As I fought off the post lunch overwhelming urge to slip into a food induced sleep coma, I drifted in and out of coherent thought processes, wondering why under certain light Donald Trump looked orange.

Or why in our domestication of fruit couldn’t we have made orange seeds as negligible as bananas.

Think about it.

At which point I realised that in my seedless pursuit of making life easier for humanity, there simply aren’t enough lazy hacks (seedless or otherwise) that would significantly ease the life of the chronically lazy.

A quote often attributed to Bill Gates says “always hire a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find the easiest way to do it”.

Although I’m pretty sure this is a misquote and many have now come to question its legitimacy, it still serves to highlight the importance of maximizing outcome with minimal effort.

Here are five simple lazy hacks I found that will increase productivity:

1. Develop habits

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit” - Aristotle

Cultivating daily habits is a way to set up rituals to automate behavior that will make us easily more productive without depleting energy.

For example, if you wear the same shoes or carry the same bag to work everyday, you don’t spend extra time deciding what shoes match your outfit or which bag to use today. These behaviours have been doctrinated in your daily routine so you can spend more time sleeping, getting ready or commuting to work or school.

Even President Barack Obama emphasizes the necessity of having a routine by limiting the amount of mundane choices he has to make so he can focus on the important ones.

He says “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

2. Set achievable goals

Small but achievable goals are the key to helping us feel accomplished and put us on the right track to achieve big ones.

Anything is achievable if we have enough conviction and execute a working plan to get it done. For example, If you want to eliminate swear words from your vocabulary, set small goals like go a day without swearing and slowly increase the amount of time you go without using any expletives.

A great tool 3 Wins is an iPhone app that helps you set 3 personal goals every day to help you stay on track and keep motivated to keep winning.

3. Bring your dog to work

Dogs have been proven to lower stress levels and make the work you do more satisfying. A study showed that pets have a significant impact on employee morale and increase coworker cooperation.

Having a dog around provided workers with support and the study noted that stress significantly rose during the day when owners left their dogs at home compared to days they brought them to work.

A higher work satisfaction level helps you to get work done faster and increase the quality of work produced as well. Be mindful of health policies at your workplace before bringing your pet in!

4. Eliminate distractions

The first step in getting things done is to stop doing things that you don’t have to. You don’t have to be checking Facebook five times a day or opening YouTube whenever your sister sends you a kitten cucumber video.

Here at LawCanvas, we discovered a great productivity tool Go Fucking Work that works as a Chrome extension that blocks websites for a period of time you control so your browser literally does not let you get distracted by time consuming vortexes that is Reddit.

5. Be productively lazy

Almost all of our modern day technology has been the product of human laziness. The remote control is prime example of an item so ingrained in society which has no purpose except to serve our sloth.

And why not? If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness must be the father of innovation. So the next time you’re watching something instead of working, watch a short VICE documentary so you learn something educational but interesting about Boko Haram or cannibals.

Or when you’re wasting time on the great interweb, master the art of 3 second t-shirt folding so laundry is now forever changed!