The Lazy Genius Podcast - #435 - Your Five-Step Guide to a Joyful Busy Season

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

October through December sometimes feels like a really fun roller coaster but you don’t always feel like you have time to buckle your seatbelt. This episode is going to help you not just survive a busy season but really enjoy it. Helpful Companion Links Order my new book The PLAN or ask your library to consider carrying a copy. Our digital products are going into retirement. Grab them now (at a discount!) before they disappear at the end of the year. I'll be talking with Jen Hatmaker about her new book, Awake, at Festival of Books and Authors in Winston-Salem on Saturday, September 27th. There are tons of sessions to see and authors to meet, and the event is free to the public. Episode #121: How to Build a Fall Dinner Queue Episode #434: 10 Ways I Feel Like Myself Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World by Shannan Martin 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. Want to share your Lazy Genius of the Week idea with us? Use this form to tell us about it. 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. This podcast isn't about hacking the system to find more time or hacking your energy to get more done. Hustling to be the best or to make the most out of every opportunity is exhausting and unsustainable. So here we do things differently. On this podcast, we value contentment, compassion, and living in our season. We favor small steps over big systems. Here we are lazy geniuses, being a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. And I'm so glad you're here. Today is episode 435, your five-step guide to a joyful, busy season. Today is September 15th, the middle of the final month before everything seems to kind of take off. You know, October through December,

sometimes feels like a really fun roller coaster, but you don't always feel like you have time to buckle your seatbelt. This episode is going to help you not just survive a busy season, but really enjoy it. And frankly, you can use these five steps anytime you're entering your own busy season, not just this fall holiday season that we are about to enter. And if you're like Kendra, it is the middle of September. It's still 82 degrees outside. Like, what are you talking about? If you're feeling that way, I get it. You don't actually have to do this right now, if you would rather not. But if you tend to feel spread a little too thin, or more stressed than you would prefer during the last three months of the year.

Laying the tiniest bit of groundwork now will really help your upcoming busyness feel more alive rather than so draining. I'll share plenty of examples with each of the steps. So hopefully you'll be able to see your own process in it. It's also not a complicated process. Even 15 minutes spent thinking through these steps, it's going to make a huge impact on your busiest seasons. After we go through all of that, today's A Little Extra Something is a mini office hours. So I got a question about last week's episode that's likely relatable to a lot of you. So I want to answer it here on the podcast.

As always, we'll share the lazy genius of the week and we'll wrap up with a mini pep talk for when it feels like everything matters. Now, before we get into all that, I wanted to let you know that at the end of this December 2025, we are going to be closing our digital. store. That means that all of the products that we sell digitally, the holiday docket, the summer docket, the recipe e-book, and the swap, those will all go off into the sunset and no longer be available. Now, December's far away, so you have plenty of time. However, the holiday docket specifically, it might be something you want to check out early. Today's episode is about the busyness of this holiday season, and part of the reason that we need help with that season is because it's different than the norm. There are extra things with all the holidays and traditions and family trips,

and that's on top of like managing regular life. We want tools that help us figure out how to navigate that irregular alongside the regular. And the holiday docket is just such a tool. And while it's great for anyone in any stage, it is particularly suited for families with kids still at home. So all of the products, they have been $15 historically, but they are currently all marked down to just nine dollars. So if you haven't gotten any of these now is an excellent time. The holiday docket, it helps with the holidays. The summer docket helps with the summer. The swap is a lazy genius decluttering guide. And then the recipe ebook is seriously like such a sleeper product that you will want to snag it. It's 25 tried and true recipes that my family still eats on the

regular. Like all of these things are in a rotation at all times. And the photography is really pretty too. So again, there's not like a huge rush here. These will be available. through the end of the year, but I also know that you might want to get them before you forget that they're going away. The good news about digital products, too, is that once you download them onto your computer, you'll have them forever, and you can reprint them as often as you would like. Both dockets, both the holiday docket and the summer docket are undated, so you can use them over and over again. So if you want to check out those products before they're gone, you can go to the lazy genius collective.com slash store.

