No one is really lazy.

But most people are just lazy to do things that don’t matter to them. They don’t want to do them, but they know they need to do them anyway because it gets them what they want.

Like if win one million ringgit at a lottery, and on your way to collect your money, you have to stop your car: there’s so much road kill on the road you can’t get past until you remove them.

Nobody likes removing road kill, but if you don’t remove them you won’t move to the road in front of it.

You then have two choices: either remove the road kill (which you hate doing) or go home (and get nothing).

For most people, one million ringgit is a lot of money, so no matter if they like doing it not, they’ll remove the road kill.

This post is about how to remove all the road kill in your life so you can get to your million ringgit faster.

Trust me, that first road kill you see? Nope, it’s not going to be the only one.

So get good at removing them fast. Here’s how:

A. Automate

Have you seen malls so ancient you still pay for your ticket to a human at the exit?

Don’t be that mall.

If a machine can do it cheaper and faster than you, let the machine do it.

If you need to buy the machine, buy it.

Don’t use your calculator and punch numbers if you can use excel to do the calculations at a fraction of the time.

You will save at least one hour every week if you do minor calculations and at least an hour every day if you run a small business.

If there is a machine that can detect every single road kill on your way and remove it before you get there, buy it.

When you automate every part of your life that can be automated, you will find many extra hours you never knew existed.

“But, Lu Wee, why do you need so many extra hours for?”

Anything you want.

At least you are not wasting it on things that a machine could have done.

B. Delete

On your way to your million ringgit, someone will tell you, ‘Hey, you might want to take a detour along the way to collect some diamonds.’

Another person will tell you, ‘Oh yeah, don’t forget the gold too!’

If you listen to everyone who tells you to take detours, you will have to make many, many stops along the way.

Some of these detours are even dangerous – you may get lost in them and not be able to find a way out. Worse, your desire for the treasures ‘along the way’ may become so strong that you forget about your initial goal.

In the end, you will waste a lot of time taking these unnecessary detours. Sure, you would have learned a lot, but you would have a lot without taking these detours too.

So, here’s the second tip for being productive when you are lazy: delete all detours, no matter how shiny they look.

The faster you get your million dollars, the faster you can lay around and be lazy.

So don’t sabotage yourself!

C. Upgrade

You can cut a tree faster with a sharpened chainsaw than you can with a blunt one.

Everyone knows this.

But yet, we seldom apply this principle to ourselves.

Sometimes it’s because we don’t realize that we need sharpening. We think that since we have passed through 16 years of formal education then we should be good.

But this is wrong.

It’s like buying a sharp knife and expecting it to never go blunt with use.

Like upgrading the OS on your phone, you need to upgrade your personal ‘OS’ too.

There’s nothing worse than trying to use a 2017 app on a 2006 OS.

You can’t load Uber on an iPhone3 fast enough for the app to be useful to you.

I tried this. In the end, the girl had to take a taxi which cost four times more.

What a waste.

So here’s your last tip on how to be a productive lazy person: keep sharpening yourself. Don’t allow yourself to become blunt.

With a sharp body and mind, you can cut through problems in a fraction of the time many other people may need.

And again, if you need less time to solve problems, you will have many extra hours to do anything you want.

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So what are you going to be?

A productive lazy person than a hardworking unproductive person?