124. How To Be Lazy and Still Get Ahead: 9 Simple Habits I'm Trying

Nine boringly simple, science backed habits for better focus, energy, and happiness, so busy women can chase their big, exciting goals without the hustle or the burnout.

I've decided to be a lazy person, on purpose, in about ninety percent of my life. In this episode, I'm walking through nine boringly simple, science backed habits for better focus, energy, and happiness, the ones I'm using to chase my biggest goals without the hustle.

✨ Write it Down: get it out of your head, paper or screen, doesn't matter 

✅ Catch and Correct It: the fast swap therapists use, plus the "never miss twice" rule 

🔑 Choose What Gets In: why fewer notifications beats a fancier system 

🌿 Follow Your Energy: work in focused blocks, then take a real, screen free break 

👣 Take the Smallest Step: the one move that gets you unstuck on high and low energy days 

💤 Protect Your Sleep: why consistency beats a perfect eight hours, plus the real math on afternoon caffeine 

🌳 Go into Nature: the one minute habit backed by real research 

💛 Connect with Someone Every Day: why even small moments with strangers matter 

🙏 Forgive Yourself: the research backed reason self forgiveness beats self criticism

Being lazy in the right ninety percent of your life still gets you to your biggest goals. Follow the podcast so you don't miss weekly organizing tips for Beautiful Living.

#SimpleHabits #BeautifulLiving #ChoosyOrganizer #IntentionalLiving #SelfCareHabits

