The Lazy Genius Podcast - #405 - What’s Saving My Life Right Now

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Man, I love these episodes. I love lists so that’s obviously a blast, but intentionally looking for the good things, the life-saving things, the joyful things in my life right now is something I hope I never stop doing. So today I have a list of ten things, a pretty mixed bag per usual. What brings me life and saves my life is going to be different from yours. But I will try and do a good job of sharing why that thing is on the list so that you might better understand why something is on your personal list. Helpful Companion Links Order my new book The PLAN or ask your library to consider carrying a copy. Book Buddy app Messy by Olivia Dean (YouTube playlist) Cashmere Throw Blanket by Quince Cookish by Christopher Kimball (affiliate link)  I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God by Erin Moon (affiliate link) @justmacrose on Instagram Tiny little stirring spoons (affiliate link) Get on the list for the Latest Lazy Letter. Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! (Affiliate links) Download a transcript of this episode. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that. And enjoy. Via rail, love the way. 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 405. What's saving my life right now? Man, I love these episodes. I do this every season and it's such a fun practice for me. I love lists, so that's obviously a blast, but intentionally looking for the good things, the life-saving things, the joyful things in my life right now is something I hope I never stopped doing long after this podcast is done. So today I have a list of 10 things, a pretty mixed bag per usual, and also per usual. This list is not meant to be prescriptive for you. What brings me life and saves my life is going to be different from you. But I will try and do a good job of sharing why that thing is on the list

so that you might better understand why something is on your personal list. All right, let's jump in in no particular order. The first thing is my book buddy app. Oh my gosh. Okay, so I mentioned this in The Ladies, Lazy Letter a couple of months ago. A great newsletter, if I do say so myself, which you can sign up for in the link in the show notes or on our website at the lazy genius collective.com slash join. So, if you have been around here for five minutes, you likely know that I love reading. It is my favorite hobby. I collect books like it's my job. And there is very little in this life that gives me more pleasure than reading books. For years, I have kept track of what I read on Trello. You can read about

that if you search lazy genius Trello or you can click the link in the show notes to the episode. How do you, it's actually not an episode. It's a blog post. How to use Trello to track your reading. I still track reading the exact same way that I did when I wrote that post like eight years ago. Nothing has changed. But I do read a lot. I collect a lot. And I'm a mood reader. That means that it's getting harder and harder for me to go to my bookshelf and know what to read because I can't keep track of what kinds of books are on my shelf because there are so many.

For a while, I tried to shelve them by genre. But that didn't always work because I'd like run out of room. on the dystopian shelf or whatever, or I just wouldn't remember what something was about. Basically, reading from my shelves became a struggle because it just got so big. I didn't know what anything was anymore. It was a good problem to have, but still a problem. Enter book buddy. Oh my gosh.

Okay, so before Christmas, I was served to post on Instagram when I was still on Instagram about someone using one of those like scanning guns from the library in their own home. to scan all their books. And then the info went straight to an app. I was like, there are apps that do that. So I don't have a library scanner because I thought, well, I don't know that I need that specifically, even though that would be fun, that I spent an entire evening researching book organization apps because like, holy moly, yes, please. And I settled on book buddy because the enthusiastic reviewers, they sounded like me and read like me. And they used the app the way that I would want to. So I, gave it a try. Y'all, when I say that this thing has brought me tremendous joy and it has saved

my reading life and I use it every single day. I am so deeply serious. I spent an entire day over Christmas break inputting all the books on my physical shelves and now I'm slowly working my way through reading lists from the past eight years, all stored in Trello. And then I will input everything that's currently unread that's on my Kindle, which is also a lot. So I'm categorizing all these titles by genre, red status, star ratings, who recommended the book to me, whether I own it, or if I lent it to someone or I borrowed it from the library. I love how visual the app is because you can see like all the book covers in so many different orders. Like you can sort like you would any list, but you can, it's just the book covers. So I love how visual it is.

and then since I'm a mood reader, I can know what mood I'm in, right? I can just go to that genre in the BookBuddy app, click around the descriptions of the books that are in that genre because the descriptions are automatically inputted when I scan the barcode. And then I just choose what book I want. I go to my shelf and I choose it. Now that I have BookBuddy, I have organized my like physical TBR bookshelves in alphabetical order by author name, which I've never really.

felt like I could do because there was no way that I can like figure out what a book is by the author's name. You know, that just that organization didn't work for me. But I wanted it to be that way. So now I feel like I have this beautifully organized library on both my phone and in my house. And it's making reading my physical books so much more fun. I'm trying to read way more for my shelf this year. I'll get to that later and depend less on like a library holds and Kindle books, since both of those things, library holds and kindle books, get me in ruts. They get me in reading ruts or they make me distracted more easily because I'm on my phone. So this app has been amazing on all counts.

