The Lazy Genius Podcast - #326 - How to Magic Question Your Morning

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

This is the time of year when we start hearing a lot of buzz about transitioning to fall. If transitioning to fall is all the buzz, a morning routine is for sure the buzzword. But morning routines don’t have to be a checklist to follow or a pass/fail assignment that determines the outcome of your day. Let’s talk about how to Magic Question your mornings.   Helpful Companion Links Episode 58: The Lazy Genius Morning Routine Episode #202: Revisiting Your Morning Routine Episode #172: Resurrecting Routines Bonus Episode: Lazy Geniusing a Morning Routine with Erin Moon The Lazy Genius Collective Facebook group Change Your Life Chicken Shawarma Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! (Affiliate links) 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

Hey there, you are 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 326. How to Magic Question Your Morning. This is the time of the year when we start hearing a lot of buzz about transitioning to fall. Summer has a very particular energy as we know and it's important to live in the season, right? We love doing that around here. But if you're not careful, that buzz can get too loud, crowding out. matters, especially when it comes to mornings. If transitioning to fall is all the buzz, a morning routine is for sure the buzzword. We put a lot of stock in how the morning goes and its impact on the rest of the day, and to a point I agree with that. My morning often impacts the rest of my day. However, I can have a great morning that ends in a crappy day or a crappy morning that ends in a great day. A morning routine is not the magic formula. It's great to have, but it's not your only option. I was talking to Leah, my team's director of content about this, and she said something that really stuck with me. She said, you know, we treat other people's morning routines like their homework. Isn't that true?

There are so many books about morning routines and the things that like successful people do to start the day and all sorts of stuff like that. We ask our friends and our family and Facebook what their morning routines are so we can get ideas. We grab onto everything that we can that sounds reasonably good to make our morning routine work and we treat it like homework. It is a task to complete, a checklist to follow, and it is completely devoid of our own personal needs. So if that is our problem, feeling buzzy about a new morning routine and following everyone else's guidelines about what one should be, what is our solution? What do we do? Let's get into it. First, let's name where we are. We're in the first week of August, which means different things for

different people, but for everyone, it does mean some kind of practical transition to a new season. Our seasons all look different, but something else is coming, right? School, changing weather, a holiday season on the horizon, maybe going back to work if you're in a job that has a slower movement in the summer. We are in or about to be in a practical transition, like pretty much all of us. That is one part of where we are. Another part of where we are is in an intangible transition. New seasons feel like something significant, whether the practical pieces are there or not. And there are a lot of mental pieces and parts that can create a sort of pile up in our minds. You might be entering another, just run-of-the-mill new season, but you're still feeling a little

angsty about it, which is super normal. or you might feel like you should feel a little angsty about what's coming, even if you're not. You know that feeling where everyone else acts like the sky's falling and you're wondering what you're missing? You're like, I'm not nervous. Should I be nervous? Oh my gosh, should I be nervous? That's also super normal. In fact, I think there tends to be a lot of like optimization energy in the air around this time. So even if you're content with your life, the messaging implicitly tells you, you should not be. We have been taught by the productivity industry that anything out of order is the enemy, that going into something without a plan is the enemy, that stress is the enemy. We're supposed

to fix it, no matter what it is. Your choices should be intentional and optimized and ready for battle, especially when a change is ahead of you. Meanwhile, fall is like, what did I do? You are absolutely allowed to feel any level of unease or nervousness or anticipatory stress about the upcoming season that you need to feel. Absolutely. But you also don't have to let what's around you tell you a message that is not true for you. You can be stressed, but there's nothing wrong with you if you're not. You can also be stressed without the ultimate goal being the elimination of it. Sometimes things are just hard. In fact, oftentimes things are just hard. Being a person, is not an easy task. We all have obstacles. And as I just typed that phrase, my computer auto-populated

the end of the sentence to obstacles to overcome. Like even Google Docs is telling me I need to beat what's in front of me. You don't, y'all. You really don't. You can just exist where you are without coming up with systems and strategies and tricks to make your life as smooth and optimize as possible all the actual time. Smooth and optimized are not the primary goals here. They're not bad things to pursue. but not at the expense of staying grounded in yourself first. 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 things. public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. So we have named where we are. We are in a practical season of transition with some intangibles floating around in the culture and in our heads. And we can decide how much of that is ours to manage and hours to let go.

