Hello, 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

320, How to Feel Good About Free Time. Let's begin with a working definition of free time. Free time is

time that is free of responsibilities, obligations, and being beholden to someone else's needs,

wants or whims. If that's the case, free time sounds absolutely lovely. I love time where I

don't have to worry about other people's needs, wants and whims. But free time for women, especially,

comes with a slew of problems, namely guilt and having it, and fear of wasting it. So today we're

going to talk about how to reframe free time and feel good about it. This podcast has a high

percentage of female listeners and while this topic is not exclusive to women, I would bet a lot of

money that women struggle with this more than men do. I don't have data to back up like the

emotional struggles of free time and downtime, but I have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence to support

that in general, women, more than men struggle to take, accept and enjoy any time that is disconnected

from all responsibilities and expectations. It's really hard for women to naturally do this. And

if you do naturally do this, you were likely raised by adults who were countercultural in their

gender roles and or you have done a lot of work in this area over many years in your own life.

So in many ways, this idea of feeling bad about our free time, it is in our marrow, it's in our

cultural conditioning. So you're not alone in your struggles. A lot of us feel this way.

Now, as I thought through this episode, I came at it from a dozen different angles. Like, I

cannot remember the last time I spent this much time trying to break an episode because there are

so many ways we can approach this topic and I just couldn't nail it. It was actually a bit of a struggle.

And then I thought, wait, I already have a system for this. We just need to follow the five steps

to lazy genius free time. So that's what we're going to do. The five lazy genius steps are prioritize,

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