You are not lazy, you are overloaded
Why your mind reaches for the phone when the thing that matters is waiting
Last week was about the nights when thinking circles without arriving. This time it is about the days when we avoid tasks that would be small, and about the verdict we pass on ourselves afterwards.
„A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.“
Laziness is a rare trait. Some will want to disagree. But I have met a great many people, watched them learn and decide, and seen just about everything, exhaustion, fear of the task, fear of failing, the splitting of one job into twenty smaller ones until the sheer number seemed overwhelming. Real laziness, a stable preference for doing nothing while capacity is free, was almost never among them. And yet "he's just too lazy" is one of the most common things people say about themselves and others.
Two minutes, three sentences
With me, most recently, it looked like this. An email to my insurance adviser, open for four days. Two minutes of work, three sentences, one attachment. I sit down in the evening to write it at last, and an hour later I know a remarkable amount about the current state of the games industry (I am a hobby gamer), but the email is not written. As I go to bed my conscience pipes up of its own accord, "Pull yourself together. You can't even manage three sentences."
The interesting part only struck me the next day. On other evenings I write the same kind of email in passing, on my way out the door, without the slightest inner resistance. I am the same person, it is the same task, and yet a completely different outcome. But a trait that holds on Monday and not on Wednesday is not a trait, it is a state. Traits do not change from one day to the next.
Whoever keeps the misdiagnosis anyway pays for it twice, with the evenings that sink into avoidance, and with a self-image that turns a few overloaded weeks into a character trait and then murmurs along quietly at every new undertaking. Psychology knows the effect of such labels well. This labelling, the self-attribution of a supposed basic trait, shapes both the self-image and what we expect of our own effectiveness, and the two together steer what we next believe ourselves capable of. The label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We behave in keeping with the image so as not to have to challenge it constantly, and the image confirms itself.
Nineteen background processes
What really happens on evenings like these can be described plainly. The part of our thinking that can hold things present at once, working memory, is limited. In the late eighties the learning researcher John Sweller showed that processing and learning drop measurably as soon as this capacity is exceeded. He called it cognitive load. And that load is not only what we are working on. The unfinished takes up room too, so-called open loops, the promise still open, the postponed call, the decision that has wanted making for weeks. Whoever carries twenty open things around is never working on just one task. He is working on one task against nineteen background processes. I like to compare it to open browser tabs. Each one eats memory in the background, and less is left for the one window actually being worked in.
An overloaded mind then does something very predictable, it falls back on the easy thing, on what no longer asks for a single decision. On evenings like these the phone does not win because it pulls so hard, but because it costs nothing. One scroll, another, videos curated just for us, the mental effort is close to zero. The three-sentence email, by contrast, demands any number of small decisions. What exactly do I write? What will it set off in the other person? What follows from it for me? It is small in minutes but expensive in capacity. The retreat to what is easy is not a lack of will, but a flight from effort and consequences that no longer fit into a full head.
Where the threshold lies at which a mind starts to dodge differs from person to person, and it is not a fixed quantity. It shifts with practice and habit, but just as much with sleep, the state of the day, felt uncertainty and the amount of what is currently open. Part of what we admiringly call discipline in others is simply a favourably placed threshold on an uncluttered day.
There used to be a more popular explanation, one that described willpower as a kind of tank that empties over the day and that physical and mental effort both draw on. This idea of ego depletion was everywhere for years, and I would have liked to tell it here, because it is catchy. Only it did not replicate. More than twenty labs with over two thousand participants tried to reproduce the effect under strict conditions, with little success. What has held up is something less comfortable and, I think, more useful. It is not that your energy is spent, it is that your capacity is occupied. An empty tank asks for rest. An occupied memory asks for something to be released. This fits what Piers Steel found in 2007 in a large review of procrastination research, that what gets put off is above all what is unpleasant and what has to compete with nearby temptations. It has little to do with a missing will to work. Most chronic putter-offers work without pause, just at everything except the one thing.
Overload is not the only reason we fail to start. Sometimes the hesitation protects us from something else, the possibility of failing, for instance, but that is its own story for its own piece. For the simple three-sentence email left lying, the simplest explanation usually holds. There is just too much open.
Why pressure makes it worse
Here lies the real turn. The verdict "lazy" is more than merely hasty, it is itself a load. Whoever diagnoses a trait in themselves raises the pressure with yet more resolutions, stricter plans and the firm intention to pull themselves together from tomorrow. But pressure is load, and load was the original problem. The overloaded mind is handed one more task, to repair its own character, dodges even more reliably and so supplies the next proof for the verdict. A closed loop, the verdict produces the behaviour it believes it is describing. (How readily we gather evidence for what we already believe was the subject here two weeks ago. The loop works inward too.)
A state, by contrast, does not ask for repair of the person. It asks for the situation to change. The useful question on an evening like this is therefore not why I am the way I am (that one we only carry back to bed and brood over), but what I am carrying around with me just now. That is a countable question, and here counting is far better than judging. Mostly the count yields something that is sobering and relieving at once. There is simply too much open. Then the next step is no longer effort but subtraction. One thing gets finished, one gets cancelled, and one gets a fixed place outside the head, a note or an appointment, so that it stops taking up memory. The resistance in front of the small task is not a wall but a weight, and a weight can be set down.
What I like about this thought is how unexcited it is. It calls for no discipline offensive and no new self from Monday, only a look at the situation instead of at the character. Perhaps what you have taken for years to be your character is only a very full Tuesday that has repeated itself too often.
For the week ahead
If you catch yourself procrastinating this week, do not judge, count. Take a minute to write down everything that is currently open, tasks, promises, unanswered messages, seeing friends, time for family, your training plan, postponed decisions. Then close a single one, or give it a fixed place outside your head. Watch what the resistance in front of the actual task does afterwards.
Three questions for the road.
Where do I call myself lazy or undisciplined without ever having counted what is actually occupying me in that moment?
Which open thing has been taking up capacity for weeks, though it has long deserved a note or a fixed appointment?
Am I avoiding the task right now, or everything else that is open?
I hope you can close a few open tabs this week, and I wish you a good one.
— Luc
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Anderson, C. J. (2003). The psychology of doing nothing: Forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 139–167.
Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405–417.
Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Alberts, H., … Zwienenberg, M. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546–573.
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications, and the public interest (pp. 37–72). Johns Hopkins Press.
Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94.
Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.
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Thinking from Scratch
by Luc Albrecht
Exploring how we think, decide and create clarity
