The Magic Question
Kendra Adachi’s book The Lazy Genius Way is my favourite self-help book of the past few years when it comes to all things house and home.
The whole philosophy of the book is the idea of being lazy about things that don’t matter to you and being a genius about the things that do. This might sound too simple but after reading the book I’m a big fan of the concept and love how Kendra gives so many real life examples of how to use each tip.
In the book she discusses 13 Lazy Genius Principles. Thirteen different things that can make life so much easier. I learned something valuable from each chapter. Whilst you don’t need to read the whole book cover to cover or even in order I would recommend doing so because some of the steps go really well together.
The principles that most stuck with me are: Decide Once and The Magic Question. Decide once is self explanatory. Make the decision once, so at the start of the week you could decide what you are going to wear/ cook/ eat etc – all in advance. It’s about reducing decision fatigue and simplifying decisions that need to be made.
But what is the Magic Question? It’s all about making life easier later. The actual question is:
What can I do now to make life easier later?
Now this doesn’t mean what can I do today to make life easier in 10 years’ time (although if you apply this principle daily then in 10 years’ time I’m sure your life would radically change!)
It’s about eliminating pain points from daily life as much as possible to help life run smoothly.
Example: I hate cooking when I’m stressed or in a weird headspace. So recently I started asking myself the magic question:
What can I do now to make cooking dinner later easier?
Answer: Do prep work at lunchtime.
Result: I now prep some part of the day’s dinner in advance. This can involve chopping up vegetables (the MOST boring task of all) or cutting up meat & allowing it to marinade in a bowl for the afternoon.
The amazing thing is that when I’m doing veg prep at lunch time it’s one super small task but if I’m doing that same task at dinner time it turns into a major stress because I’m nearly always trying to do 1000 things at once with very little time available.
You can literally ‘magic question’ anything. Here are some ideas I started exploring:
How can you make working out later easier? Lay out the mat and clothes in advance.
How can you make studying easier later? Put the books out on the desk OPEN at the page you will start on in today’s session. You can also decide in advance what your treat for a successful study session will be.
How can you make cleaning the house easier later? Put the exact products you need for each room in a mini basket in that room. Again, you could also decide in advance what the reward for cleaning could be (for me this is an episode of my favourite TV show).
How can you make planning easier later? Keep all your planning resources in one box or section of your desk and that way they are readily available for weekly planning sessions etc.
What things can you see yourself using the magic question for?
I’d love to know what interesting uses you think of!