Hey there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 388. the most freeing piece of time management advice you'll ever hear. The Plan, my book on compassionate time management, has been in the world for two weeks now.
And I really hope you all have been enjoying it. Books stick with us when there are catchy things, right? Frameworks, acronyms, illustrations, analogies. The plan has all of those. But I wanted to spend a little time talking today about one of those analogies. And it, to me, is one of the most freeing pieces of time management advice you'll ever hear.
A few weeks ago, I did a private book club Zoom with members of the plan's low-key launch team since they got to read the book early. And we spent almost half of that time talking about this analogy. They illuminated so many things for me, brought the analogy to life in ways I never anticipated, and it made this tiny piece of content hidden in this book feel so much more alive and important. So much so that I wanted to share it with you today in an entire episode.
First, I'm going to read a short excerpt from the chapter, Here's the Plan, that talks about this analogy. And then I'm going to share some of the things that came up in that book club with regular Lazy Genius listeners and readers. to help you relate this analogy even more to your own life in a way that brings freedom and lightness no matter the season you're in. So first, here's the excerpt from the chapter. Here's the plan. Living is painting a picture.
but we've been taught it's assembling a puzzle. I love puzzles, but my life isn't one. I'm not trying to repeatedly create a static image, meticulously meeting its pieces in place. starting with the edges and working my way in. Instead, I want my life to be like the act of painting. I hold my palette full of all kinds of colors, moods, needs, simple hopes for the day. Then I take my brush, work with what I have, and paint.
Depending on what I notice in the painting, I adjust the color. I pay attention to what is happening right in front of me and slowly usher in a beautiful image. Living where you are is like painting, not assembling a puzzle. Not even paint by numbers. It's painting, fluid, open, creative, and human. Now, lest you assume painting comes easily to me, let me assure you it does not. I am in the 99th percentile of successful life puzzlers.
I can craft an impressive You Are Here map, the likes of which you've never seen. Quick interjection here to my own talking, but I'm talking about the You Are Here map at the mall that we all know and love, which is another analogy I used in the book earlier. Okay, carrying on.
Puzzling has been my default for decades, but being good at puzzling doesn't mean it works. Robotically constructing your life to match the picture on the box is unsustainable. Nor do I think you really want to keep that up. So instead of trying so daggum hard at something that you might not even want, and that definitely doesn't work, let's paint.
All right, that's the excerpt from the book. Now, before I start talking some more, I want us to pause for a second and for you to think about this analogy, this idea of life being more like painting than putting together a puzzle. How does that sit with you? You can even pause the episode for a minute to think about it I know that for me, I spent years and years trying to match the picture on the box.
That's what happens when you don't let yourself change your mind, when you blame yourself for being undisciplined because certain things you wanted to do aren't working for you right now. When you don't take into account your sleep or mood or the hard news you got yesterday or the draining conversation with a coworker or the fear that you're going to get fired because of that draining conversation with a coworker, matching the picture on the box.
It made me a robot. And I'm already pretty good at that without any help. But there is something tough here. Painting is harder than puzzling, at least at first. We don't live in a painting culture. We live in a puzzling culture. There aren't many models or teachers showing us how to live this way.
How do we consider what we have in front of us today? How do we still get our stuff done while honoring our needs and our bodies and our energy? How do we have ambition and goals without getting sucked into turning them into a puzzle? For a lot of people, myself included, it's a tough ask. It feels unnatural. It does not come easy. In fact, one of the reasons we're doing this episode today is because someone asked in the Facebook group,
how to live like this. They were so used to puzzling life together in service of the picture on the box that doing anything different just felt strange. That's why I brought the topic up in the Launch Team book club. I was curious how other people were interpreting this analogy and what it had done in their lives after experiencing it a little bit. The answers were so thoughtful and lovely, and I want to share some of them with you.
Sadly, I don't have names attached to these words so to those of you who said them, thank you. I'll share some thoughts about puzzles first. One thought I loved that came from several folks was that puzzle thinking forces us to use and even need all the given pieces, right? When you put together a puzzle, if a piece is missing, the whole experience feels like a waste. such a letdown when you put a puzzle together and it's not complete.
So if you apply that same idea to how we live our lives, an idea we have been taught to implicitly and explicitly do by the productivity industry, it makes sense that if one area of our life isn't going according to plan, everything feels off. If we have a to-do list that we don't get that one last thing done, we feel like we failed. If we made plans to do these three main things today and we get to the end of the day, one is left, but we just don't have the energy or desire at all.
We beat ourselves up and say we're not disciplined or consistent and that it's our fault. Life is what it is. We bully ourselves into showing up for ourselves, but in service of goals that might not even matter to us. When one piece of a puzzle is missing or pieces don't fit, or you realize you've put the edge pieces together out of order because you thought that these pieces lined up, but they don't, the whole thing just feels shot. It impacts the entire process.
Doesn't that kind of make sense that you feel the same sometimes about your life? If you've been taught that life is putting together a puzzle, puzzles have a lot of pressure to them. Like another person in the book club said, there is a right way and a wrong way. There aren't options when it comes to your puzzle. Puzzle energy also tells us to use every single piece, which translates to making everything matter.
