Are you lazy? How lazy? I think technology is giving us opportunities to take laziness to an entirely new level!
I remember life before the Internet took over. Many things have changed. Now we can buy stuff online. We can watch movies and TV shows on our computer instead of our TV, when we want them. And we have access to an incredible wealth of the world’s information by simply visiting a search engine like DuckDuckGo.com and typing a few keywords. We can store infinite photos in our iPhones. We can use templates to quickly create presentations and reports. All that automation should be freeing us up to get smarter than ever. But that isn’t my experience.
Our brains take shortcuts. For example, it’s hard to know if someone is competent. So research shows that we interpret confidence as competence. Our brain substitutes the easy decision for the hard decision. We aren’t even aware of this consciously, however. That’s why certain professions wear suits—to give clients the knee-jerk impression of competence, even if none exists.
In the last two days, I’ve had a few younger people demonstrate a remarkable laziness factor. Whereas someone in my generation wouldn’t look something up because it involved going to a library or calling a reference librarian on the phone, these younger people tell me they did a web search and couldn’t find the information they need. So they stopped trying. Without an answer delivered up instantly, even in the age of the Web, kids who have never known anything else get stopped in their tracks the instant their preferred method requires extra effort.
Of course, if it’s happening to them, it’s probably happening to me, too. Where once I wouldn’t have minded picking up the phone and calling someone to arrange a meeting, now it’s just easier—and lazier—to send them a million emails, even though objectively, it’s far less efficient. That’s because my new standard is twitching a finger and clicking a mouse button. By comparison, lifting a phone to my ear is a huge amount of work.
Be on the lookout! In the long run, our in-the-moment laziness may seriously hamper our ability to get big-stuff-done. Our brains are substituting the question “is this easy to do right this instant?” for the question “will this make reaching my overall goal any easier?” And it’s the latter question—the one our brain skimps on—that is most important. It’s the one that will help you reach you goals.