All right, let's get to the episode, your five-step guide to a joyful, busy season. Now, this episode feels necessary for me on a personal level because our October through December is the busiest season for the Adachi family by a significant margin. Significant margin. We have 10 family birthdays, 10. And those aren't like 10 random family members who live in Minnesota or something. Like, I don't actually have any family in Minnesota, but you know what I mean? These are family members who live within a 10-minute drive of me or actually are inside my house. In addition to all the birthdays, we have high school football season now, which is a whole thing, and we love it. We have several beloved fall family traditions that can

only happen on weekends. We have a church Christmas program that usually takes a good bit of time. We have parades. We have costume plans we have to make for Halloween. We have a bunch of oddly placed teacher work days and holidays so that like no week feels regular ever. There's not a lot of repetition. And then fall is always a busy time here at the Lazy Genius Collective and this season is no exception. Oh, and side note. So we're taking, as a family, we're taking two massive trips that we're not really like in the plan at the start of the year or even the start of the summer. A weird snowball effect happened a couple of months ago and now our whole family is going to London and to which is amazing. Like I'm so stoked. But obviously that's a lot. That's like a whole project. We had to

start this summer like getting the kids passports and all the things. Then you guys, we found out just a week ago that my oldest kid Sam, he's the one who plays saxophone. He's super musical. I've shared about him on Instagram before. But he was accepted as a member of the Great American Marching Band. It's a band that's constructed of high schoolers from all 50 states. And he's going to be marching in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I am serious. So the Adachis are going to be spending Thanksgiving in New York, which is super bonkers. So what I'm saying is like our already busy season, it just got even busier. And if I look at my Google calendar, I'm thrilled, but I'm also terrified. Like there are so many blocks of things and very little white space. Now, you might not be watching your kid march down Central Park

West like I am. I will never get over that that's a thing. But you definitely have busy seasons. where you look at your calendar and you're like holy actual moly what am i going to do when you see it all at once like that typically we all freeze and and then we panic we freeze and then we panic and we start creating like massive meal plan charts we're putting sticky notes everywhere we might think that our messy closets are the culprit we're going to start an organizing spree we might even buy a new planner to help hold all the madness more effectively now i understand these reactions. And today I want to prevent you from making it because guess what? Reacting that way, it doesn't really help. I talk about this in the early chapters of my time management book The Plan,

but we think that seeing everything at once is going to make everything better. Like we want the bird's eye view of our life, that you are here map, that you find at them all. We think that seeing all the pieces and parts of our lives and rhythms and where we are inside of it is going to make a busy season feel more in control. On what's wild is that the opposite is true. When you look at everything, you understandably think there's no way I'm going to be able to do all of this. And when you take it all in at once, you're right. You can't. You as a person right now in this moment cannot process all of the busyness that is headed your way, not all at once. And this is why we do things differently here. This is why lazy geniuses start small, start with today and stay kind doing it.

If you keep your time management efforts limited to smaller chunks, all while keeping like a wise eye ahead of you a little to, you know, anticipate the next batch of urgent things, you're going to feel busy because like seasons are busy. But you'll probably enjoy the busy season a lot more. You'll have a better grasp on what you can let go so that you can actually rest. And you're going to recognize that you don't have to get everything done right now. You can stop for a minute and just deal with what's in front of you. It's all going to be okay. So with all that in mind, as we remember to start small and start with today, let's walk through these five steps to have a busy season that's still full of joy. Now, these five steps, they kind of mirror the lazy genius method a little, which is prioritize, essentialize,

