The Lazy Genius Podcast - #48: The Lazy Genius and Time Management

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

We don't have to mechanize our schedules to stay on top of our days. Learn three pillars of Lazy Genius time management as well as my favorite time-saving Lazy Genius Tip of the Week that's basic but so helpful in the rhythm of life. Stuff Mentioned In This Episode: The Magical Key to Doing It All The Lazy Genius Does Laundry Join me on Instagram every Thursday at 12:15pm EST to talk about that week's 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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If we break it down, this is one of the most basic and most important topics. How you spend your time and manage all the pieces is essentially living life. So today we're talking about how to love life, I guess. It got real deep there. But in this episode, we're going to talk about the three pillars of lazy genius time management. So let's just jump in. Pillar one.

Your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does. your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does. It's the most complicated but practical concept. How you spend your time is directly related to what you believe about yourself, other people, your home, your work, and the world around you. It has some broad strokes. So let's look at some examples. What you believe about your city, about how it takes care of marginalized people,

how it allocates funds, combine that with what you believe about your voice in your city. your voice makes a difference your vote makes a difference your advocacy in a city council meeting makes a difference those beliefs combined together will likely mean you'll spend a good amount of time making your city better because you believe it needs it and you believe that you can right so you believe deeply in justice you have hope for change and you believe in your ability to help usher in that change so your time will be affected by that now so that's like a really practical example but what you believe isn't just about a worldview. The tiny things you believe about yourself

will also affect how you spend your time, far more probably than the big sweeping ones. If you believe that your dream of being a writer is valid, you'll spend time on it. But if you want to be a writer but believe that your words don't matter and they've already been said, that dream will die where it's standing and you won't spend time writing.

You might even say that you just can't find time to write, but if you truly believe that your message was important, you would find a way. We all believe these little things. We do. So you are not alone. There's another subtle one that many of us believe. And that is that spending time on Instagram will make us feel better. I love Instagram.

Again, major disclaimer. I'm not saying put away Instagram. I adore it. I look at it multiple times a day. But we have a slight addiction to checking our phones all the time, right? but outside of the addiction part, outside of like the just automatically reaching for the phone, why do we fill the time between tasks and sometimes during the task with our phones? Could it be that we believe that it'll make us feel better, that it'll make us feel more connected?

Maybe we thought that when we first got Instagram. I don't really remember what I thought the first time I got Facebook or Instagram, but the point is we assign value to some things that don't actually do what we believe they should do. I used to think that Instagram made me feel better, but it never did. There was always an account I followed that made me feel badly about myself and my life. People traveling, dressing their kids and beautiful organic clothing, eating whole roasted fish around a beautiful table and all these like children who will eat things that are more than chicken nuggets. I would check over and over again, like kind of like I was looking for a fix,

wanting so desperately to connect and feel part of something. Because I believe that it could. I believe Instagram could do that for me, but I was operating with the wrong belief. In that context, Instagram definitely couldn't make me feel better. I was putting too much pressure on it for one. And two, I was looking to Instagram for validation rather than looking at my own life. Or I wanted to, like, distract myself from what felt boring and groundhog dayish, you know, by looking at other people and how they were living and like maybe try to do some of the same things that they were doing.

So my beliefs about my own life that is boring and not as awesome as everyone else's and my beliefs about what Instagram could do for me, that it can make me feel better, that led me down a path of being addicted to a cycle of unmet needs and wasted time. I spent so much time refreshing that app, hoping to see my life reflected in the pictures of mothers that I thought were doing a good job. and when I didn't see myself, I felt like crap, like I wasn't enough. Because I believed I wasn't enough. Like, that's what it was, that I wasn't doing a good job as a mother.

