In honour of International Women’s Day, a kinder take on a rigid concept, by Kendra Adachi.

In hosting The Lazy Genius Podcast, Kendra Adachi serves up practical advice to the modern listener, on how to be ‘a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.’ Where modern life is overextended and often overwhelming, Adachi provides useful tips on how to develop systems for what really matters to you, and how to let go of what really doesn’t.

A useful example of how Adachi strikes this more flexible productivity balance comes in Episode 295, ‘How to Lazy Genius Your Habits’. Released in January to coincide with the new year, Adachi takes a softer approach to habit formation—a process which most people want to master, but which comes with negative associations of pressure, anxiety and self-reproach. The idea of the habit, it seems, has a hardness to it.

Adachi begins the episode by offering a ‘fresher perspective on what a habit actually is’, using the dictionary definition of a habit, as ‘a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.’ Adachi suggests this wording is more comforting than we might expect.

The word ‘settled’, Adachi offers, is ‘calm and soft and grounded’, while the words ‘regular, tendency, and practice… are not hard and fast, all or nothing words.’ Each of them means ‘often but not always,’ Adachi affirms, which means that ‘kindness and softness and smallness and ease are built into the definition of a habit, and I think that’s really lovely.’

In the definition, then, is the pliability and the permission that just might help the habit stick—in a much kinder and more forgiving process.