Kate Taliaferro
St. Thomas More Writing Group (co-leader)
When schedules begin to spiral out of control and the laundry is overflowing, it can be difficult to identify what really needs to be done. If everything is important, it is challenging to choose which things to do and which ones to let go. While Kendra Adachi’s The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius can’t tell readers what matters most on their calendar, it can provide a framework to answer that question and then make meaningful decisions about day-to-day life. Adachi wants to help her readers become lazy geniuses when it comes to time management—to “be geniuses about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t.”
The PLAN is not another planner. Nor is it full of schedule hacks and tips for optimizing every second of the day. Instead, Adachi has set out to write a time management book, specifically for women (however, the principles can be utilized by anyone), that offers simple methods to “live an integrated life that starts exactly where you are.” For Adachi, an integrated life is one that highlights the good and beautiful of the present moment. It honors and provides space for the current season of life to be settled into rather than pushed through. Finally, an integrated life celebrates the person you are today instead of longing for a possible future self.
PLAN is an acronym for prepare, live, adjust, notice. Though the acronym holds true, Adachi actually uses a pyramid image to describe how the steps work together. The base of the pyramid is to name what matters most, as everything in her lazy genius philosophy rests upon this point. From that perspective, the steps of prepare, adjust, and notice work together as the three sides of the pyramid. Too much of one and the pyramid will be lopsided. The pinnacle of the pyramid is to live.
Starting with the base of the pyramid, Adachi encourages the reader to take time asking questions about the current season they are experiencing in order to name what matters most—season of the year, of life, of toddlerhood, of preparing for a wedding, etc. Adachi defines a “season” as the current present moment and next period of time based on the reader’s life circumstances. Identifying and naming the current season provides a helpful framework to work within that is defined, specific, and able to be broken into smaller pieces. It is also an opportunity to consider where enjoyment could be found in this season and where the good is within it, even if it is a season of hardship or sorrow.
After naming what matters most for that season, the three sides of prepare, adjust, and notice are brought to the table. These three sides of Adachi’s PLAN pyramid are highly intertwined and can be used daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonally. There is no correct order, as each has its own value and purpose.
Adachi advises readers to think about the upcoming season and look for opportunities to prepare today so that tomorrow, or the next event on the schedule, is a little easier. Preparing well gives greater flexibility to adjust when things don’t go according to plan. Adachi is very practical in her methods and examples: Life doesn’t often go according to plan. By adjusting expectations for the season, as well as being willing to adjust in the moment when things go awry, life becomes less frantic. Adachi encourages frequent noticing during the season. This could mean noticing where adjustments are needed or what kind of preparation done today will lighten a future load. It could also mean noticing the feelings and emotions brought up by a certain event or individual.
The pinnacle of the PLAN pyramid is to live. By this, Adachi means to live an integrated life where all the parts of a person are present and valued. Simply put, “When we are integrated, we compassionately love our true selves and seek to live smack-dab in the center of who we know ourselves to be.”
As I read this book, I felt that the principles and methods were ones I wanted to incorporate into my daily and weekly routines. However, there are lots of ideas, options, lists, and tools offered in the book. Midway through I began to feel overwhelmed by the options available to me: daily check-ins, weekly planning updates, monthly overviews, seasonal checklists. They are each individually strong options, but in my opinion, it could be a challenge to implement everything all at once.
Thankfully, Adachi does not recommend this course of action. One of the guiding principles of the lazy genius model is to start small. She wisely includes a concluding chapter reminding the reader that starting small, with today, is the best place to begin.
Male readers may struggle with the beginning chapters of the book, where Adachi asserts that the time management techniques typically advocated for in most self-help books come from and assume a male perspective and lifestyle. While many of these books are read by women, they are written by men. In Adachi’s opinion, the current productivity-focused culture is not a sustainable model to live one’s life by, especially if that person is a woman with a wide range of hormones throughout the month, invisible mental loads in the home and at work, cultural expectations of body type, and the expectation to achieve perfection in all areas of life. Adachi believes that the current paradigms and time management tools were not written with women in mind. She would like to offer an alternative option with her book.
As someone who has tried multiple planners in the quest to find the one that would finally solve my scheduling headaches, this book was very refreshing. It offered me new ideas for the way I plan my family’s schedules and how to identify why we do what we do. The encouragement to use tools that help me live my life today, rather than be constantly trying to achieve tomorrow, takes a load off my shoulders. Today is the day I am living and there is good here—today—even if it hasn’t gone according to plan.