You’re Not Lazy, You’re Overwhelmed (feat. Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius)

Most people I know are feeling overwhelmed, to put it lightly. Between the stuff you have to do (work, paying your bills, getting your kid new shoes, or vacuuming up the dog hair before you host book club) and the things you wantto do and know will make you feel better (going to the gym, drinking water, REST, spending time with friends, starting one of the million hobbies you bought supplies for and shoved into a closet), it’s all too much and somehow we still don’t feel like we’re doing enough.

We’re supposed to do it all (and make it look easy), but it feels like an equation that always adds up to “well, if you can’t figure out how to do it all you must be a loser!”

Today’s guest is Kendra Adachi, AKA The Lazy Genius. Kendra is the author of The Plan: Managing Your Time Like A Lazy Genius, a book that is nearly the exact opposite of any time management book I’ve ever read, and a message I desperately needed to hear.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Hi everyone, it’s Nora McInerny and we are just a few weeks away from the New Year.

Where the self-improvement economy is going to kick into overdrive with big, loud, flashy messages about how you can do more and be more and set goals and accomplish them and rip the lid off 2025 and man oh man, is that a hard siren song for me to

resist because I am a recovering perfectionist and a person who is also recovering from tying my value very tightly to my accomplishments, which makes me deeply unspecial because the culture that we live in really does love a productive person, an

efficient person, a person who can wake up every morning and sees the day before the day even knows what’s happening. The day has not even started and you’ve got your hand around its neck and you’re like, I’m in charge. That’s the kind of person we

like. And that’s the kind of person I have always strived to be. And sometimes I think that I’m there. And most times I feel like I could be there if I have the right notebook or the right planner or the right order of operations.

I always ask people how they do things because I am sure that there is some cheat code that I have not learned yet. I have a tendency to treat myself like a robot or a piece of machinery.

Like I should just be able to do things perfectly and on time and without any issues because that’s my job as a person.

Person means do the things, the little things like buying toothpaste before we run out or unloading the dishwasher or putting my shoes away.

And the big things like my job, raising children, which is a series of many, many tasks, some big, some small, all feel highly consequential. Owning a pet. I mean, it just, everything.

And when I can’t do everything perfectly well, I am perfectly unhappy with myself.

So if you too have held yourself to an insanely high standard, if you have a hard time separating your being from your doing, this conversation with Kendra Adachi, aka the lazy genius is for you. It’s for all of us.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Kendra in person in Chicago for the launch of her new book, The Plan, which is a time management book that, it’s not like other time management books.

It is the exact opposite of every time management book that has, oh my God, the number of books I’ve bought and tried to live by that I was like, this is, okay, this is going to solve all my problems. But all it did was create problems.

And then one of the problems was it created pressure for myself because these books would just haunt me and taunt me from my bookshelves. Kendra’s book is not like that at all. It is compassionate.

It is considerate. It truly goes against the grain of what most of us have internalized. It is a book that I highlighted to High Heaven.

And lucky for all of us, I forced Kendra to sit down in my truly Icky Airbnb, aesthetically unpleasing, vibeless, Icky Airbnb, just to have this conversation. Here we go.

Kendra, I’m going to read you the first thing that I asterisked.

That I wrote?

That you wrote.

Which is again, something that I find. Okay. How many tabs do you think I put down on this book?

I’m so honored by how many tabs.

There’s so many dog ears.

There’s so many pages folded down. I read aggressively and I read physically. So, I need to highlight, I need to underline, I need to annotate, I need to dog ear, I need to know what I’m going back to.

It becomes a problem when you dog ear nearly the entire book because then you just think, what was past me trying to do?

I look forward to finding out the answer to that.

Okay, the first thing was 93% of time management books are written by men. I did not know that. How did you come to find that out?

I was writing the book proposal for this book, and part of the book proposal process is like, what’s on the market?

What are your comps? And so, I started looking at all of the comps, and I was like, this is a lot of dudes, so many dudes. And I thought, I wonder, is there an impressive statistic of how many dudes are writing books in this space?

Which, this is not in the book, that 70% to 90% of people who buy these books are women, and they’re repeat customers. So, they’re still looking, no matter. I did my own math.

I did my own math. I looked through years and years and years of bestseller lists, across-the-board recommendations. And this is how stats work, apparently, that whether the list is, you know, seven long or 1,700 long, it always came out to 93%.

And I thought, well, I think we have a problem here. Somebody who’s not a dude needs to write a book for people who also are not necessarily dudes.

Lightbulb turns on above your head.

Yeah.

You say, I’m not a dude.

I’m not a dude.

Oh my God. That’s me. That’s me.

I could do this. I could do this. Before you wrote a time management book, were you one of those 73% of book buyers looking for a time management solution?

Looking for the next thing.

Yeah.

The next thing that’s going to save everything.

Because that’s the way the industry is built is we are taught that one more planner, one more book, one more magic hack is going to make everything better. It’s going to make your life organized.

