How I Use Kendra Adachi’s Playbooks to Have More Fun

I’ve shared about how I use a time budget and a list of 100 dreams to have more fun. Today, I’m sharing about my secret weapon that’s been helping me bridge the gap between “bucket list” and “day to day.” Over the years, I’ve tried spreadsheets, planners, and notebooks to help keep track of the mid-range time horizon. I was never able to stick with anything very effectively—until Kendra Adachi’s playbooks.

Who Is Kendra Adachi?

If you’re an Enneagram One and haven’t heard of the Lazy Genius, Kendra Adachi, you are in for a treat. Kendra is the Enneagram One big sister we all need, gently bossing us to be geniuses about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t.  She’s the author of The Lazy Genius Way, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, and (my personal favorite) The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius. Kendra also has a podcast (you guessed it, The Lazy Genius Podcast), and the playbooks are her latest offering to help people plan like people, not productivity robots.

What the Playbooks Are

The Lazy Genius Playbooks are a set of four adorable little notebooks, one per season. I love that the Winter notebook is for December, January, and February, and the other seasons continue in groups of three from there. The notebooks are undated, which means that it’s no big deal that Winter spans December to February. The divisions fit really well with my own conceptualization of the seasons, and I’m really glad Kendra didn’t let the calendar boss her into a January start. They come in cheerful colors and have simple black-and-white interiors.

Each playbook includes reflection questions as you close out one season and enter a new one. It also includes pages for each month and a page for each week within that month. The monthly pages include a brain dump page, a “have-to/hope-to” page, a “notice & adjust” page with reflection questions, and a “before moving on” page with additional reflection questions for the end of the month.

What the Playbooks Are Not

The playbooks are not planners. While you could use them as your only planning tool if you wanted to, Kendra expects that you’ll use them in conjunction with a planner. Although each week of the season gets a page, there are no dates, and the week pages don’t include a daily breakdown. So these would be difficult to use without at least a calendar as a complement.

They also aren’t a long-range planning tool. While you could save them to look back on from year to year (and this could be helpful if you identify some pitfalls to avoid going forward), they aren’t for planning every summer you’ll ever have. They’re just for planning the current one. Kendra often reminds her audience to live in their season, whether literally or metaphorically. If this summer you have a toddler (raises hand), daily trips to the pool are probably too much to manage. But I can include one trip per week if that’s important to me and to my other kids.

I confess I’m not big on the reflection pages. They would probably be really beneficial for me if I spent some time with them. Enneagram Ones are known for being perfectionists, but my sense of urgency often trumps my perfectionism. My goal is typically to complete as many tasks as possible to a very high standard. But I’m not the kind of perfectionist who will spend hours getting one thing right while I leave other tasks undone. So I tend to skip over the reflection invitations in favor of mapping my tasks out for the month.

As part of my learning to have fun, however, I think I will give the questions a chance this month! They will probably help me focus better on my actual goals and intentions rather than just plowing ahead with something that might not actually be working well.

How I Use the Playbooks

My favorite page is the brain dump page. Over the last several years, I’ve been leaning into seasonal rhythms in my food, clothing, and décor choices. The brain dump pages help me remember all the swaps I want to make as the season changes. I also note birthdays, holidays, and other large events coming up, such as back to school season. Because the playbooks aren’t calendars, I don’t usually include events that don’t have associated tasks, like a school meeting. But if I need to plan a party, buy a gift, prep for a trip, or make a dish, that will probably make the brain dump list.

As part of my annual planning, I usually take a look at my list of 100 dreams and try to identify 10 or so I could tackle in the upcoming year. I also have some recurring projects I try to do most years, like a photo book from the previous year, a “day in the life” photo book, and a reunion with my college roommates. As I’m making my brain dump list for the month, I check those annual goal lists to see where I’m at.

Some projects can be checked off easily over the course of a month, like creating and ordering a photo book. So I try to add one of those to the list for the month. Other projects, like making a quilt, need to be spread out over the course of a year. So I note how much progress I need to make on those projects as well.

Breaking Down by Week

Once I’ve finished my brain dump, I’m usually thoroughly overwhelmed. But it does feel better to have it all on paper than floating around in my head. And once I process the list, I feel even better! I start by assessing whether everything I’ve listed out is actually in the right list.

When I start a new season, I’m often thinking about all the holidays, birthdays, and other special events that month contains. And often, I don’t need to think about those until the month they occur. So I move them to the appropriate month so I know I’ll come back to them later.

I might also have some of what Kendra calls “never mind” items. Maybe I wanted to organize a closet, but there’s no particular reason it has to happen this month. If I can see that the month is full already, I can migrate this to a different month or just say “never mind.”

Once my list seems reasonably accurate for the month, I start breaking it down by week. Some tasks really do have to happen in a particular week, so I list those where needed. Then I break up larger projects into weekly goals. For women, Kendra includes a section in The PLAN about how to align your tasks with your cycle weeks. This can be really helpful to consider if some projects or project steps are going to require more physical, social, or emotional energy than others!

I spend some time at the beginning/end of each month setting up the playbook for the coming month. Then, when I do my weekly time budget, I grab my playbook and see what I’m hoping to accomplish that week. I might need to migrate tasks that didn’t get finished the previous week. Some of them might need to get moved to “never mind” status. But this does help me keep much better track of goals throughout the year!

Do You Need a Playbook?

Because I’m not big on the reflection questions (yet), I could probably have a similar result with any old notebook. And you could too! But I have gotten a ton of value from Kendra’s work over the years, and I like getting to support her. Plus, they’re just so cute and cheery! So no, you don’t need a playbook. But they sure are fun.

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Have you tried Kendra’s playbooks? How do you keep track of annual goals throughout the year? Are you a sucker for a cute planning product even if you’re going to ignore the prompts like me? Let me know in the comments! I love hearing from you!

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