Kendra Adachi

I loved this book & had a chance to meet the author today! It focuses on time management, but from a woman’s POV. She encouraged integration and leaning into each unique seasons instead of constantly striving to do everything all at once and be great all the time. I love that she includes details about monthly cycles and seasons to incorporate into your planning. There were so many helpful tips and I know I’ll refer back to it frequently. The way traditional time management books work is show more creating unaltering habits that will provide stability and consistency. In The PLAN, the author acknowledges that system rarely works for women. If you are a mother, you are often trapped by the whims or circumstances around your kids' schedules or health. Without kids, you are still, like almost every women, reliant on your own body's cycle. You can either embrace that or try to fight an uphill battle against it. Adachi offers actual systems for time management that work for women. show less

This book, oh my lord. It feels weird to gush about a time-management book, but I have never felt so seen and affirmed by *anything*. The PLAN is written specifically with lady-people in mind, for the way or brains and bodies and minds work and the ways we’ve been socialized, with *specific* attention on the ways that most of the advice we get about time management, goal-setting, and productivity are just. Not. Built. for our lives and the spaces we inhabit. The suggestions will feel show more familiar to readers of Adachi’s fantastic first book, The Lazy Genius Way (also brilliant), or listeners of her podcast (also fab) but they are specifically, deeply rooted in a kindness-to-self perspective that is just so necessary, especially those of us late-wave GenX-ers who quickly figured out that feminism had, by the nineties, gotten us to the point not of having it all, but of having to DO it all and also never complain, but then didn’t know where to go from there. And she folds those of us with neurodivergence right in to what she has to say about how to shift your thinking away from productivity culture and into being productive in a way that is personally meaningful and doesn’t wear you down right out of the gate, by focusing on what actually matters to you in a given situation or season of life, and then building from there. Adachi does this with so much grace and humor and kindness, and without making promises about quick fixes. The PLAN is a process, a way to settle into the fact that life is a perpetual work in progress, a way to find some stillness in the chaotic ocean of daily life, and a way to learn to trust yourself and your body even if you’ve always been taught that you can’t or shouldn’t. I feel like a book about getting organized maybe shouldn’t move you to tears on a commuter train, but this one certainly did me. Adachi has made I think a conscious effort to fold in women in a wide range of life stages and situations - so there’s advice that might be most helpful to moms, but also advice that’s helpful to ladies with no kids but long commutes or stressful jobs, and ones with caregiving responsibilities, and many of the other daily-life challenges that we all face. This book isn’t promising you that you’ll set the world on fire, or retire at 40 with a frillion dollars in the bank, or that your days will be perfect, glassy surfaces of uninterrupted productivity where you silence notifications for hours at a time or rigidly block out “deep work” or create complicated workflows or to-do lists that magically tick along towards finished. She’s offering the world we already live in and a way to learn to adjust to the fact that it isn’t static from day to day or week to week, we can’t control everything or sometimes anything, and curveballs don’t just come from the mound but from all the bases and sometimes the outfield or the grandstand or the bleachers or straight out of the heavens. This is so practical, so necessary, and so validating. I can’t say enough nice things. If you are struggling with your self as you are, with your own imperfections, with feeling like everything is out of control, with feeling like your brain went on a long walk in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in the pandemic and never came home, I truly think this book will help you, even if your only takeaway is “Hey ma’am, I see you over there, and you are not alone.” show less

My gosh, Kendra Adachi just gets me. You know how in some self-help/advice books, you can’t relate to any of the scenarios provided or you roll your eyes at how impractical the suggestions are for your life? Not only does Kendra constantly give “maybe you” scenarios that are *exactly* my life, but she also encourages readers and listeners to personalize any of her advice to fit their own preferences, seasons, and needs. The Lazy Genius methods are such that I think I can actually show more sustain them in my home, specifically in the kitchen. I’m excited about planning, organizing, and curating a space I enjoy being in that meets my family’s needs. show less

The "lazy genius is one who is a genius about only what matters (to you) and lazy about the things that don't." The trick is figuring out what matters to you at different points in your life and that's what Kendra Adachi helps with.

This is not a recipe book or really a how-to-cookbook, but the ground she does cover is useful and from a unique perspective. She doesn't teach you how to cook, but how to make your kitchen work for you.

Kendra helps you name what you personally prioritize in show more cooking, meals, and process and apply what you need to do to get the outcome you want.

Her principles are applied to the kitchen, but they work outside of it, too. Along the way, she presents some practical examples and applications and easy-to-absorb bonus cooking tips like:

- the liquid formula (no liquid = saute; a little liquid = stew; a lot of liquid = soup)
- cooking techniques that work well or don't for chicken/beef/fish

If you're sometimes overwhelmed by what other people do in the kitchen or what you feel like you should be doing, but can't quite manage to pull off, this book is full of "big sister energy" to help you sort it all out. Recommended. show less