Escaping the Productivity Trap: Kendra Adachi’s Lazy Genius Perspective

Jen Hey, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Welcome to our beautiful set. Gosh, it’s so pretty in here. 

Amy It’s so. Fancy. 

Jen Amy’s here. She is here because this is what she does now. 

Amy This is. This is my job. 

Jen This is your job? This is a real job. And if your kids are anything like mine, though, they may believe it and they may not. My kids are always still like. Yeah, but what do you do? Yeah. I’m like, I just can’t with it. I work. So roomie is always like, well, I mean, I guess you just, like, are on a laptop. Like, I mean, I guess at the bottom of the foundation, but, like, there’s work in here. 

Amy The best part for me is I work from home mostly with my other job. 

Jen Yes. 

Amy On a laptop. Well, so. But now I leave the house. 

Jen This feels like a real job. 

Amy I have to go to work. 

Jen You’re like don’t mind me. I put on blush right. 

Amy And pants. Well leggings. 

Jen But like it’s like you guys are pants in this context not pajamas. 

Amy I mean when I say I work from home like hardcore jammies till 2 p.m.. Sure, sure. So, yeah. 

Jen I mean, you did walk into this studio today and say, did you notice that I put on makeup? And what I said to her, which was correct, was is what you mean by that? That you took your Burt’s Bees tinted lip gloss or lip balm and put it on your cheeks. And she’s like, well, yes. So. I mean, that’s makeup. Technically it is. Okay, I you I give it to you. 

Amy And it might be a 3 in 1 product. I don’t know, because I need new glasses. 

Jen Oh, like, where else could it go? Your eyelids. One on your mouth and one on your cheeks. 

Amy I’ve seen this, like on Instagram ads that these products exist. 

Jen You’re getting Instagram influence for makeup. Do they know you? No. That is the the algorithm is failing you. 

Amy Well, I mean, I try really hard. You were talking about like. Fancy shoes the other day. End set. You kept saying, I’ll just send it to you. Oh, and I said, no, don’t you know you don’t want to click on that. 

Jen To say that. 

Amy I want my feed. What I need for my feed. Yeah. 

Jen Raccoons are sick. 

Amy Beans, salads. I’m never going to make and Dave Grohl every day. I need a little bit of that, and I. I don’t need makeup or shoes, but it sneaks in sometimes. 

Jen Has the algorithm given you what you need? Do you have those things? Raccoons? Yes. You have raccoons in your feed. 

Amy I mean, because I follow raccoon accounts. 

Jen I don’t understand what you’re saying. 

Amy Like raccoons doing funny things or, like, maybe like pet raccoons or like, you know, like wildlife rehab sort of things. anyway, it’s excellent content. And yes, I’ve curated it. 

Jen Okay. Do you know, I don’t know how this has happened. I understand that the algorithm is spying on us at all times.But, I don’t know how this has happened, and I don’t know why. I must have hovered over something too long, but I am now. I’m telling you every third thing on Instagram for me. Is, the, the feeds where a chiropractor is cracking someone’s back or neck and they put like a little microphone on it. So I was like. Well, I’ll tell you what, I will sit there and watch it for 25 minutes. I it’s working, but I don’t know how they knew this about me. I’ve never even been to the chiropractor in my life. So what? Why do you think I wanted this? 

Amy I walk into the studio every week and talk about my decrepit body, so it it may have picked me up on your Wi-Fi guide.

Amy That is it. I’m so sorry your. 

Jen Back made me know about this. Holy shit. 

Amy I’ve probably googled stuff on your Wi-Fi to. 

Amy Oh my. 

Jen God, this is making so much sense. If I start getting wrecked and stuff, I swear to God I’m not joking. Okay, you guys, we have such a good show today that you’re going to love this interview. You are. You’re going to love. We have Kendra, a doctor, on the show today, and you may know her by her moniker, which is the lazy genius. So smart. She’s been on the show before, and also she’s one of my favorite followers. Or follows. You follow her and you have been following her. Anyway, I don’t want to give it all away, but. It’s good if you feel. Let me just put it like this. If you feel in any way overwhelmed. Stretched too thin. Not enough hours in a day. And all of that packaged with a nice little veneer of self-loathing. This is your episode. Like, stick around. 

[Rant or Rave Segment]

But before we get to it. We’re going to do a little. Segment we like to call rant or rave. Now in honor of our guest. Yes, we’re going to do a little rant or rave Lazy Genius edition because her whole deal is be a genius about the things that matter to you, and be lazy about all the rest of it. So first of all, I love that. So she’s got a bunch of, like, hacks and ideas for some of the things that tend to drain us dry like an energy vampire. And one of them is meal planning. So we’re going into rant or rave. By the way, we only get three minutes for this. I’m going to set. I am setting an alarm because we take time management seriously around here. 

Jen Okay. Rant or rave? Meal planning? 

Amy Rave for sure. The rant part is about adopting and abandoning all the different meal planning systems and then like, feeling like a failure and giving up and then like not having anything for six months. But then I always get back on the bandwagon because I have a lot of people in my house and I. 

Jen Just and some weird food stuff that you have to care about. 

