The Lazy Genius Podcast - #153 - Time Management When Time Makes No Sense

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Yes, we’re still in the coronavirus pandemic, but honestly, there are lots of times when time makes no sense. It’s a struggle to get a handle on how to manage our time when our regular average day and the regular average things you normally do to fill it gets turned upside-down. So today we’re going to revisit the three Lazy Genius pillars of time through the lens of time making no sense. Helpful Companion Links The Favorites File is the entertaining homework you didn’t know you needed right now. Sign up to get your free download here. Revisit The Lazy Genius and Time Management for more of my thoughts and opinions about time management. Listen to more wisdom from Beth Silvers on her podcast Pantsuit Politics. She and her co-host Sarah Stewart Holland wrote a book called I Think You’re Wrong (But I’m Listening) if you’re interested. I’m planning to be on Instagram @thelazygenius this Thursday around noon ET to chat about time management when time makes no sense, so be sure to follow me there. My book The Lazy Genius Way is now available for pre-order at your favorite place to buy books. Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there. You're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 153. Time management and time makes no sense. We are still in the coronavirus pandemic, but honestly there are lots of times when time makes no sense. Having a newborn baby, for example, time makes no sense then when you are home with tiny kids and nobody's in school and you live like the same. kind of day over and over again, time doesn't make sense there either. When you watch someone you love go through chemotherapy, when you're waiting to hear back from graduate schools and you don't have a job yet and you wonder if you're supposed to get one or just keep waiting. Honestly, there are months when like just being on my period turns time upside down. Basically anything that takes your regular average day and the regular average things that you normally do to fill it and then like shifts it around and upside down, it's a struggle to get a handle on how to manage our time. Obviously, the situation we're all in right now is a massive example of that, but it's real outside of a pandemic

too. So today we're going to revisit the three lazy genius pillars of time through the lens of time making no sense. Before we get into those, one way you can use your time when time makes no sense is to do something ridiculous and fun, something like the favorites file. If you're new here or didn't hear me talk about it last week on the podcast or you don't follow me on Instagram. You don't know what that is. So let me tell you real quick. The favorites file is a free downloadable little project. I made just because we just need to have some fun. It's where you name all kinds of your favorite things in pop culture. There are directions and assignments, obvious things like favorite movie and TV show, but also favorite episode, the actor who gets

like a season pass, who you'd watch in anything, who you'd like to be stuck with during a quarantine, all kinds of important stuff. Last week we went through the show file. Today we start the film file. Now, you can obviously download these whenever and fill them out whenever you want to. But it's such a fun project and it's an extra fun project to do together. Now, your together could be a few friends and you have this fun thing to connect you during social distancing and you like do it over a box or Zoom or something like that where you talk about all your lists. Or you could do it like in a bigger together on Instagram with me. So we have got some fun like prompts of really stupid, but very, still very important stuff to share every day. You're welcome to share once,

occasionally, every single time, just whatever kind of, you know, gets you excited to answer. And then we've got some templates that you can put in your Instagram stories to fill out your answers and share them that way. The whole point is just for us to do something fun. We want to distract ourselves from all the craziness in the world when we need to. And maybe maybe still feel like the satisfaction of finishing a project, even if that project is making a bunch of lists that involve people we will never meet. So if you want it, there is a link in the show notes or you can go to the lazy genius collective.com slash tFF for the favorites file. And please just come play on Instagram too. You can share some fun tidbits about yourself by sharing your

list. Today's prompt is about your favorite movie theater experience. So you can get all that info for all that stuff at the lazy genius on Instagram. I have been spending some of my time working on my favorites file and it is time well spent for my emotional health for sure. But obviously we all have a lot more to do every day than that. In fact, some of us feel busier now being home than we did before. There is a slowness to not having soccer practice and meetings and rehearsals for school plays. Even just like the not having to get up and and out the door every day for school or work for some of you is its own kind of slowness. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to do.

So many of us have more to do. Time is shrinking almost. It's really, really strange. In this current situation, I just think about the woman whose husband still has to go physically to work in an essential job. And she is a teacher and has to teach online classes and figure out how to do the whole online platform thing and coach students and parents through how to use the technology and has her own kids at home who needs some help doing their own schoolwork. And if one of those kids is in preschool or

daycare or something, stop it. You, my friend, do not have a slow life. Your time is definitely turned upside down. So what do we do when time makes no sense? Let's revisit the three lazy genius pillars of time. Hopefully they can like hold up and hold true even when things are weird. That is the hope. And if you're wondering where I first talked about these and you want to listen to that episode, it is episode number 48 called The Lazy Genius and Time Management. Okay, pillar number one, your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does. Your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does. Okay, the idea behind this is that we think we have zero time.