Ten stars. Highly recommend I will return to it forever and ever and ever. Okay, the second thing that is saving my life right now is the album messy by Olivia Dean. If I wouldn't get in trouble for like copyright things, I'd play you. some of her music, but this album has been on repeat for several weeks, and I have no intention of stopping. Olivia Dean is, she's really young, but she sings like she's lived a lot of life. Her music feels like it's like moody oranges and teals and like you should be wearing like a flowy vintage dress in the desert at sunset. She's got some Adele vibes and that there's

like a timelessness to her music, but she also has like a lot of modern sass. every song hits. The order of the album is spot on. Her voice is like silk and messy as an album. It is safe for little ears. I can't vouch for her entire catalog, which is actually pretty small, I think, because this is her first like full album. But messy has been played during dinner for my family many, many times. The only possible hiccup for the tiniest of tiny children is that she says, me and my sexy problems in the first line of the first song. So if your kids have eagle ears and they don't yet know what sexy is, that's like the only warning needed. Otherwise, clear as a bird. Also, I could be a florist. The song I Could Be a Florist is one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard in my whole actual life. So, number two, the album, messy by Olivia Dean. Okay, number three, this is going to sound like I'm very bougie and also might sound like an ad. While I am a tiny bit bougie in certain areas, this is less bougie than it sounds. and is also not an ad, even though it's a product from a brand that I have advertised as an ad on

the show before. But it is the cashmere throw blanket from Quince. You guys, this thing is like my blankie, like I'm a toddler. The blanket is the ribbed knit cashmere throw from Quince. And while it is $140, which is a lot for a blanket in general, it is half of what other cashmere blankets like it would cost. And this thing is magical. It's magical. It's so lightweight, ridiculously soft. And it has changed how I sleep. This is why it's saving my life. So I like to be in a cold room when I sleep. But I also want to feel cozy. And my formula for that for so long was to make the room cold, put on like long pajama pants and a cozy sweatshirt and socks, even though that particular choice makes some of you think I'm an animal. I am not. And then I sleep the night away in

bliss. Well, perimenopause has changed things for me. And now I wake up sweating through my PJs, like a higher number of nights than I ever thought I would say. You know that feeling when you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to like pee or you have to shed some layers because you've been sweating? And you know that if you moved around too much, you're going to wake up, you know, like you're still kind of half asleep, but you don't want to wake yourself up too much. That's what was happening to me most nights. I would wake up sweating. I would have to shed some layers that were required when I went to sleep. And then I would wake myself up too much, trying to get comfy again. And then I couldn't go back to sleep. Plus, I never felt like I could hit the right temperature

anyway. Like, this is why I'm so obsessed with this blanket. I sleep in the amount of pajamas that won't leave me sweating at 2 a.m. But in the meantime, I put my quince cashm. right on top of my body, like under my regular covers. I'm serious when I say it's like my own blankie. It keeps me warm. And if I need to adjust the temperature under the covers, all I have to do is just move the blanket. That's all. It has made my sleep better, but also my enjoyment of sleep better. Like I actively look forward to getting cozy in my bed with my blankie. It's worth every penny. And I would pay it again if I had to. But I don't because it's still as great as the day I got it. It's amazing quality. Again, this is not an ad.