Amy Yes. Food allergy. Like I just have to plan it. My current iteration though, it’s actually working for me. It’s my Google calendar, and I just, you know how you can. There’s like a holiday calendar and maybe work and school. I just have a meal planning sub calendar with its own color, and that way I can like just click and drag oh, stuff. Like I set a pizza for every Friday and it’s orange. 

Jen I kind of like that. 

Amy And then I can go back and easily look at my calendar like I don’t need recipes anymore. I don’t need shopping lists. It doesn’t need to be overengineered. Like I for years like. 

Jen Overengineered. 

Amy Overengineered, but also like cooked everything from scratch. Like addressing everyone’s allergies. I can do it. It’s just organizing okay ahead of time. So I really I do like the system and I’m like, there’s some weeks that I forget to do it and whatever, people eat sandwiches, but I keep going back to it, I like it. Okay. 

Jen Okay. You used exactly a minute and a half of our three minutes, like it was a really good time management. 

Amy I have actually been wondering about this with you. Like you. You said you wrote a cookbook about. Cooking for, you know. 

Jen A lot of people. 

Amy A lot of people. Yeah. And now sometimes. 

Jen So I’m somewhere in between rant or right now, like, in the olden days, I had to do this, or we just, we would, I guess. What else? Staff, I don’t know. And but now there’s less people here, although some of them are still here because I don’t know why. Yes. Because I don’t know why they came back. 

Amy They won’t leave. 

Jen But I do this and like I do Instacart. So this is one way that I save myself one zillion hours is that I have my groceries delivered. And I know that is probably I don’t know what that is, but I’m not sorry. 

Amy I do. 

Jen Too. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I have an order of my staples that I just hit add all to cart every single time. I always need them. I always need the bread. I always need the milk. I always need the turkey, whatever it all is like. I have my room, so never think about that. That is a zero thought process for me. Load to cart and then I am down to generally planning. Oh my god, I don’t know how this is going to sound, but about. 2 to 3. Meals that I’m going to cook that I add on top of it. So I just put it right in cart and then it comes to my porch. So to me, I like that. 

Amy It sounds like you’ve adopted Kendra’s, mantra of. The current season that you’re in. Make adjustments. Yes, I have a system. It’s flexible. It’s not a failure if you don’t do it every single day. 

Jen Yeah, and last year’s plan isn’t always this year’s plan, so. Okay. Okay, so that was a mostly a rave for us. Yes. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Okay, one more segment before we onboard Kendra in here. Because she’s smart. 

 

[ Gen X Cellence segment]

This is, of course, I think my my favorite of all of our segments, which is Gen Excellence.  We are clearly Gen Xers. We are right in the pocket. Looking backward on our days of being a young person, young women or whatever. Let’s just think loosely. Teens to like, you know, 20s. Okay. Could that that era of our life. What was A fashion choice, a fashion trend. That you loved, but in retrospect, it was just terrible. But at the time, you were like, look at me. Like, look at me. I’d like to hear what you think about this. 

Amy Mine is none of my things that I have good memories of are going to be rooted in. Look at me. 

Jen No. You’re right. Okay. Maybe a very quiet internal voice that it’s like. I mildly like how I look today. Is that closer? I’m okay. I’m fine today. 

Amy I absolutely have something that I loved. But I loved it because of the efficiency. And I didn’t know it at the time, but it was like the birth of my uniform. Mindset. 

Amy High school. Like, sophomore? Junior. So, like 87, 88. 

Jen And this was the birth of your uniform, which what she means by that is her uniform is black clothes every day, head to toe. That’s just the. Frankly, I’ve almost never seen you do anything else in 15 years. 

Amy So 90% of the. 

Jen Time, I’m literally wearing it right. 

Amy Now. Black dress, black leggings because

Amy It’s just easier. 

Jen Okay, I’m sorry I’ve interrupted your story about when you were 15 or 16. 

Amy Yes. Units. Do you remember? 

Jen Stop it! Do I remember? I wore units to my sophomore homecoming dance. 

Amy It’s I. Where did it go? Why did it go away? Oh my God. You can wear that. I personally did not wear the belt as a skirt. 

Jen Did you wear it as a tube top? I know you didn’t. I’m joking. I didn’t either because I was in my modest days because of God. So we didn’t show shoulders on lot. 

Amy But it could just be like it didn’t matter what combination was washed and ironed, because, you know, we ironed things in the 80s. It didn’t matter. You could always choose something and put it together and, like, then if you were, you know, back when I cared about these things, I was like, well, I wore this with the V in the front last week, so I’ll wear with the V in the back. So it’s not exactly the same thing, but it was like it just capsule wardrobe. 

Jen Well, yeah. 

Amy The store was. 

Jen Beautiful. Cubbies. It was a organizer’s dream.

Amy Dream? Like, I actually have OCD. So, yeah, going to the store and picking something out was like, hit all of the marks. I loved it, and then it just went away. 

Jen Well, it was certainly trendy, which means it didn’t have a lot of staying power. Like, they literally built an entire brand on one style that just didn’t have any flexibility. Had nowhere to go. Like, exactly. Once that was out of style, they’re like, well, shit, what are we going do? These cubbies. 