It’s going to make you a really beautiful robot who can live her life without any stress and full organizational skills at all times. And what’s wild is I don’t even know that that’s a goal we want to have.

But even if it is, that’s what the industry is built on is that you keep coming back.

Cause there might be, I was talking about this with our mutual friend, Kate Kennedy, that it sometimes feels like everybody else has a secret that you don’t know yet.

100%.

And it might be the planner, it might be the notebook, it might be the app, it might be the iPad version, it might be some, there’s some thing.

There is an online course out there that’s gonna change your life and make everything better.

It’s gonna make everything better. And for me, I’m also a person who has sought so many solutions for the problem of being alive, by the way.

And I have treated myself like a robot and thought, well, if I can just get the programming right, then I won’t feel overwhelmed and I won’t feel stressed out. And the problem is just you.

Correct. The problem is you. And the reason why, when this veil came off, and I thought, dude, the Emperor Superdupe has no clothes.

Like, why are we all living like this? It’s because if we are listening to men, 93% of the time in this space, guess what men don’t contend with, especially male authors. Number one, you don’t have a boss.

If you write books, you don’t have a boss. Almost certainly. You and I both are examples of that.

It’s like you can check your email before two o’clock and then never again. You can structure your own schedule when no one else is telling you what you need to do. So that’s number one.

Number two, men do not carry the mental load of the invisible scaffolding of one’s home and family, if there is one of those that you live with other people. They don’t carry all that. Yeah.

Except in my household, my husband will listen to this and so he does need everybody to know, except in my household.

My house is the one exception. There might be four others throughout the US.

And you’ve got one of them.

I do benefit from being in my home. At least I am a man. I get to feel that.

I’m kind of into that.

That carefree what’s for dinner.

Right.

And it is a generalization. What I’m saying is certainly a generalization and there are going to be exceptions to all the things. But in general, yeah, these authors don’t have bosses.

They don’t do all the things. They’re not the ones who stop work to get the sick kid. They’re not the ones in charge of dinner and the birthday parties and all the different things.

And then the third thing that men don’t have is periods. And then when a period decides to leave you in a dramatic fashion, like there is so much that men don’t contend with.

And I don’t want to make it, I don’t want to make these authors and these time management experts out to be the bad guy, because they’re not bad guys. They have really great ideas. There are a lot of things that work.

But the overall space, the information we’re given is just so incomplete. That’s what it is. It’s incomplete.

It’s not that they’re bad or that it’s wrong, but it is 100% incomplete.

Some of them I do think are bad and wrong.

No, I mean, that’s not trying to be nice.

Yeah, you’re being really nice. But some of them I do think are bad and wrong, and I would read these books and be like, huh, again, if it’s not resonating with me, it’s because there is something wrong with me that I can’t implement this.

Not that it’s impossible to work a four-hour work week if you work for a company, or if you have social and familial obligations, or you just don’t, I don’t know, you just don’t work that way.

There was this time management system that I really, really tried to live by in my early 20s, where one of the main tenets of it was having no emails in your inbox. I know, I know exactly, you know exactly what I’m talking about, right?

And it was like, you just can’t have anything in your inbox. And all your emails will fall in to one of these three categories. And wouldn’t you know, that did not work for me at all.

Nope. It did not work for me. I’m an inbox 500 girl, you know, that’s just how I am.

No shame in that.

I do feel like I have tried so much and have always been looking for like the exact thing, like the exact thing.

You have something that you call the black trash bag.

Yeah, big black trash bag energy. That’s me. Yeah.

It’s we swing from I gotta find the magic thing and you try to implement the magic thing. And then you grow tired of trying to implement the magic thing. It’s why chore charts last for two and a half days, if you have children.

And that’s on a, if that’s when they are working well.

Winsing. Yes. Yeah.

But then you swing to the other side of things are going to be different around here.

And you get your trash bag, your big black trash bag. And this is metaphorical as well. So this can be with the actual stuff in your home.

And you’re like, there’s too much stuff. We’re moving to a tiny house, everybody get on board. You can’t take it anymore because you feel like you have to start over.

If something is not working, you have to start over. And we also do that with our schedules and our feelings about ourselves. Like there’s a lot of scrap it, blank slate, because this is the other thing that the industry teaches us.

These dudes tell us that if every single day is not building on itself to lead to an ideal future version of yourself, it doesn’t count. And that’s just the most untrue thing ever.

But what it does is it makes us feel when we look back on a day, when we end the day and we’re exhausted or we climb into bed and we’ve cried four times or we yelled at a kid or a kid yelled at us or our boss got mad or we just don’t like our job,

there’s so many things that happen that we get hit with it. We have no control over and we lie in bed and we’re like, well, that day was a failure. That day was a failure. And rather than going, well, some days are and I’m okay.

And I’m going to go to sleep now and I’m going to wake up tomorrow. No one teaches us that that’s okay. They’re like, you better get it together tomorrow.

Because you’re wasting your life.

Yeah. Yeah. There was an influencer.