organize, personalized, and systemize, you will hear some familiarity a little bit in this order of things, which I hope reminds you that like you literally can lazy genius anything. But if you really want like to deep dive into the lazy genius method, it's laid out specifically in my book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, where I teach you how to Lazy Genius like pretty much everything in your kitchen, which is a good time. It's illustrated. It's a pretty book. You can check it out. But anyway, these five steps might feel a little bit familiar in concept but not in specificity. So even if you're familiar with the lazy genius method, these five steps will bring you a lot of help. All right. So step one is to slow down for real. When you feel the rise of a busy season, when you feel that panic or that

stress, you will likely either freeze or you're going to speed up. Try not to let either stick around for too long. because they just don't lead to good decision making. Slow down. Slow down. Slow your breathing. Slow your scroll. Slow your flipping of the planner pages and getting more overwhelmed with, you know, each week that you pass. Slow your grip on thinking that you can control everything. And slow down your reactionary energy where you want to manufacture and micromanage your whole life to the degree. Slow that down. If you start thinking about this season and you catch yourself like breathing fast and raising your voice, you know, if you're frantically flipping pages or scrolling your Google calendar and your eyes are like getting wider every week you pass, if you start to declare things like

you guys all have to start making your own dinner, I'm not doing it anymore. If you start to plan every hour of each day thinking it's going to help you stay on target, you will pass out from exhaustion. adrenal fatigue is real, y'all. So like, chill out, slow down. The main reason that you feel the need and even sometimes the compulsion to manage every aspect of your life and to have it ordered just so is because you've been taught both explicitly and implicitly that order over your life is the goal. Greatness as a person is the goal. efficiency and optimization and being the master of your days is the goal. Y'all, it's not the goal.

At least it doesn't have to be. You can pick a different goal. The goal instead can be contentment. The goal can be paying attention to what you and your people need today, not just on like a logistical level, but on an emotional one. The goal can be integration and personal wholeness, no matter what chaos exists on your calendar or in the world. You do not have to hustle all the time.

You do not have to score your life the way that the productivity bros do. You can operate differently, and I think you should. That way of life is unsustainable, and it's not terribly kind, or even human. It's mechanized efficiency

at the cost of your own humanity. And that's why you think it's important, though, to go so fast and do so much and organize everything, because they tell you to. I'm telling you differently. I'm telling you to first, slow down. Now, step two is to create space for the essential things now.

You have probably, you know, a list of things that are coming up in your fall season that are like peak enjoyment. Maybe you always go to a farm and pick out pumpkins to carve. Maybe there's a festival in your town that you never miss. maybe there's like an annual movie marathon with friends or something. I want you to give space to those things now. Give space to whatever is essential to your enjoyment of the season now. So what does that mean? Well, it means you write down those deeply essential things, the things that if they didn't happen, you would be legitimately devastated about it. And then I want you to take those things and plug them into your calendar. I want you to give them space before all the space is gone.

Then you don't have to stick to the date that you give them, of course. You're just like creating placeholders. But you can create an event on your calendar when you have like an empty Friday night or whatever that says possible movie marathon night or something. And you could do that across a couple of dates on your calendar. You could even put like all the, you know, let's say you pick three possible dates for this movie marathon or something, you can put the other two dates in the details section of each event so that you don't have to click around to remember, you know, which dates you chose. And then once you and your people pick a date, you can make it real on your calendar. You know, you already have the event there. So you delete the other two and you keep the one on

there. But that way, nothing got scheduled where an essential event could have gone. One of our favorite things to do as a family is to go to this local farm where we do a corn maze, we take a hay ride, we pick out pumpkins, we've been doing it every year since my oldest was like two years old. It's our fall opening ceremony. We still love it. I've told you about it before. Now, we take friends now so that our kids have like pals with them and because, you know, teenage boys tend to get a little snarky about family-only activities. That's fine. But the essence of the ceremony is still very strong. Well, this has to happen on a Saturday. It just does. Weekdays are obviously work in school. Those are out. And we're really involved