Amy I would still be wearing it. 

Jen God, you really would. Also. I am jealous of you. I. Maybe. Maybe I just don’t remember this. But I didn’t feel like I could afford units. I had one, I had one units outfit. It was royal blue and I got it with a white scrunchie belt. Yes. And I wore this to homecoming, and I just thought nobody could tell me nothing. Nobody could tell me nothing in my units. But I didn’t have any more. Were you fancy? We were a little bit poor. 

Amy No, I wasn’t fancy at all. In fact, I had a clothing budget every year. Like a tight clothing budget. My parents said, you need to learn to budget. You have this much money. You can do what you want. Like, if you’re smart about it, you’d buy more than one pair of jeans. But I learned pretty quickly like, oh, I could go to this place, get just a few pieces. That’s true. And then that’s all I wore. 

Jen Just sweat small around with a V in the back. Yes. And it’s like a new shirt. 

Amy And then you borrow your friends. 

Jen That’s true. 

Amy So true. 

Amy Yes, that’s a good one. 

Jen I wonder if you think you have a picture of yourself in units. Why do you always want. I just do. 

Amy Everything. 

Jen I want to see you in your units. And I am thinking right now, God, I wonder if I do, but I only have the one. I only have the one outfit. 

Amy Well, if it was homecoming. Janet King took a picture. 

Jen So that means it’s maybe still on film in a bread sack in her attic, right? Okay, that’s what that means. That doesn’t mean anything at all. Mom literally one time gave each of us a bread sack of printed photos, and she’s like, do you want these? Oh my God. I guess that was the best she could do. We didn’t. You know, she’s not. That’s like me, her thing. Okay. Mine is short Well. But I remember doing this and I thought it was so cute at the time. At the time I thought, well, I am adorable. And this is early 20s, so. Oh, I feel like I had. I mean, I had kids, I think, which is sad, but. There was this situation where you could take your strands of hair from all here and do them in little rows and like, do a little twisty twist, and then right back here, you’d clip it with a little butterfly clip. The teeny tiny and I would do like you like six perfectly even rows. I mean, I would line that stuff up with my like, comb and I do my little twist, and then I’d have like, boop boop boop boop boop butterfly. Yes, sort of translucent butterfly clips back here. And I just thought, oh, and then I kind of like to tease the back like the sprout that came out of the back, the hair sprout. I’d give it a little tease and then a little spray. And I just thought I should have my own show, like on the Disney Channel, as, like the cool big sister, because, you know, I was only like 24 even though I was a mom. I thought that was really cute. But now, when old pictures from that era come up and I see that we all had that hairdo. It’s so not cute. It’s just not cute at all. And it wasn’t cute to begin with, frankly. And then my jeans were so low. Oh, they were so low. And I thought that was so cute. 

Amy I can see this whole. The whole look. Yeah. Head to toe. Yeah, but look in someone’s face. Is there. It’s not yours. It’s probably someone like from the Disney Channel. Like, yeah, I can see the whole. 

Jen Like Ashley Tisdale. 

Amy Put together. Yeah, yeah. 

Jen Yeah. I think that was probably like my inspo board. You know where all those like 14 year olds on. On Nickelodeon. Right. So anyways, I’m sorry about that. I always say at least that’ll never come back. But you know what? We do not know that we do not know that. 

Amy I mean, you conjured it. 

Jen Probably, the stuff that comes back around or I’m just like, how how how did it how could it? But it does. 

Amy But these days, it lasts for like a day and a half. It’s a good point. And then something else comes up, so it’ll be fine. 

 

SUGGESTED MIDROLL SPACE #1

Jen All right, you guys, thank you for being on weeds with us for a minute. But it’s time. It’s time. To bring back to the show Kendra a Dapchi. The lazy genius of our dreams. She’s the best. Let me tell you about Kendra, in case she’s new to you. Because you’re about to love her. So let me just get you ready for this. She’s a New York Times bestselling author. She’s a podcaster. She’s a wife. She’s a mom. She’s got three kids. She went to college to become a high school English teacher. But instead became the lazy genius. Don’t worry about it. It was a good move. So what that means practically, is that she is actually a guru in teaching people how to curate their energy and their time so that they are focused on doing what matters to them, leaving behind the rest, and not operating out of this constant sense of, over, well, chaos and shame. Right? Anybody? Hi. So. you might know her and if you don’t, you should from her podcast, which is called The Lazy Genius. Her first bestselling book was called The Lazy Genius Way. And then she was on the show in November of 2020, in a series that we called For the Love of Small Wins. She’s got this really great approach to big systems, which is to go small, like, do not burn everything down and start from, why don’t you just do this easiest, smallest, next right thing? And it’s kind of a revolutionary idea for me, frankly. So anyway, she’s got a new book coming out on October 8th and it is called The Plan Manage Your Time like a lazy genius who doesn’t need this. 

Amy Who? Everybody. 

Jen Yeah. That’s correct. And me and same. please enjoy this conversation with Amy and me and the absolutely wonderful Kendra Doshi.