But often how we see our schedule, our responsibilities, even our worth affects our time more than the blocks on our calendar do. The irony of this current upside down time is that there is virtually nothing on my calendar. Literally nothing. I've deleted stuff that's no longer relevant, meetings and all that, and it's all gone. Like my calendar's empty, except for birthdays. It's weird. And yet, I still feel busy. I still have stuff to manage. So before we even get into the beliefs part of pillar one, that our beliefs affect our time more than our schedule does, it's weird to think that our schedules have way less power over our time than we thought. I mean, right now, there's no calendar. Schedules don't look at all like they did. We're living each day,

one at a time, in the most intense way we ever have. But there's still time to manage. So let that be an encouragement as we have this conversation that no matter how you get your schedule together, your time still has power in more ways than one. No matter how much you get your calendar under control, time still has to be managed or at the very least your attitude towards it has to be managed or noticed maybe if the word managed feels too strong. Okay, so how do we look at this first pillar of time management when time makes no sense? How do we consider our beliefs about time, especially when our schedules are so strange? I got a DM from someone named Danielle on Instagram a week or two ago and she shared a story about her time.

that I think illustrates this pillar so well. So I want to share it with you. She said, I'm a new mom and I'm in the middle of maternity leave. I planned to get my son on a schedule a couple of weeks before returning to work. But after talking to friends, it seemed like maybe I needed to do this whole schedule thing sooner. Up until that point, I had been feeding on demand and sleeping when the baby sleeps. Everything has been fluid and it's worked wonderfully. I've had energy and felt completely sane. P.S. side note, that is the hope, isn't it? And rarely achieved when you have a new baby. My husband is working from home, so this has allowed him to spend more time with our son as well. Well, we changed our approach, got him on his schedule, and it's working perfectly.

He's sleeping when he's supposed to, waking up only once at night to eat, and I'm nursing at predictable times. By the rulebook, it's working. But what isn't working is that I have six more weeks of maternity leave, and I'm not holding my baby when he's sleeping. I'm not wearing him around the house since he's in his room most of the day, and my husband isn't seeing him nearly as much either. Yesterday I was struggling to decide what to do with his schedule, and your voice popped into my head, what matters to you?

I realize that it matters to me that I get to snuggle my baby while he's little, because in a few short weeks I'll be working, and I won't be able to do that in the same way. It matters to me that my husband gets to spend time with him. What doesn't matter to me is that my six-week-old, being on a military schedule just because I'm supposed to do it that way. I'm happy to tackle this in a month. I'm not happy having restrictions on my newborn right now.

So I've decided to keep the schedule for another day or two to continue learning what I can, and then I'll adjust it to what works for us and what matters to us. I'll certainly take some tips with me, but I'm not going to follow this schedule because I'm supposed to. I'm reprogramming my brain to think, what matters to us, and then to make choices in light of that. I'm approaching this with meaningful intention and my whole family's benefiting from the joy,

peace, and love that comes with that. Danielle, thank you for sending that to me. And I share that here with all of you because it's such a perfect example of how our beliefs affect our time more than a schedule does. Danielle could have managed her time by this schedule. She felt like she was supposed to create for her baby. Most of us do manage time by schedules. but she decided to lead instead with what mattered,

and that affected how she managed her time. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality.

of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now, you don't have to have a newborn baby to do this, obviously, even though having a newborn is like definitely an example of when time makes no sense. There are other scenarios where time doesn't fall into place the same way where down is up and up is down. In those situations especially, it's so important to name what matters, to tease out what you believe about the situation. If you are stuck at home and are going to be helping your kids with online school for the rest of the school year and trying to balance your own work and your partner's work and you miss your people and all the things. And if you let all of that stuff crush your brain and make you spend every day walking around

believing, this will never end or I cannot do this anymore. It is going to affect how you manage your time. I can say that with great honesty because that's my exact situation. When I get into that desperate headspace, I overplan. I over schedule. I. I over schedule. I overmanage and then I just get overwhelmed. I go crazy with the time management or I just give up and throw in the towel because my belief says that it's never going to end and I can't do it. Now I'm not saying we're not all going to have moments of emotional collapse because life right now is weird and hard. We are going to fall apart. But falling apart isn't the end. The really lovely thing about falling apart is that when all those pieces are broken and lying on the floor,

in like a crying heap, we can see what we're made of. And then we can decide what pieces might not be serving us very well. Beth Silver's on the podcast Pantsuit Politics, she said the same thing about our country as we, you know, more or less fall apart during this crisis. The blocks have fallen down, but rather than rushing to rebuild them in the same way, we can use the falling apart to assess what we no longer need, what we need to make bigger and rebuild in a new and better way. I do think that analogy works to a point for our own inner work. Vulnerability and falling apart do help us see the pieces of ourselves. A light shines

and then we can see more clearly what we're allowing to matter and what might not need to matter so much anymore. Okay, so that's pillar one. Your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does. I think that's totally still true even when time makes no sense. Pillar number two, you can do it all if you decide what all means. We hear a lot about the woman that can do it all, and it's a bit of a tired story. Like at this point, we intellectually know that doing it all is a myth. And even more than that, the list of all the things that we're supposed to do, it somehow keeps getting longer.