in our church on Sundays. Plus, it's the NFL season. And we're not going to be like in a cornfield when the Panthers or the Chiefs are playing. So Saturdays it is. That's like our only option. Now, I don't know about your life, but fall Saturdays are like a whole thing. And with all of our family birthdays, and then depending on when holidays fall, our weekends between October and December, they're usually pretty limited. So a couple of weeks ago, I went into my calendar to identify which Saturdays were free for us between now and the end of the farm's corn maze season, which is the beginning of November. There were two, just two, just two. And then one of them I just found out it might be when a friend's baby shower is, so we'll see if it

ends up being just one. But if I hadn't done that work to create space for this essential thing, Like, our fall is not the fall if we don't do this. I think that we would fill up our weekends not realizing that we did not have any time left over for our fall opening ceremony, for this thing that really matter to us. Create space for the essentials now. Go ahead and do it. You don't have to create space for everything. But make sure that the most important things that you and your people love to your bones, that there's space for them. to happen. Now before we get into the last three steps and before we take an ad break, which makes

this episode free for you to listen to. So thank you sponsors. Here's your quick reminder that we send out a podcast recap email every other Friday. It's called latest lazy listens. And it summarizes the episodes. It shares the lazy genius of the week, as well as other segments that we have on the show. And it has a little extra note from me to help encourage you through the weekend. We also list upcoming episodes, which is fun. So you can get like a sneak peek on what's coming down the podcast pike. So if you would like to get that recap, you can head to the lazy genius collective.com slash listens. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen TIG one. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available

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You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right, so we have slowed down. We have created space for the essential things. And now to step three. Step three is to simplify the regular things. What do I mean by regular things? Food, laundry, dishes, carpels, things that don't stop no matter the season. Now, when you are busy, it's usually because you're dealing with extra things. You know, it might be that all your kids are in sports at the same time, which is unusual. It might be that you have like a huge presentation you're preparing for work. that's outside of your typical workflow. It might be that you're hiring a new team member or your bathrooms being renovated or your budget took a hit because of a surprising medical bill and you're picking up extra shifts at work to make up for it.

Business is either a result of being over-scheduled and doing too much on the regular or having extra things on top of your regular things for a short season. When this happens, the regular things. those daily replenishing tasks like food and dishes and clothes and putting things away, they need to be simplified. Eat repetitively. Avoid wearing dry clean only clothes so you don't have another errand you have to do. Be kind to yourself about not having variety in how you move or clean or rest or dress or eat.

Simplify things. For food, you can create a denture. which is a list of recipes that you're going to pull from for the next month or two, and that's it. You're not going to look around anywhere else. You can create a meal matrix where you assign a certain type of meal to each day of the week to simplify the decision-making process. For clothes, you can do the same. You can choose a uniform that you can do different versions of, but it just makes getting dressed a lot easier. Rather than creating a new carpool schedule each week based on minute availability of everybody involved, you make one.

one that just repeats forever and you have people adjust within it if they have to. For laundry, you can pull clean clothes out of hampers rather than drawers so you don't have to put things away. The list of ways to simplify the regular things is pretty endless and personal. You eat on paper plates for a bit. You have your laundry picked up by a laundry service. It comes back clean and folded. You can get meal delivery kits.

You just eat a bunch of pasta and call it good. You stop switching purses every day and you just carry. either one, even though it's not the best match with your outfit or whatever. Like nothing is too silly or small. The list is endless. And in fact, I think the smaller, the choice, the more significant it can be. So simplify the regular things. Then step four is to triage the extra things, to organize, prioritize, and put them in their place. Now, what do I mean by extra things? Well, the fall is full of extra things. You know, it's the events, the holiday preparations, the school concerts, the time set aside to thrift for Christmas gifts because you really love doing that.