So it's all very nuanced, but it's so very connected. Like these tiny things that we believe about what we do and who we are, as they connect with each other, they affect how we spend our time in big ways and small ways. We make time for what we believe to be important. Yes, we also make time for what's urgent, but we'll get to that in a second. In general, our beliefs affect how we spend our time more than our schedules do, from the big picture to the tiny sole picture that no one else knows about. So if you feel like your schedule is just too full, consider what you believe to be true

about where you're spending your time. Pillar 2. You can do it all if you decide what all means. I wrote a blog post about this that I'll link to a the show notes, the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash time. That's the show notes for today. We know we can't have it all, but if you decide what's most important to you and let the rest go, you can like kind of do it all and have it all because you've defined what it means, like within reason. The reason that this, this mental shift is so great is because it keeps us from feeling

like we're lagging behind, like we're missing something. vital that everyone else has. All of these other people, right? They seem like they have everything together and can work out and cook dinner and have a side hustle and volunteer at school and sing at church and have a pretty Instagram and read

75 books a year and can make their own jam and like all the things. No one can do all of that. Or if they do, they also have a house cleaner and they have a super supportive spouse or a mother-in-law who babysits a lot. They have a lot of disposable income. They have probably less

than one child. Like those things are true. But when we choose what matters, when we choose our all, when we choose what all looks like, we really do live differently. We act differently. We're not scrambling to fit in another obligation or moaning about our lack of whatever it is, fill in the blank. Our attitude is one of plenty and contentment, which is really transformative when you're intentional about it on a regular basis. So if you want to try this out and live this second pillar of time management, let's do this. Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm all the things.

All the things you do, all the things you want to do, all the things other people do, write out everything. Then go through and cross out stuff you know you don't care about. Then highlight stuff that's obviously in your wheelhouse that you super care about. And then assess. Okay. are your highlighted things enough? Like, is that good?

Do you feel good about that? Or when you read them all out loud, are you overwhelmed because you cannot possibly do them all? Did you highlight too much? So first, you're definitely going to want to look at the stuff that you did not highlight and did not cross out and consider them crossed out because you can't add more. Okay? Like, if you're already overwhelmed by your highlighted stuff, you cannot highlight more. Second, look at what's highlighted and see what's important to you as opposed to what you think is supposed to. be important to you, right?

Seeing it all laid out really, really helps. And if you only have a few highlighted things, then you can look at the things that aren't highlighted and decide what you're going to add into your life to be your all, to be what matters, to be how you spend your time. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4.

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a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. And before you get wigged out because of the things on your list that you just have to do because of your job or your family or whatever, it's all about how you frame it.

For example, you and your people need to eat. That's a given. But you don't have to be. Betty Crocker to do it. So as you write things down, you'll see like broad necessary categories, like feed everybody or take care of the house or take care of myself. Take those broad categories and consider all the possible forms they can take. Feeding everybody might need homemade dinner. It might mean a lot of takeout, meal delivery, sharing cooking with your family, utilizing freezer meals a lot, doing weekend meal prep.

cooking the same 10 recipes that you rotate until the space of your life changes. There are so many ways to approach feeding everybody. So don't assume one way in your mind. And then don't paint yourself into a corner of like how things are supposed to be. Okay. Remember that what matters now, what it means to quote, do it all will change as your life changes. This list will not be tattooed on your body. So be flexible and gracious with yourself and see where that brainstorming.

takes you so you can do that for those big those big categories like feeding and the house and all that there are lots of parts to it so just take your time be kind to yourself okay so pillar one your beliefs affect your time more than your schedule does pillar two you can do it all if you decide what all means and our final pillar my favorite pillar pillar pillar pillar three do what's necessary before it becomes urgent. There are three time buckets we all live with. The necessary, the urgent, and the desirable things we want to do. Sometimes things overlap in a couple of categories, but we'll get to that. First, let's look at the difference between necessary and urgent. A necessary task is laundry. Everybody needs clean clothes. An urgent task is having to do laundry right now because your son doesn't have any clean underwear.

So yes, there are some urgent tasks like wiping up spilled milk that are just they are what they are, right? But for the most part, the trick is doing your necessary tasks before they become urgent. The urgent is what makes us crazy. Putting out fires is what makes us feel like we don't have time for anything. That's because we haven't planned for those things. Our adrenaline is super high. Our frustration is even higher than that. And I don't know about you, but a lot of urgent tasks are met.

with very little appreciation when they're taken care of. This is not true exclusively from others, but that's one of the most thankless pieces of being a mom, I think. So you're constantly putting out fires in the background while everyone else just kind of goes about their businesses and they have no idea what you're doing and all that you're doing for them, right? So if you lose your handle on all of those like seemingly automatic things that no one else notices,

then everybody loses their business and freaks out and blames you. And you're just like, I'm just trying to do all the things. Can you let me pee about myself? Like it's really easy for everything to feel super, super urgent. So again, the key is to tend to necessary tasks before they become urgent. And when you do that, when you manage your time to tend to necessary tasks, you don't use as much energy as you would if they're urgent because you're, you're not like frantic, right?

