How Being Lazy Made Me More Productive

November 11, 2024 - Published

Being lazy and being productive sound like complete opposites, but for me, it became an essential strategy to get anything done. How does this paradox work? Well, we can start by talking about my Pokemon challenge, which is when I feel this really affected me and my art.

The Pokemon Challenge

There is a common Pokemon challenge that I've seen multiple artists take on. It's simple: draw one Pokemon every day by their Pokedex number starting from #001. For everyone keeping up with Pokemon... yes, there are over 1,000 of them as of the time of writing. It would take years to finish, not even including the ones they'd add over that time period.

Of course, this was daunting and I was very uninterested in taking up the challenge. This was until someone showed me a Favorite Pokemon Picker (most likely this site), which used a specific algorithm to allow you to find your favorite Pokemon without having to sift through all 1,000 of them one by one. After using it, I had a list of my top ~100 favorite Pokemon, and the idea came to me: I can do a modified version of the Pokemon challenge where I only have to draw my favorite Pokemon! 

While I don't remember the exact circumstances of what brought me to start the challenge, I imagine I was frustrated at the time for not having any kind of consistency in my work turnaround. I could draw relatively fast, yes, but if I ever wanted to make a running comic or sprite a video game as planned, I would need to have the drive to draw every single day, no matter how I felt. I needed to prove to myself and everyone else that I could do it. How would I do that?

By being lazy.

The Perfectionism Challenge

Now, there's a fascinating thing with social media that everyone who's been there long enough knows. It's this pretty infuriating thing where, very often, a creator's work with the least amount of effort gets the most popular. I was lucky to have a comic that did very well on Twitter! It got thousands of Likes and even spread to other websites. However, that's not my most popular post. That title belongs to my 5 minute edit of a Batman meme to insert Parappa in using Paint.NET, which has tens of thousands of Likes.

Similarly, lots of art pieces I greatly admire are just uncolored sketches from the artist. It'll be a quick doodle that I end up really liking, either because their skill brings up the level of quality of all their drawings, or because their style just puts this indescribable soul into all their pieces that still shines through. That being said, I had to remember this also applies to me -- it did not matter how little effort or how many mistakes my art had; most likely, the people who were fans of my art wouldn't mind, and would tend to enjoy all art I made. 

Of course, that does not mean that there was no point in making high quality art -- you only need to look at the most classic animated movies to see how amazing art is remembered and rewarded. It simply means that people don't mind mistakes and unfinished drawings as much as most artists might think. As someone whose mind tended to be perfectionist and constantly wanted to correct mistakes... this pill wasn't as tough to swallow as I thought! For some perfectionists, I can imagine it can be tough to overcome that mental barrier. For me, I was very happy to have an excuse to be lazy! Maybe that will be enough to work for others.

The Challenge Challenge

I started the challenge with my top Pokemon -- that way, even if I gave up the challenge early, my top favorites would still be drawn. Then I drew the next one. And the next one. There was only one goal: keep the streak going as long as possible. It didn't matter if it was shaded, colored, or that it even looked good; I just had to draw SOMETHING every single day.

And I did! My quality varied wildly, yes, but I got a large amount of attention for doing the challenge, and it produced almost 150 drawings. The attention was expected (posting daily + Pokemon art is a match made in heaven for the social media algorithm), but the streak was not. It went on for so long that I actually had to go back and grow the list of favorite Pokemon, because I had run out of Pokemon to draw.

Comments from friends made it pretty clear: 100+ daily drawings is super impressive! Did it matter to them that I didn't put 100% effort into every single drawing? No, of course not. That's because 100% effort and 100% consistency 100% of the time is impossible. Doing a drawing every day for 100+ days is not less impressive because I "wasn't trying," that's something that's just expected. I'm sure there are a few artists that are incredible and could do an amazing job for each of those 100 days, but I don't think that's a realistic standard that anyone should hold themselves to.

For reference, my average time for finishing a shaded fullbody beforehand was maybe 1-2 hours. During the challenge, that time was brought down to 10-30 minutes. This made it something that was a lot easier to fit into my schedule, whether I wanted to (or had to) work on other things that same day, but bringing that time down was impossible without skipping over some of my quality checks.

Still, most of the drawings were lined, colored and shaded. Some of them never got shading, and the few that were only sketches were lined and colored on later days. All of them were meant to have unique poses, many with some type of joke or reference to keep them engaging. If I had the time, I would even experiment with my style which allowed me to grow a little bit even with all the restraints. By setting the bar down to "finish anything," my own drive brought that bar up to make something that I could be more proud of.

Pretty soon, I began to discover something that made me such a supporter of this "laziness" theory.

The The Challenge

How often can you work at 100%?

If life is a marathon, not a sprint, then a sprint would be running at 100%. If you had to run 100 miles, would you do the whole thing sprinting at your fastest speed? This is the basic idea I learned during the Pokemon challenge. If I can't sprint through the entirety of my life, then I better be REALLY good at jogging.

During the Pokemon challenge, my effort was usually 10-50%, but rarely anywhere close to 100%. However, all that practice made my lower bar PRETTY decent. This was an extremely powerful tool -- if I could put out good drawings at 50% effort, then I could consistently put out drawings without ever burning myself out. 

So, yes, I did clickbait a little bit by using the term "lazy," but my ultimate point is this: nobody should be expected to do their best on everything they do all the time. It's just unrealistic. I'm not saying you aren't allowed to work hard -- jogging by default doesn't mean you aren't allowed to sprint -- but I think that everyone should be allowed a bit of laziness if that's what "not working at 100%" is called. Most of the time, getting SOMETHING finished is better than not finishing anything at all, so sometimes that means being a little lazy can be more productive than being a perfectionist.

I took the article name to heart and didn't put effort into the header names, so sue me.

But yeah! This is a philosophy I carry over into a lot of my work, not just art, and something that I think a lot more people should feel OK with doing, especially when it comes to hobbyist work.

• Vecderg