So what I want you to do is you're going to look at your calendar week by week. And you're going to notice events that aren't normal. Now, don't immediately think that you have to break down every single thing that doesn't normally happen. I really just want you paying attention to things that are either so extra or so large that they need to, more than that week's attention. Here's what I mean. So if I look at my calendar, I will see that on Saturday, September 27th, I'm going to be in Winston at the Festival of Books and Authors to be Jen Hatmaker's conversation partner about her new memoir awake. Okay. Now there is a lot of preparation involved with that. From start to finish, here's all the things that I need to do. I need to read her book.

I need to come up with some questions that I want to ask her. I need to figure out when I'm going to leave my house and what the weather's like so I can choose a good outfit. I need to look at the schedule for the rest of the festival so that I can see what I want to do, like just as a reader, not as an author. Okay, well, I've read her book. It's excellent. I wrote down questions as I read. So really, I just need to like gather them up in an orderly way, but that's mostly done. I haven't figured out my timing or the weather, but that's because both are not urgent needs and they can happen like that week. You know, I can figure that out that week or even the day before. I can also choose when I'm going to wear closer to the day when the weather forecast is more accurate. I've already gone through the schedule. I've

already pinpointed a couple of sessions that I want to go to. One of those fun fact is actually with an author who's a friend of mine I went to college with. I haven't seen him in years. His book is featured at the festival and he's doing a panel. So like when I was going through the thing and I saw his name, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm definitely going to his event. And then we already touch base about like maybe grabbing coffee when we're both not working or fanning over authors there that we love. So essentially, this extra event on my calendar on September 27th, it does not have a lot of extra tasks left to do. I just need to pick what I'm wearing and decide when I'm leaving. Guess what? Those are things that I can do the week that I'm planning the week. Like I can do

that during my regular weekly planning. I don't need extra time or effort. Now, that is a very detailed example of how you can think about these extra things. Some extra things do not require extra preparation. They don't require pre-planning or triaging multiple tasks across several weeks. Some of your extra things just make that particular week a little more squirrely, but you can adjust the week itself how you need to to accommodate that extra thing. Now, an example of something extra that does need more effort on the front end and could use a little bit more triage is this trip to New York for Thanksgiving. I've already started by getting us a place to stay and playing tickets, but outside of that, I haven't done anything. I'd like to spend some time researching what we might want to do while

we're there. I'm going to spend some time gathering the Internet's best parade tips. I'll need to get luggage for the whole family. We're already going to do that before I trip to London. Like, that was already in my mind. Like, oh, yeah, we got to get luggage because we don't, we don't have luggage. We, and we need it, though, for New York, right? The times we've traveled together as a family have been, like, shorter trips and have only required, like, a couple of carry-ons, maybe a backpack or two, or we just do, like, big duffles, big clunky duffles if we're driving in the van. These two trips this year are going to be different. And I want space to calmly decide what luggage we want rather than scrambling to order something that's not the best

fit the week that we leave and hope that it arrives in time. You can see the difference. Not every extra thing needs to be broken down with these tasks spread out across a few weeks, but some do. So when you come to an extra thing on your calendar as you're flipping through all these weeks, try and notice the difference. Ask yourself, well, every single, about this be fine if it's left until the week that this thing happens? If the answer is yes, you just leave it, right? You'll get to it that week eventually when you plan your week. No worries. Those tasks are already in the right place. You don't have to do anything with them. If you need more than that week, if you need more time than you have that week to accomplish whatever

the extra task requires, the extra event requires, then figure out what you need to do, what you need to decide beforehand. Figure that out now. Figure that, figure out how early you need to do some of those things in order to make the whole project easier. And then you could even think about, because you've got time, you can think about how you might get help with some of those things. When you're triaging, you can outsource things.