So yeah, we know we can't do it all. And the response doesn't need to be, well, I can't do it all, so I'm just not going to do anything. You don't have to live that way either. instead decide what matters and spend your time doing that stuff as much as possible right now when time makes no sense during this coronavirus pandemic the all looks different um like now feeling like you have to do it all it looks like being an enthusiastic confident homeschool mom getting up even earlier than before because you have to get the same amount of work done as you did before um you think you have to cook meals the same way. And like now, since we're all home all the time, like maybe you should cook

lunch and breakfast too sometimes. Even when time makes no sense, we can get caught up in the trap of doing it all. And in fact, when time makes no sense, we need to be reminded in a new way that we cannot do it all because the all looks different. And we've kind of forgotten what we know, that we know we can't do it all. So in this weird time, I want you to choose what all means. what matters and then manage your time according to that. Not according to like Frankensteining together what mattered before time made no sense and then what's being added after. Start again. The blocks have fallen. So take a minute to rebuild them in a way that makes sense for you. Not to like haphazardly resemble what once was. That's where we get overwhelmed because we're trying to fit our pre

upside down time life into our upside down time. life. And it doesn't always work that way. So take a minute, start over what matters now. And finally, pillar number three, do what's necessary before it becomes urgent. I think this might be the most important pillar when time makes no sense. Things are upside down and what once was urgent is not anymore. Getting to soccer practice on time, for example, that is no longer urgent or even necessary. There is no soccer. So in this new time, what is? What is? necessary. Eating, maybe getting school done, your list can be whatever it needs to be. But name what's necessary for you and your home to function well. That definitely starts with naming what matters.

Like maybe on a bigger scale. Like for Danielle, what matters is holding her baby as much as she can while she's home. That's a bigger why. That's a bigger matter. But from there, she can name what's necessary to support that, to support what matters. Once you name what's necessary, or you just look around and see what's necessary, you tend to those things before they become urgent and you're just putting out fire after fire. Your kitchen could be a really good example of this. What matters right now is staying home, right? That's what matters. One of the necessary things about staying home is eating. Now, if you're like me and you have five people at home, every single day for a sequence of many, many days, you go through many, many foods, a lot of

dishes, a lot of decision making around food. That is necessary. Okay. So how can you tend to that now before it becomes urgent? You or whoever can put the breakfast dishes and cereal boxes and stuff away once breakfast is over. Three bowls and a couple of juice cups. It might not feel like much when you get to lunch? But then what if the lunch stuff is still out when it's time to make dinner? Then that messy kitchen, it feels urgent. You might eventually wait so long that there aren't clean dishes anymore. And then it's really urgent. So tend to the necessary before it becomes urgent. Now, I'm not saying if you have dirty dishes in your sink that you're a bad person, 0%. But if you feel the urgency of a dirty kitchen and you don't like to feel that way,

tend to what is necessary before it becomes urgent. You get to decide what that means. Your kids having snacks might be necessary. Instead of feeling the urgency of constant questions and nagging and decision making as it relates to your kids needing snacks and like if chips is its own food group, you could tend to the necessary thing of snacks by having like a little box on the counter that you make at lunch that has all the snack food options for the afternoon. nude. They eat it when they want to, and that's what they get for the day. No questions. So you're tending to the necessity of snack requests before it becomes urgent in the form of whining children and you hiding in the closet with chocolate. Okay, so time management, when time makes no sense,

actually uses the same pillars of time. And honestly, guys, that is why I love living like a lazy genius. So much of what we talk about is more about principles than playing. In fact, my new book, The Lazy Genius Way, it comes out August 11th. It is all about that. It is a collection of principles that you can use to lazy genius anything. You can create a lazy genius system around anything. We grab for plans and hacks. And sometimes those are helpful. But when time makes no sense, you need a perspective that still does make sense. So I hope that these three pillars of time will help you do that. And if you, again, if you're looking for something to fill any free time that you do have, don't forget about the favorites file. It's been so fun. I can't even, I can't even tell you. Like, I'm just glad I made it for me. And I'm glad that a lot of you were enjoying it. But even if you weren't, I would still be happy I made it because it's just been so fun. A link for it is in the show notes. Or you can go again to the lazy genius collective.com slash TFF. And if you're interested in pre-ordering the lazy genius way, you can get details for that at the lazy genius collective.com slash book. This could actually be like a really fabulous way to support your local bookstore that might be struggling right now. We can request orders through them.

And then that kind of gives them business right now. So you could consider that or any other bookseller suggested at the lazy genius collective. com slash book. Okay. That is it for today. Thanks so much for listening. I hope that even though time makes no sense right now that you feel like this episode was a deep breath that you can keep breathing.

So take care. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough.

Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.