Yes, I’ve had this exact problem in school, and it took me about 12 years (3rd grade through middle year of law school) to figure out how I could cope with it.
One hack that’s helped me work together with people who have, shall we say, varying levels of motivation, is to ask people, nonjudgmentally, about their motivation levels and then try to assign each person a quantity of work consistent with him/her getting that work done very well. When you start hearing phrases like “Really? That’s all you want me to do? OK! [shrug]” then you know you’ve cut the portions small enough. With a little bit of friendly prompting, the small amount of work will probably get done reasonably well and reasonably fast—you will spend less time/energy prodding than you would have needed to do that portion of the work yourself.
Of course, this strategy will leave you and any other highly motivated team-members with an “unfairly” large chunk of the remaining work, but, crucially, this will still be less work than you would have if you tried to go it alone, either before or after trying to assign lots of unwanted work to unmotivated teammembers and then having to (re)do it when it’s not completed on time or not completed up to a reasonable standard.
I find that its better to know that you’re going to do a lot of work and plan for that than to be surprised when you find at the very end that someone didn’t pull their weight, and you wind up cramming to do it.
Both ways you do the samish amount of work, but in the first way you can actually deal with it on your schedule.
I do a lot of my work at the last minute anyway, since I a) try to pretend school doesn’t exist a lot of the time, and b) focus better when I have a tight deadline. Which is why I ran into trouble with this group project, but it makes it easier to deal with other groups where last-minute cramming ends up happening.
Yes, I’ve had this exact problem in school, and it took me about 12 years (3rd grade through middle year of law school) to figure out how I could cope with it.
One hack that’s helped me work together with people who have, shall we say, varying levels of motivation, is to ask people, nonjudgmentally, about their motivation levels and then try to assign each person a quantity of work consistent with him/her getting that work done very well. When you start hearing phrases like “Really? That’s all you want me to do? OK! [shrug]” then you know you’ve cut the portions small enough. With a little bit of friendly prompting, the small amount of work will probably get done reasonably well and reasonably fast—you will spend less time/energy prodding than you would have needed to do that portion of the work yourself.
Of course, this strategy will leave you and any other highly motivated team-members with an “unfairly” large chunk of the remaining work, but, crucially, this will still be less work than you would have if you tried to go it alone, either before or after trying to assign lots of unwanted work to unmotivated teammembers and then having to (re)do it when it’s not completed on time or not completed up to a reasonable standard.
I find that its better to know that you’re going to do a lot of work and plan for that than to be surprised when you find at the very end that someone didn’t pull their weight, and you wind up cramming to do it.
Both ways you do the samish amount of work, but in the first way you can actually deal with it on your schedule.
I do a lot of my work at the last minute anyway, since I a) try to pretend school doesn’t exist a lot of the time, and b) focus better when I have a tight deadline. Which is why I ran into trouble with this group project, but it makes it easier to deal with other groups where last-minute cramming ends up happening.