The Lazy Genius Podcast - #297 - 5 Steps for More Ease at Work

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

I believe that people can feel more at ease at work no matter what work it is you do. In part one, we’re going to walk through how to do that, and in part two, we’ll apply those principles to a re...al life example to show you how the steps can work. So let’s jump in!   Helpful Companion Links Episode #296: How to Lazy Genius Your Habits Episode #177: The Lazy Genius Plans a Day Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! 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

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Starting point is 00:00:46 Hey there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I am 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 297, five steps for more ease. at work. That sounds pretty good, right? I will sign up for more ease at work. Most every person listening has at least one job. And by job, I mean something you do almost every day that you're probably paid for. The exception here is caregivers of family members, whether they're kids or sick or aging parents or siblings. Y'all probably don't get paid. But the repetitive nature of your
Starting point is 00:01:23 daily existence that is postured toward another person that includes tasks and responsibilities, that is a job. It has more layers and fulfillment probably than many paying jobs, but you're just not paid for it. So still, I believe that people can feel more at ease at work no matter what work it is you do. In part one of this episode, we're going to walk through how to do that, how to find more ease at work. And in part two, we will apply the principles of how to do that to a real life example to show you how the steps can work. So let's jump in. This episode is called Five Steps to More Ease at Work. but let's begin by tackling what this episode is not. It's not about making your actual work easier. Now, is that possible? Maybe. But that's not what we're talking about today. Today, I want
Starting point is 00:02:10 you to learn how to experience more ease. You can feel at ease when work is difficult or busy, but easy work does not always put you at ease. We're better off spending our energy being at ease within ourselves than trying to hack our way to easier jobs. So ease more than easy. I almost said ease over easy, but that's eggs. That's not right. So what is this thing? What is this magical application that will make us more at ease at our jobs and then our work? Now, I do not have the only answer, but I do think that one significant answer to how you can experience more ease at work is rhythm. Every job benefits from some kind of rhythm, whether you have a boss or you are the boss, whether you work from home or at an office, whether you work part time or full time,
Starting point is 00:03:05 whether you have a creative job or a linear job or a service job or a management job, or you have the job that you don't get paid for. Every job benefits from some kind of rhythm. Now first, let's talk briefly about what a rhythm is. A rhythm is a regular repeated process or even a group of processes. It's easy to confuse a rhythm with a routine and even a routine with a habit. We talked about habits last week. If you have a like a nesting doll of repeated choices, the innermost doll, the smallest doll is the habit. then next is a routine and finally a rhythm. And then really if you want to get like super woo-woo, the outside doll is really your life. Your life is made up of rhythms, repeated groups of processes or routines.
Starting point is 00:03:59 And your routines are usually made up of habits or actions that eventually could become habits. So a rhythm is more expansive than a routine. A routine is generally like this thing than that thing. A rhythm is this group of things than that group of things. I also think a rhythm is more soulful than a routine. Not that a routine cannot have soul. That's not what I mean. But when you think about a rhythm versus a routine, a rhythm has more breath in it somehow. It's like it's more grounded. It's more fluid. It just feels really human. A routine can skew robot real fast, right? Now, I love routines. I love habits. But just like your habits are well served by examining the routine, your routines are well served by examining your life's broader rhythms. Are you regularly experiencing processes day to day, week to week, month to month, that support what matters to you? And my guess is if you do, if that's true, you feel at ease more often than you don't.
Starting point is 00:05:12 all of us will feel ill at ease plenty of times but if your rhythms are in line with what matters to you if the rhythm of your day is in line with what matters to you and you slowly develop those regular processes those rhythms that include meaningful routines and habits if everything well most everything is pointed in the direction of what matters to you you are going to feel more at ease within yourself So I don't think that rhythms are the answer to ease, but I do think they're a significant one. So let's talk about how to create a rhythm in your work specifically so that you can feel more at ease. We are going to do that with a process we have not used in a hot minute. We're going to apply the five lazy genius steps to creating rhythms and therefore experience more ease at work.
