and over time he simply cannot get to work. Very often this happens when already in a hurry. I had it - urgently, just urgently, I need to do something, but on the contrary I fell into mourning about “I still won’t have time”, and as a result I did it even worse (deadline passed, work was not done). I don’t know about you, but at the same time I sometimes drank (to relax), which made everything even more pitiable.
Decision:understand it immediately will not succeed. You need to pull yourself together. The most effective way for me was the following. Do you have a friend you are most afraid of? Or make a collective image. As an option - do not be afraid, but respect. Or the image of the person you want to be like (for me, this is a very strong-willed, disappointed rich and smart guy of indefinitely 30-40 years old, who wanted to put on everything that does not interest him and who in life did only what he wanted, but became rich smart and strong).
Introduce him. And imagine that he says in a threatening (in the case of “fear”) or derogatory-evil (in the case of “respect”) voice, it’s extremely cold: “I got up and went to work.” Calm, without a mat so. In general, you know better. Maybe you are afraid of the gopniks, and if you are “run over”, you will become stiff. Apply this image. It is necessary that straight to the bones from this mental voice. I do not have time to notice how I am already completing the project.
3) “I love freelance / work, but the rest of my life is guano and I don’t want to do anything.”
Solution: you need to get lost in work like in a magic forest, so that you can forget about all your troubles behind freelance. It doesn’t work right away, for this you need to overcome “laziness”.
You can overcome laziness again by taking an interesting project for you. Which will cover you with your head. Copywriter? An interesting topic of the article. Programmer? A project with awesome technologies and code requirements, not performance. Designer? Draw a design on the topic that you like best in life (nature, food, women, whatever). The main thing is to feel that you LIKE to work. Try not to take a routine later.
4) “The budget is small, the dates are small, the customer is an unpleasant person.”
Solution: Refuse and all. Only work with people you like. If you work with someone who annoys - there will be no mood, no money, nothing. Let idiots work with idiots, and you find yourself an adequate partner.
5) "How tired I am of freelance!".
Decision:Change your occupation or get a job. Maybe then I want to come back. A two-week break was enough for me to flare up again with a passion for customers, projects and the mysterious “performer is needed”.
In my opinion, all this causes the so-called laziness. The list can be supplemented, but laziness definitely has a reason, it needs to be found and beat against the wall until it falls behind. It’s not about you personally, but in some external circumstance that causes the state “well, nafig”.
To summarize, in general. The absence of laziness is harmony with oneself, with the surrounding world and a sense of happiness, the absence of a feeling that something is wrong in life.
There’s something else to catch in case laziness is quite ordinary and there are no obvious reasons for it. It happens, of course, that I just don’t want to do anything. You need to feel that things are more important than all nonsense. For example, I played a lot in WoW. But some time ago, I realized that "pumping a paladin" is the same job, you need to do this for 8 hours a day. It’s better I’ll do a couple of projects, I thought - both money and reputation, but real, not toy. Who can boast that you have "fallen" level 80? When you meet girls, colleagues? This is all nonsense, because without hints it’s clear what is more important. But this must be felt. Hindsight is strong. This method was already described somewhere here, but I repeated it only for the sake of WoW. For example, in "Stalker" or "Counter-Strike" this does not work, there is no feeling of wasted time. And in MMORPG, it seems he’s killed a month, and "pumped" just something to the 40th level. Fu, nafig, nafig.
A similar effective method, as already mentioned, is with the "little man in my head." You can’t do it yourself, imagine someone who can make you tremble with two words.
And yet, if you feel that you are starting to be lazy, quickly for the computer, open the project and start writing code. Just not thinking. It blows away in a matter of minutes.
I hope that I informed you of the essence of the problem, I did not have a goal to stock up with solutions for all occasions, because for each they are different. You just need to sit down and think - what is wrong in my life, why am I lazy, maybe I'm unhappy? Rummage thoroughly and thoroughly in your life - think about why you don’t want to work, maybe last week you didn’t wash the dishes, or maybe you aren’t happy with your wife (non-obvious reasons) or one of the cases described above. I repeat myself: “Fighting with laziness itself is the same as fighting symptoms - the disease will kill you anyway, just later.” Cancer will eat your brain while you are taking analgin from a “headache”. It’s tough (especially since I revised House), but the comparison is impossible.
Thank you, I hope for an invite and I hope that someone really helped to see the Universal Evil.
Original at dimoning.ru .
How does “laziness” arise (I will continue to write without quotes)? In my free time from spitting on the ceiling, I thought a lot about this topic. :) And I came to the following conclusion. Laziness in itself is not a natural state; it can be caused by several factors that urgently need to be removed from life. Laziness ... It is rather apathy, unwillingness to do anything. She does not appear herself and does not pass herself. You can wait for her disappearance for months. And, here's the thing, if you try to fight it in the vein, as they say here, it will not help, because you are not struggling with what the problem is. More truly - as a rule, laziness too quickly grows into something more, you are lazy with the force of 10 minutes, and then something more global comes already.
So. The lack of apathy is based, in my opinion, on the presence of happiness. In other words, while you feel good and comfortable - there is no reason for “laziness” (apathy). Fighting laziness itself is the same as fighting symptoms - the disease will kill you anyway, just later.
1) "All life is work." When you wake up and the first thing you think: “I have a project (s), I need to urgently do it!”, This is not life. Everyone knows how the freelancer’s happiness (free time and free schedule) turns into his tragedy, when he burrows into projects at the very top, and only 3 hairs stick out on the surface of life. How it turns out is also not a secret - if you have scored a lot of projects or if you can’t cope or just got tired.