I love that for us. Now, with that in mind, let's move into thinking about potential solutions to our seasonal challenges. Please know I love solutions. I love them. I just want us to be in the proper headspace when we come to them. Now, I do think that while mornings are not magical, they are a potential solution and a great place to start if you are feeling stressed. Like, we all have mornings and most of us start our days in the morning. But in a season of transition, the morning that you experience now could be different from the morning you will experience when you are deeper into August and September. You will almost certainly have to turn your mornings, either slowly or abruptly, no matter what. So let's go back to that last exercise

of naming where we are. Where are you in terms of your morning? What does your morning look like now? And then how would you like your morning to look when you're in your next season? The object is to get from here to there with as little robot energy and as much wisdom as possible. And I think the wisest path is the simplest one. We are going to make this as simple as possible by asking the magic question and then keeping the answer as small as we can. The magic question is what can I do now to make something easier later? The magic question is one of the 13 lazy genus principles that I wrote about in my first book, The Lazy Genius Way. And that is the question. What can I do now to make something easier later? Now our something in this case is transitioning our current morning to our design.

desired next morning in the next season. Your primary job is to name that transition in the simplest way possible. So look at what your morning is like now. You can list the things that you do. You can also list the things that you feel. You know, what is your energy? What makes you frustrated? What makes you happy? What are the actual tasks that you're going through? Now consider how you want your mornings to look when you're in September. You're not trying to create a morning that is the easiest morning of all mornings until the end of time. You will have bumps. You will have particulars of your morning that you just cannot get rid of and that's okay. So when you think about what you want it to look like, be realistic. Perfection is not on the table here. Or be idealistic about the elements, but realistic in

your expectations of them. You know, they're not all going to work out all the time. So either way is great. Be realistic or be idealistic about the morning, but realistic about the expectations. So, You have here, you have there, and you likely have numerous connective threads between those two. What is the longest thread? What is the biggest adjustment jump as you look at those two mornings? If you have kids and they get up whenever they want to right now, but in a couple of weeks they'll have to all be out of bed by like 645, that's a pretty nasty thread, right? so maybe just focus on that make your morning transition simpler by focusing on only one thing one

connective thread not all of them this is where we remind ourselves of the magic question what can I do now to make that thread easier later what can I do now to make the kids getting up way earlier and at the same time easier later you are the best person to answer that because you know your home and your kids. Now, it might be the standard idea of waking them up earlier and earlier over a week or two before school starts or you might have another idea that works better for you. The point is to ask that specific question and make the answer as small as possible. We'll be right back. This is all actually a very short process, which is why this is a short episode. We could talk about the specifics of a morning routine for a long time, actually.

And in fact, a great buddy episode to this one is episode 58, the lazy genius morning routine. That episode was over five years ago, but it's still a banger. In fact, fun fact, that is the episode that connected me to Jenna Fisher in one of our favorite lazy genius internet moments ever. I'm just going about my business one day in January of 2019. And my phone starts blowing up with words like Instagram and Pam in like all my text from different people. I'm so confused. So I opened Instagram to an utter barrage of DMs from people with various forms of like exclamation emojis and gifts. Jenna Fisher, aka Pam Beasley from the office,

was talking about my morning routine episode, this very one, episode 58, on her Instagram stories. And we all lost our minds. Cut to five years. That episode is still great. Morning routines are still worth talking about. And Jenna and I have become internet friends. She endorsed both my books. She is a genuinely lovely human. The internet is such a wild place. But all that to say, that episode is still great. And a fantastic listen if you want specifics on thinking through the particulars of your morning. I won't get into it here since I already did there. But that's why this episode is so short. Now, your job from this episode to recap is to recap is to to remember the machine that we live in, the world of Western productivity, and remember that it is

okay for your life and seasons and mornings to not be smooth or structured or consistent or optimized or whatever word you keep striving for. There are many ways to mourning and you can choose what works for you without listening to the chicken littles of the productivity world. but since not listening doesn't mean just putting our heads in the sand of our own lives, we can still consider how we might make our mornings a little easier for us, especially during this upcoming seasonal transition. And you do that by naming where you are, where you'd like to go, and the simplest path to get there with as few steps as possible.

I love doing this with the magic question. What can I do now to make that singular transitional thread easier later? And then do that one thing. If it doesn't work, try another thread. If it does work, feel free to add a second thread later. Start small. Go slow. Be kind.

And that is how to magic question your morning. All right, before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it is K with no last name from the Facebook group. There is a private lazy genius Facebook group that has over 27,000 members, which is kind of nuts. They are really great over there with like a million and one ideas for everything. It's what you want Facebook to be if you're on Facebook. What is hilarious actually about that group is that a ton of them don't even know who I am. They don't know about the lazy genius way or the lazy genius kitchen or this podcast. They just have found this smart, kind group of people solving problems like a bunch of champs

and just enjoying being part of it. It's pretty hilarious. But anyway, this very, very quick tip is from Kay in that Facebook group. Here's what Kay wrote. I love making Change Your Life chicken shwarma in the air fryer, and it turns out perfectly. I marinate whole, boneless chicken thighs, and then cook them at 390 degrees in the air fryer for 14 minutes,

flipping halfway through. They're great every time. Well, that is pretty fantastic, and I might try it this week, actually. if you have not made the lazy genius change your life chicken shwarma you are missing out it is absolutely delicious really easy it's just chicken oil and some spices cooked in a variety of ways listed on the the blog post about it and now one of those ways is the air fryer so great so we'll put a link in the show notes to that recipe that links to it and it says like how to cook it on the stove in the oven or on the grill and now thanks

to K, we have the air fryer addition to that, which is so great. So thank you, Kay, and congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. All right, y'all, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. 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.