Starting point is 00:06:06 If you are new here or you just need a refresher, the five lazy genius steps were first shared in my second book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, one of the most overlooked but important lazy genius principles. And there are 13 of those. And they are described in my first book, The Lazy Genius Way. But one of the 13 principles that is more important than we often realize is the principle, go in the right order. Chances are, many things in your life could have more ease in them. If you didn't change what you were doing, but you simply changed the order. order in which you do it. I give a ton of examples for that in the lazy genius way of going in the right order. But the ultimate lazy genius order to do anything, to lazy genius anything,
Starting point is 00:06:53 is to follow these five steps in order. So I essentially took some of the lazy genius principles and I put those in the right order so that you can solve just about any problem that you need solving. And that is where you begin. In order to apply the five steps to a problem, you need to name, the problem. So when you think about your work, your job, and the energy around it, what is the problem? What is your challenge? Where do you need to feel more at ease? Now, the temptation is to be pretty general with that answer to say things like, I just have too much to do, or I'm just so tired all the time, or I'm not appreciated or I just hate going to work. Now those statements could very well be true and they certainly feel true, right?
Starting point is 00:07:47 But those statements are not solvable. Not really. They're too big. If your problem is you're tired, you might think a nap will solve it, but only for now, right? Like that's not a long-term solution, nor is a vacation or a new mattress or a new job. When we have big problems, we're stuck with big solutions. And big solutions don't work. They're too expensive or ineffective or they just take too much time or energy. Now, this has been a fairly regular lazy genius statement around here, but the smaller the problem, the easier the solution. It's just the way it goes. We think that we need to solve big problems. But you have been trying to do that
Starting point is 00:08:37 your whole life probably and my guess is it still has not worked. So let's start small. That is the most annoying and also the most transformative of the 13 lazy genius principles. Start small. In other words, for this, make the problem smaller. So as we go through these five steps to help lazy genius, that small problem and add more ease in your work, you've, do need to know what your problem is. And the smaller you can make it, the better. Now, let's briefly walk through the five lazy genius steps if you have never heard them or if you just need a refresher. The five steps are prioritize, essentialize, organize, personalize, and systemize. Once your problem, once your small problem has been identified, the first thing you do is prioritize. The problem that you name,
Starting point is 00:09:35 it will inform the priority. The problem itself will help you name what matters most. If the problem is that you never have time to stop and eat lunch at work, then the priority is that you take a lunch break. If the problem is that you have a coworker that you can't stand, the priority is that you somehow get along better with that person or have more compassion for that person. If the problem is that you are always late for work,
Starting point is 00:10:03 and therefore you just feel rushed and behind all day, then the priority is that you get to work on time. You see what I mean? The problem informs the priority. So once you've named what matters most about that particular problem, once you have prioritized, you move on to step two, essentialize. Essentialize is to get rid of whatever is in the way of what matters, whatever's in the way of your priority. And occasionally it also involves adding something that. you need, but don't have. You want only the essential things around you that support your priority.
Starting point is 00:10:40 I won't give examples of all these, like I just did with prioritize. But remember in part two, we're going to apply these principles to a specific problem. But step two is essentialize. Get rid of what's in the way. Step three is to organize, to put everything in its place. Everything can be items on a desk, to emails in the right folders, to the thoughts in your head. you just put everything in its place. You must always, this is important, you must always essentialize before you organize. That step really matters. Otherwise, you're putting things in place that you don't actually need, right? We go in the right order. Step four is to personalize. You want to feel like yourself and whatever it is you're doing. The more grounded you are,
Starting point is 00:11:22 the more confident and alive and sparkly and comfortable you are, the more at ease you will be. So with whatever problem you're solving and whatever rhythm you're trying to create, it is vital that you do not lose yourself in that. Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point? And finally, step five is to systemize. That's basically keeping something in a flow, keeping something going. So often we have solutions, but we don't have follow through to maintain that solution. That's why systemize is part of the process. If you don't have a way to help the solution stick around, you're going to be back where you started pretty fast. So those are the five steps to lazy genusing any problem. Prioritize, essentialize, organize, personalize, and systemize. Or name what matters,
Starting point is 00:12:12 get rid of what's in the way, put everything in its place, feel like yourself, and then stay in the flow. Next, we're going to apply these five steps to a problem at work that could be solved by adding a rhythm. We'll be right back. 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.
Starting point is 00:13:00 You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, let's make some rhythm. Does anyone else, when they hear the word rhythm, start singing Gloria Estefan? Like, the rhythm is going to get you. The rhythm is... I listen to that album. Let it loose. That's what it was called.
Starting point is 00:13:19 I listened to that album. It was her and the Miami Sound Machine, like on aggressive repeat when I was eight and nine years old. Like, just constant plays. That album is shockingly good. You are very fortunate that I will now be a professional and I will not keep singing Gloria Estefan songs because I really want to. But that album is so good. Okay. We have named why a rhythm is essential to creating ease at work.
