Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with slacking

Srsly, I can't be arsed.

droplet — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:54:04 -0800

How to encourage myself to put forth the effort to actually live a life? I'm living as a physically and intellectually mature 3-year old.

I have a job. I sleep. I eat. I read. I bathe and brush my teeth twice a day. But for things I claim that I really want to do, such as have good friends, become fit, be in a romantic relationship, make films / comedy, live in London, sing in a band (even for fun), invest in real savings for my future and not merely some sluggish 401k, I don't make any effort to meet any goal. I don't make goals, rather. 99% of what I have in my life right now didn't take much effort to get. The only things I've actually worked hard on for my own benefit was physically escaping my abusers at 18 and getting an internship my junior year of uni. For the life of me, I can't remember how it felt to want those two things so badly that I did what I had to do. With regard to the abuse, I claim to want to get over what happened, but only just figured out that I've shut down all real communication with my therapist and have used my 40 minutes every week to harangue the people who hurt me. I have to force myself to go to therapy! I don't even make an effort to do the things I claim to enjoy, like music or movies or cooking or travel. I've taken classes in things, but stopped when they required real commitment, emotional or otherwise. I could say that about my relationships as well. I have a job. I sleep. I eat. I read.

What's frightening me is that deep down, it feels like a large part of me doesn't want to do anything, even something as simple as doing the laundry. Some of these things I do, but there's no sense of, "It has to be done to get what you want and that's OK." I get upset that I actually have to clean my apartment or do laundry. It's been this way at least since 5th grade. I don't want to work, even at the job that's currently paying my bills. I don't want to talk to people and find it a hassle to have to return phone calls and emails, so never mind true intimacy with a friend or partner - that's too much work. I don't want to try. Yet, I'm angry at myself for sitting around on my ass just reading , just eating, envying Bob Odenkirk or the woman at my job who's happily married to a nice man. I'm angry at myself for the little kid inside who's all, "DON'T WANNA! GIMME!", while knowing logically that the world owes me nothing, nothing will be handed to me and that no one is truly going to care about me except me, and no one's going to give a damn anyway if I don't.

In looking to be honest with myself, I've been asking: Is my current routine all I truly want or am capable of? Why am I unwilling to accept risk? Why won't I challenge myself? Why am I unwilling to do the work it takes to make my life better? Am I one of life's cowards? If so, can I learn to make peace with this? I feel frozen, and the answers haven't been forthcoming.

I want to know if any MeFites have gone through this issue and what they've done about it.

No work today

barrakuda — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:12:23 -0800

how to explain the lack of... uhm work... at work? so my boss has been away for a few weeks and in that time i didn't do much work. i did some work but definitely not enough for all the time i had. the problem is that i am completely uninspired and somewhat unqualified for the task at hand (commenting on some really bad papers + a plethora of random tasks) and by this work in general.

at this point, i feel that the job is pointless, oscillating between little value-added and useless, and generally neverending. i am not sure if i care about keeping this job - i obviously can't stay motivated or interested in what i'm doing or focused on anything for longer than half an hour. my circumstances, other than my sentiments, dictate for me to stay here for the next four months. for the record, i have performed outstandingly in the past and only recently feel/behave as described above. generally, i feel like an ass and fully expect my boss to ask - what have you been doing all this time? i don't know what to say to this. i feel guilty but also annoyed and a bit hopeless. i don't want to make any stupid excuses, so no dying grandmas or personal health problems. tell me people, what do i say?

also, anyone who'd like to pitch in with strategies for motivating oneself to do completely uninspiring jobs, please do so. (this is not about personal effectiveness GTD type stuff - this is about making yourself do things even though you have no interest in them)

explain it to a pro

raisons de coeur — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:49:23 -0800

So a 'ruinous indiscipline' issue (described here and here) isn't getting any better. I keep getting extraordinary chances and 'rescues' through social connections but keep falling back into stagnation and crises. There's really no sort of requirement for school or work that I don't consistently fail. Now I'm thinking of getting help and I'm wondering, firstly, who would I need to see? (I don't have health insurance and the seriously low-end school I'm at doesn't really have health services, but money is not too much of an issue). Secondly, what would I tell them? I still have the feeling that "help: I can't do anything!" doesn't sound like a real problem and more just a personal-habits failure..

unable to perform thy terms too hard

raisons de coeur — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:41:16 -0800

I really really dislike doing things. This goes all the way ad absurdum in that I actually would rather freeze into nothingness than deal with college, work, chores, and so on. I assume this isn't normal. What to do?

I'm coming round to thinking I need to unplug and get help since I haven't snapped out of it all these years but it just seems so lame an issue, there's the internal disciplinarian saying "stop being lazy and it'll be ok"--and I stay skeptical of the capacity of external help to address something so mundanely internal.

I guess my question is "oh god what's wrong with me!", or more specifically whether you find this indicative of a particular pathology or dysfunction you're familiar with.

It's so frustrating because all the structural components to crawling back on track are laid out for me, but however resolute I get, I keep betraying trusts--mine own and other people's--and staying on one side of the bridge. It stings so badly when for example at work someone says "can you do this now? are you back? are we gonna kick ass?" and I'm all like "yeah!" and then flicker out again.

The irritating part is that this is independent of the nature of the task in question, they just all weigh down on me as numbingly boring.

It's all so greasy, dank and dreary, man. wtf.

