Create Space for Your Genius

Playful Procrastination

Hello gorgeous folks,

This is a great week to reevaluate our relationship with our time and schedule. Too often we fill up every moment with a plan, a meeting, an agenda item, the get-it-done-today task.

This week Venus enters Leo on July 11, 2024.

Venus rules relationships, partnerships, beauty, art, and money. Leo helps us access our passions and encourages us to shine like the Sun. 

We are also moving towards a Mars-Uranus conjunction on July 15, 2024. Mars and Uranus coming together means we can expect the unexpected. Either in world events, our personal lives, or both.

What does all of this have to do with planning and productivity?

By trying to “conquer” our productivity, we end up stifling it. This week’s energies can shake us up and out of those tendencies.

Some of the world’s greatest thinkers, entrepreneurs, and inventors gave themselves time just to be, what I call “playful procrastination.” Creativity and productivity require “wasted” time. 

Some great examples of this principle are detailed in the book “Idea Flow” by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn, of Stanford's renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (a.k.a the “d.school’). 

They suggest every week, investing time in what they refer to as “‘gathering inputs” or stimulation from non-work environments to spark ideas. Their book is aimed at managers and corporate executives, so they recommend a busy manager take an hour-long walk around the neighborhood. VPs, a two-hour walk, and CEOs take four or five hours to themselves.

The book shares that Jeff Bezos during the early days of Amazon left two days each week unscheduled allowing him the time to go “trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web.” Love him or hate him, Bezos gave his genius time to blossom.

We can use this week’s astrological energy to set up regular "wasting” time periods. As solopreneurs, the CEOs of our businesses, let’s give ourselves at least four hours a week of unscheduled time for our genius to surprise us, inspire us, and reconnect us to our passions driving our work.

For my parents out there, yes, I mean you too. This can be done during a playdate with other parents and children. While the kids are playing or out with another caregiver, do something not directly work-related. Let laundry wait. 

The trick with playful procrastination is not to fill that time with more “chores.” Doodle on actual paper, dance, listen to the podcast, or research that work-adjacent topic that has been needling you at the back of your brain.

Let me know how it goes.

Easefully yours,

Darice