A friend of mine in college was writing me his take on what he used to call laziness. I thought I would share my response.
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I see I didn’t address your point about laziness. I think for creative people, whether in arts, programming, teaching, or some other field, a certain amount of down time is necessary for what I suspect is background processing in the brain. I certainly do believe there is such a thing, with its negative connotations, as laziness–it probably stems from a disinclination to do what one doesn’t want to do and so, I would say, from a lack of self-discipline. Even at SJS I see a lot more of that in the best students than I did, say, 20 years ago. While most students here do a fair amount that they would say they don’t want to do, instead of thinking “that’s just the way the world is,” they grumble as though it were a personal affront to their dignity. An unmerited (in my view) sense of entitlement among students certainly existed when I was a student, but it is much more widespread and a bit deeper now. The senior moms just gave the seniors a lunch because it was only 99 days until graduation. Really? That’s a Lower School thing: the first 100 days. I share seniors’ tiredness in the spring, but not their sense of entitlement, which makes for clashes every year, some hidden and some overt.
The positive aspects of laziness are that mental distance from the daily routine, which is one outward sign of laziness, is I think necessary for most of us to do the background processing, free some of our mind from its usual ruts, and have the time and energy to disengage the mind from running the routine as much and free it to do other things, of some of which we may be unaware.
Your breaking projects into chunks idea is useful, but for it to lead to anything except some facility with the ideas and skills in each chunk, my experience is that it needs guidance–at least for 98% of the people I teach. Effectively, that’s what I do in my math courses, where the “invisible hand” (as Adam Smith) would say is the labs. I used to be annoyed and am now just amused when students and parents would say I never taught them anything, that “we had to teach ourselves math.” While that’s true in a basic sense–I don’t think anyone can teach you anything: you have to at some level absorb and internalize it yourself no matter how much or how little structure is provided–what they forget is the months, probably adding to years now, I’ve put into writing and rewriting those labs, changing them as the needs of each individual class change. But kids have little sense of time and no sense of history, so no-one but me really knows that.
Likewise, in an English class, I don’t “teach” anything overtly, really–unless you count the written models I’ve provided to my juniors. What I do is choose things to read, choose topics on which to write (if I do), choose certain things to talk about in class rather than others, and the overall effect is a structure that’s like spun glass with the tensile strength of a spider’s web: Lots of structure and support, but so nearly invisible that most students don’t realize there’s any structure at all….
DO you have a kindle or kindle app? If so, I’ll send you Bertrand Russell’s short book on Laziness. It’s well worth reading and won’t take long.
doc
PS Even the “bad” kind of laziness potentially has a really good side: they say that if you want to make a process more efficient, give it to a lazy man because he will have great motivation to make it easier to do!