You can outsource something to a friend or a partner who, like, loves researching things way more than you do. You can ask a friend that thrifts a lot to keep an eye out for a cowboy hat for a Halloween costume or something so you don't have to like keep going to the thrift store in a busy time and you don't really enjoy doing that. If you're hosting a big Halloween party, you can look at the list of tasks you need to do and kind of where they land as you triage them across like several weeks. And you can realize that like, oh wait, I can ask this person to take care of like bring in all the drinks or I'm going to ask this creative. friend or my mother-in-law who's really good at making things to help me think through how to execute this Barbie costume or something. Like looking at tasks ahead of time, it actually helps you see where you can delegate and ask for help before things get too busy for you to actually enjoy them,

much less get them done. This is a true story about a recent task delegation of my own that I did. So I'm always a little nervous when I do something for the first time, especially something that is old hat for other people where my newness might get in their way, namely public transportation. So I've ridden the subway in New York and in London. After a while, I didn't feel as nervous and it was all fine. But it's been like a, it's been a good stretch since I've ridden the subway or dealt with public transportation. And I've been nervous about this, especially for these trips. So do you know what I did? I asked chat GBT. I like literally went on chat GBT and I was like, hi, I'm nervous about public transportation and riding the subway in New York because I haven't

done it in a long time. What should I know? And doggone it, if there were not like 10 excellent ideas of how to deal with the nerves on both emotional and practical levels. And then like tips on which kind of passes to get and stuff. So you can even delegate a thinking task to AI when appropriate. I know that AI is like complicated. I think that's a great use for it. When we're stressed out, ask a question to kind of organize some solutions. Now, triaging the extras, it's really just putting things in their place. That's all you're doing. And sometimes the place is with another person or with AI.

Or it says a task reminder on your Google calendar. It's a sticky note on your fridge that says this week, it's using your seasonal playbook that we sell to kind of organize those things on the pages that say week one, two, week three, week four. You can just go ahead and put things on their appropriate week. wherever you want to put them. It honestly doesn't matter how you do it. What matters is that you give yourself a little bit of time to notice those extras and

give them a place before the busyness takes over to the point where you can't really deal with them in a thoughtful way at all. And then guess what happens then? You don't enjoy yourself. You don't enjoy the season anymore. The stress drowns out the joy. We don't want that wherever we can help it. So step four is to triage the extras, put them in their place, especially if they need attention outside of the week that they are happening.

And finally, step five, prioritize feeling like a person. I just go back and listen to last week's podcast episode for this. If you missed it, it's episode 434, 10 ways I feel like myself. I talk about ways that you fill up and then ways that you wake up. and we all need both. So when you are in a busy season, it is easy to just feel like a machine that doesn't stop. You know, you get to the end of the day and you're just like flat out exhausted from the tasks and the change and the world happening around you that you could just feel so overwhelmed on many levels. It is imperative that you tend to yourself, that you make that

a priority. My friend Shannon Martin is an author, an overall fantastic person, and she's releasing a book in March. It's called Counterweight. weights, an essential practice for holding hope in a heavy world. The cover is stunning. So is her writing. I encourage everybody to get the book. But you don't have to wait for the book to embrace her practice of counterweights right now. Shannon's invitation to practice counterweights means to engage in the things that balance out what is hard. Make food. Sip tea under a cozy blanket. sit in your yard next to your flowers, watch birds, take a nap, laugh with friends. Most of the things that make you feel like yourself can operate like a counterweight as a way

to bring balance back to your inner life. The list of counterweights themselves is long and very personal, but the point here is I want you to prioritize them. Take time to do them, be vigilant about them. If you keep pushing through a busy season, especially in an overwhelming news cycle and world, without tending to your own joy and rest and play and relationships, you're not going to make it. You will crumble under the pressure. You'll grow hard in your soul. You'll start to ignore the things that matter to you and deference to the things that you can manage or control or that manage and control you. So step five. In having a joyful busy season is to prioritize feeling like a person. Do human things. Do purposefully

unproductive things. Be with people. Take the long way. Turn on music and dance or turn on music and be still. Pick up the paintbrush. Make a pie for no reason but for your own pleasure. Go get some mums and enjoy looking at them out your window. Water your houseplants as a liturgy, not a chore. be vigilant about honoring your own humanity and the humanity of others. That is integral in being grounded, integrated, and a whole person anyway. When we are people first people, busy seasons shift their shape. So be a people first person, not a schedule first person or a task first person or an optimization first person, be a people first person. And you count as one of those people.