The irony is that there's about to be an ad break. This is the part of the episode where I'm about to put an ad break, and I will die if a quince ad shows up here. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw,

a special series on how our podcast, public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay. The fourth thing that's saving my life right now is the cookbook, cookish, cookish. I have many beloved cookbooks on my cookbook shelf, and they will remain there. I love them. But there is something about this book, Cookish, from Christopher Kimball at Milk Street, that just checks all the boxes for my family. I heard about this book from Shannon Martin, who loves to eat and cook the way that I do. She appreciates big flavor just as much as she does little effort because, you know, life is life. She mentioned it in her newsletter as a go-to

cookbook, and so I decided to try it. Dude, usually when I flip through a cookbook, I'll mark like, I don't know, eight, ten recipes that I'm mildly optimistic to try, but it's rare to find a cookbook where the majority of the recipes I know we're going to be hits for like my entire very picky family, or at least three or four of them, this cookbook was like, oh my gosh, what is happening? So the way that I tend to meal plan for dinner is that I will plan one or two weeks at a time, usually choosing only one to two new recipes every two or three weeks. Most of that is because I don't have a ton of new recipes I get excited about making. And I know that my kids, you know, are not going to like automatically reject them because

that's tough for my psyche to choose something that I know that they're kind of going to hate. But then the other reason is because new recipes just require more attention and time, right? Two things I rarely have at the end of the day. Cookish has over 200 recipes of just really accessible food with a big flavor, but not a ton of time required. It's just how I want to cook. So after reading through some of the book and having like dozens of recipes that I wanted to try, I picked one. It was a Moroccan-inspired chicken.

It's made with some spices that are familiar to my family, but in, ratios that are not, so it tasted a little different. I served it almost the same way that I would serve, say, like, chicken shawarma, but not exactly. Enough was similar to make my kids not freak out, but enough was different to make me feel like we were trying something new. And they all liked it. Like, I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. My mom stayed for dinner that night and she loved it too. I do wonder a little if they were performing a tiny bit for their nana, or they were a bit thrown by my dinner time optimism and enthusiasm, which I rarely have. And they wanted to meet my energy. I don't know. I have no idea. I just know they liked it. So I grabbed the cookish book at that time,

like during dinner. I grabbed the book. I showed it to them. And I was like, it's from this book, you guys. And there are so many more that I think we should dry. I was like a game show host. And they were into it. So that weekend, I made a meal plan for the next couple of weeks. And I included three cookish recipes on our dry erase calendar that the kids always look at when they want to know it's for dinner. Not only did they like the food, they weren't thrown off by new recipes on the board because they know it's coming from cookish. Like they kind of trust the cookish book. Y'all, there's no such thing as a magic cookbook. Every family is different, right? There's no single cookbook that works. But for my family in this season, Cookish is winning. It's a little

magical and I'm pretty over the mood about it. Okay. So the fifth thing that is saving my life right now is very different than the Cookish cookbook. It is taking Instagram off my fun. So I talked about this in this most recent month's monthly newsletter called the latest lazy letter. So I won't go into quite as much detail here as I did there. But in the middle of January, I realized that I was just giving way too much of my energy and my piece to Instagram and frankly to anything based on an algorithm that refreshes itself. Now, it hasn't always been like that. It hasn't always been like that. Instagram, has been a really delightful place for me and has not caused a lot of turmoil and the boundaries have

been fairly simple to set. But it has changed and it is now a difficult place to be. Instagram has become the wolf that keeps wanting to blow my house down. Sometimes it's fine and I can take it and I, you know, might even get some good out of it. But most of the time, it's just really not fine. Now, a primary issue for me is that I am on Instagram's timeline. You know, I'm at the mercy of whatever the algorithm chooses to show me when I open the app. And then I stay there, even though I have other things that I should be or would rather be doing. I, like many people, have been pretty addicted to tapping the app, you know, over time. In fact, the reason I deleted it was because I had told myself to not open it.

Instagram on a particular day because I was actively making a boundary to just not go online on a particular day. But I tapped the app anyway because I'm so used to doing it. Right. Even when I moved it to other parts of my phone, like it still showed up in the main swipe down search bar thing. And I would tap it. And I would get out of it what I didn't want to get. So I had to take it off. I had to delete it from the phone. The only time it has not been deleted over the last month was last, last week when I put it on my phone to upload a post about my friend Aaronman's new book called I've Got Questions, the spiritual practice of having it out with God. I posted that and then I deleted the app again. So I respond to DM still. I do that on my work computer like a couple days a week.

