What To Do When Your Lazy Voice Tells You To Slack Off & Why I Hate The Word “Employees”

This should probably be written as two separate articles but I literally bang the post out right at the end of the day as late as I can leave it due to my other commitments requiring my time. I’m also just blogging about my day so it might come out a bit of a mash up but what the hell.

Man I was tired when I got up this morning. Really tired. My body reminding me how tired I am and spending much of the day consuming content referring to people as ’employees’ has taken up much of my day so I’m writing about it.

To be clear it was actually yesterday when I wrote most of this, but I didn’t quite finish it due to spending more time trying to finish off some crucial work for my ecommerce brand which I have to prioritise.

Anyway the night before I couldn’t sleep and only managed to nod off about 2am (I know because I looked at the time – yep, probably shouldn’t do that!) and then was up at just before 5am, then last night was the usual 10.30-11pm… but it caught up with me.

I’ve tested the boundaries of sleep previously, to learn what I can get away with before it negatively affects my productivity and alertness in the day, and the answer is… 6 hours.

Anything less than 6 hours and it’s not cool and I’m not firing on all cylinders.

One key thing I’ve learned over the years is that you win with consistency. You see everyone can work their arse off and sacrifice their free time when they’re all fired up, but a big thing that separates the successful from the ‘could have been’, isn’t putting in the work in when you’re fired up.

It’s when your eyes are tired, your body feels heavy, your mind weak and all you want to do is collapse on the sofa. The little voice in your head is whispering at you:

“It’ll be alright, just do it tomorrow”

“You’re tired, you need a rest tonight (just like you did a few nights last week)”

“You’ve done a fair bit last night and did that one thing earlier so you’ve done alright”

“You’ve been working hard recently (for a week), you deserve a night off”

It’s these days that you need to drag yourself up and get at it.

Consistency is the key and especially when you don’t feel like it. The biggest tip I can give is don’t think about the work you have to do. If you catch yourself thinking about slacking off, think about the end result of doing the work and why you want it, not the actual work itself. Also learn to recognize that this is probably a sign you need to triple down tonight instead of slacking off.

I was super tired tonight but I got home from a fast paced day at the office, shoveled a Muscle Chef down me then completed my competitor pricing research for our new product range, typed this post and reviewed some resumes for a recently advertised social media position. Did I feel like doing this? Fuck no but do I want the end result? Hell yes with a burning desire!

To give a bit more info on the pricing, I’m actually calculating margin. When you launch a new product or range of products you always need to do your numbers. For me, this means working out:

• The cost of product including shipping, packaging, any packing services as well as tax/duty etc – how much it costs to obtain your product
• The cost of sale or estimated if it’s new – how much it costs you to generate and process a sale of your product
• Product’s share of operating costs
• Margin

If the margin is way too thin then I know that this is probably not a viable product or worth my time but if the margin is healthy after all the deductions then it might be worth moving forward with it or warrant further investigation.

A very rough estimate is if a product sells for about 5x more than the cost of product then it’s often got enough margin in it to have a chance of producing a healthy profit after all other costs like cost of sale etc have been deducted. Don’t be lazy and go off that though, do your numbers.

What I was doing is checking the pricing of several leading competitor products to get an indication of the retail price of the product so I can do my calculations.

Important: Know the difference between lazy and a strategic break to recharge

To be clear all the above waffle I’ve just been spouting about getting stuck in when you don’t feel like it… it’s very different making yourself work hard when you don’t feel like it vs when you are a bit burned out and need to take a little time out to recover.

You need to be self aware enough to recognise which is which. The truth is you know deep down whether you’re slacking or whether you legitimately need some time to relax to come back stronger and more productive.

My favourite way to rest and recharge and come back feeling awesome is to escape into nature. Head out to forests, mountains, lakes, fields, beaches… whatever. Go walking, sit and look out and listen to all the sounds and just clear your mind of noise. Leave your phone at home too!

Try it for yourself next time you know you’ve reached your limit.

Why I hate referring to people as ’employees’

I’ve been setting up some new HR software today and going through all it’s training videos as part of the setup process. Is it just me or does anyone else hate referring to people as ’employees’?

To me, as soon as I hear it used to describe a team, I instantly think it makes them sound like ‘robots’. What makes it worse is whenever you are reading or watching something that is talking about ’employees’, it’s usually very dehumanizing in tone and often talking about strategically or psychologically manipulating people (although usually not maliciously).

People are not employees. They are Scott, Steve, Sarah, Sophie and a ton of other names. They are individuals with individual needs, motivations, aspirations, ambitions, thoughts, feelings, behaviors and all experiencing different things going on in their personal lives on a day to day basis.

They are only coming to work because they have to when they’d much rather be spending time with friends and family or on their passions or whatever else they do in their spare time.

Fuck the corporate world. Treat people as individual humans and don’t lose the human touch and I bet you see improvements.  😉