So the five-step guide to a joyful busy season is to step one, slow down. Step two, create space for the most essential things now. Step three, simplify the regular things. Step four is triage the extra things. And step five, prioritize feeling like a person. I hope that those five steps help you find more joy and the busy seasons of your life. All right, today's a little something extra is a mini office hours. So I saw this question last week on one of my Instagram posts. And while I answered it there, I also want to answer it here. So I posted a reel about how to feel like yourself in reference to last week's podcast episode, which obviously I already referenced in this episode. And, And this was a comment from Nikki that I bet resonates with a lot of you listening.

This is what Nikki said. I don't know where to start to figure out what fills me up. I know I spend too much time on my phone or watching TV and not enough time sitting with myself or my feelings, but I don't know where to start any suggestions. Okay. Now, this is real. Many of us get into ruts of behavior like phone scrolling or we're in seasons of life where we are all about caring for other people like motherhood.

and then consequently we start to lose the thread on ourselves and on what fills us up. We haven't consistently filled up in a valuable way in such a long time that we don't even know what we should do now, which feels like a big problem, right? And what do we know about big problems? They require big solutions. If you feel this way, if you feel the same way as Nikki, and I know many of you do, you don't know where to start because there are so many things that could fill you up. So how on earth can you try them all or know what works or pick the right thing or find a way to incorporate it into your life every day?

You might also do what Nikki did, which is make it kind of heavy out of the gate by saying something like, I know I don't spend enough time sitting with myself or my feelings. Listen, I don't fill up when I sit with myself or my feelings. That is called therapy. And that drains me. Holy moly. It's healing, but it's not necessarily filling, not immediately. So there's a good chance that your lack of connection to what fills you up.

It might be that you've got this layer of heaviness draped over it because you think the problem is that it's something about like your own self-awareness or maybe how often you're contemplative or like if you do something that's leading to some kind of self-improvement or on an emotional level. And listen, if you aren't filling up and you start telling yourself that you really should fill up by sitting with your own emotions, girl, you are backing yourself way up. Nannicki's question ended with, I don't know where to start any suggestions. Yes, start with today. Start noticing what fills you up even a little bit today, like on the tiniest level.

Like yesterday, I was bustling about in the kitchen. I was making granola, probably dinner also. I was just like doing the thing in the kitchen. And then I heard my daughter Annie laugh. Girl loves to laugh. I turned the corner. I saw her sitting on the couch with the smoothie that I just made her and her roll doll book and her stuffies and her cozy blanket. it was after school. She was just as content as she could be laughing at this book. And like, I almost cried. It was like it was like the hose turned on and filled out my dry plant so fast, seeing her there happy. Her comfort and her contentment and joy, it's part of the reason why I bustle about in the kitchen and make smoothies and tidy the living room and organize our days so that the afternoons are not always chaotic so she can chill and read under a blanket. I do all of that to

create space for my family and myself to enjoy their life when they are home. Not everywhere they go is a safe place, but home sure is going to be. So I saw the purpose of my homekeeping in that little moment of Annie sitting on the couch and laughing. In that little moment filled me up in huge ways. So this is, it's a bit of a treasure hunt, which is kind of fun. It's like this slow moving journey of discovery and what fills you up. But you don't have to make it big or heavy or laid with like emotional development. Just start today. Notice what makes you smile and laugh and relax.

I feel good. Maybe you can write them down. Maybe not. Maybe you'll spot patterns. Maybe not. Maybe you'll find the most life-giving, lifelong hobby. Maybe not.

