00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one. It's part of my interview series where I talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and they share tips that will hopefully help the rest of us have better days as well. So today I am excited to welcome Lisa Woodruft to the show. Lisa is the owner of Organized three sixty five, a company that teaches people how to make their lives better. She is the creator of the famous Sunday Basket method of life organization, which we will talk about, and she also has all sorts of great other projects going on in her life. So Lisa, welcome to the show.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Laura, I'm excited that you are here. Maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about you and how you wound up in this line of work.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Well, part of it was reading your books. They really helped me conceptualize time differently. I've always been a person that has wanted to squeeze every second out of every day, very creative, and when I turned forty, I decided to start my own company that someday would hopefully employ people. So I've been doing this thirteen years, podcasting for ten and I've really dove about as deep as you can get into as to how do we manage our households? How do we look at that both from a business lens and as a home owner or somebody who lives in a household, but also from an academic lens, and how can we create operational systems that make it easier for everyone instead of everyone having to reinvent the wheel and create their own systems inside of households.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to that end, you actually went back to school to research organization from sort of like a psychological you know, organization management persons. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. What led to that.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in twenty twenty one I hired someone who had a PhD. And we did academic level research in order to figure out how much housework are we doing or what is housework? And I didn't know much about academia, and as we were doing our study, we stumbled upon the fact that there is no definition of housework anywhere, not in academia or anywhere, and After we did our study, we found some significant results, and I realized that if I wanted to keep researching this, I wanted to be the researcher who did it. So at the age of fifty one, I went back to school and I'm getting my PhD. I'm at the end of my second year and getting ready to start my dissertation. And I'm so glad I did because there's so much amazing, awesome research and literature out there already. But we have not truly defined a lot of our household management roles or operational definitions, and so the studies are not really comparable. And the studies talk a lot about the problem, but we aren't doing a lot of applying where we're applying a solution and then seeing if that solution is significant, And that's what I really want to do.
00:03:06
Speaker 1: Well, that's really exciting. Yeah, I mean it makes sense. It's an area that just people have not done a whole lot of research into. I mean, obviously there's a lot of sort of feminist writings back in the day of housework being something that people spent time doing, but I doubt it has been approached from a very systematic perspective in that I always love studying time use and so just even seeing how people spend their time in their homes. It's just this area that everyone does, and yet it wasn't deemed worthy of study. I mean probably because it was mostly women doing it. I mean, I guess that would be one of the reasons.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, And to your point, there are so many studies and instead of looking at how we utilize households when we move from our childhood home to our own home, like from eighteen to eighty years old, all of the studies strip away people who are single parents, strip away people who are not married, and they narrow all of their studies to married couples with children. Because you're right, it's all rooted in feminist literature coming out of the late seventies and early eighties, and so we have a lot of theories about why women do more in married couples. Do you realize that only forty percent of the United States is married, and less than that even have children. So there's sixty percent of the adult population that really has not been studied at all.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, fascinating, And I know you're going to come up with some great stuff on that, but let's talk a little bit about how Lisa organizes her days. So tell us a little bit about your morning routine.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so simple, and I like that it's so simple, and I talk about that all the time because I think often we can think that our morning routines have to be really elaborate. It's very simple. I take a shower. I either curl my hair or I don't curl my hair. That's a twenty minute decision right there. I wear the same makeup every day, seven days a week. I'm one of those always has makeup on. I grab my protein bar and coffee and I'm out the door.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: Awesome. And then what do you do once you get to work?
00:05:09
Speaker 2: So this is what I realized. I have a morning, afternoon, and evening routine at home, and I have a start of the day, mid day and end of day routine at work. And those six routines really create a scaffolding for me. So when I get to work, I like to say that I'm going to jump right into work, but I never do. I always make a coffee, I walk around and I talk with the other team members that are here. I check Instagram too many times, I check my email, I get everything situated and it's usually about thirty minutes before I actually hop into my first meeting or whatever I'm going to work on for the day.
00:05:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell me a little bit about Organized three sixty five of the business, because you said, you know, one of your goals starting it, you wanted to employ people, and obviously you have a team. Now what exactly does the business do and what does that team look like?
00:05:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I was a school teacher and a former stay at home mom, so I do not have any business training whatsoever. So when everybody said like, oh, you could have products, I was like, Okay, you can create courses, Okay, you can have a podcast. I'm always like yes. I said yes and to everything. So we do a lot of things here at Organize three sixty five. We have trademarks, patent patents, copyrights, but basically we're an adult school. So if you want to learn the skill of organizing as an educator, I've created wrap around services. So you mentioned the Sunday Basket, which we'll talk about. Every single product that we have has a physical component like you're getting your school supplies or your office supplies. It has an online teaching component where I have courses and lessons that go along with the physical product. And then we have a community aspect, so there are co working times for all the different products, so you can get online every week and literally do that activity with someone live.
