Lazy Days and Productive Days

I'm writing this post on Tuesday, because Tuesday has been a Lazy Day.

For starters, I slept in, which is always a good sign that it's a lazy day. I then decided I didn't have the enough groceries for breakfast, so I went to Ricky's for breakfast, which makes hitting the Save On Foods afterwards easy. The contract of buying groceries after eating out makes me feel a little more justified in eating out.

Of course, while I was at the restaurant I thought about my story and tried a whole new angle on it (previous angles still aren't congealing enough for me). I then bought groceries, and I did the whole trip on foot in order to get steps and to enjoy the act of walking. I'm now sitting down to do my Check-Ins, after which I'll be doing some Unity training. Because today is a Lazy Day.

It's at this point that I realized that as much as I feel relaxed, I'm not actually being lazy. If you put the things I'm accomplishing in a list, it looks like I'm working my butt off. But it doesn't feel like it, because I'm relaxed and unstressed. It's just a startling remind that work isn't hard; stress is hard.

I like to call this more positive mindset "Gentle Action". When in a state of gentle action, there's very little stress, very little expectation. Instead, you're just enjoying the act of getting things done for the sake of getting things done.

Tom DeMarco, one of my favorite writers on how to be a good manager, actually has a graph in his book, Slack. It shows how people who are under just a tiny bit of stress are really productive, while people who are under heavy stress are much less productive. So gentle action isn't merely a pleasant way to do things, it's a productive one, and managers should aim to keep their employees in this state just to maximize efficiency, with the happy side-effect that they get to feel like a good person.

This duality where good business practice is the same as being a good person gives me great hope for the future of the human race, as it means that the practical arguments and the humanitarian arguments lead to the same conclusion: be nice to each other so we can maximize our productivity. But that's a whole new post. Or possibly a whole new field of study.