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Transcript

Guys, I'm finally coming into my own. Or maybe it's more like I'm transforming into my current self. So no more hustling, no more trying to be everything and doing everything. I've decided I'm going to be a lazy person.
Is this what self-realization is? I don't know. I'm not a woo person. I've always been way far on the science side, and just taking things as they come.
Well whatever it is, I've realized that I'm just happier not doing the performance thing that I think we tend to do. We do it in our workplace because it's required of us. I mean, we have to in some instances in order to keep going. It would not be a good look for you if you took down the person in the staff meeting who's always late, the one who must argue and complain about every proposal, the one who has to talk and talk and talk so you know you won't make it to the Honor Roll Assembly or to that dinner reservation tonight. Sometimes, we have to perform.
That's why I think there's an argument for me to be lazy. I don't want to perform in, like, 90% of my life.
Now, maybe you're with me up to here, but you still want to succeed in your life, right? We don't want to just become slobs that do nothing.
Well, I've been experimenting to find the happy medium, or I should say the happy 90%, and so I want to give you my conclusions so far. So these are the things I'm doing to allow me to be lazy, but still achieve the goals I've set out for myself.
Now there are some criteria that have to be met for me to try something. First, it has to be backed by science, or at least excellent anecdotal proof. And second, it has to be simple. Like boringly simple.
Like, if it takes huge amounts of set-up, or extreme sacrifices of my comfort, I don't want it. I'll resist. I know myself well enough to know that.
There's a reason why we fall into our phones or onto the couch at various times, right? It's because it's effortless. So I'm looking for relatively effortless stuff that actually helps us get stuff done.
And don't be fooled. Boring and simple does not mean we dial back our ambitions. You have big, exciting ambitions. I have big, exciting ambitions. We're just experimenting to see how much of these we can achieve without the crazy hustle, or waking up at 4am and never allowing ourselves to watch an episode of Widow's Bay, right?
What I'm saying is if we're constantly living our lives like we're on a sacrificial diet, can we really sustain that? How long can you live without sugar? I tried. For me it was something like 30 hours.
But somehow we think we can live the hustle life for many many years. Constantly on the go, always being productive. Minimal downtime. And we think that's sustainable.
Of course I know it's possible. My point is that I don't want that. And if you're still listening, I don’t think you want that either.
Welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living. I'm Zeenat Siman.
This podcast is for the women who are done organizing everything and ready to be choosy about what matters, what's enough, and what can wait.
This is episode 124. Today I'm walking you through nine boringly simple habits, three for your Attention, three for your Well-Being, and three for your Happiness, all backed by real research or real experience, that are letting me be lazy through most of my life while I still go after the ambitious goals that I've set for myself. You don't need all nine this week. Pick the ones that fit.
So let's start by looking at where our energy goes each day. We need energy to focus on stuff, so our Attention. We need energy to focus on our Well-Being, and we need energy to focus on what makes us happy.
I start with Attention because it's what we align mostly with success, achievement, productivity. We need to think, then decide what we should do, and how to do it.
So the first Attention habit is Write it Down. It doesn't matter if that's on paper or on a screen. The point is getting it out of your head.
There's research on why that works. Psychologists found that when people had an unfinished task on their mind, just making a specific plan for it, without even doing it, was enough to quiet the mental tension around that. Their brains treated having a plan as close enough to done. A separate sleep study found the same thing in a different setting. People who spent five minutes writing a to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about things that they'd already finished. Writing it down told their brain it didn't need to keep holding onto it, right? To remember it.
Now I also advocate for writing down what you're thinking, especially before a big meeting, a tough conversation, or if you're feeling anxiety, that kind of thing. The thing here is that when you write, don't edit while you do it. Don't worry about full sentences, grammar, or filling the page. This is an actual studied practice, it's called freewriting, and the reason it works is that your brain can only do so much at once, so if you're trying to write and judge what you're writing at the same time, you stall out. That's the blank-page feeling. So turn off the judging and just write.
One more thing you should know before you start freewriting. You're not writing down what you already think, you're writing to find out what you think. So the thinking happens on the page, not before you write it down, right? So don't sit down with the goal of writing something good, or even something that makes sense. Sit down, give yourself five minutes, and don't stop writing. What comes out is usually really useful, probably more useful than what you thought that you had in your head to begin with.
The second Attention habit is Catch and Correct It.
Therapists have used this for years to help with things like nail-biting or tics. You catch the urge fast, right when it starts, and swap in something small and different right away, instead of trying to prevent it before it happens.
So say you notice you've already opened an app that you were trying to avoid. Close it, then stand up for a glass of water, or take three slow breaths. You want a small swap, that’s done fast.
There's a second half to this habit. It's about what happens when you catch yourself missing a bigger habit, like say you skipped your walk today. Missing something once is a slip. Missing it twice in a row is where it starts to turn into a new pattern. So if you skipped your walk yesterday, go back small today instead of skipping again. So walk to the mailbox and back if that's all you've got. The goal here is simple. Never miss twice in a row, even if you don't complete the thing a second time. So you do half your workout the next day. That's still catching and correcting. Yeah, I'm totally on board with that.
The third Attention habit is Choose What Gets In.
Researchers who study interruptions found it takes about twenty-three minutes to fully get your focus back after just one interruption. Now most of the time you do go back to what you’re doing, but each little ping costs you the next twenty three minutes even when you think you bounced right back.
What you do here isn't creating a fancy system for managing your notifications. It's fewer notifications. A phone with less coming in is easier to stay focused with than a phone with a great system for handling a lot coming in. Just like a closet with fewer clothes in it is easier to manage than a packed-full closet with a great system for a lot of stuff, like umpteen tiny compartments for each pair of socks.
Those are the Attention habits I'm experimenting with. Now next up are the Well-Being habits.
We start with Following Your Energy, which is about matching how you work to how your energy actually moves, instead of fighting it.
We treat the workday like it's supposed to be one long, flat push, right? Eight or ten hours straight. But that's not how attention actually behaves. It comes in waves. This isn't a new idea. It goes back to the same researcher who discovered REM sleep, who found that the ninety-minute cycle that your brain runs at night doesn't fully switch off during the day either. When researchers studied top violinists, the best ones didn't practice more hours than everyone else. They practiced in short, capped sessions with real breaks in between, and they slept and rested more than the less accomplished players did.