Starting point is 00:13:44 Having a rhythm each day that helps support what matters most to you, it grounds us. It grounds you in yourself and in your work. A rhythm is grounding. And when we are grounded and secure and who we are and what we have chosen, we feel more at ease. When we don't feel like we're starting from scratch every day, when we know what might be coming and when we have like general, repeatable approaches to what is coming, we find more ease in our tasks and in ourselves. It's like a very soulful way of being prepared. Now, we need to name the smallest problem we can around our work rhythms. You don't have to create a rhythm for your whole week of work or for a whole day or even
Starting point is 00:14:31 for starting or ending your day. Like those might still be too big depending on what's going on with you and what keeps you from feeling at ease. So what is that? What is that thing that keeps you from feeling at ease at work? Is it a person? Is it the confidence you have or don't have in a certain part of your job? Is it that you go from a busy home to a busy office and back to a busy home but now everybody's hungry? we want our problem to be smaller.
Starting point is 00:15:03 So try and dig one layer deeper at a time to figure out what currently has you uneasy. Okay. Now we're going to use an example to work this out. I'm going to use one from my own life. Now, I realize I've mentioned this several times before, one of which was last week. But I'm doing that on purpose because we think that we have to solve. everything at once. That the bigger the problem, the better it'll be once it's solved. We almost don't believe that one simple solution to a singular small problem could have the
Starting point is 00:15:42 kind of impact that I'm currently claiming it can have. Now, I didn't say will have. I said can have. Give it a shot. Give this small solution idea a shot. And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. small solutions pretty much work most of the time. If they didn't, this podcast would not have almost 300 episodes. Like y'all would have stopped listening a long time ago. But I do want to leave room for those of you who might have a problem that is rooted in your season of life and doesn't really feel very solvable right now. You could be discouraged by thinking about this.
Starting point is 00:16:17 Or maybe you named one problem. You created a small solution for it because I talk about this a lot. And then it didn't work. and you're frustrated by that. You know, there could be any number of reasons why it didn't work, but you've given up because of that one, in your eyes, failure. So I'm just offering that this is not a perfect system with faultless solutions or that you'll always even be in the state of mind to accurately name what's going on in your insides.
Starting point is 00:16:46 You can still apply these five steps and then try again if it doesn't seem to stick. Just keep making the problem smaller. But I see you. skeptics and you are very welcome here. I hope you keep listening. All right. So back to this repeated small solution. I keep talking to you guys about my lunch. It is, it is my best example for how a work rhythm, a singular work rhythm, has helped me feel more at ease in my work and therefore in my comprehensive life. So I am a fairly intense person. I often say I have caffeinated squirrel energy. I am also an enneagram one. And so my gift and my curse, depending on the day, is making things better.
Starting point is 00:17:24 than they were before. But I've got a lot rolling around in my head and in my body all the time. Like just all the time. Now, some other context. I work from home, usually in my garage office slash podcast recording space, which is where I am now, that we invested in in 2021. I also really love my job. I do. I love this work. I love making these episodes for you. I have a wonderful team that does their greatest contribution so that I can do mine. And so my work is mostly creative in nature. I would say 90% of my working hours are spent doing something creative, making this podcast, writing the newsletter, writing books when I'm writing books, writing in Instagram,
Starting point is 00:18:09 when I'm writing on Instagram. Most everything is creative. And creativity for me by nature has a lot of momentum. once I get going, it's hard to stop. Or if I can't get going, if I can't get my creativity going, then I perseverate on the fact that I can't get going. So I'm either obsessed or I'm obsessing over the fact that I'm not obsessed. It's like super fun.
Starting point is 00:18:35 So after many weeks of sharing various stressful situations and concerns and whatever with my therapist, she said, do you eat lunch? This was quite a few months ago, maybe a year ago. But I was like, I mean, yeah, I eat lunch. And she said, do you work through your lunch? I saw where this was going. Sometimes, I said. Then she said something like, well, do you enjoy your lunch when you have it?