And then whenever I want to post other content, I'll just I'll just figure it out. But I'll probably reinstall the app, post the content and then take it down again. Instagram no longer works the it used to for me as a just as a viable content creation tool. And a lot of other folks in this job feel the same way. It just doesn't work the same way as it did. So I don't really want to spend my time on something that is hard and also doesn't work very well, right? From a business standpoint, that's not very wise. The podcast works well, books work well, email works well. Instagram doesn't so much. And personally, I have gotten so much life back having it off of my phone. Now, this is not a choice for everyone, nor is it a choice for forever for me, but it is a choice for me right now. I don't

know how long it will last, but I cannot tell you how much lighter I feel, not having something that refreshes with a million new pieces of things for me to see directly on my phone. Now, it took me a while to get used to. It absolutely did those first few days. Like I had a tiny bit of and I did not realize how much I depended on the app, even just in little fits and starts. Even during times I thought I wasn't really depending on it. So my personal boundaries around it were not enough as they were. So I had to take another step. Again, you don't have to take that step. I'm not saying that. And even if you did take the step, it might not impact you the same way it has me. I don't know. But I am really grateful for the way that it has impacted me.

so that's number five. These next few will go a bit quicker, I think. All right. Number six is desperately ironic given number five because it is an Instagram account. So when I log into Instagram to respond to DMs, like once or twice a week on the, you know, on the desktop, I was like, what's the word on the desktop? I actively go and check this account for anything that I missed. And the account is just Mac Rose. So J-U-S-T-M-A-C-R-O-E. So J-S-T-M-A-C-R-O. S-E. Mac is a personal stylist. Now there are a lot of people doing great things out there for style and confidence and helping us all get dressed in the morning. And I'm so grateful for all of them. Something about the way that Mac describes style and shape and how to make formulas, it just clicks

with my brain. I have learned so much from her. It's crazy. One reel that she made in particular was how often we try and minimize the more voluminous parts of our bodies. Say like if your midsection is, you know, bigger, you hold more volume in your midsection. You're technically an apple shape. Her take is, like, let's chill with the fruits. But her take is, if you want a little more balance to your overall shape, don't minimize your existing volume because that's difficult to do. And it also feels like it's seeing your body is deficient in some way. So instead, add more volume on another part of your body to balance it out. She talks about, like, stacking shapes on top of each other. Like, so much about shapes. It's just so basic and interesting and accessible to me.

So she talks about stacking shapes on top of each other, how to shop your own closet, how to kind of teeter-totter, a balanced outfit with pieces that don't look like they would make sense together. I have put together a couple of outfits recently, just in the last couple weeks, after hearing Max teaching and like really absorbing it in my head, like I hear her in my closet. And they are outfits from pieces I've had for years and never would have thought to use to together. Like I'm that person that's like, well, this doesn't work for me because I just, I just wear the same things all the time. It's just really transformed how I get dressed. Her advice is practical, so easy to apply, and it makes a difference in my everyday style.

So that's just Mac Rose. All right. Number seven, I kind of already mentioned this. And this shows that I didn't do a good job of like putting these 10 things in a particular order. but number seven is prioritizing reading the physical books in my library. Y'all, I have so many. I have over 200. It's so many. And I added eight just this week and another 10 are on their way. Now, there are many reasons why that is that we do not have to get into right now.

But I just love books. I love having them in my house and therefore having them quickly in my hands. I decorate with books. They are my hobby. They are how I connect with friends. like I pass them along when I finish them. It's just a whole thing. But the overwhelm of my personal library was keeping me from reading what I had because I didn't know what I had. Now that I have book buddy, I know what I have. But really, reading physical books the last couple of months has been

such a delight for me. I have enjoyed the experience of reading more than I have in a while. I have a book and just about every room of the house. I'm always bringing one with me wherever I go. I think the act of having reading close by, but not depending on my phone or my Kindle, just for this season, has been so good for my soul. I'm just going more analog on purpose, and it's been really helpful for me. So physical books for the win. Okay. Number eight is also reading, but a different kind.

It is my daily Bible reading because I'm reading the Bible in a year using one of those like special Bibles that has everything printed out, like you buy it on purpose. It's a Bible and your Bible. And it's bound by date, right? But the great thing about this, I mean, it is reading the Bible. But it's really the text group that I'm in with my three friends that I'm doing this with. We're all reading it together. And it's so nice to ask questions of each other or say just like how cuckoo pants a story is.