So here's what you do with that. Work in a focused block, right, you’ve heard of time blocking, and then take a real break before you start the next block. A real break has one rule. No input. Scrolling your phone during a break doesn't count, because that just trades one kind of stimulation for another, and you come back more depleted than when you started. A break looks like a short walk, doing the dishes while you look out the window, or a few minutes of just sitting there, or a nap if you've got the option. Why more offices don't have a quiet room, or a dark room, is beyond me. Most people could do with a good 15-minute nap after lunch. Ten to twenty minutes is enough. You're not trying to overhauling your day. You're just following your energy waves instead of pushing through those dips.
The next Well-Being habit is Take the Smallest Step.
We just talked about how our energy ebbs and flows, and that's true of our physical energy and our mental energy both. We don't have the same amount of energy at nine a.m. than we have at three p.m., so we take advantage of the energy we have, on the ups and on the downs.
On the energy ups, the trap we tend to fall into is skipping steps. It's like trying to run the 5K before you've even warmed up. That's when mistakes happen, and when you skip the parts you actually needed to learn. So even on a high-energy day, find the smallest first step. And then the next small step, and so on.
Now on the energy downs, the problem is different. We don't even want to start. Making dinner feels like a chore. Writing that memo feels like a mountain. The fix is the same. Find the smallest first step first. Open the fridge and look at the ingredients that you’ve got in there. Write one line. That's how you start. Then the next step to take after that tends to show up once you've taken the first step.
The last Well-Being habit is Protect Your Sleep. And if I had to pick one thing out of everything in this episode, this is the one. In my opinion, good sleep is what most affects your work, your relationships, and your health.
The research here kind of surprised me. It's not really about hitting some magic number of hours of sleep. A study that tracked about sixty thousand people for years found that how consistent your sleep schedule was predicted how you'd live better than how many hours you actually slept did. So yes, you want to get 7 to 8 hours of sleep, ideally. But if you had an event, or you need to take your kid to practice at 5am, that may not happen. What you should be aiming for is a consistent bedtime and wake-up time, even on the weekends. So if you stayed out late on Saturday, still aim to wake up at your usual time on Sunday. Get out in the sunlight early, and take a short nap later if you need it.
The second thing here is that caffeine needs to stop early. Caffeine has a 5 to 6 hour half life. That means that after you drink a cup of coffee, half that caffeine is still in your system 5 to 6 hours later. And that amount drops by another half 5 to 6 hours after that. So let's say you drink a regular cup of coffee at 3pm. Now not a double-shot cappuccino, but a regular cup of brewed coffee has about 95mg of caffeine in it. 5 hours later, at 8pm, you still have half of that caffeine left in your blood, so 47 1/2 mg of caffeine. Five hours after that, at 1am, you've got half of 47 1/2 mg, so about 23 1/2 mg of caffeine still in your blood. So you can see how that could affect your sleep, right? So if you're going to have coffee or tea in the afternoon, maybe make it decaf, or start with half-caff and reduce it over a week or two until you get to decaf. Or choose a different drink altogether, something that doesn't have caffeine in it at all.
OK so the final place that our energy goes each day is towards our Happiness.
The first habit to put your Happiness energy into is Going into Nature. Now, I'm not telling you to go camping or hiking every week. I sweat the second I step outside in Miami in the summer, and I cannot deal with creepy crawly things. This is much smaller than that. This is being part of nature, not conquering it.
I take the dog out at night before bedtime, and when I'm out there, I look up to see what planets or constellations are visible. I have an app that I use. I look at where the moon is. Now sometimes it's just too cloudy to see anything but clouds, so I watch the clouds move instead. If you haven't done this since you were a kid, try it. Step outside after dark, it doesn't have to be super late, and just look up for a couple of minutes. I just feel the awe of the sky and the hugeness of it.
Is there science behind this? Amazingly enough, yes. It splits into two parts. One psychologist had people look up at a group of really tall trees for exactly one minute. Afterward, those people thought less about themselves, and they were more likely to stop and help a stranger who needed it. One minute did that. That's close to what you're doing when you’re looking up at the sky for a couple of minutes. Now, if you also want to lower your stress hormone, that takes a little more time. So a second study from 2019 found that the biggest drop in your stress hormone happens around twenty minutes outside. So looking up at the sky for a couple of minutes gives you that feeling of wonder really fast. A slower walk with the dog gets you closer to that twenty-minute stress relief too.
The second Happiness habit is to Connect with Someone Every Day.
This can be small. Say hi to the cashier at the grocery store, make eye contact, ask how their day's going. Same thing with the librarian. It can also be bigger. Ask a colleague to grab coffee, go to lunch with your partner, video call your mom, or call your kids. Just one small connection a day.
There's science behind this too, and it comes from two different studies. One team of researchers looked at quick moments with people you don't really know, like the cashier or librarian. They found that these small moments make you feel like you belong, even though the happy feeling from any one of these interactions is small. The other study has been running for more than eighty years, following the same people their whole lives. It found that having strong connections predicts a long, happy, healthy life better than almost anything else that they measured. And it doesn't need to be a deep conversation. Sometimes just knowing someone is there is enough.
The third habit for Happiness is to Forgive Yourself for the days when you didn't do any of the other habits.
You can have a genuinely crappy day where every single thing on this list falls through. But you know what? You have tomorrow to get back to it. I try not to call it a restart, because a restart makes it sound like you're back at square one. You're not. You're continuing, with a blip on one day.
It's the same as missing a workout. You don't give up on working out forever. You just do the workout on another day, or you do half of it. You get back to it. And to actually do that, you have to forgive yourself for missing the day in the first place. I'm not saying it doesn't matter that you missed a day, or a week. I'm saying it matters very little over the course of your life, if you get back to some kind of movement when you can. There's research that backs this up directly. People who forgave themselves after falling behind did better the next time around. The ones who stayed hard on themselves repeated the same pattern. The same goes for the other eight lazy habits we've talked about today.
So those are the 9 boringly simple habits I'm experimenting with, as the lazy person who isn't interested in hustle and crazy schedules and sacrificing naps. And every one of these habits still gets you to the big, exciting ambitions that you started with.
The Attention habits are Write it Down, Catch and Correct It, and Choose What Gets In. The Well-Being habits are Following Your Energy, Take the Smallest Step, and Protect Your Sleep. And the Happiness habits I'm trying are Going into Nature, Connect with Someone Every Day, and of course Forgive Yourself.
None of these take much from you, and that's the point. You don't need a bigger system or more willpower. You need to be choosy about the ninety percent of your life that you don't want to be performing in, where you just want to be yourself.
This is Choosy Organizer stuff, even when it's pointed at your own energy instead of at your closet. You get to decide what's worth the performance and what isn't. And if you're still telling yourself you have to earn your rest, holy cow, you already have.
So try one or more of these nine this week, and let me know about it. You can email me anytime. And if you're enjoying the podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you'd hit follow, so you don't miss next week's episode.
Have a beautifully organized, and lazy, week. I'm Zee, and I'll see you on the next episode.