The appetite of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the appetite of the diligent is abundantly supplied. – Proverbs 13:4, Amplified Bible (AMP)

Jerry DeVries, 78, was one of the experts that Karl Pillemer interviewed for his book 30 Lessons For Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans. As Mr. DeVries reports:

“BY THE TIME I was a teenager, I was working on the farm seven days a week when I wasn’t in school, and many days before school and after school. I was a teenager and getting up at four in the morning to milk the cows and feed the cattle, and then going to school at seven thirty, getting out of school at three thirty in the afternoon, and then getting on the school bus and then going back out to the farm and working until after dark. And that’s before you even started studying. I knew what hard work was, and when you’re fifteen or sixteen that’s a pretty good lesson.”

Within Mr. DeVries’ life experience we find another of God’s lessons on how to combat that all too familiar feeling of being overwhelmed: work hard to complete the tasks that need to be done.

Sometimes our feelings of being overwhelmed can be tied to allowing, through laziness and/or procrastination, our responsibilities to accumulate to an overwhelming level. Of course, this is by no means the only cause of feeling overwhelmed, for even the most diligent people can find themselves concerned over all that they have to do. But for those who are prone to slothfulness, the work pile often becomes heavy for no other reason than this: the perpetrator chose to play rather than to work.

The cure for this predicament, of course, is to cast off laziness and replace it with diligence. This is easier said than done because bad habits, like slothfulness, are hard to break. But broken they must become, or the work pile will get heavier and heavier. Here are two suggestions for breaking the habit of laziness:

• Create some work momentum: Commit to work on a task for just 5 minutes. Very often, once you work for 5 minutes on a task you will find out that it isn’t as awful as you expected. You’ll get into the groove, and before you know it, you’ll have the project finished.
• Reward yourself for completing a task: We dread some tasks so much that we need a little incentive to do them. Reward yourself with a prize for completing a job that you need to do. It’ll require some discipline to keep away from the prize until the task is done, but if you do, you’ll find yourself working surprisingly hard to earn the reward you seek.

Sometimes that dreadful feeling of being overwhelmed can be conquered by good, old-fashioned hard work. If that’s the cure you need today, then quit putting it off, and get busy!