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00:00:01
Lisa Woodruff: Escaping the Quicksand of Disorganization
59 Plays5 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with organization expert and educator Lisa Woodruff, founder of Organize 365 and author of Escaping Quicksand, about a quiet assumption many people carry for years: if your home feels chaotic, the problem must be you.
Lisa’s work began with closets, paperwork, and clutter. Over time, she noticed something deeper. The people she worked with were not lazy, careless, or unmotivated. They were operating without systems. Schools teach students how to manage classrooms. Businesses build processes to run operations. Yet households, which function as complex economic entities, are expected to run on instinct alone.
The conversation explores how overwhelm builds slowly. Not because of a lack of effort, but because of invisible decisions accumulating over time. Many people spend their days reacting to whatever is urgent, cleaning the same spaces repeatedly, and carrying dozens of unfinished tasks in their heads. Without a structure to hold those responsibilities, the mental load keeps growing.
They also discuss the idea that organization is not a personality trait. It is a skill. And like any skill, it can be taught. Systems externalize decisions, reduce cognitive strain, and create capacity for the moments when life becomes more demanding, such as caring for aging parents, managing multiple households, or navigating unexpected crises.
At its core, this is a conversation about relief. About permission. And about recognizing that feeling overwhelmed is often a signal that the system is missing, not that the person is failing.
Topics Covered
- Why overwhelm often comes from missing systems, not lack of discipline
- The difference between housework and household organization
- How invisible decisions create mental load over time
- Why organization must evolve across different life stages
- The concept of “Swiss cheese organizing” and order of operations
- How external systems reduce cognitive stress
- The role of executive function in managing a household
- Why people keep reorganizing the same spaces without making progress
- The hidden economic impact of running a household
- How organization creates capacity for unexpected life events
- Why organization is a learnable skill, not a personality trait
- The importance of organizing spaces that support you, not impress others
- How systems allow others to help when life becomes overwhelming
Episode Links
- Check out Lisa’s upcoming book, Escaping Quicksand: https://organize365.com/escapingquicksand/
- Listen to the Organize 365 podcast: https://organize365.com/podcast-landing-page/
- Learn more about Organize 365: https://organize365.com
- Follow Lisa on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/organize365/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Lisa, thank you for joining me today. Where does today's recording find you? Eric, thank you so much for having me. um I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I'm recording from my office slash warehouse.
00:00:16
Speaker
Would you mind telling me a bit about yourself, Lisa? I like to tell you how old I am, which is something that women don't usually tell you. So how I describe myself now is a 54-year-old woman who lives in Cincinnati.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm a wife. I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother. i'm a CEO. I'm about to finish my Ph.D., Um, and I am someone who over time thought I would never have enough time. Like when I was in the active childbearing years, I thought there's never going to be enough time for me to do all of these things I want to do. I'm very passionate and I have a lot of ideas. And now that I'm in my fifties, I just want to tell all the women who are still in their thirties and forties, like there will be time more time than you can even imagine. So much time that I decided to go and get my PhD in my fifties. What are you studying for your PhD? Um,
00:01:04
Speaker
I'm just about done. it It'll be an applied psychology um degree, and I'm studying housework, household management, and how executive function, how we support executive function in households.
00:01:17
Speaker
We don't, by the way. So, uh. As a teacher, I've developed some products and courses that as a teacher I would use to support a student in the classroom, and I support household managers in the household that way. And so now I'm going to bring those into academia, do some research, and see if we can find support that what I've created in the household works similarly to what we create in classrooms.
00:01:39
Speaker
Having read... you know, your prior book and now your upcoming book. And I liked both of them. I i want that to be on the record. it As I said before, we started recording.
00:01:53
Speaker
What you do and what you talk about is very much of interest to me. I think that organization of a number of different kinds, whether it's notes, whether it's paperwork, time management, if you want to factor that into the form of organization,
00:02:14
Speaker
All of these things, I think a lot of people could benefit from. And so as you're talking about your PhD, and then I'm also thinking about what do I know about you already? Or how might I describe you to someone else?
00:02:31
Speaker
One of the words or labels that I would put on you or your work is organization. And so I'm curious, How much, if there's a Venn diagram overlap, perhaps, or where it is that organization fits into your doctoral research?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yes. As far as doctoral research goes, it is not in there at all because there's not a lot of academic research on physical organization at home.
00:03:05
Speaker
So hoarding, yes, or time management or executive function, but like figure you physical organization at home, it's really, really hard to find basically any ah academic level research on that. So it it's not part of my doctoral research. It's definitely part of my life experience. It's how I've identified myself up until recently as primarily an organizer, someone who was able to be organized or got other people organized. And that's why I've had success. um Actually, the only thing I found in academia about home organization was in one study.
00:03:39
Speaker
They called household organization an optional hobby undertaken by women. And I was like, or it's where exponential time comes from. Like, I just like i about ah lost my mind. It's it's not studied.
00:03:53
Speaker
it's It's not studied in academia. Yeah. So it sounds to me then like there's been an an evolution perhaps in your thinking and also what you offer. But am I correct in thinking that earlier in this part of your career or life, I guess, that are earlier in this part of your business, let's say that the, the label or the idea of organization was a major focus.
00:04:23
Speaker
So I say that I'm 54. And the reason I say that I'm 54 and that I'm getting a PhD is to your point. We as entrepreneurs can start companies and create great transformations for our customers.
00:04:38
Speaker
However, academia is a much longer lens. Like things that happen in academia last from generation to generation and you can build on previous researchers' work. So the researcher that I identify with the most is Lillian Gilbreth. And she was an economist. She was a psychologist, but she really looked at efficiencies in the home. She's the cheaper by the dozen lady. Yeah.
00:05:00
Speaker
She invented the petal trash can in the kitchen and the putting organization in the door of the refrigerator and the kitchen triangle. These were all invented by her and her husband. And this was back in the 30s and 40s. And since then, we've been talking about household organization more as a male-female dichotomy in marriages and not from an economic or a product productivity lens.
00:05:24
Speaker
But if I go back to my childhood, I'm the oldest grandchild on both sides of the family, the oldest great grandchild. And my dad had a big Irish Catholic family. So a lot of his siblings were still in grade school when I was born. And so I was just part of that big mix. I got to see how that family ran. My mom was from a Protestant English household, very different, you know, same cities. They were High school sweethearts, I got to see how that family ran much smaller. My grandmother was an only child. Her father was an only child. So, you know, that was a different household, different household economics. Just everything was different about those households.
00:05:59
Speaker
And then starting at the age of 12, I started babysitting. I babysat for primarily doctors' families. So wives usually were um at home, but they weren't really stay-at-home moms. They were very active in the civic community, prior professionals, but they were doing a lot of civic things. And so they were busy, and I was watching their children.
00:06:16
Speaker
And I really took on a lot of ownership in those households. I'd go on vacations with them. I'd grab all the presents at Christmastime. One of them counseled me in in my 20s on how to remodel their house for productivity purposes. So they really saw me like as an integral part in those households. I went to school and I got a degree in early childhood and elementary education.
00:06:36
Speaker
What I really wanted to do was own a corporate daycare center and provide support to women who are working in a corporate daycare. But i didn't end up doing that. I ended up being a preschool teacher and kindergarten teacher. And then we adopted our children and I lived the best decade of my life as a stay-at-home mom. Like that's all I ever wanted to be was a stay-at-home mom. Did that for a decade, earned some extra money on the side in a couple of different direct sales companies. And then I was approaching my 40s.
00:07:00
Speaker
And as I approached my 40s, just, you know, the overwhelmingness of life or having lived a couple of decades of an adult kind of caught up with me. You know, all the financial decisions we'd made in our 20s to buy a house, put our kids in private school, things like that were compounding. Our income wasn't keeping up with those um things. My parents got divorced.
00:07:21
Speaker
My father passed away, and I ended up with my sister settling that estate. And then we had the 2008-2009 economic recession. As you know, I'm old, so we had to live through that recession.
00:07:32
Speaker
And that really impacted our income as well. And I found myself turning 40. I'd always been organized or able to organize other people. And what I found was i was the most disorganized I'd ever been.