Need to defuse the situation. It is necessary to make sure that getting up in the morning, wiping your eyes, the only thing “urgent for a computer” does not occur to my head.
Decision:Firstly, I recommend not taking more than 1 project at a time, even if it is 100 rubles. Secondly, do not put off until the last minute, if not corny. Thirdly, you do not have to constantly sit at the computer and press F5 on the mailbox in the hope that the customer has sent something - go outside for a couple of hours. Experience has shown that these 2 hours can be spent in two states: 1. wait and worry, running from the kitchen and back, 2. take a walk and relax, meet someone. And the customer, in any case, does they lie to send something in 2 hours (and there are slow ones that you wait every 5 minutes, and they appear only after two days). Let the customer wait for an extra hour, and not you (but do not get carried away).
That is: love yourself more than work! Work is bread, but bread is not all life. You can always get bread in other ways, go to work as a loader, make your own project, change your profession, grow a garden and bake it yourself. Has such a thought crossed my mind? Have a quiet breakfast, wash, walk an hour, think about nature or have sex with your beloved. The main thing is to think that you need to respect yourself and love more than anyone else in this world (and believe me, if you don’t go too far, the employer is also more pleasant to communicate with a calm and rested person).
2) "I will not succeed."Sometimes it happens that the project is complex, the customer is nervous, and the contractor does not like himself and over time he simply cannot get to work. Very often this happens when already in a hurry. I had it - urgently, just urgently, I need to do something, but on the contrary I fell into mourning about “I still won’t have time”, and as a result I did it even worse (deadline passed, work was not done). I don’t know about you, but at the same time I sometimes drank (to relax), which made everything even more pitiable.
Decision:understand it immediately will not succeed. You need to pull yourself together. The most effective way for me was the following. Do you have a friend you are most afraid of? Or make a collective image. As an option - do not be afraid, but respect. Or the image of the person you want to be like (for me, this is a very strong-willed, disappointed rich and smart guy of indefinitely 30-40 years old, who wanted to put on everything that does not interest him and who in life did only what he wanted, but became rich smart and strong).
Introduce him. And imagine that he says in a threatening (in the case of “fear”) or derogatory-evil (in the case of “respect”) voice, it’s extremely cold: “I got up and went to work.” Calm, without a mat so. In general, you know better. Maybe you are afraid of the gopniks, and if you are “run over”, you will become stiff. Apply this image. It is necessary that straight to the bones from this mental voice. I do not have time to notice how I am already completing the project.
3) “I love freelance / work, but the rest of my life is guano and I don’t want to do anything.”
Solution: you need to get lost in work like in a magic forest, so that you can forget about all your troubles behind freelance. It doesn’t work right away, for this you need to overcome “laziness”.
You can overcome laziness again by taking an interesting project for you. Which will cover you with your head. Copywriter? An interesting topic of the article. Programmer? A project with awesome technologies and code requirements, not performance. Designer? Draw a design on the topic that you like best in life (nature, food, women, whatever). The main thing is to feel that you LIKE to work. Try not to take a routine later.
4) “The budget is small, the dates are small, the customer is an unpleasant person.”
Solution: Refuse and all. Only work with people you like. If you work with someone who annoys - there will be no mood, no money, nothing. Let idiots work with idiots, and you find yourself an adequate partner.
5) "How tired I am of freelance!".
Decision:Change your occupation or get a job. Maybe then I want to come back. A two-week break was enough for me to flare up again with a passion for customers, projects and the mysterious “performer is needed”.
In my opinion, all this causes the so-called laziness. The list can be supplemented, but laziness definitely has a reason, it needs to be found and beat against the wall until it falls behind. It’s not about you personally, but in some external circumstance that causes the state “well, nafig”.
To summarize, in general. The absence of laziness is harmony with oneself, with the surrounding world and a sense of happiness, the absence of a feeling that something is wrong in life.
There’s something else to catch in case laziness is quite ordinary and there are no obvious reasons for it. It happens, of course, that I just don’t want to do anything. You need to feel that things are more important than all nonsense. For example, I played a lot in WoW. But some time ago, I realized that "pumping a paladin" is the same job, you need to do this for 8 hours a day. It’s better I’ll do a couple of projects, I thought - both money and reputation, but real, not toy. Who can boast that you have "fallen" level 80? When you meet girls, colleagues? This is all nonsense, because without hints it’s clear what is more important. But this must be felt. Hindsight is strong. This method was already described somewhere here, but I repeated it only for the sake of WoW. For example, in "Stalker" or "Counter-Strike" this does not work, there is no feeling of wasted time. And in MMORPG, it seems he’s killed a month, and "pumped" just something to the 40th level. Fu, nafig, nafig.
A similar effective method, as already mentioned, is with the "little man in my head." You can’t do it yourself, imagine someone who can make you tremble with two words.
And yet, if you feel that you are starting to be lazy, quickly for the computer, open the project and start writing code. Just not thinking. It blows away in a matter of minutes.
I hope that I informed you of the essence of the problem, I did not have a goal to stock up with solutions for all occasions, because for each they are different. You just need to sit down and think - what is wrong in my life, why am I lazy, maybe I'm unhappy? Rummage thoroughly and thoroughly in your life - think about why you don’t want to work, maybe last week you didn’t wash the dishes, or maybe you aren’t happy with your wife (non-obvious reasons) or one of the cases described above. I repeat myself: “Fighting with laziness itself is the same as fighting symptoms - the disease will kill you anyway, just later.” Cancer will eat your brain while you are taking analgin from a “headache”. It’s tough (especially since I revised House), but the comparison is impossible.
Thank you, I hope for an invite and I hope that someone really helped to see the Universal Evil.
Original at dimoning.ru .