For a while I've become interested by the idea of micro-laziness. These are the small, everyday behaviours that aren't a big deal individually, but add up to something larger. They are the tiny decisions to 'not bother'. From not screwing the cap on the milk bottle fully, to crossing the road before you get to the zebra-crossing, through to not tying your shoelaces fully before running outside to put the bins out.
These little moments of micro-laziness, when you start to notice them, become an amusing area to study human behaviour - both of yourself, and others - and are the source of a much bigger problem.
I first noticed it myself, with one specific behaviour I did almost daily. I enjoy a good lunchtime stroll to get the blood moving and clear my head. As walked between my old place of work and where the shops were for lunch - the most direct route involved walking through a corridor of smokers. Even though this was outside, it was always a thoroughly unpleasant experience for a non-smoker like myself - as you could smell that nostril filling, headache inducing smoke 30m before you reached them, and 50m afterwards. And so my solution was to hold my breath for the 30-60 seconds it would take to get past them.
After a good year of running this carcinogenic-gantlet it occurred to me that I could just go on the other side of the building. This route would perhaps add 1 more minute to my walk - which is actually a good thing when going out for a lunchtime stroll - and it was significantly more pleasant. As I smiled at my own ridiculous behaviour I coined the term 'micro-laziness' to explain my poor decision making,
Since coining the term in my own head, I've started Googling it sporadically to see if anyone else is talking about it. The '50' search results for "micro-laziness" that I found just now suggest the term is far from mainstream!
CAR PARKS AND CROSSFIT:
Despite that, now that I have it as a term (as now do you!), I see it crop up all the time. Two of my favourite examples I see on a daily basis. The first is in car parks. Everyone tries to get a parking space as close to the shop as possible. Some people will drive around for 5-10 minutes in an attempt to get that 'perfect' spot by the door. If they actually considered that behaviour properly - they would realise that if they parked in a space towards the back of the car park - it is not only much easier to park (and there are less other cars who will dink their car doors into your own), the additional 30 seconds of walking is much more time-economical than the 5+ minutes driving around for a space. And for those thinking 'yeah, but it is further to walk' - this is at odds with their trip around the supermarket where they wouldn't think twice about walking an extra 100m because they wanted something from one of the isles.
My second favourite example is at the gym (another place where people try and drive as close to the entrance as possible!). I do CrossFit, and as part of that we do a lot of Olympic weightlifting - using big long bars, and loading those bars with weight-plates. We'll all do it in a session - load-up the bar with an increasing number of plates until we hit the weight we want. Now, in order to stop those plates falling back off - you are supposed to attach a small metal clip - that just keeps them locked on. However, the clips are a little fiddly, and are more effort - therefore over 60% just don't bother putting a clip on. Now - considering we are at the gym to lift heavy weights and do exercise - it strikes me as wonderfully silly that at the same time we can't be bothered to put the clips on.
**So, why should we care? **
To the point of this post: micro-laziness is directly analogous to Sir Dave Brailsford's & Team GBs 'marginal gains' - where you focus on improving everything by 1% it adds up to a total of large improvements. That strategy has lead to Team GB's total dominance of world track cycling for over a decade. For micro-laziness, the concept is the same - but rather than the addition on 1%'s, it is the subtraction of 1%'s that accumulates to a larger macro-laziness.
It is difficult to quantify the impact of these tiny decisions. Using the lift instead of the stairs, for example, may equate to 50 calories not burned a day. No big deal - that basically equates to a rice-cake! But that adds up to 1-2kg of weight not lost a year. If you apply that logic to not writing your to-do list before leaving work in the evening, or not responding to emails if older than a week, or a whole host of other 'little' things - they will all be totalling up to much larger numbers. In fact, that total could well be the difference between the you that hits their new years resolutions, and the one who doesn't (and has already forgotten about them).
So - I'd be really interested - what micro-laziness events have you spotted about yourself, and are going to change?
I'm off to find those weight-clips...