Starting point is 00:19:00 And the answer at that time was no. I didn't want to spend longer than I had to on my lunch. Because even though my kids are in full-time school, I am still the primary kid parent. My husband leaves for work before my kids leave for school. and then we're all home for at least a couple of hours before he gets home from work. So I'm the school drop-off pickup parent. I'm the afternoon homework parent. I'm a snack parent. I'm the make-dinner parent. My husband does a lot around the house. We have a really good division of labor that feels like very equal. But that role, that particular role, falls to me. So for the longest
Starting point is 00:19:37 time, I felt so protective of my work hours because they were limited. They were going to be over. Now everybody's work hours are over, but they felt shorter than I wanted them to be. I have a full-time job, but not full-time hours available for that job. So we've got to cram everything in, man, including lunch. But my work days were always so stressful. And my therapist was the one who suggested that maybe a small solution to my huge problem of feeling stressed was that I wasn't taking a break. And so maybe I could take a lunch. break. So that was the priority to eat lunch every day. There weren't any words about, you know,
Starting point is 00:20:25 what I would eat or when I would eat or what I would do while I ate, but the priority was simply to take the time to enjoy a meal and enjoy myself while not working. Okay. So step one is prioritize. Name what matters. I need to eat lunch without working. Step two is essentialize. what was in the way? I would bring my computer into the house during lunch instead of leaving it in my office. And that was very distracting, right? So I got rid of the computer during my lunch. For a short time, I actually would bring my lunch to my office and like just down the driveway.
Starting point is 00:21:04 And I would watch a show on my computer in my office thinking that would be enough of a solution. And then I could just get back to work as soon as I was done. But I could still see my email tabs, you know, when I was watching. something. I was still in my office, surrounded by my work stuff, and I couldn't really rest during that time. So I essentialized and I got rid of having my computer nearby and of eating lunch in my office. I got rid of those things. Now, after a little while of doing that, I also got rid of just figuring out what to eat on the fly. That wasn't really helping matters much. So now I prep lunches. I plan dinners that have leftovers because the energy I was bringing to figuring out a lunch on the
Starting point is 00:21:52 fly that is also caffeinated squirrel energy. I don't need more of that, right? I need something prepared and quietly ready for Kendra so Kendra can quiet down. That was step two, essentialize. Get rid of what's in the way. Step three is organized. Put everything in its place. So I was going inside to eat lunch at random times, nothing consistent, which meant that sometimes I would eat really late, like close enough to bump right up against getting the kids from school. And that did not create any sense of ease. It was still stressful, even though I was stopping to eat. So I put my lunch hour in its place, not just in my head, but on my calendar and in my planner. I have meeting blocks blocked off on my Google calendar. So Leslie, Team LG's director of operations, just so she doesn't
Starting point is 00:22:42 unknowingly schedule a meeting or something when I'm having lunch. And I put a 1230 flag. If y'all remember bunting and flags and chairs from our various time management episodes in the past, I put a 1230 flag in my daily plan for lunch. That is when I stop every day. I stop at 1230. So I put that in its place. Okay. All right. Step four is personalized. I want to feel like myself. when I'm taking a break and eating my lunch. And one of the things that fills me up big time is stories, either on TV or in books, usually books. So I either read or watch something that I really love during lunch. That helps me feel like myself. Now, if the weather is warmer, I might eat outside on my porch instead, because that's another way I start to come back to myself is being outside. Not like
Starting point is 00:23:37 hiking and doing like lots of moving things. I'm not much of a mover, but I do like being outside. But ultimately, I do something that makes me feel like myself while I eat. And finally, step five is to systemize, to stay in a flow. Now, I kind of already did that back in step three, where I organized my lunch by putting it at the same time and putting it on my calendar, right? But a way to, for sure, for sure, for sure, stall out in this rhythm is to not have food that I look forward to eating ready to eat. If I have to settle for a ham sandwich, which I don't love, but it's like it's there, you know, or if I have to cook something that takes 20 minutes, but I'm hungry, and so I snack on whatever I can find until I can eat, and then that kind of defeats the purpose of eating on purpose,
Starting point is 00:24:29 you know, basically if I do not have food ready to eat or like to heat up or just like go get, you know, that is a recipe, no pun intended, that is a recipe for getting out of the flow. So I need a regular rhythm, a system, if you will, of prepping a yummy lunch once a week so that I can enjoy the regular rhythm of eating every day. Now, that lunchtime rhythm that I've been doing for maybe almost a year at this point, it has transformed the ease of my days. That alone has single-handedly given me space to breathe and be a person and do something fun and give my brain a break from work, give my body its fuel. That alone did it. That mattered so much. And as time went on, that rhythm, that work rhythm, it gave way to others. It
