Hey there, you are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I am Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 322. What to do with random pockets of time? Let's start off with appropriate credit and the origin story for this episode.

My friend Katie, you know her as What Kate Finds on Instagram. She's amazing. She is the inspiration for this episode.

A few months back, because of an injury, she entered the season of appointments and physical therapy and whatnot where she had her days bisected in such a way that left her with what she calls stupid pockets of time.

And then one of her buddies, who I also know from Instagram, currently Carrington, Carrington, renamed Stupid Pockets of Time with the beautiful acronym, Spot. Where do I have spots? Okay.

So Katie has a highlight on her Instagram account that's titled Spot, where she describes her process and how this whole thing came to be.

But she said something in one of those story panels that feels very resonant for a lot of us. She said, when this happens multiple times a week, this being having stupid pockets of time that feel wasted.

I feel very frustrated, unproductive, and annoyed at myself. I think we can all identify with that feeling. Our time feels out of whack somehow. And there are these random pockets that don't feel good for much of anything.

And because we don't approach them intentionally, they feel wasted and then we feel bad about it. So Katie asked herself, how can I reframe this and use these stupid pockets of time to my advantage?

And that's what I want us to do today. I'm going to proceed, however, with calling them random pockets of time for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not going to take Katie's phrase or acronym.

And if I use it in the title or I keep saying it, it will become mine. It's like the daily delete the practice of deleting your photos from your day. So your photo app doesn't become unwieldy. That is not mine.

The daily delete is not mine. It is Miss Freddy's. But because I said the name of it on an episode with her, people think it's mine. It's not. So the daily delete is Miss Freddy's and spots or stupid pockets of time is Katie's.

So we will say random pockets of time with no acronym as we proceed. Also the more I thought about it though, I think that a stupid pocket of time and a random pocket of time are actually a little bit different.

A stupid pocket of time is always random. But not every random pocket of time is a stupid one. Allow me to explain the difference because I think sometimes the way we think about these things, it really does matter.

A stupid pocket of time can feel annoying. Stupid pockets of time have an air of inefficiency to them. Like I have this appointment at one and this other appointment at 330, even though I wanted this second appointment to be at 230 and I couldn't.

And now I have this like inefficient 45 minutes between appointments, you know, this feels stupid. But some pockets of time feel emotionally neutral, even good. They're not annoying at all. They're just random.

A random pocket of time for me might be the 45 minutes between finishing up lunch and then picking up my kids at 2 o'clock. I'm not annoyed by that time at all. It's great. But it is random.

And it could be a little trickier knowing how to spend it. Right. So I'm going to use the phrase random pocket of time, even though it does not provide a good acronym like spots does, we will leave that for what Kate finds.

But also I think this phrasing might be more inclusive to a lot more of our experiences and can still offer a name that covers a wide range of frustration levels random, stupid, what have you.

So let's talk about how to approach that time. Now here is something funny as we begin when I was working on this episode. I've been working on it for a while today. I tried to come up with a system, a path, this list of questions to help you figure out what to do with your random pocket of time.

But I started to realize that in some cases, thinking through the questions, it would take up all the time. And really the reason that I had the questions to begin with was to help you feel confident to choose what you want to choose.

But you know what? I want you to feel that confidence without needing a handful of guiding questions to get you there. I'm just telling you right now, you can just pick something.

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