Category Archives: “UN” Productivity / Time “MIS” Managment

How to be lazy.

by admin

Do less in more time!

We here at ‘Monday’ like to do as little work as possible, and to that end I’d like to present some advice on how to do less in more time. Slacking is an art form, especially when it comes to make it look like you’re not slacking. A famous quote goes something like “Keep slacking, but don’t ‘look’ like you’re trying to slack. I don’t know slack casual.” That’s whole point of this, do less work and spend more time doing it.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. So 80% of your work comes from 20% of your time. Now if you wanted to do more in less time, you’d probably focus on that 20%, but since we want to take more time and do less work, you need to figure out what takes 80% of your time, the stuff that doesn’t produce anything and focus on that. Focus on the 80% that doesn’t matter.

Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So what’s the obvious conclusion? Allow more time for completion. The more time you add the more time you work. Of course I don’t know if this means you work more because you have more time, or work less. Actually we don’t care if we work less, just get less accomplished so that works.

Don’t do work in low intense bursts. You would accomplish more if you time boxed or essentially spent less time and worked harder. We don’t like working harder, we like taking it easy. Spread tasks out that should be done in a few hours to cover a few days. You want to work on low energy so you don’t actually get anymore done. Work slavishly until you’re so tired you’re about to drop. Basically when we’re refreshed we can work more effectively, so try not to work effectively by wearing yourself out.

Remember big large overwhelming goals and don’t split it up. The larger the goal the longer it takes. This is actually contrary to being lazy, however, not getting anything accomplished is just as good of a goal is being lazy. Remember busywork is your friend. Use it. Don’t take breaks either. Focus on doing work and not finishing projects. Don’t ever delegate, because it might make you more productive, instead try to do everything yourself.

Finally Clutter. Live in a messy house, and a messy desk. Keeping clean takes time; it also motivates you when everything is in its place. Instead be disheveled, disorganized, and disordered. If you can’t find anything, you can’t get any work done right?

These are just a few of the tips. There are more that I may introduce in a later article. So in summary, focus on what doesn’t matter, allow yourself tons of time, big goals you can’t possibly finish, work a lot but try not to get much accomplished, don’t take breaks, add clutter to your life and you’ll soon be doing less in more time.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

Stickman Comic Strips – No Talent Required

AllKillerNoFiller Laziness 90x300 Stickman Comic Strips No Talent Required

This should qualify as a stick man

Today’s article is going to be a short one. We’re talking about comic strips. But not the kind you have to have years of art school or a lifetime of study to draw correctly. Two words: Stick Men. That’s right; you don’t need any formal art training to draw stick men. In fact you probably played hangman at some point in your life, maybe when you were very young. In it you spell out a word by trying to select the proper missing letters and when you choose incorrectly one more piece of the ‘hangman’ is drawn. This is a stick man at its very basic. Now you have all the training you require, however, the talent of humor is beyond the scope of this article. The ‘Monday’ way of course is not to try to be funny but just draw stick men in little boxes sequentially as fast as possible and have that be the post for the week. So without further ado, this week’s ‘comic’: (To your right)

Note: Due to the hectic work schedule and general productiveness of us here on “I’ll Do It On Monday!” we regret to inform you that this week’s comic strip was not drawn by us. (Really it means we’re so dang lazy that we got someone else’s comic strip instead. Don’t worry we have full permission. Trust us we’re professionals.)

Please note the comic on the right is from All Filler, No Killer by Leo Loikkanen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

How to write the same article in hundreds of different ways.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never really written one article many different ways, but I would like to. Actually that’s not entirely true, I have made a couple of articles that are some what similar, like How To Waste Time For Fun and Profit, 10 Awesome Internet Time Sinks, 5 Tips for Procrastination, De-motivate Yourself, and probably others I will write in the future. So that gives me enough authority to write about this. Well not really because, like, it’s me and I wouldn’t trust me with anything.

In any case here is some advice on how to write the same article in hundreds of different ways.

Pick a topic you’re interested in and divide it into different aspects. Not unlike taking a big project and dividing it up into smaller steps, this will not make you more productive. But like when you pretend to work or try to be lazy this can be used for busy work. Let’s say time management is your topic and you’re going to write an article on time boxing (See Time Unboxing for more info not time boxing).

There may be several techniques to time boxing, let’s say, the Pomodoro technique a method in which you set your slot of time for 25 minutes and take a 5 minute break in between each, or the procrastination dash where your time box is only a few minutes, or maybe you want to build up to a longer time period and start at 1 minute and break for a minute, then increase the time worked until you’re up to 20 straight minutes, or maybe you want to decrease the time by starting at the 20 minutes, or maybe you want to just spend 30 minutes on a task or project and then decide to switch to something else.

All of these are basically the same thing, setting aside a period of time in which to do work. (We’re not a big fan of work around here but I’m making a point, so bear with me.) You can disguise the same article about time boxing as these different time intervals. Stacked, with-or-without breaks, descending intervals, fixed intervals with no break, a circuit where you automatically switch tasks when the timer rings, etc. There’s no limit as to how many timeboxing articles you could write with this.

You could also pick items that are similar to each other but not exactly the same and write about them. For instance, overcoming procrastination (which we don’t condone), or increasing motivation (which we don’t condone), or overcoming laziness (which we don’t condone). These are pretty much the same things, you just write it a little differently. You can even copy parts of one into another, and just rearrange it. It’s just that easy.

Now you should go and write one article 20 ways with confidence. It’s an unlimited source of traffic to your site to have hundreds of articles. In fact I think I’m going to do that myself, that way I don’t have to finish writing articles for the rest of the year. Only need to do it for half or a quarter of the year and regurgitate the same information over and over.

Until ‘Monday’