But we're not trying to micromanage our joy. Just be where you are today. Start small by just noticing. And if you'd like to try and connect some dots, great, but the dots themselves matter just as much, if not more, than trying to connect them. I think connecting them is a bonus, but it's not necessary. Just spot the dots, spot the moments, spot where you fill up and enjoy them. All right, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it's Melanie Elleison. Melanie writes, something that really matters to me is getting a walk-in

every day. I also really like to have my nails painted. The problem is I always end up up messing up my nails because I'm in such a hurry to do the next thing that I don't let them dry. Yesterday, I realized that if I got myself completely ready for my walk, including having my sneakers laced up, that I could take a few minutes, paint my nails before heading out the door. My walk is about 40 minutes, which is a perfect amount of time to have my nails completely dry by that time I get back. And my nails have never looked better. No touchups required this time.

Oh, my goodness. How great is this? Melanie, you have hacked habit stacking. So this is great. tiny things like this, they make all the difference, y'all. Maybe there are a couple of things that you like to do every day or on a fairly regular basis, but you're bumping against some kind of obstacle with them. So try and make those activities more aligned to benefit even more from both. Like, what a great simple example this is of like basically going in the right order. So thanks for sharing, Melanie,

and congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. All right, let's move into a mini pep talk on when it feels like everything matters. Now this feels like a good little topic for an episode on a busy season, doesn't it? I just want to remind you that the expectation that everything should matter, it is rooted in a performative, productivity-based patriarchy

that does not leave space for people to make small, contented decisions, to do anything in a mediocre or unoptimized way, or to honor the fact that women specifically are holding farm invisible work than their male counterparts are. The pressure that you feel in your chest and in your head as you try and hold all the plates, juggle all the balls, all the needs that are put upon you by people who do not even hold the same values as you sometimes. You don't have to live as a bigger,

better, faster person. You do not have to be impressive in your ability to manage a home and children and a job and date nights and your body and your relationships and your community and your yard and your budget and all the things with this level of excellence that's honestly rather homogenous and the same as everyone else's values you have your own values you have your own season of life your own pace your own energy your own family purpose your own faith your own neighborhood, your own passions. And all of those things do not need to be crammed inside the productivity-based patriarchal system where women are simply expected to get everything done now, get it done well, and also you need to look great while doing it. Like that system is broken.

It is unkind. It's severely limited in its scope and perspective. And it is not for you. So when you feel like everything matters and you can't possibly let anything go, I'm not sure that's you talking. That's expectations talking. That's culture talking. That's someone from a different generation who had different resources and values and expectations talking. You are allowed to make different and even difficult choices about what your life will be about. Yes, you want to be the person who's juggling everything. and doing it well, but that is just not real. That quest is not accomplished by anyone. The people who

look like they're able to do it all, either have a ton of resources or help to do it and to do the things they don't like, or the people that you see have let go of things that you don't see. You do not have to make everything matter. With the highest energy across every category, you simply cannot. It's impossible. So don't see that as a failure, but as freedom. You don't have to make everything matter equally. What a gift that is. So enjoy choosing what does matter to you, live like it matters to you, and then be lazy about the rest of it in whatever season that you're in. And that's a mini pep talk on feeling like everything matters. If this episode was helpful to you, or if you've been looking for a way to support this work, it would mean the

the world if you would share this episode with a friend or leave a kind review on Apple podcasts. Both of those things seem small and in some ways they are, but it's those small things that add up to get the show in front of more people and the world needs more lazy geniuses. So thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting this work. This podcast is part of the Odyssey family and the Office Ladies Network. This episode is hosted by me, Kendra Adachi, and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fisher, and Angela Kenzie. Special thanks to Leah Jarvis for weekly production. If you'd like a podcast recap every other week, be sure to sign up for latest lazy listens. It goes out every other Friday. You can head to the lazy genius

collective.com slash listens to get it. Thanks y'all 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.