Starting point is 00:25:36 started giving me margin energetically and logistically to see my work days in a way that I could batch stuff. I could take days off sometimes. I could do any number of things to slowly be at ease in my work. And now I have tremendous ease in my work, truly. Now is my work hard? It is. Do I get stressed? I do. Do things sometimes not go according to plan? Of course. Am I always motivated? No. But do I feel at ease more often than I don't? Yes, absolutely. And that growing ease, as I've added to existing rhythms and started paying attention to new ones that could not have happened all at once. That would have been too big. It had to start in one place with one thing to solve one small problem. So please hear me. Naming and solving a small problem using these five steps is so much better
Starting point is 00:26:42 than trying to solve everything at once. It's not going to work if you try to solve everything at once. I know you want to have it solved quote unquote right now. And you're like, I don't want to spend a year building a rhythm. But look, how old are you? Look back at your life. Have you been trying to find these rhythms for like your whole adulthood probably because that's what we do. So why not start small now with one thing so that it can build into other things? I know those small solutions they don't seem significant, but they are. They very, very much are. We'll be right back. A couple of final thoughts as we close. First, your rhythm that you want to create more ease in your work. It could be a rhythm that doesn't actually happen at work. It could be before
Starting point is 00:27:40 work or after. It could be a rhythm of rest on the weekend or a night before bed. It could be a relational rhythm because your job is lonely and you need to touch base with someone you love at least once during your workday. Basically, your rhythm does not have to be a rhythm of how to approach your inbox, although that could very well be a helpful rhythm for you. I just want you to keep an open mind as you name your problem and you let it form your priority. Your lack of ease at work, it could begin at home on the drive in your body because of something you ate or didn't eat or because of a human interaction that always saps you dry. Just keep an open mind. It doesn't have to be actually confined to work to bring ease to work. Make this rhythm be what you need it to be,
Starting point is 00:28:28 not what you think it should be, or something that's obviously connected to your job if that's not what you actually need. Second, sometimes the thing that we want to take away from our job to feel more at ease, it just can't be taken away. If you are a nurse or a doctor or in any sort of medical service industry job, you are interacting with people who are probably hurting all the time. That is your actual job. A lot of people, they don't do that job because they cannot feel at ease in any way in fulfilling its requirements. The thing that they would need to take away to feel at ease is taking away the actual job. But somehow you do.
Starting point is 00:29:09 You do that job. And we're so grateful. You can sit with hurting people. You can carry all the things that you carry. And while you might find that a lot of that job comes naturally, it's still draining, right? Being at ease at work doesn't mean that your job is easy, which we already said, but it also does not mean that the solution is to try and lesson or eliminate the hard part. Some jobs are just hard. So instead, think about how you can bring more ease into your body
Starting point is 00:29:47 and your mind and your soul as you work. Or how you can bring ease into other areas of your life so you have margin for your work. You know, the answer to that is different for everybody. But if you have a hard job by nature, don't dismiss this practice of creating a rhythm because, you know, you can't make your hard job easier. Remember, that isn't the point. What instead can you do to feel more at ease within yourself before, during, or after your work?
Starting point is 00:30:25 And then third, you can feel busy without. feeling stressed. It sounds a little bit like a paradox, but it's true. We think that we're stressed because we're busy. But that's not necessarily the case. Our goal is not to be less busy, maybe, and it's certainly not to eliminate stress because we can't. It's instead to have an internal practice of managing our expectations around our time and our rhythms at work. If you can't, keep telling yourself that you're so busy and you're so overwhelmed and you keep that caffeinated squirrel like she's just going full throttle you're going to have a really hard time seeing clear solutions and showing kindness to yourself you're not going to be able to relax into that at all and you're then just
Starting point is 00:31:16 going to stay stress and stress does us zero favors you guys it messes up our hormones and our skin and our digestive systems and our calendars but it can be managed not eliminated managed stress is going to be part of your life and likely your job. So instead of spinning your wheels to either get rid of it or lament that you have stress or beat yourself up because you thought you were going to get rid of it and you still have it so that means you did something wrong, instead create rhythms in your days and your weeks that create space for your stress to relax and ease up and therefore turn into something else. So, to recap, we want to create more ease in our days and in ourselves, especially when we go about our daily responsibilities at work or working at home. The point is not
Starting point is 00:32:11 to make things easier, but instead to feel more at ease. One way we can do that is by creating rhythms in our lives that support what matters to us. We can do that by naming the problem, making it smaller, and then applying the five lazy genius steps to help uncover a potential solution. Prioritize or name what matters. Essentialize or get rid of what's in the way. Organize or put everything in its place. Personalize or feel like yourself. And systemize or stay in a flow.