If you want a complete life, ma'am, you need to include these 12 categories in your life development plan. And if you leave them out, it means you're not managing your time or your priorities appropriately. No, thank you. Not everything can matter. And it certainly can't all matter at once. It is very, very hard, one might even say impossible, to include every piece in your puzzle all at once in order to match the painting of someone else's design and influence.
I just don't think those of you listening to this podcast have any interest in that. You've tried it. You felt terrible because you either ran yourself ragged trying to put the puzzle pieces together or you just gave up knowing you couldn't do it. You're right. You can't. Even the best puzzlers can't. But that doesn't mean the problem is you. The problem is the puzzle. Living a vibrant life is not putting together a puzzle day after day in service to the picture on the box.
Living a vibrant life is like painting. And here are some thoughts from the group on that. There were several people who really resonated with the idea that paint itself and the act of painting are fluid and flexible. Puzzle pieces don't move. They don't adjust, but paint does. Paint moves. It's supposed to.
In fact, one of the things that makes actual paintings the most beautiful is their movement. Movement is critical to painting. And that flexibility and fluidity and movement is critical to a compassionately lived life. more ownership of what you're making. Putting together puzzles takes a certain amount of technique and skill, but you don't have to think about it really, not in a way that's present in the task.
Does that make sense? If you imagine someone who is sitting in front of a canvas with a few paint colors and a brush versus a person who's starting to sort the edge pieces from the middle pieces, because if you don't do that in a literal puzzle construction, like I don't even understand you. The mindsets between those two people are different, aren't they? The life puzzler is mechanical, ordered, methodical, and a little detached.
The painter is creative, loose, responsive, and paying attention to what they see. The postures and mindsets are very different. Plus, as a couple of the launch team folks pointed out in the Zoom, when you paint the layering and dimension and adding this on top of this and adjusting this color that isn't quite right. When you apply that to your life, it also adds dimension and meaning to your life. As one person said, I'm a piece of art, not calculus.
And this leads me to the final thought from the group that I loved. Someone said, a puzzle feels unfinished if it isn't perfectly done, but a painting can be paused or complete however you leave it. Isn't that beautiful? If we look at our lives as a path to something we are trying to complete, and it's not great until that completion happens, we won't notice the beautiful paintings from today.
We won't be content with something that is unfinished today or even something that's finished that doesn't look as complete as a painting we're used to. I've learned this in my actual painting practice, like with real brushes and paint, that if I see each painting as needing to hit some level of excellence to count, the joy is taken out of it.
I enjoy every face I paint. Sometimes they don't finish up in a way that brings me the same amount of satisfaction and enjoyment, but that doesn't mean they were wasteful. They didn't teach me something or... They weren't okay to just make for no other reason than the enjoyment itself, you know? We put so much pressure on the completion, on the picture on the box.
If everything is in service to this ideal life created to set and forget, to repeat, to not have changed minds or pivots or incomplete plans, we will always feel like we're behind, like we're doing it wrong. Puzzle energy tells us we're doing it wrong if we deviate from the methodical process that leads to the picture on the box.
And I'm here to offer a new way to see. What if you view life as a painting instead? What would that do for you day in and day out? What kind of freedom would it offer you? I think a lot. Now will it feel easy out of the gate? Maybe not. Will you lean on puzzle energy pretty often still? You totally might. Does that mean you're doing it wrong? No.
You're just being a person trying to live a good, contented, wholehearted life as often as you're able and being kind to yourself and your people, no matter what circumstances get in the way. That's living life like painting. The plan has a lot of principles and strategies to help you implement this into your life. So if you haven't yet picked up a copy, I hope you're able to soon. It's been such a gift to see it impact so many of you. And I'm genuinely so, so grateful.
And that's the most fraying piece of time management advice you'll ever hear. You don't have to build a puzzle to match a picture on the box. Just paint every day. Before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it's Bambi Nelson. Bambi writes, a few years ago, I noticed that almost any messy space in the house could be quickly cleaned up by first tackling trash,
then toys and tech, and finally textiles. I love a quippy term, so I started calling it Triple T. I truly feel that even the most overwhelming space can be tamed by the Triple T method of addressing trash, toys and tech, and textiles. This is so fun. I love it when we figure out what our own situations are. We name them and we make handling them fun and personal. You know, like we tidy the L.
We also say dishes and trash. You know, I'm like literally yelling dishes and trash. If we take care of dishes and trash, our house becomes wildly less chaotic. That could be something to notice in your own home or in the room that you feel like you tidy the most. What are the common categories of stuff?
Name two or three, give it a cute name if that helps, and then just tackle those things. If there's space left in your energy or your schedule, maybe you or your people can do categories beyond those initial things. but thinking about it, that simply could really help. Thanks for sharing Bambi and congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week.
This episode is hosted by me, Kendra Adachi, and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fisher, and Angela Kinsey. The Lazy Genius Podcast is enthusiastically part of the Office Ladies Network. Special thanks to Leah Jarvis for weekly production. Thanks y'all for listening. I hope you're enjoying reading the plan. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week.