Humans are lazy creatures by nature. Its just the way it is. Laziness isn’t a bad thing, in fact I think it has many benefits including getting adequate rest, keeping things as simple as possible, doing only what’s important, etc. If we can just accept the fact that we are lazy by nature we can use it to our advantage. One of the ideas I’ve been playing around with lately is the idea of intolerable inconvenience. The basic premise is you make something so utterly inconvenient for you that your laziness kicks in and you decide not to do that something. This works great for getting rid of bad habits, saving money, sticking to a good eating lifestyle, and so on.

I first noticed this myself one fine morning when I realized I didn’t have any food in the kitchen but was starving. I was going to drive over to Tim Horton’s for a breakfast sandwich and coffee (bad habit) but realized I didn’t have a car for the day. “Oh, how inconvenient” I thought to myself. So what did I do? Nothing. I decided to fast that day instead (good habit). When I noticed that I did a good habit instead of a bad habit because I was too lazy to walk to the Tim Horton’s, I thought “hmmmm, what else can I make really inconvenient for myself to force good habits?”. Some of the stuff I came up with was removing a lot of bookmarks to time wasting websites so that if I wanted to go to them I would have to type them in manually. Too lazy, screw it. Another is hiding the remote control for the TV so that I don’t watch it. Get rid of the junk food in your house or put it in the attic or something. Lock your credit cards in a safe. You can get pretty creative with this if you use your imagination. Cell phone bill too high?  Give the phone to your neighbour.  Need to study more and play games less? Hide the power cord to your Wii.

Note that the opposite also works. Make good habits super convenient for you. Have a giant glass of water beside your bed so that when you wake up in the morning you can chug it down and hydrate right away. Put the vitamins and supplements you take right beside the glass of water. Put your keys in the same spot everyday so you’ll never lose them. Leave your lunch at the front door so you never forget it (or set a daily reminder that goes off before you head out the door reminding you to grab it from the fridge). The list goes on. Make the good stuff easy to do and the bad stuff really inconvenient. I like it, nice and simple and effective.