00:07:46
Speaker
I didn't really know how to go forward from there because all of my organization tricks didn't work anymore. And that's when I started to realize that how you organize in your 20s, in your 30s is different than the organization you need in your 40s, 50s, 70s.
00:08:03
Speaker
As I started to organize 365, the year that I turned 40, I started doing in-home organization in Cincinnati, Ohio. And I've organized hundreds of homes. And it was then that I started to see that, oh so if you're an empty nester, your household actually functions differently than if you're a stay-at-home mom or if you are a single woman or if you are a widowed man. you know And how these different households function actually is more than just organization. Organization isn't a one and done. It is a continual reordering of your spaces, your mindsets, and your processes throughout your entire lifetime. And I was like, oh, game on. This is a lot of fun.
00:08:40
Speaker
And another reason I say that I'm 54 is because I've been through menopause now. and Once you go through menopause as a woman, you realize there's not a lot of research being done on menopause. okay There's a lot not a lot of people you could talk to until they've been through it. And so since I've been through my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and since I've been through so many houses, both in my childhood as a teacher and as an in-home organizer, I have seen hundreds of households and how hundreds of households run, whereas most people have seen maybe a handful.
00:09:10
Speaker
Your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, a couple of close friends. You really don't see inside of people's households the way that I do. And so I'm able to now really um look back that organization is definitely part of it. But the biggest thing I see now in hindsight is household managers have no systems at all.
00:09:29
Speaker
So when you go to school, you've got a locker, you've got a teacher, you've got a curriculum, you've got books, you've got textbooks, you've got a curriculum. You go to work, you have a desk, you have a computer, you have internet, you have a system. When you move out of your childhood home into your household, you go, guess I better go to Lowe's because I don't own anything. I need to go buy everything I need to do everything I need. And you have to create all those systems yourself. And it really is... um I see that as the biggest problem in the world is that we're all cobbling together our own systems that live in our brains. And so how do we even work with other people when we get overwhelmed to lighten the load? We can't because the systems we created in our head are individual to us. It's not like we are doing our taxes. We could go to CPA and help with our taxes. We're running our household. How we run our household is different than how everybody else runs their household.
00:10:18
Speaker
Early on, a focus of your work was on paper organization, correct? Yes. So along the way, in the six years that I did in-home organizing in Cincinnati, okay, I'll tell you why I got into paper. Well, number one, I used to be a Creative Memories scrapbook consultant for 17 years. I actually still am. But I would help people make photos, photo albums. And I organized hundreds of albums. I personally made over 300 albums, including White House photos and everything. I love it. So when we were organizing people's homes, there were three different things that we organized. We organized the physical space, you know, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the family rooms. You would organize the storage areas and photos.
00:10:59
Speaker
And then you would also organize the paper. So as we were organizing all these rooms, You'd organize the nightstand, there'd be receipts in there. You'd organize in the kitchen, there'd be a junk drawer with papers in there. You'd go into the storage area, there'd be a file cabinet there. You'd go into the laundry room and there were bags full of paper shoved in the laundry room.
00:11:17
Speaker
Do you feel seen? Because everybody has these. Like we were like, oh, I'm just gonna clean out the car and then we shoved this here and then we forgot where'd that paper go. And so I noticed all of these papers And I would pull those together. And as my business grew, um I started to add organizers. And so I would have the organizers organize the physical spaces of the house because they were very easy to teach. Like, okay, here's how you organize this. And then they would go do that. The paper was really hard. They would always leave the paper to me because they never could understand how I under how i organized the paper.
00:11:47
Speaker
And I didn't mind it because I was in my 40s. I wasn't very... fit so I could sit on my hiney and I could organize paper. So that was great. I wasn't like cleaning out the attic or the storage. So I was like happy with my um my role. And a couple of years into organizing, I realized that just like with photos, we could actually take the paper out of people's homes and I could actually organize that in my basement.
00:12:08
Speaker
So I started collecting all the paper while we were doing the job, bringing it to my house. I'd organize it with my organizers at my house. And then I wasn't in the client's homes as long. And as I started doing that in the basement, I remember one day I had five different organizers. We had five different projects going on in the basement. I was managing them all like the teacher that I am in the classroom.
00:12:26
Speaker
And I was teaching my organizers how to see paper the way that I did. And I saw it like a teacher would as in subjects. You had financial paper, you had medical paper, you had paper related to the household if you were gonna sell the household. You had operational paperwork, like how your household runs is different than everyone else's, which I kind of looked at like your lesson plans that you would have for your house. If you had kids, there was kids memorabilia paperwork and then there was also kids medical paperwork if they had an individualized education plan and needed extra support at school.
00:12:56
Speaker
And so I could easily take all these papers and I could turn them into binders, I could turn them into things. And I realized what I did was i I created lesson plans for your paper. I created like a course in doing your paper. And once my organizers were trained, they could go and they could just go in any home and they could recognize these categories of paper and organize them into these binders and be done, you know, lickety split.
00:13:17
Speaker
And no other organizer had really figured this out. Everyone else does file cabinets. And I did file cabinets at first, too. But the problem with the fire cabinet is you can't evacuate in case of a fire or an earthquake.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I had clients and, you know, on all the coasts that were evacuating and they'd organize their file cabinet the way I said to and they couldn't evacuate the paper. And I thought that's a very bad solution as an organizer. So now we do binders.
00:13:43
Speaker
What was the experience like or how did you come upon the decision or the realization that organization, you know, maybe but maybe it's not even an organization as much as it is the ability to see paper in the way that you saw it was a learnable skill rather than something that was just built into you, Lisa.
00:14:06
Speaker
When you ad hoc create your systems to run your household, as every single person has done, Your system is your system. And then an emergency happens. So you become sick. Someone else becomes sick. You have to manage multiple households. Now you've got to figure out how to reconcile these two systems.
00:14:25
Speaker
For me, that happened when my father got sick and I was his power of attorney. Needed to do a bunch of things for about nine months. And then he ultimately passed away and I needed to settle the estate. We think that all the information we need is on paper somewhere in our house. You know that file cabinet, right?
00:14:39
Speaker
My dad's file cabinet had golf scores and car catalogs in it. That was not helpful. I never got into his computer. So I had to go on a scavenger hunt to find all the bills in order to pay them. Like I had to figure out how to recreate his life from scratch. So a lot of what we need in order to be part of healthcare, in order to settle an estate, in order to sell a house, in order to file a tax return, in order to advocate for your kids in a school setting, you need paperwork.
00:15:08
Speaker
in that setting that substantiates what you're saying with your mouth. Because you know what you're saying and you are correct in what you're saying, but no one believes what you're saying unless you can show them a little piece of paper. Hence why I'm getting a PhD. Yes, my thinking has changed in getting the PhD, but a lot of what I'm talking about or what I want to study was an idea before I had the PhD. I just have a scientific rigor behind myself now. ah But a lot of what I'm saying is not changed from before I got the PhD. But now I'll be taken seriously and be able to publish in different places that I can't when you don't have a PhD.
00:15:38
Speaker
who So in organizing that paper, I realized that people were learning how to organize their physical spaces on their own. So I was doing in-home organizing and I had two clients call in the same week and cancel my services. They said, we don't need you to come back. I said, oh, I've offended them or they ran out of money. was like, you know, do you want reschedule? And they both said, no, we finished the job over the weekend. We paid attention to the questions you were asking us. And we just, we learned how to do it ourselves. And I was like, this is terrible because I need earn earn money. And then I thought, this is great.
00:16:11
Speaker
I'm a teacher. If this is learnable, how do we teach this skill? I mean, lots of people can figure out how to organize their own closet because there are so many resources on organizing your closet. There just aren't resources on every single space in your household. So I set out then to create an online curriculum to organize every space in your household.
00:16:28
Speaker
So physical spaces are one thing. Paper is the other. So then I wrote that book, The Paper Solution, for how do you organize all these different kinds of paper. I want to get to your new book and also, you know, some of your more recent thinking, but when I read your first book, i I was thinking about the method that you developed. And then also I'm forgetting about the name of, I guess the product, but you will tell me I'm i'm certain that you sell and the approach.
