Kendra Adachi’s "The PLAN" Offers a Gentler Approach to Time Management
My days have not been going according to my meticulously crafted plans.
Plans to get up at 5 a.m. are thwarted by restless nights of sleep. Plans for dinner shift because of my husband’s semi-unpredictable schedule and my own tiredness. Plans to start our homeschool day promptly at nine often fall through because, if I’m being completely honest, I have unrealistic expectations of the speed with which we’ll all get ready, eat breakfast, and do our morning chores.
If I’d found myself in this situation a few weeks ago, I would have been beating myself up. (For those who are familiar with Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, I’m an Upholder; I’m also an Enneagram one.) Instead, I’m navigating these days with an unusual calm. I now know a better way forward, thanks to Kendra Adachi’s latest book, The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius.
Adachi approaches time management with a framework that’s not based on pushing ourselves, but rather on being kind to ourselves. And she wrote it specifically for women.
We at Verily have read some great books by women about time management, productivity, and habits over the years, mostly by Gretchen Rubin and Laura Vanderkam. But it turns out, there actually aren’t that many women writing books in the productivity space.
The majority of productivity books—93 percent, by Adachi’s analysis—are written by men. And as helpful as their strategies may be for one part of the population, they don’t always work for the rest of us.
“Think about it,” Adachi writes in The PLAN. “Most time-management authors and experts are men who do not have a boss, a home to run, or a menstrual cycle. I don’t know if you’re aware, but all three of them are notoriously unwieldy. And if you’re not wielding them on a regular basis, it’s much easier to create your ideal life.”
It’s with this mindset that Adachi offers an approach—dare I say, a plan—that’s tailored to fit the lives of women, while being flexible enough that each of us can apply it to our own unique circumstances.
Rethinking the Goal
One of Adachi’s key principles is that “the goal is not greatness.” Instead, she urges readers toward integration, or wholeness. Citing vulnerability researcher Brené Brown and therapist Aundi Kolber, she illustrates being compassionate with ourselves with examples that challenge the ideas often seen in productivity books. For instance, rather than striving to “cultivate a champion’s mindset” and “develop hustle,” we can let go of perfectionism and remind ourselves, “I am allowed to take care of myself.”
Another key principle is “start where you are.” Often, Adachi points out, we’re encouraged to envision where we want to end up, then break the journey from here to there down into goals. She suggests starting where we are: “This season. This body. This family. This crisis. This financial situation. This transition. This holiday. This school project. This work deadline. This tantrum. This headache. This meal. This walk. This deep breath. This moment.”
“Don’t assume that pursuing greatness based on an invisible future is your only option,” she writes. “You can, instead, seek integration right where you are today.”
You Do You, in a Good Way
Readers of Adachi’s other books, The Lazy Genius Way and The Lazy Genius Kitchen, will recognize her foundational exercise of naming what matters to you in your particular season of life. In other words, what are your unique priorities right now?
With underlying principles and personal priorities in mind, Adachi constructs the PLAN, which is an acronym: Prepare, Live, Adjust, Notice. Prepare is about the order in which we do things, while Live is all about living in our current season of life, whatever that might be. Adjusting is what it sounds like—making adjustments, but with an emphasis on starting small. And at the heart of Notice is “[being] kind to yourself.”
For visual learners, Adachi pulls these ideas into a pyramid, with “what matters most in your current season” as the foundation. She explains: “The three triangles (or pyramid faces, if you’re a math nerd), are prepare, adjust, and notice. They rest equally against each other, finding support from what matters in this season, and they create the apex of our pyramid . . . the point. And the point, my friend, is to live.”
Right Here, Right Now
We typically focus so much on the past, the future, or perfectionism that we lose focus on right now. “Our present rarely gets our full attention,” she writes, “and I invite you to begin changing that for yourself.”
For me, one of the most freeing concepts has been Adjust—I’ll sometimes even utter “adjust” out loud when things aren’t going according to my increasingly more kind and realistic plans. In addressing the temptation to lean into a life overhaul, she humorously describes what she calls “Big Black Trash Bag Energy”: “the frenzied frustration that everything is falling apart and the only way out is to completely start over.” Most of the time, the solution isn’t to get out the Big Black Trash Bag, but to “start small.”
When my kids’ rooms were a mess last week, the Big Black Trash Bag Energy was strong. But I kept thinking, “adjust,” and somehow resisted the urge to do a massive declutter (which we just did a few months ago). We started by tidying up and ultimately parted with only an incomplete Hot Wheels set and a few long-neglected Barbies. If my kids knew who Adachi was, I’m sure they’d be thanking her for the number of toys that were spared because Mommy started small.
Being Honest about Hormones
Adachi also devotes an entire chapter to periods. “During their busiest years, women experience monthly hormonal changes—yet we completely ignore this in time management conversations,” she writes.
Rather than ignoring our cycles and trying to power through, we can honor our fluctuating energy levels and leverage them to our advantage. Using the insight of Kate Northrup, author of Do Less, and Maisie Hill, author of Period Power, Adachi explains how to work with our cycles, including an awareness of how they symbolically align with the four seasons of the year—and the parts of the PLAN.
“A woman’s hormonal patterns, and therefore her energy, vary multiple times over a single month,” she writes. “If, as a woman, you start to notice those patterns and adjust your decisions based on the energy you have, you will prepare differently and therefore live the way you desire to live.”
For example, the menstrual phase has been compared to winter—a time of slowing down. She suggests doing slower, more mindless work during this time, giving our bodies rest, and leaning into the N in the PLAN: Notice. “You don’t react or fix,” she writes. “Just notice. You’re primed for it, so let it do its beautiful work.” In contrast, the follicular phase, when estrogen increases, is like spring, and Adachi suggests using this part of our cycle for creative, deep, or organizational work, which is tied to the Prepare part of the plan.
Practical Advice and Pep Talks
When it comes to implementing these ideas, we’re not left to our own devices. Adachi equips readers with a few frameworks to supplement the PLAN, including a section on ways to approach a to-do list. My favorite is “Now, Soon, Later, Nevermind,” which provides just enough urgency to prioritize, without the frustration that accompanies moving a “Today” task to “Tomorrow.” (“Now” can mean what we want it to.) She also walks readers through planning a day, a week, a project, and a season using the PLAN.
Finally, there’s a section of little pep talks, for situations like “When your plan falls apart,” “When you feel guilty,” and “When you don’t have help,” to offer encouragement on hard days.
After reading this book and sitting with the ideas for a few weeks, I appreciate how easy they are to remember. But this system isn’t about perfection, so even if I don’t remember all the specific details or practice all the components on a given day or over a week, the PLAN still works. Ultimately, The PLAN is about being good to ourselves—a reminder we women often need.
