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 273, How to Cross the Summer Finish Line.

At first I had titled it How to Cross the Summer Finish Line Strong because that's how we usually think about crossing finish lines.

Then I found myself echoing words I've heard from voices like Emily P. Freeman and Kate Boller about how we can just be regular. Right? We can just finish. We don't have to finish strong, we just finish.

So today that's what we're talking about, How to Cross the Summer Finish Line in a very summer little short episode.

The challenge is I think with crossing the summer finish line, especially if you have kids or are in education, is at the end of summer and the beginning of fall bleed together.

There's not a clean mark between the end of this and the start of that, which means it feels like we're neither beginning nor ending anything.

We are not crossing finish lines or hearing starting guns at all. We're just running around like headless chickens. So I think that's an important energy to name.

It's hard to feel like you're ending something when something else begins before the ending is complete.

And I think that's true of a lot of seasons of life, right?

Very few things have clean starts and stops without overlap. So maybe, maybe we need a different measurement.

Yes, we for sure want to cross the summer finish line, but I think we need to be gentler about how we label our seasons and how finite and linear we make them.

If very few things have standard stops and starts, why do we work so hard to force our seasons into that box? We waste a lot of effort trying to make things binary like a light switch, right?

Summer is on or it's off. School is on or it's off. Anything is on or it's off.

We try to create systems to support that structure, that on off structure, when that structure isn't even a thing.

If you're a certain kind of person, listening to me talking right now, you're going to want to throw your phone across the room as I encourage you to relax and not make life so structured, but I'm still going to do it.

You don't have to make everything so structured and linear. Sometimes it's not even possible. And one of those times is in this muddy place of seasonal transitions.

So if the transition is murky and there really isn't a summer finish line in the way we wish there was, what can we do to finish well or finish at all?

My guess is that one of the biggest reasons you're feeling like you have to finish well or that you feel the finish threatened is because you have things you haven't done during the summer that you wanted to.

And you're anticipating all the things you need to do to get ready for the next season. Basically there are just too many things to do. That's usually where stress comes from. There's too many things to do.

So let's address that problem. This is a super simple idea here. I've already shared before my to do list strategy when I'm feeling crazy in my brain.

I do a brain dump of literally all the things in my head. And then I categorize those things into four categories. Now soon later and never mind.

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