00:17:01
Speaker
Uh, but i was thinking about, as I was reading your book, how you thought about paper organization. And even, think that there's, there's a relation, if not some implication in what you're saying about helping those organizers see paper in the same way that you saw it. But one thing that I think I heard you saying was gap understanding paper or organizing paper was,
00:17:35
Speaker
was the you can recognize this is a piece of paper, right? You can take the step of not just throwing it away or maybe putting the paper in. i think you call it. Is it a Sunday folder or Sunday bin Sunday basket? And you can take that step of putting it there.
00:17:55
Speaker
But. as I'm sure you've encountered, there are lots of people who are not note takers, but they start taking notes. And because they went to some course and somebody said, you should start taking notes.
00:18:06
Speaker
And then at some point they get overwhelmed because hey they don't have one of the next steps, which is you advocate for, if I recall correctly, sitting down on Sunday and you know you organize all those things in that day basket.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yes. So, you know, they don't have that next step of, okay, you took the notes or you put the mail or whatever it is in the right place.
00:18:33
Speaker
How do you now make the decision, not just half the time, but make the decision about where all of these things go before you even try and, you know, don't don't try and boil the ocean, but rather just take one step.
00:18:48
Speaker
And so for me, You know, I, I've spoken handful of times at conferences about this kind of organization system that I haven't. And the first step is just, if you have an idea, just record the idea, get the thought out of your head.
00:19:06
Speaker
And I would equate this, hopefully this is fair, but I would equate this Lisa to, you know, you, you talk about if you get that bill in the mail that you know, you're going to have to pay and you're not paying it immediately, then put it in the,
00:19:21
Speaker
day basket, right? And so if I'm driving to work and I have a thought and it feels like that thought is worth holding onto, then record it, get it out of your head. And you can go about that in a number of different ways.
00:19:37
Speaker
But then the next step that I talk to people about is what I call a range. And that is take time where you would otherwise be doing something that is easy to recognize as it's not valuable time.
00:19:50
Speaker
Like you step on the escalator wherever you are or into an elevator or you're waiting in line at the post office and you would pull out your phone and look at your email or look at social media for 30 seconds and instead go and look at all of those notes and say, oh, this one goes here and this one goes there and this one goes there.
00:20:11
Speaker
And so not to go too far into describing my own system, but I felt like when you were talking about helping these organizers see paper in the same way, like one of the things that was probably missing was that they could recognize this is something that might be important.
00:20:34
Speaker
But they just didn't have a schema or some sort of heuristic that would help them determine, but where does it go next? I love that you said schema. Can I build on that? Let's do it.
00:20:47
Speaker
Okay. So I'm talking about schemas in my dissertation. So I'm not doing an organization dissertation, but I'm doing a dissertation on our executive function.
00:20:58
Speaker
And does a woman's ability to have good systems for remembering future tasks reduce her anxiety? And how we measured that was through prospective memory and working memory.
00:21:12
Speaker
So prospective memory is the ability to remember what you need to do in the future and actually do it on time. And working memory is what you're working on right now. Like we're recording this podcast, so we're actively engaged in thinking about this podcast. But let's say, you know, the dog barks or the doorbell rings. We are going to turn our attention to that and then come back to whatever our working memory is doing.
00:21:32
Speaker
So um my hypothesis was not supported. So my hypothesis was that if you had stronger prospective memory, you would um you would have less anxiety.
00:21:45
Speaker
And the reason it was not supported is very scientific. I now know I would never have understood this before a PhD, but basically... At the beginning of your day, let's say you don't have any cognitive load right now.
00:21:59
Speaker
Women who have strong perspective memory have very little or no stress. Women who have weak perspective memory have very high stress before they even have any to-dos on their list, before they have any cognitive load. But as the day goes on, as her cognitive load increases, because the woman with good perspective memory started with a baseline of a very low stress, her stress rises faster than women whose cognitive loads are increasing. So we centered our variable. So let's say it was zero, if you have good perspective memory, 20 for medium and 40 for high.
00:22:33
Speaker
Now you get to the end of the day and you have a lot of cognitive load. Well, that woman who started at zero now has a stress level of 43. Now, I'm saying, but yeah, the woman that had weak perspective memory started at 40. It's like you're ending your day where they started. So theirs is going up just not as sharply.
00:22:48
Speaker
Anyways, all that to say that um in my discussion, I am saying that I think that women who have... Strong perspective memory have created schemas for their household management. And because they have created schemas in their cognitive load theory. So in cognitive load theory, you have a task, you do the task.
00:23:09
Speaker
And ah when you do the task, you can encode it deeper into your brain. And the final step in cognitive load theory is to take time and create a schema. So like in business, that would be if you're going to do something repetitively, take the time and document it in an SOP.
00:23:25
Speaker
Our brains do this. Like if you do a task over and over and over again and you could stop and you can reflect and you could create kind of like a habit or a schema in your brain, then your brain will pull out that file and run that schema as opposed to every time you do it feels like you're doing it for the very first time. So that's creating schemas. So my hypothesis, well, my new hypothesis that I'll have to test again, is that women who have ah higher perspective memory have become professional household managers. So they've created a lot of schemas. And so they're able to handle a lot of household management, which appears at ease with ease.
00:24:00
Speaker
However, when they need they get overwhelmed, they have a hard time offloading that to someone because the schemas are internal. Their internal schemas that they've developed over decades of running their household. So when people say, how can I help you? They really don't know how you can help them because they're running it all internally. It's not external.
00:24:18
Speaker
That Sunday basket and externalizes this. So the Sunday basket externalizes. The scheme is still run. You're still running the household. But when someone says, what can I do? She can look at this box of all the things that she's doing and say, oh, yeah, here's the birthday party. Can you go get ready for this? Or we've got to go you know.
00:24:36
Speaker
turn in the tax returns. Otherwise, this is all in her head. So everything is all in her head and she can't see the physical representation of it Okay, that's interesting because, well, for a number of reasons, but when if we if we think of just paper, you know then when these things are all split up, I might lose them, but even if I haven't lost them, as in i i you ask me, where are these bills?
00:25:02
Speaker
They're not organized with everything else, but I do remember where they are. but yeah I might lose them, but even if I don't lose them, then trying to pull out from the nightstand and then pull out from the counter. I think you might've had a name for it, though.
00:25:22
Speaker
Maybe not in one of your books about like that, that place where everybody puts their stuff when they walk through the door. Yeah. You know, yeah i talk about things like that with people as well is, uh, you know, I, I pull out something from the nightstand. I pull out something from that counter or shelf or whatever.
00:25:40
Speaker
the It seems like if it's split up, it's so much harder to then be able to say, here's the birthday card, here's the whatever. Can you do X with it? Can you do something very specific?
00:25:53
Speaker
So getting it all in one place seems like actually a very important step to being able to then have a system. Yes, and there's even more to it. So once I was able to externalize it for myself in the Sunday basket, and then I started manufacturing the Sunday basket, now I could create my own school supplies.
00:26:12
Speaker
So in the way in which I create school supplies is we use these... um plastic colored file folders, but I manufacture them so they're all the same color. Like when you go to a store, you always see these in a rainbow, but I manufacture every single color the individually.
00:26:28
Speaker
And so each color means something. So blue is the color of people. Purple is the color of your house. Pink is the color of yourself. And so since everything has a color, they now become like subjects in school.
00:26:40
Speaker
So when you're looking at your box, it's not just all the things you need to do. If you're like, okay, we're going to allocate our money for the household this year. How much mulch are we going to do do? we have the money to redo the roof? You know, where are we on that loan for um paying off the new HVAC?
00:26:54
Speaker
All of those are going to be in purple slash buckets. So even though there are like 40 slash pockets inside of this box, it only looks like you're running, you know, four different sections of your life. You're running people, you're running the physical household, you're running your finances, you're running yourself. And then we have some weekly ones that you do. So it not only externalizes what you're doing, but But it groups them into certain categories. And also a lot of our household projects take years to do.
00:27:21
Speaker
Or we'll have an idea like I would love to put that awesome garage flooring in for my husband. He really wants that. We've had that idea for a decade. I have a slash pocket with, ah you know, quotes in there for that. So I know how much it is. I know when we would do it. We're not going to do it anytime soon, but I have it there.