Starting point is 00:32:48 One small rhythm will create space for another and then another. and over time you will be in such a flow and you will begin to feel more at ease in general no matter what is happening around you and those are the five steps for more ease at work okay before we go we're going to do two things in a second we're going to celebrate the lazy Jesus of the week but before we do that i want to tell you something that is new and free by the way that we are doing we have created something called the latest lazy Lattest Lazy L listens, say it three times fast, is our newest member of our email family, the cousin of the monthly newsletter, the latest lazy letter.
Starting point is 00:33:32 Latest Lazy Lissons will come to your inbox every other week on Fridays, and it is essentially a podcast digest. It takes the previous two weeks episodes, and there is a summary of each episode. Any steps that were in that episode are written out in words. There are companion links. some of which are not in the actual show notes of the episode. There is a note from me with some thoughts after the episodes have been released, things I've been learning from having those topics out in the world. And then we'll also each week have the lazy genius of the week written in the email too,
Starting point is 00:34:09 which is super cool. It's basically like a written, compact, beefy summary of each of the most recent two or three episodes, if there's a bonus, podcast episodes. So if you listen to the podcast and you wish you had some things written down, this is for you, because it's written down for you. If you listen, but you don't always get to every episode because of your schedule or not having the time or you're wondering if the topic is actually relevant for you, this is also for you because you can get a pretty significant amount of information from the latest lazy listens without having to actually listen when you don't have the time. And then finally, if you love sharing the podcast with your friends and your family, which I'm so appreciative of that, but sometimes it's hard to get someone to commit to
Starting point is 00:34:52 listen to a 20 or 30 minute episode. You can forward this email to them. And it'll have enough information to be beneficial to the friend or family member that you want to hear the episode without sort of forcing them to listen. And then they can decide on their own if they have time to actually listen to the episode. So it's so fun. Also, you guys, Leah, the director of content on Team LG, She designed this and she made it super clean and pretty, but it's also like the opposite of overwhelming. I almost said it was underwhelming, but that is an incorrect characterization. The way that the info is presented in this email, it allows you to see only what you want to. Initially, the email is long enough.
Starting point is 00:35:37 You can't even really scroll it. That's how short it is. And then you can click on the parts that you want to see. It is just compact and practical and hopeful and cute. and it is coming to an inbox near you starting Friday, January 27th. After that, it'll show up every other week. So if you are interested in getting the latest Lazy Listens, there is a link in the show notes, or you can go to the lazy genius collective.com slash listens.
Starting point is 00:36:02 Okay, now let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it is Jill Copenhagenhaver. Now, before I share Jill's message, let me give you a little context. So early in December, I shared a story on Instagram about a local business owner, local to me, whose house caught on fire the week before Christmas. She and her husband, they have two little boys and they lost so much of their stuff. And then they had to leave the rest behind. They really had nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Starting point is 00:36:30 And again, the week before Christmas. So I shared a link to her Venmo for anyone who wanted to help out a little bit, for them to kind of like furnish an Airbnb and they have like things, which so many of you by the way, it was such a blessing to me and to Ricky and her family. I'm just so grateful. But this message from Jill, it came in that day when I shared that Venmo link. And it is such a really lovely perspective on giving. So this is what Jill writes. Your story got me thinking about a lazy genius thing that I do. Whenever people pay me through Venmo, I always let it sit in the account. If I need to make a payment that's smaller than the balance, I use it.
Starting point is 00:37:11 but otherwise I just let the balance sit. Then when something like this opportunity to share comes along, I donate whatever the balance is. It's usually somewhere between $20 and $70. And because it was never in my bank account, it doesn't affect my budget. It's a nice, it's nice to give brainlessly because you know it's already set aside. So Jill, this is so lovely and like a very pragmatic way to be generous. You know, a lot of folks want to give generously, right? But budgets are usually pretty steady while giving opportunities, especially ones like this, they're not. They're not a study. They can kind of surprise you.
Starting point is 00:37:52 So this is such a great way to be postured toward generosity while still feeling responsible with your other financial commitments. So I just think this idea, it will encourage a lot of people. So thank you for sharing it, Jill. And congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. All right, y'all, that is it for Remember to sign up to get the latest lazy listens at the link in the show notes. I do hope that this episode was encouraging you today. And I hope that you just start so small with one small work rhythm to start moving towards more ease in your work. Thank you for listening, sharing with this episode with your people. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.
Starting point is 00:38:30 I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. 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.

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