Or we shared like how we struggle with this really hard thing that we just read and trying to process it. And, you know, I love the Bible. I do. It can also be like a real tough hang. I told my kids that yesterday. they left the house for youth group. And it was like a Bible study night for youth group, which they do like once a month. And I said, hey, just so you know, like the Bible's cuckoo-pings crazy. Like it's nuts. And so if you hit something in there that you're like, this is wild times.

Don't be afraid to say it's wild times. Like the Bible's wild. That's why we have Aaron's book. I've got questions because it's wild times over there. So it's nice to have, I have really loved having these trusted, beautiful friends that I can text this to. Like every single day. It's just been really life-giving and lovely. Number nine are these little tiny stirring spoons that I got on mine. They are long golden stirring spoons that I use in my coffee and I stir together like a sauce for dinner or I use it to stir honey into yogurt for a snack.

I don't know what it is about these things, but they bring me tremendous adjoic. They're beautiful to look at so much so that I have them in like a little jar on my counter, with my other coffee stuff, so they're out. But they're also really functional in a way I did not anticipate. The long handle and small spoon, they just make for like a lovely stirring experience that feels different from a regular spoon. I can't explain it. I guess there's some sort of physics thing at play, but I don't know what it is. Regardless, I love them. And you can get a pack of four for like seven or eight dollars. I use multiple spoons every single day. I love them. I love them. And then the 10th thing that saving my life is that January is finally over.

It was just the longest month ever. And sometimes it's good to name that you got through a tough season. There's a fine balance between being honest about how you're feeling in a season and also not wishing it away at its own expense. I tried to not do that with January, but also holy moly, get out of here. It was just too much at once and I barely made it. But I did. It is February now. I have never been happier to see February in my whole actual life. Sometimes the turn of the calendar page is in fact what we need. So to recap, the 10 things saving my life right now are the book buddy app.

It's the pro version, by the way. The free version only lets you have 50 titles. Are you kidding me? The album, messy by Olivia Dean. My Cashmere Blanket from Quince. The Cookbook, Cookish, by Christopher Kimball. taking Instagram off my phone, logging into Instagram on my computer specifically to look at just Mac Rose's content,

prioritizing reading my physical books, my group text with my Bible in a year friends, my tiny golden stirring spoons, and the fact that it's no longer January. I hope you have fun making your own list. And that is what's saving my life right now. Now, most of the things that save our lives, as we just learned are pretty small. And that's a beautiful thing. You don't need big sweeps of new

ideas or systems to make everything better. That rarely works anyway. So in the spirit of starting small, maybe something that might save your life a little right now is using a lazy genius principle this week on purpose. Like pick one of the 13 that is on purpose for you right now. See how it might show up in your life even just this week. Start Small is one of those 13 principles. And if you need a refresher on all of them, you can check out my first book, The Lazy Genius Way. I recently added a decide once to our life of I go grocery shopping on Mondays after all my meetings are over, because we have stopped doing as much fresh things delivered because it's just not starting out so great. I've had to do too many returns. And so I go to the grocery store now. And,

And I have decided once that it's on Mondays after my meetings are over. And it's been weirdly helpful to add that little small anchor to our life rhythm. So check out the lazy genius way or you can pull out your copy that you already have for a reminder of the 13 principles and just try one this week. All right, before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week it's Abby Nois. And also I cannot say Nois without my husband being a brow and being like Nois. Sorry, Abby. Abby says, my decide once slash house rule is about the library. We go to the library on Fridays

after school and each kid is allowed to check out as many books as their age in years. The kindergartner could get up to five books. The third grader can get up to eight books and I could get up to 40, which hasn't happened yet, L.O.L. Beyond that, I don't police their choices. It's baked into our weekly routine so I don't need to remember to make it happen. And it's a nice outing to have of on the calendar each week. I love this Abby. Simple frameworks for repeated choices can go such a long way. And I imagine that the first library trip after a birthday is kind of fun because that person gets to add another book to their pile. That's so fun. Also, I'm going to need you to check back in when you actually do check out 40 books at a time because that is amazing. So thank you for sharing Abby and

congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. This episode is hosted by me, Kendra Adachi, 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. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra.

I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch.

I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.