00:27:35
Speaker
um And where do you put stuff like that? As a household manager, as a CEO of your business, where would you put those kind of things? And the other thing I would say um related to what you were saying is that when you think about doing your paid work,
00:27:51
Speaker
We're told to have theme days, to batch our days. This is how we can get more productive with our time. So I have a couple of days that I do podcast recordings. i I have like an administration day. I have a deep work day when I do a lot of writing. And then that way I'm not just coming in and doing email for 30 minutes, a podcast episode, and then writing for 30 minutes. And then, you know, like I'm theming my days.
00:28:11
Speaker
This does the same thing at home. What we do at home is we're like, oh, shoot, i think I think we need to make that bill payment. Let me go find that bill and pay that thing. Oh, yeah, ah I saw the neighbor getting mulch. It's time to figure out how much mulch we need. Oh, shoot, we're going to birthday party of this weekend. We didn't get a gift yet. And we're constantly running around like this Just checking things off of our to-do list. And as our brain remembers things, we're like, oh, yeah, I got to do that. I got do that. I got to do that. When you have the Sunday basket, you're able to put all of those things in there.
00:28:38
Speaker
And then you say, OK, what has to be done before next Sunday? First of all, it's much more focused. You don't pull as many to-dos out. And second of all, you let your brain have all the ideas it has whenever it wants. Like, we're going to the beach this summer.
00:28:51
Speaker
And my grandson is four. Perfect gauge to go to Legoland. I had that idea last week. We're not going for another, i don't know, 12 weeks. Like, I'm not buying the tickets now. I'm not making that decision now. But I wrote down, should we take Grace into Legoland? I dumped it in the Sunday basket. Then I talked to my daughter the next Sunday. I saw the note. i was like, oh, yeah, what would you think about if we took, you know, Grace into Legoland? She said, oh, that's a good idea because it's that or Disneyland. I'm like, OK, so now I'm thinking about which do we have the money for, which day would be best. But I'm not doing you anything about it. But the idea is there. And I have a placeholder for it now.
00:29:26
Speaker
You said something at one point about creating a schema again or something along those lines. Like if you if you don't have schema and then something comes up, you there's, forgive me if I'm mixing thoughts or or terms here, but the way that I recall it is something like,
00:29:50
Speaker
you're increasing your cognitive load and or you're just making things more difficult because you're not just doing the task. You're also adding an additional task of creating the new or thinking about the new way of here's how I'm going to have to go about this.
00:30:06
Speaker
And, When you said that, what I thought of is, think it was in your new book, Escaping Quicksand, but it was in one of your books for sure, that you recommend that people organize places that do not get, ah guess, disorganized as often. Yes.
00:30:30
Speaker
And I think it was because then you know that it's organized and you you sort of have a system or everything has its place or something of that nature. and And so as you were saying this, one, I thought about that. and And another thing is that I thought that if I am not naturally inclined to having a schema, for example, if I at least get the closet organized, let's say, or the bathroom or whatever it is that is less likely to get disorganized. It's not the living room because the kids get out toys every day, right? You yeah you tell a story that I really enjoyed and I told you before we started recording, I laughed out loud it at actually a couple of places in your book.
00:31:12
Speaker
And one of them was talking about That room is going to get messed up 30 minutes after I organize it. and But as you were saying, you know, the creating a scheme again, one thing that I was thinking about is if I am not naturally inclined to create a way that I do this thing, then by just getting the closet organized, which nobody else is going to see, it's more likely to stay organized, which creates less likelihood that I will increase my cognitive load or stress or whatever else.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So you're talking about Swiss cheese organizing. And i just so appreciate that you read the books and we're having such a rich conversation. And I hear you pulling out different themes. And I just want to acknowledge or bring forth the fact that I have so many thoughts and ideas that appear to be brand new and revolutionary because I look at the household like a business.
00:32:10
Speaker
And I don't think people have ever done that before. And so organizing people's homes in person, helping them organize it online, having a podcast for over a decade and studying this my entire life, I've come up with a lot of systems. They're not a lot. They're a handful of systems that we need to put into place.
00:32:28
Speaker
And so it does seem like a lot. So we've just talked about the weekly planning in the Sunday basket. We've talked a lot about information management and paper in general. So that's your CEO and your CIO responsibilities. OK. And there's some CFO in there, too.
00:32:43
Speaker
Now we're transitioning into the physical space. So when we think about the physical space, this is what we often think about when we think about housework and we think about household organization. I think we're going to talk about housework later. Housework is very specific. It's just three things and you have to do them your entire life. So we're going to talk about household organization first.
00:33:02
Speaker
Household organization is really what I mentioned earlier in my introduction, this idea that If you could take some time and really you could do this. You don't have to be at home. You could do this while you're driving or as you're falling asleep at night and think about what is working and what is not working in this household. Maybe it used to work. And so we keep going doubling down on that organization like the pantry because it worked a lot but for a long period of time. And now it just never seems to work. For me, my pantry stopped working when I changed how I was eating.
00:33:31
Speaker
But I kept trying to keep the pantry organized how I used to eat back in, you know, the early 2000s. No one's eating today. Like in the early 2000s, we thought that a good meal was meat with a potato with a roll with corn. That was like that was like an A plus dinner. You guys, if you ate that today, you'd be like, why are you eating that? You're going to be the size of a pig like you can't eat that way anymore. Nobody eats that way. But ah my pantry was organized for, you know, the meat, the carb, the bread. And so you've got to change your spaces for how your lifestyle has changed. That is organization to begin with.
00:34:06
Speaker
Now, what we're talking about is Swiss cheese organizing. I realized along the way, probably closer to a decade ago. that The reason why households are not organized, one, not every space has been explicitly taught as to how to organize it, but some of them have, like closets and um kitchens and things like that. But second, it's not an effort problem.
00:34:25
Speaker
Very often, women especially will feel like, if I double down, if I put in more time, if I put in more effort, my house will finally get organized. It's not really an effort problem. It's an order of operations problem.
00:34:37
Speaker
Because when women go to do the household, they're going to go to the spaces that their spouse or their family members will see first. The kitchen, the family room, the playroom. And that is like playing whack-a-mole.
00:34:48
Speaker
Because you can organize those. I mean, we've got a a newborn and a four-year-old in our household. My husband walks in from dinner and he goes, this family room is trashed. I'm like, this family room will be trashed for the next 10 years. Because we have two boys and living in this house. And their mother is a single mother who's exhausted. And she can't keep up with it. So...
00:35:05
Speaker
Take the five minutes to pick up the toys and just stop berating her. Like just this. This just is life. And yet most of our house is totally organized because the the babies aren't in those sections. So what I say to women is this.
00:35:17
Speaker
you Stop picking up after the family. Walk over the toys. Go to I'm putting you in your bedroom. I want you to go in your bedroom. And I want you do your bedroom, your bathroom, in a closet. You want to organize your bedroom and bathroom and closet, but you're not giving yourself the time to do it because you feel guilty because the family room is a mess. The family room is always going to be a mess.
00:35:38
Speaker
So this weekend, ignore it and go really purge your closet and organize it the way you've wanted to for years probably. Then spend some time cleaning out your bathroom.
00:35:49
Speaker
Give yourself six weeks to get your bedroom and bathroom and closet how you want it. If you have the time and the money, go buy the bins and the flocked hangers and all that stuff if you want to. But that's not necessary. You don't have to do that. And when you're done, then go do the toy room and the kitchen and the and the family room and make it all nice and tidy and it'll last a whopping 30 minutes. But when you go to bed and when you wake up in your bedroom, you are going to feel supported. You're going to have organization that matches the phase of life you're in. Your summer clothes are going to be in the closet or in a different place in the closet. And your winter is going to get pushed to the back because we've changed seasons. You're not go to be tripping over things that should have been donated or just being stored in your bedroom because you were too exhausted to put them where they need to go. Just get that stuff out and really take care of yourself. The whole book, Escaping Quicksand, which I love that you love it, Eric. It is written for women, but I love that you laughed and that you have such an appreciation for it. It really is for to give ourselves permission
00:36:44
Speaker
to take some time and establish systems and mindsets for ourselves as we age in our households that we manage to support us so that we can get out of the quicksand of the never-ending to-do list.