Which bonus, doing it that way often leaves you with more time to do the things you desire. If you can find a rhythm for what's necessary, you'll be less of a slave to the urgent and will be better acquainted with the desirable. Let's use Laundry Day as an example. I have an episode that explains all the details of Laundry Day, if you want to learn about it, that I'll link to in the show notes. But the idea is you do laundry on the same day every week, and you don't do laundry any of the other six days. And you don't really do anything else on laundry days.

It's just laundry day. So I share all the reasons, plus the best order to wash your loads, which is super important in that episode. So you can check that out. But the point here is that by tending to laundry when it's necessary, you keep it from being urgent, which means you won't have to sacrifice an entire Saturday, watching 17 loads of clothes when you'd rather be reading or cooking a fun dinner. going for a walk with a friend or taking your kid to the library, right? Another example. Do your, the dreaded afternoon? Do your kids come home from school with 17,000 pieces of paper? You have to sort and sign and like shamefully throw away when they're not looking. That paper, plus homework, plus book bags, plus making dinner, plus the fact that everyone turns into a monster at 4.27 p.m.

makes weekday afternoons feel excessively urgent. But there are some necessary tasks in there that you can tend to before your kids get out of school to make that time feel less chaotic. Chop stuff for dinner during breakfast or lunch or the weekend before. Mix together the marinade before dinner so you can just dump it in a pan without thinking and having to pull a bunch of bottles out. Have a cute box with a lid on it for the love on a shelf somewhere where you can put all the papers just to get them off the floor and the counter and out of your eyeballs and you

can deal with them later like while the kids are showering after dinner when it's calmer when you can drink a cup of tea and light a candle and play grown-up music and feel like a person even with the pile of paper the urgency of the afternoon it isn't always so much about the tasks as it is about having too many necessary tasks all in one place and feeling like they need to be done right then you can remove the urgency by doing what's necessary before it becomes urgent. And again, the more we tend to the necessary with a regular rhythm, the more time we'll have to do it all, to do the things that are desirable for a full life. So those are the three pillars. On Thursday, I will be on Instagram around 1215 Eastern to share a few practical time management tips. So you can

follow me on Instagram at the lazy genius to check those out in a few days. It's the 25th of January that I'll be on there. We don't have to mechanize time management. Lists are great. Planners are lovely. Systems are literally my best friend. I don't know how I would live without them. That's just how my brain works and I love life more because of my systems. But if we rely on those too heavily without knowing our thinking behind them, without recognizing the pillars that hold up our time, we'll lose our way fast and then everything will feel urgent. So I hope that this way of seeing things, like it just helps you see your time and manage it in a way that makes you feel like a person who isn't going crazy. So let's do a quick lazy genius tip of the week. I want to make sure you do

family pick up time if you have a family. setting a timer for anywhere between like two and five minutes and just saying family pickup time it's going to change your life it's going to change your life at first they're going to moan like when you first start doing it they're like you know the whining that always happens but once they know that the time is finite and really quick and that the house it does feel better when things are back in their place your people will be more on board we do about a two-minute pickup before showers at night and then sometimes before the kids are allowed to have screen time on the weekends, it makes such a difference for me because I'm not spending so much time tidying, right?

We crowdsource it and we get it done in less than five minutes. So definitely do that, even if it's just you and a roommate or a teenage kid, it doesn't have to be little kids. It's just a great thing to do together. And if it's just you, still set a timer. Be like, all right, here we go. Five minutes. And it's going to make such a difference in your day.

Okay, that's it for today, you guys. Thanks so much for listening. I hope to see you Thursday, January 25th, on Instagram for our live conversation on time management tips. And be sure to check out the show notes at the lazy geniuscollective.com slash lazy slash time. I appreciate you guys so very much for being here. Remember to be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a bee or bee?

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