Gray is the Color of the Day

Smarson — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:42:06 -0800

Looking for a Firefox extension or alternative browser that allows for web pages to be grayed out (specifically images) a la Ghostzilla. My daily work load comes and goes in cycles and so I often find myself with any where from 5 to 20 minutes of free time to do what cube monkeys do best, surf the web. I'm pretty active on Flickr as are many of my friends and so I'd love to be able to be editing image tags, descriptions, etc. during these intermittent periods of lulled labor. Unfortunately the way the desks are arranged in my office more than a few people have a clear view of my monitor. Clearly nothing x-rated going on in my web meanderings, but it still doesn't scream productivity to those that see my monitor from 20 ft. away on a regular basis.

Thought about using Ghostzilla purely for the grayed out image capability, but am worried about incurring the wrath of IT since that would be using an unsecure browser. I'm not worried about IT tracking what I do since I'm pretty sure they don't care as long I'm not posing any kind of security threat. I mainly just want to be able to browse knowing that the images of my friends doing stupid stuff aren't crystal clear to my bosses/co-workers who sit behind me.

Any ideas?

How to Stop Slacking

raisons de coeur — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:05:58 -0800

Is there anything besides 'willpower' to grab hold of if you wanted to stop being ruinously indisciplined? Do you know people who've managed major personal change on that front? It's difficult because it feels like it's literally ALL IN YOUR HEAD so how do you change your own mind? Say you slacked. Say your life was literally ruined by this: that you had the best possible education and life circumstances your parents could possibly manage, which is a lot more than the background they came from--a hell of a lot more--but because of how you mismanaged it all, your childhood friends are now generic yuppies while your current peers by position/income are now generic service industry clerks (I'm early 20s).

Say it didn't matter whether it'd be education, work, or even things you'd take on for fun--you just never followed through. That it was pervasive: it didn't matter whether the issue was personal calls back to people, filling out a plain form, doing the dishes--everything from things like that to showing up to high-powered meetings 20 mins late (and thus managing to get yourself shut out of future such meetings since they all gave up on you).

Say you've heard this hundreds of times before: "you're so damn smart, I can't believe you didn't [pull through on whatever the issue was.]" It'd be almost cliche: no matter what it is, you'd have the capacity to do it but fail nonetheless. (Literal quote from a few weeks ago: "I can't believe you [didn't manage X issue at Y place.] NOBODY [doesn't.]" Again, it wasn't so much that I didn't do X to its requirements; I just didn't do X.)

Say that the wrecking effects this had were wildly disproportionate to the causes, eg. getting around to submitting the form would be trivial but not having done it suddenly colors your whole life status.

Say every time you got a chance to begin anew--and you get them again and again--you blew it.

So you were barely functional; anonymous--obscure--fading away.

Is there anything you could do besides wake up hoping to 'somehow' spend today differently.
I guess not.
Damn.

How can I finish strong?

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:17:28 -0800

How can I finish strong? How can I maintain the same discipline that I have at the beginning and middle of a project or goal once I start to near the end? I tend to excel at whatever I put my mind to. The problem is that I frequently have a very difficult time putting my mind to something, especially if it involves maintaining long-term discipline, such as taking a class or training for a marathon. I think that these two examples illustrate my point:

When I was in college, I would frequently maintain very strong A's until later in the semester, when I would often slack off and not study for an exam or turn in an assignment. I never had any difficulty understanding the material, but would often compromise my grades this way. Typically, I would either slack off in the last 3/4 of the semester and either bomb an exam so bad that I needed to get straight-A's in the rest of the class to salvage a B for the course, or I would slack off enough for the final exam to bring my grade down to a B.

Another example is marathon training. I started training for a race about 4 months ago. About mid-way through, I ran a half-marathon in a very good, and completely satisfactory (to me), time. Based on that time, and where I was in my training, I think that I could have easily met my marathon goal time. However, the past few weeks I have been extremely unmotivated when it comes to training and have barely run at all. As a result, I'm sure that I'm going to get a 'B time' instead of the 'A time' that I was originally shooting for. A quote from a teacher that perfectly captures this is "You're like a bald tire on ice" (slipping).

I realize that these two examples are fairly trivial, but I raise this question because I want to learn how to address this habit before it affects something really important. I'm pretty successful career-wise and am at a point in my life where I'll soon be moving on to much larger things, both in my career and in my personal life. But I believe that I could be more effective (and happy) if I could overcome this problem.

I've thought about this quite a bit and considered that maybe I'm lazy by nature or that once I've proved to myself that I can probably do something, I lose the drive to finish it up and actually do it.

So, MeFi'ers, what do you think? What's my problem and what can I do to keep my eye on the ball going forward?

Thanks!

Am I being Watched at work via remote access?

LongDrive — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:20:40 -0800

[RemoteAccessFilter] Am I being watched at work? Okay, heres the deal. My workplace runs on all macs, and we just installed a new server and upgraded the os. On the old version there was a little man under these binoculars who went black every so often, and when that happened I made sure I wasnt on the net or anything. On the new server os we just have a big pair of binoculars there, and I have no idea if there is any way to tell if my computer is being monitored or whatnot, either via remote access (the binoculars), or some other piece of software. Or if they can tell which software is active for how long or whatnot... Checked the manuals for remote access, and I am reluctant to ask the IT guy even though we are on good terms and all...

Now I know the simple answer is, dont surf the net at work, but thats not really what I am looking for. Most of the time I really dont have anything to do, honest to god, and I would just get bored to death otherwise. Been at the place for a year, but I really cannot lose this job.

If anyone can help at all with this, please make yourself known. If you need any more details, let me know. Thanks!