00:37:00
Speaker
It sounds like you found a lot with your clients that they were spending every evening organizing, and you know, picking up the toys or cleaning the kitchen yet again, because we cooked yeah ah yet another meal.
00:37:15
Speaker
And Then in their bedroom, in the, I don't know what, they there was some place that they just didn't organize as much. And the problems just continued to sit there and it weighed on them and created some sense of overwhelm. And so at some point you came to the realization that you can clean the living room every day, just like you can clean, I don't know what, and on a computer or in our work.
00:37:42
Speaker
You can clean that thing every day. But just like work, there's always more work to do. And so you came to this realization that there are some other areas that actually you would benefit from if you clean it once. And it's not that it's a one and done thing, but it just doesn't need to be touched again. I guess you you you that you came to that realization because of your work with clients. Is that right?
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, you know what? It was when I was creating, I'd moved from in-home organizing, I had created a program called the 100-Day Home Organization Challenge. And when I created that, I was in my mid-40s, my kids were in high school, and in that 100 days, you would organize all of the family spaces in your household.
00:38:24
Speaker
And we would just run that on repeat. We'd do that three times a year. Like, we knew do it again, do it again, do it again. And people were having great success with that. Like, their kitchens, because we always start in our kitchen every time. Man, people's kitchens are so organized.
00:38:37
Speaker
And then we'd do all the family spaces. We did kids' bedrooms, because at that time I had kids inside of the program. Now it's separate. And we would get to our bedroom, bathroom, and closet. We would get all of that organized. But we never got to storage rooms. We didn't get to the laundry room. We didn't get to paper organization. That wasn't really part of the Sunday basket. And what I found was my clients were really good students. Like they would do the program over and over and over again, but they weren't getting done.
00:39:06
Speaker
And as a teacher, like if I'm teaching you the skill of organization, at some point you should be able to say I'm done because housework you're never done with. That's dishes, cleaning and meal preparation.
00:39:17
Speaker
But organization, like as an in-home organizer, I could do it in a week. I'd bring my team in to be five grand. We'd get you organized in one week. Like it would all be done. um So why weren't my clients getting that same result?
00:39:29
Speaker
And I realized it was because they were trying to maintain these living spaces and we were only doing the living spaces. So I expanded the program to an annual system. So now it's called the Productive Home Solution. I took kids out. I took paper out.
00:39:43
Speaker
And we're only focusing on the physical areas of the household. And I said, if you will follow the system for the whole year, it will take you a year, but we're going to hit every single area and we're going to get them all the way done. So storage rooms, attics, garages, laundry rooms, spare bedrooms, linen closets, like they all got put in there.
00:40:00
Speaker
Because if you get through the curriculum then, 80% of these spaces, once you organize them, will stay organized for four years, 10 years. When you organize your storage room the way I do it, it stays organized forever because it becomes a prepaid store. Storage is a store. So it's prepaid store. your Yours might not look like a store. Mine do. Then we put in this plastic shelving.
00:40:20
Speaker
We put in bins. And once it's organized, you can literally move from one house to the other. It'll be the first space that's organized in your new space. We have a lot of military families and they just keep you know moving it to the next space, the next space, the next space. That space stays organized because the system moves with the room. And so it's instantly organized in the new setting. So, yeah, it's an investment of time and and some money in the bins and the shelving. But once you've done it, it's done.
00:40:45
Speaker
It doesn't have to be redone. Well, when you organize in this way and you organize all those spaces, then the only spaces that need to be reorganized and maintained are, you know, those main living spaces, the kitchen, the family room, the entryway, those spaces. You can easily get those done in a couple hours on a Saturday morning, and you can live your whole week in an actual organized space.
00:41:07
Speaker
If organization is a learnable skill, how do you learn it? And when do you get to say you're done? In 2021, I did research where 87% of Americans believe that organization is the learnable skill. I've replicated this study four times, and it's always 86 87% believe that. people have gone through study.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yet then when I divided it into personal organization, paper organization, storage organization, and family organization, people self-rated, are you organized in that area? 17%, 18%. I was like, oh, these aren't even failing grades. These are like, our school is shut down. Like we we've been shuttered because our grades are so low. There's no there's no rehabilitation here. And i was like, that's terrible. Because if you believe organization is a learnable skill and yet you are not done,
00:41:54
Speaker
then you think you are the problem. And that's not true. The problem is there is no course for you to take. There's no one teaching this so that you can learn it. I believe that if it is teachable, it is the teacher's job to figure out how to teach it so the student can learn, not the student's job to learn it through osmosis.
00:42:14
Speaker
um And so that's what I've been doing. How do we teach organization? Everyone can learn organization. How do we teach earlier you said and more or less it was about organizing or maybe we were talking about cleaning up physical space i forget exactly but the thing that you said was it's not an effort problem and then you just saying that you know if it's learnable and you're not effectively doing it, you're not if you're not yet done, you're not organized, then you are the problem.
00:42:50
Speaker
Brings to mind things like, you know, feeling like, yeah know and you you said, you know, your book is is geared towards women because at least in my experience, it is primarily women who, whether they're doing most of the cleaning or not, certainly seem to bear a large mental burden.
00:43:12
Speaker
about organization or cleanliness or and ah be executive function in a household and so on. and And so in my experience, there's this feeling of it's just never ending. and And then i wonder, you could probably tell me if for some portion of those people, they those women, they feel like Why? Like, there must be something wrong with me if I can't be like if if it never ends.
00:43:47
Speaker
Like, is this the way that life is supposed to be? or you know, running a house is supposed to be like, is there something wrong with me that I can't just be done with this at some point? Think back.
00:43:58
Speaker
The original economic entity was the household. And women have run households since, you know, dinosaur days. Basically, women have always run households. I mean, i go I love going through historic homes.
00:44:12
Speaker
You go through presidential homes. And um it was always the wife that ran the home or one of the president's daughters who ran the home. They didn't run the home.
00:44:22
Speaker
And they ran the people that supported those households. um And so women have always run households. The American household... is 68% of the U.S. economy, 68% of U.S. s GDP is household spending.
00:44:38
Speaker
So how households are run, how households redistribute their wealth amongst, you know, the economy in the United States is highly determined by women. It always has been.
00:44:49
Speaker
Maybe it won't be in the future, but it always has been up until this point. And academia will support that. I mean, there is not a single study that says men are doing more work at home than women are. So let's talk about the work.
00:45:00
Speaker
Women are doing, on average, 28 hours a week to run a household, not including parenting. Now, I have a problem with how studies are measuring what that work is because every single study measures it differently. But without parenting, it is about 28 hours week.
00:45:17
Speaker
A little bit more a little less, but it's not a lot more or a lot less than that, which probably is shocking to you. It's probably shocking how much of the GDP our households are. It's probably shocking how much work that this household is. So now I'm going to tell you a little bit of how I understand the history from I told you about Lillian Gilbert. I'm going to bring you up to present day in academia. So Lillian Gilbert was approaching the household. And at that time, the only degrees a woman could get in college were a home economics degree or a teaching degree.
00:45:46
Speaker
My great-grandmother got a teaching degree and my grandmother got a home economics degree. Those were the degrees that were offered to them in college. And a home economics degree was a science degree. And that is, you know, the what Lily and Gilberth was doing. They were looking at the efficiencies at home, the economic impact of home. We moved from Lily and Gilberth and the efficiencies into the economic era of households. That's when, you know, a lot of the consumer package companies would start selling things.
00:46:11
Speaker
You know, GE was selling all of the appliances and we were selling all these convenience and freezer meals to household managers so that they could have more time and we could reduce the amount of work that they were doing at home. And there was a reduction in the amount of work down to this 28 hours. it was a lot more hours to run a household before that.
00:46:30
Speaker
Then in the 70s and 80s, we moved to the feminist um understanding theory that we're working under now called doing gender. So in the mid 80s, there was a theorist who created a theory called doing gender saying that women replicate the work they saw their mothers do and men replicate the work they saw their fathers doing.
00:46:46
Speaker
So women do more housework at home because women did more housework at home. And this was based on a study of about 360, I think, families. And of those 360 families, they were all married with children under the eighteen age of 18, and every single one of them owned a house except for one.