And this made me sad. I’ve brought this up before. But because he’s dead and he would say online all the time, like, if you’re not growing, you’re dying, right?

Like if you’re not getting up and giving every day your best. And I think to me, it’s that’s not a good message to give people. But I think it’s sadder that he might have died believing that.

Like he might have died believing that like truly, the only way forward is relentless movement. When in reality, nature shows us all the time, constant growth is not possible.

Nope.

Okay. I maxed out at six feet.

Okay.

That’s all I’m getting physically, right? No one is growing forever. My hair will only get this long.

Yeah, and it will stop.

And it will stop.

Yeah, sure. You know, I’m never going to get the Guinness Book of World Records for longest fingernails.

No, I hope not. That feels so complicated.

I think about it more than I would like to admit.

My daughter watches YouTube videos about people who are trying to win that award, and it’s troublesome to me.

Your daughter and I have so much in common based on that sentence alone.

There it is.

I love it.

Wow.

I don’t know a lot of people like that, so that’s good to know that you’re raising one. Hopefully, that’s not frightening to you. But yeah, in reality, nothing grows forever.

Also, in reality, our plans are only as good as the unknowable, unforeseeable future, truly.

That’s why there are two things I say about plans all the time. One is plans are not pass or fail. They’re not pass or fail.

They’re just intentions. That’s all they are. There’s no moral code to a plan.

There’s no tally. There’s no one keeping tallies of how many plans you make that fail or work. That’s just not how they are.

So if you change, even just your… I’m laughing because I’m about to say change your mindset. And we have said today in other conversations about how sometimes that phrasing is problematic.

But if you have a paradigm shift of, oh, wait, I don’t have to see this as like, oh, I did a good job or not. Like you’re not waiting for your A plus well done sticker. It’s just life.

It’s just an intention I’m setting. But sometimes things happen. Wow.

That’s really quite freeing. And then the second thing is, this is why I say that learning to pivot is more important than learning to plan. Because you’re going to have to pivot way more anyway.

So why not develop that skill and see that as a good thing rather than as you’re bad at planning?

Yeah.

It’s just not how it should be.

Yeah. So have you always been like this? I need some clarifying details.

There’s a few questions. One, are you an oldest daughter?

I am an oldest daughter.

Hell, I just know. I just know in my heart, you were the first one out the gate and you were like, everyone follow me. Oh, God, get over here.

It’s like it’s a blessing and a curse.

Yeah.

Yeah. There’s no one that I have more. Like I feel sad for my older sister because I’m like, oh no, you didn’t get an older sister.

Someone’s got to be the oldest sister.

Somebody’s got to be the older sister. Yeah.

And you guys do a lot. It’s like a sacred role. It’s a sacred role in the world.

We also put a lot on ourselves because I was having a conversation recently with a couple of other older sisters.

And we were like, well, sometimes you go into the room where the meeting is happening and it’s a volunteer situation. And you think, if I am in charge, it’s actually less work for me because they don’t know what they’re doing.

And were you growing up or like, because you are known as the lazy genius online, when did the lazy genius, when did Kendra become the lazy genius?

Oh, she was not that long ago. After three children, I was always genius. That was what I thought counted.

Part of it is because it’s what I could control, being really good at things, being dependable. I had a really tough childhood.

And so being able to put myself in a position where I didn’t rock the boat, where I made everybody happy, I performed well. Those were safety defense mechanisms for me. But then what’s wild?

And perhaps this is true for a lot of different types of defense mechanisms.

But when you are someone, especially if you are female and you are very competent and dependable, and you show up, and you’re an old soul or whatever, you’re so praised for having it all together.

And so it made me even more afraid to be like, oh, you know I’m a wreck over here, like an absolute basket case all the time. But if people found that out, then maybe they would leave.

Maybe they wouldn’t depend on me anymore, they wouldn’t want to be around me anymore, wouldn’t think I was good at things anymore.

So it came, trying to be a genius at everything, trying to be so great at everything, to the point where I wouldn’t try anything new if I knew that I wasn’t going to be the best at it, then it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth even doing.

So I lived most of my, all of my childhood and my early adulthood as, well, we’ve got to be so awesome at everything. And then I had a kid who didn’t sleep, who was a really hard baby. And I went in being like, I’m going to make all of his food.

I’m going to, I was the stereotypical that person.

He’ll literally never look at a screen.

Never. He will never look at his screen. He will never yell at me.

I will never yell at him.

I’ll never even say the word no. Because it’s so negative.

It’s, we’re going to be, it’s just going to be, yeah. When I think back at how precious I was in trying to be this mother, I just want to go and hug her.

I want to go and hug my 27-ish year old self and go, sweet baby girl, you are trying so hard at all of the wrong things.

I’m Nora McInerny, and you’ve been listening to Thanks For Asking. This is a listener-supported podcast. You can get the full episode ad-free in only one place, over on our Substack.

The URL is always linked in the description, but it’s noraborialis.substack.com. This episode was produced by Marcel Malekibu, and our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson.