The Art of Being Lazy

Many would-be writers, I have discovered from my reading of Medium stories, are held back from their Nobel prizes by that almost invincible affliction, procrastination. Far be it from me to quibble with any person’s self-diagnosis, especially concerning a condition as devastating as procrastination, but I have found, for myself and many others, that the driving force behind non-productivity (in just about any field) is not procrastination, it is the more complicated and nuanced being of laziness.

Laziness is often confused with procrastination, which is wrong. Procrastination is a basic strategy used by essentially lazy people to not do a task at the moment. It comes from a place in the soul that insists that the task gets done, but not by that procrastinator at that moment. But it allows for, in fact, demands, by its very essence, that the task will be done, possibly at a later time by the procrastinator him- or herself or immediately by someone else (the most sophisticated form of procrastination is embarking on a lesser task so someone else will undertake your original, greater task).

Procrastination necessarily includes a second task which, in the eye of the procrastinator can be said to supersede in importance and urgency the procrastinated task. No-one can legitimately procrastinate without doing something else. The nature of the procrastinated task is not important — it…