00:47:03
Speaker
So we're basing all of our current literature on this population. Back in the 80s, 40% of Americans were dual income with kids under the age of, well, not dual income, nuclear families, man and woman with children under the age of 18.
00:47:17
Speaker
Today, that's only 17.9% of the U.S. population. And yet, that is still the same population that we are studying for household because the doing gender theory says women do more than men.
00:47:28
Speaker
Well, you can't support a theory that women do more than men if you're not managing married couples. So we're not looking at singles, couples, like 40% of children this year will be born to single mothers. They're not included in the study.
00:47:42
Speaker
And we're not looking at families whose children have grown because there's not as much work to do that's being measured as there is in young parenting households. So all that to say is now in the last, i guess, 40 years, we have been looking at household management as a he said, she said discussion.
00:48:00
Speaker
How do we get men to do more? Basically, is what you hear everywhere. Women are doing so much, men should do more. That's that's kind of what I hear. And okay, maybe. Have you ever tried to get anybody else to do more work? It doesn't work very well. And also, I love to really look at what can I do? Like how can I, my husband does do a ton at home. um And that's been a slow change over the last decade of him doing more than half at home than what I do.
00:48:26
Speaker
But that isn't something that you can dictate and takes a long time to change who's doing the work inside of the household. So how can i as someone who's leading people, women who are doing the primary amount of work, how can I create systems? How can I make this easier? How can I reduce how much work we do altogether? How can I elevate the female position, not as doing the invisible labor and put upon and like, ah what was me,
00:48:52
Speaker
We are the leaders of society and we have been forever. Like we've been running households since dinosaur days, is what I say. And we're responsible for 68% of spending in the United States. Like if that's not a CEO. i don't I don't know what a CEO is. And as a CEO and a business owner, having grown a successful company and having employees and all of those kinds of things, those responsibilities, when I take my learnings of being a profitable and productive CEO and I apply it to my household, I feel so empowered.
00:49:22
Speaker
I make better decisions. I eliminate work that should never have been on my to-do list at all because it's not worth my time and attention. I'd rather go put time in with my grandchildren. or I'd rather go be working on my economic enterprise of my business as opposed to dusting or something like that. And so I don't let all of the work at home become this big laundry list of things that I have to do because I'm a CEO at home and I'm a CEO in my business. And as a CEO, I wouldn't tolerate all those extra meetings, extra emails. I'd just be like, we're not doing that project.
00:49:52
Speaker
And so I think that way. How do we as household managers, ladies, think that way? How do you really? and and so i'll I'll do one more um point on this.
00:50:03
Speaker
Another thing I hear a lot in media that bothers me is that women's labor at home is free. It's devalued. Somehow the government should pay us for being at home. I don't i know I'm like, i don't even understand how you would do that.
00:50:17
Speaker
And I think here and sit here and I think when I was a stay at home mom, I brought in a little bit of money, but not a lot. But I had a huge economic impact on our household. You know, I clipped coupons. I cut i um cooked from scratch. I volunteered at the kids' school to reduce our tuition. You know, I did all of these things that had an economic offset.
00:50:37
Speaker
And so if I could reframe that, I would say to all women who are running a household, trying to figure out what your economic value is, the economic value of the business that you are running is whatever you put on that top line of your tax return.
00:50:52
Speaker
So if you and your spouse or whatever money that your household brings in $50,000, you're running a $50,000 business. If it's $150,000, you're running a six-figure enterprise. Because you are.
00:51:01
Speaker
because you are You are doing the invisible work and the strategic work and the mental work that is related to running that household. And you are redistributing and saving that amount of economic entity. So there is a cost per dollar for us to go work in the workplace. And then there is also what is the value to of that dollar in your household? Because that is the economic weight of the entity that you're running.
00:51:24
Speaker
i feel like a lot of times it, the there are just so many things Lisa to work on so many things that need proving. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about a little kid's soccer team, or we're talking about something at work or any number of things. And some of those things that need improving,
00:51:46
Speaker
are The current state is not fun. It's not something that we're happy about or whatever else. But hopefully as many of those things as possible, we can feel like I get a choice.
00:51:58
Speaker
And if I work hard at this, I can actually have an impact. And that's immediately with at at least that last portion that you were talking about, what comes to mind is that I would hope that a lot of women would hear that and think,
00:52:14
Speaker
I can do something about whatever my current situation is. I agree. And also, I think that we feel that way as women. Like, okay, I've got this. I'm going to keep going until the unexpected happens, usually with a family member.
00:52:31
Speaker
um i haven't been sick myself, but I can imagine if you were sick yourself. In my case, it's you know, stepping in for my father or other family members that need support and then managing their household and all of their needs in addition to my own household, in addition to all of the things that I need to do for myself.
00:52:47
Speaker
When we have to do that, when when we get the opportunity to do that, let me say it that way, we want to. We want to take care of our spouse, our parents, our siblings, our kids, our ourselves. Like, that's what we're here for. We're here for relationships, not just to be worker bees, even in our own companies. We're here to have a relational life with people.
00:53:07
Speaker
You will go through a season where you will have a family member who needs you to step in as their caretaker. And if you have children, you already have the care. We know what's related to that. As you get older, these seasons will happen unexpectedly, and they can last a long time.
00:53:23
Speaker
Like caretaking for parents can last a decade. It could be a long, long time. And at that point, a couple of things happened. One, you need to have good systems in your household because now you have to run two households. And you need to put the family member's household on your system, not trying to run two different systems. If you think about buying a business and you're going to run them on two different um accounting systems, like what a nightmare that would be. So you need to have both systems running on the Sunday basket, running on the paper solution, running like the first thing you do is you make sure that these are running on the same system. So you do for you and you do for the other.
00:53:56
Speaker
But the other thing is, i mentioned earlier that organization is an investment of time today, which is an exponential return on time in the future. Kind of like you see your money in a 401k or, you know, retirement plan is going to grow exponentially and then you'll have a bigger pot of money when you retire, hopefully.
00:54:13
Speaker
Organization always, always, always saves you future time. It costs you current time, but it always saves you future time. And when you could get just one system in place, you know how well your life goes. And the more systems you can put in place, the more capacity you have.
00:54:30
Speaker
And in order to manage multiple households and possibly still work and be active in your children's lives, you need to have capacity. Organization is going to give you capacity.
00:54:41
Speaker
And so that is why I believe these systems are so important. Is it nice to have an operational system like Organize 365 sells? Yeah, it's great. I liked it when I did scrapbooking. I organized everyone's scrapbooking supplies in these organizational bags we sold in the same way. The cardstock paper we used was in the same rainbow order. The stickers in the sticker book were organized from January to December. I always put birthdays in July. i don't know why I did. But when we were in our workshops and people were like, I don't know where my birthday stickers are. Anybody in the room would say, oh, they're in July because everybody's was organized the same way. So when we had them the same way, people could help you because you had the same system.
00:55:19
Speaker
There is no operational system for households other than what Organize 365 has created. And so the more households we can get on this operational system when you're not in crisis, the more capacity you have when you are.
00:55:34
Speaker
So escaping quicksand is centered overwhelm. I believe you that the word overwhelm is in the subtitle, if I recall correctly. And so I think that it's fairly obvious ah given some of the things that we've said, why you talk about overwhelm, but Is there something that, is there some, was there a turning point or a realization or was there there a time when you decided or or realized that overwhelm rather than clutter, you know, paper, physical space, whatever, was the real problem?
00:56:17
Speaker
What a great question. um You know, i started the company the year I turned 40 out of overwhelm. Overwhelm of not having enough time to be a good wife and mother and my house being completely in disarray.
00:56:33
Speaker
I started the Ph.D. when I turned 50 out of a desire to prioritize my own self-care as much as I have prioritized the self-care of my husband and my children throughout the years.
00:56:48
Speaker
So I think for myself, and I think a lot of women also find in their 40s that they have given so much of themselves to their work, to their community, to their families, that they don't even remember what they like anymore.
00:56:59
Speaker
And they aren't really taking very good care of themselves. And growing Organize 365 in my 40s was a permissible way for me to travel and and work and buy nice clothes and do things because, I mean, I was CEO and I was going to be on camera or I was going to be in this interview or I was doing this mastermind. And so, you know, it was work related. I was making money and I could afford it. So it was permissible for me to be able to grow myself in that way.
00:57:27
Speaker
And I was able to do a lot of personal professional development, which I love and buy books and all the things that I like to do. But as I approached my 50s, I realized that, you know, there were some things I just wanted to do because I wanted to do them that weren't going to have an economic impact.
00:57:40
Speaker
Now, the PhD is going to benefit the business, but there's absolutely no reason why I had to get one. like My husband keeps saying, why are we doing this? i was like, because I want to. um You know, I'm not going to become a professor. I do hope to publish research, but I'm pay for my own research. Like, I'm not getting a grant. and' that I'm not doing any of the things you would normally do when you get a PhD. Yeah.
00:58:00
Speaker
But I believe that it will be a significance calculation. and I'll be able to do research like Lillian Gilbert did. And so what I've done in Organize 365 that is having success in the marketplace as an entrepreneur possibly could show support for how we would create systems like this that would live on beyond Organize 365. Organize 365 will come and go. But could these learnings that I have figured out ah be supported in science and and last longer?
00:58:30
Speaker
I feel that, not just for women, but for many adults, you get to the point where It's maybe not permissible for you to take time and money to put towards things that maybe aren't income generating or building you to your next thing. So I will often say, i mean, my kids were in, I don't know, all kinds of sports, piano lessons. They are not concert pianists. They aren't professional athletes. We had no problem spending, like right now I'm spending $80 a month on swimming lessons.
00:59:02
Speaker
I mean, for a grandchild, like, $1,000 a month on preschool. I mean, we spend a lot of money on our kids. It's like, well, this is what we should do. And this is how they're going to be well-rounded. And they're going to become contributing members of society. And then you're 50. It's like, well, you can't have $20 for a Pilates class. Can't you just do that on your own with a video from home?
00:59:20
Speaker
Like the way that we make decisions about our growth and development as adults is so different than how we would look at children. Yeah. Or how we would support our parents if we were caretakers for them. And so escaping quicksand is really the mental mindset shifts that I made in my 40s that allowed me to say, i am not taking more than my fair share of the family's resources, but also I'm not going to take none of them.
00:59:46
Speaker
Like I'm going to start taking some of these resources just to do things just like I do for, like I still grant my children's wishes. Like I'm a genie all the time. Oh, you have a wish. I'll grant it. I'll grant it. I'll grant it. Well, my husband and I have some wishes that are also going to be granted. And that's okay.
01:00:01
Speaker
How do you help people who are maybe naturally less sensitive to disorganization understand the consequences of disorganization? Good question.
01:00:13
Speaker
I am not a perfectionist. I am not a minimalist. I don't have things in color-coded, labeled bins in my house. As a matter of fact, it's kind of funny. ah A couple of years ago, we were in the garage, and my husband said... do you know an organizer? I was like, oh, this is great. He's going to be like, he's like going to tell me I'm a good organizer. He goes, because we could use some help around here. I'm like, this is organized, Greg. This is what organization looks like. It's not supposed to look like a magazine. Everything is where it needs to be. Like this is functional organizing. So I'm a functionally organized person.
01:00:45
Speaker
When I would organize in people's houses, I had a couple of rules. Number one, I would only organize the person I was working with. I wouldn't organize spouses. We would organize children. But usually i would organize the children without the parents. And i like I was like, yeah, I'll organize your kids. But you have to go away and organize the kid. So we I always organize the person with their stuff.
01:01:04
Speaker
And secondly, i actually discourage people from getting rid of things. Right. Which sounds really odd. So if people were hesitant to declutter something, I was like, we're going to keep it. And they'd be like, well, I'm supposed to be getting rid of things. I'm like, you will.
01:01:18
Speaker
I would rather people keep things and we'd be on a second or third session and they go, I can't believe I still have this thing. And then they get rid of it versus getting rid of it because they feel like they should get rid of a certain percentage or they think that decluttering is the answer.
01:01:33
Speaker
Decluttering is essential. And we definitely need to declutter things that are broken, no longer serve us, belong to someone else, you know, have, have, we don't need them. But often i feel that there are very few true organizers.
01:01:49
Speaker
Most people are decluttering minimalists or digital productivity experts. And you bounce between one and the other. So you're like, I'll declutter everything physically I can, and then i'm go become productive and I'm going become digital. I'm in the middle.
01:02:02
Speaker
Organizing is in the middle of those two things. And if you don't actually learn how to organize your space for the phase of life you're in and the people that you're communing with, your only solution is to get rid of stuff and then make it digital.
01:02:16
Speaker
And so when you feel overwhelmed and you've done this a couple of times, you go to declutter, but there's nothing left to declutter. because you have not optimized the space organizationally for what you need to do.
01:02:29
Speaker
So now you're decluttering things you actually need to get that feeling. And then you go back to the productivity and digitization. There was a point in, think it was in Escaping Quicksand, where I was sitting around my family and I laughed out loud while reading the book. And I i won't ask you to tell the exact story unless you want to but you sort of talked You spoke to it a little bit earlier when you talked about i sort of walking through the living room and stepping over the toys.
01:03:05
Speaker
and But the a point that I believe you made ah and at this point in the book was that you should make sure that your family or whoever it is that you're living with sees you doing the work.
01:03:20
Speaker
You talked about in the book that your family would go off to school or whatever it was, then you would clean up. You, at least sometimes, you know, would, you know, come home from dropping off at school or whatever you were doing. You'd walk over the toys, you'd get your cup of coffee and you'd go upstairs and you'd sit down and you'd start doing your own work.
01:03:41
Speaker
And, I think you were pretty clear in the book about this, but I wanted to ask you about the why of that? Like, what do people really get if they stop cleaning the house when the family is away, for example, or family sitting down watching a movie and you're in the other room doing something, you know, for the family?
01:04:07
Speaker
Why should they stop doing that and instead make sure that everybody else sees that work that you're putting in? I think that especially in the hybrid working situation that a lot of us still are in, male and female,
01:04:21
Speaker
When you are working where you are also living, the the two different kinds of works overlap a lot. And so my story is my husband would go to work.
01:04:31
Speaker
I would drive my kids to school. They went to two different schools in two different directions. Don't even ask me how I do that. I don't even remember how I did it. And I would get home from dropping them off and I'd started to organize 365. It was a blog and in-home professional organizing company, but I had a lot of computer work to do. So if I wasn't working with a client, I was working on my blog, my computer work, and then I'd go and I'd do the reverse and I'd pick the kids up and do the dinner and all of those things.
01:04:56
Speaker
And I... enjoy. And I think a lot of people enjoy man and woman when you have some household chores to do. I mean, good. Put in a podcast or an audio book and like just get the get the house straightened up, get all, you know, I call it putzing around, get putts around, get everything, everything where you want to be. And then and then go do your other work. and So that's what I would do. I'd drop the kids off at school. I'd get home around nine.
01:05:19
Speaker
I'd putz around. I'd do the dishes. I'd clean. I'd straighten everything up, make the beds, all that kind of stuff. And then around 10, 1030, I'd start working on my blogging. And then I have to pick up the kids at two. So I got, you know, whatever, three hours of work done. Pick the kids up. We do homework. We do the dishes. ah We would um i make dinner. We do the dishes. And then everybody's, you know, sitting around. There weren't phones at this time. So they were watching TV.
01:05:42
Speaker
And I would head on upstairs to do a couple more hours of work. And then I would hear all this grumbling, you know, like, oh, you're always working. Why you always working? Why can't you just, you know, chill? Why can't you go go with the flow? By the way, I have never gone with with the flow. I am where the flow comes from. That's why I tell my husband, I don't go with the flow. I don't know how to relax. I'm not good at that. So I would go up and then I would feel guilty. And I'm like, but I have been driving you, cooking for you, cleaning for you, picking up for you. And now I'm just going to spend 90 minutes working. Like, why? First of all, why do you care? Because you're playing. And second of all, like, when do you want me to get this done? So I'm driving the kids to school. I'm spending 25 hours a week driving at this time. And I was like, OK, well, maybe this is a me problem.
01:06:26
Speaker
So the next day i came in and I didn't clean up the kitchen. And like you said, I just made a new coffee and I went upstairs and I got all of my work done while they were at school. picked them up, came home. And then that night, instead of, you know, going upstairs and working, then I'm emptying the dishwasher, doing laundry. I'm putting the laundry on the floor, folding it right in front of them. they're like, you're always working. Why are you always working? was like, okay, so this chorus is not going to change. They're going to complain because I'm not going to sit here and watch TV ever. Still don't. You guys, I just got a PhD. Obviously, I'm not a good relaxer.
01:06:57
Speaker
But now they're complaining while they watch me do housework in service to them. I'm cleaning up the dishes. I'm doing the laundry. I'm cleaning the house. If they would like to join me, like, come on in, you guys. Like, I'm doing the housework for an audience versus I'm going to go work.
01:07:13
Speaker
for pay, you know, when they would have been. So sometimes when you just reorder the same exact things you're doing, then your family could see the work that's being done. Otherwise, they truly think fairies just come in and clean this house. Like they don't even realize how it gets done. And why would they? Because we hide how we do it.
01:07:29
Speaker
I love it. You, this is ah you know, in a ah different vein, but I wanted to make sure to ask you about this. And I think you sort of spoke to this earlier, but we just didn't get deep into it.
01:07:44
Speaker
Earlier, you said something about there being three classes of of housework or something like that. And in, I think it was Escaping Quicksand, you talk about doing this research study and asking people what I think, forgive me if I get some of the terms wrong, so you can correct them me here.
01:08:04
Speaker
But basically you ask what counts as housework. And you found, I think that there were these three categories. And what I wondered was, it please do state what those were just so that we could be clear. But also what I wondered was, did you ask what does not count as housework?
01:08:25
Speaker
Thank you for this question. So remember when I said in the 80s we came up with this doing gender theory and we asked this 300 some odd families ah that had children and had home ownership. That's where we based what we think housework is based on, the work that they did in their houses.
01:08:41
Speaker
And there were two scientists that had published papers that said, basically, you can't compare two academic studies on housework together because there is no operational definition of housework. So an operational definition is one that is clear enough that scientists agree on what they are studying so that they're all measuring the same thing.
01:09:01
Speaker
And no one's done it. like No one's come up with an operation. We have thousands of studies on housework and no one has operationally defined housework. That should blow your mind. Okay. So I was like, all right, oh I'm going to define it. So...
01:09:13
Speaker
Most of these studies are basing their definition of housework from the American Time Use Census. This is a census that's done in the United States where they ask people to recall in the last 24 hours how they spent their time. And then all of those diary entries are then coded to different categories based on economics. We want to know a lot about American families. And one of those categories is household work, household activities.
01:09:38
Speaker
And in household activities, there is a subsection called housework. And in housework, it's sewing, it's laundry, and I think it's cleaning. And then there are a bunch of other categories of activities of housework, like yard work, maintenance, food prep, a whole bunch of things. So instead of taking that housework section, most studies take the entire household activities section and measure all that work, not just the household activities, housework.
01:10:06
Speaker
And i was like, okay, two questions I had. Number one, it seems to me some of these household activities are actually housework. And number two, I haven't sewed anything in a long time. I don't know why sewing is still on the list. It's because this ah the household activities census was created in the 60s.
01:10:21
Speaker
That's why it's still on there. We haven't updated it. So anyway. I thought, OK, well, first of all, how does the American population like how do you and i define what is housework? Because in some of these studies, like according the time use census, um feeding the ducks is housework, is housework, waiting for your electric vehicle to charge was housework. like I mean, these are all things that are coded into housework.
01:10:44
Speaker
I'm like, all right. So I'm wondering that. Second thing, remember, I told you that all these studies are based on families married with children. that the That's the population the studies. I'm like, OK, but we do housework from birth till death.
01:10:58
Speaker
Like this is like a lifelong work. So I surveyed a thousand Americans, 18 65, and female, who male and female And I took 87 of these categories. And I said, just tell me, yes or no, is this housework?
01:11:13
Speaker
And if they said, yes, it was housework, then I asked them, do you think this is essential housework? Like, do you think it's essential or not? Once again, my hypothesis was not supported, Eric, because i was under the doing gender theory, which says that men and women, women do more work than men.
01:11:31
Speaker
So the theory is that they must see housework differently. They do not. There is 100% alignment between men and women as to what housework is and what it is not. There was no deviation at all. That was shocking.
01:11:45
Speaker
And across ages, no difference. They identified 19 of the 87 items as housework and they only fell in three categories, cleaning, laundry, and anything food prep related.
01:11:57
Speaker
Now, did some people say that yard work was housework? Yes. And I did ask if you owned a home, and I have not cleaned the data for that, I would guess that those are people that also own homes. But not everybody in America owns a home. So we pulled anyone that says 90% or above in agreement. That's how we created the housework definition. And I'm in the process of getting that published.
01:12:18
Speaker
Your book will be coming out a bit after this podcast publishes. And so whether it's the book, whether it's Organize 365 or whatever else, is there somewhere that I should go? One or more places? to Learn more, connect by the book, and so on.
01:12:34
Speaker
And then the second thing, whether it's something we should talk about and we haven't yet, or it's words of wisdom, things you would want me to be thinking about, are there any final things that we should make sure get mentioned today?
01:12:49
Speaker
Well, first of all, thank you so much for this conversation. i really, really enjoyed it. we um We went pretty deep on some things and uncovered a lot of ideas that I've just kind of been talking about on my podcast for a long time that I really enjoyed talking with you. And you're such a good host and had such great questions. um I don't think this is a male-female issue.
01:13:10
Speaker
I think this is a household issue. And I just love having conversations like like this. So if this has interested you or if you're if you think, okay, I haven't thought of any of those things that way, you would probably like the Organize 365 podcast. Like this is, it's a solo podcast and this is just how I talk. I'm...
01:13:28
Speaker
I think about how we run our households and how I can, as a teacher, make you see your household differently, which is really hard to do, and then operationalize it. So that's the Organize 365 podcast. The website where my courses and products are is organize365.com.
01:13:44
Speaker
That's also where you can find the Escaping Quickstand book or wherever books are sold. But we have a pre-sale bonus going on now if you want that. And I'm most active on Instagram. If you want to check out Instagram and DM me over there.
01:13:56
Speaker
And what would I want you to take away or conversation? i just think being open to thinking about your household as an economic entity, of applying business principles, educational principles into our household. I think one of the things that I have spent a lot of time doing and why I've been successful in creating what I've created is because i pull from corporate America things into my entrepreneurial business. I pull from my entrepreneurial business things into my household. I pull things from my teaching days into my household or into my entrepreneurial business. Like I i look at all these different ways in which we come together and we've created systems and we get things done.
01:14:35
Speaker
And what are the commonalities and how can we pull those threads through different ways? I guess I would leave you with this. If you were gonna think about your household as a business, You are the CEO of this economic enterprise. And so you need to step out of the doing and you need to work on your business, not just in your business. And I start that with the Sunday basket.
01:14:56
Speaker
That's your weekly planning. That's where I get you started. Once you start to embrace like, wow, this this really is an economic and entity. There is a lot of work here. Like, how do I get a handle on this? Then you need to organize your information, which is paper. You need to organize your space, which is the productive home solution.
01:15:12
Speaker
And then I would invite you to start doing strategic planning with me three times a year, just like we would in business and really start thinking about like, I can't get all these goals done, but what's one or two that I want to get done in the next four months and the next four months and really pick up that speed and that productivity and that um ability to set and achieve goals at home, just like you do in every other area of your life.
01:15:32
Speaker
I like it. And yeah, I'll say it again. I enjoyed both of your books and i did laugh out loud at several points. And I also have enjoyed this conversation and more than I've enjoyed a podcast conversation in a while. That's not to say that all of my guests aren't great. They are great. lia But I actually laughed.
01:15:52
Speaker
And you made this very enjoyable. So I hope that people check out the book. I will be buying my physical copy when it comes out. And I appreciate you joining me here to today.
01:16:04
Speaker
Thank you, Eric. Thank you.