00:06:46
Speaker 1: And many of those activities are about organizing the household, organizing paper, things like that. Yep.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: So we have weekly for the Sunday Basket, which is planning your week. We have weekly for the Workbox, which is planning your work. We have weekly for our Productive Solution, which is organizing your home. And then we don't have weekly for the paper. We usually do those in weekend retreats or we have certified organizers. So we'll walk you through taking your file cabinet and turning it into binders.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, We're going to take a quick ad break and then I'm going to be back with Lisa talking a little bit more about how you might organize yourself with some of her tips. Well, we are back for those just joining us. This is before Breakfast, but this is a longer version of the show. Once a week or so, I am interviewing interesting people about how they take their lives from great to awesome and the tips they have to help us as well. So one of Lisa's great products over at Organized three sixty five is called the Sunday basket, And obviously you can get an actual basket, but it's also a method of organizing your life. So tell us what the Sunday basket is and why people find this useful.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: So, as I mentioned in our last part of the episode, you know, one of the things that I've realized inside of households is that there are no operational systems. Like you move into a household, you literally have no furniture, you have nothing like you have to build everything from scratch, and that includes your operational systems. So the Sunday basket is a kindergarten simple easy way to take all of the decisions that come at you during the week, save them for Sunday, and make all of your decisions at one time and plan out your week. Many productive people already have a similar situation or process that they do that they have created on their own. The difference to the Sunday basket is that you literally could just buy it and it comes to you in the mail, and I walk you through how to do this in a very simple, easy way, and it's basic point it's just taking your mail, your decisions, going through your text messages, your email on Sunday, making all your decisions and planning your week. However, the longer you use the system, the more you realize that you can organize all the things we do as household managers. Like if you do have kids, their school things can be in there. We have slash podcasts for any ongoing household projects that you have going on in there, anything for yourself personally, because often our projects at home can't be done in one week. If you're going to do remodeling, you're going to have to save money for that for years and then it's going to take months to do it. Where do you put all that stuff while you're doing it or while you're waiting? And that's the problem that the Sunday basket solves.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: So it's a physical spot where you corral all the things that you need to deal with. So you know, as an example, I spend time signing children's permission slips. Presumably those would go in the basket and then I sign them. But you say corraling like your text messages, what does that even look? I mean, because we have a basket, my text messages are on my phone. I assume most peoples are there. How does the basket interact with the text messages on your phone? Yeah, so this.
00:09:51
Speaker 2: Is you know, and I am going to be doing my dissertation on the Sunday Basket. I believe that it improves your working memory and reduces task switching and opens up your capacity during the week and reduces your cognitive load. And it does that by not having to remember everything in your head. So part of the Sunday Basket process is you literally go through your text messages over the last week and make sure you reply to everything. You go through your email, or you get to the point where you're used to going through your email and realize, oh, this is something I could do on Sunday. You literally print it out and then most of my Sunday basket is notes to myself. Like if we were on video, you would see tons of notes around me. I've written six to myself this morning of things I need to remember to do but don't have to be done immediately. It's kind of like a to do list, but they're all on individual pieces of paper. That way, you can write notes anywhere, and you can also toss them when you're done with them.
00:10:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're actually if you think, at some point during the week, you know, I should reach out to Bob to see you know about the neighborhood association thing for X, Like you write that on a piece of paper, you stick the paper in the Sunday basket, and then on Sunday when you pull that out, you call Bob. Exactly how that works.
00:11:03
Speaker 2: Yes, And that's what we all do, except for we write it down on a piece of paper or we text ourselves a message, but we don't trust that we're.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: Actually going to do that.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: So then our brain is like, call Bob, Call Bob. You're like, forget it. I'll just stop everything I'm doing right now and call Bob. So I don't forget to call Bob. And so once you create a better system for having thoughts or getting requests at any time and delaying those decisions to Sunday and knowing you'll actually do it, that's where the increased mental capacity comes during the week.
00:11:31
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, I talk about this some with One of my favorite tips for people is to batch the little things. And I tend to create what I call a Friday punch list for me Friday is when I process a lot of these things. It's just a time that works for me, but I can see that Sunday would work for other folks. And I create a list of all the little things that are non urgent but I need to get to And the idea, which I think is what you're getting at as well with Sunday basket, is then I don't have to devote mental space to calling Bob the rest of the week because Bob is on the list for Friday, and I have a time when I know I will attack everything on the list that I have, you know, delegated the little things I'm batching for Friday. So is that the same mental process there?
00:12:19
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely. And you're a very productive person and you're so far down on your productivity journey. How you got to the point where you knew to do that and then had a cadence for that? The Sunday basket is the kindergarten version, like, how do you get from having all these thoughts and being so overwhelmed and so far behind you don't know what to do to you know, living an ultra productive organized life like Laura, how do you even learn that? So it also teaches that skill. You can do the Sunday basket any day of the week. We don't choose Friday because we do all that for our work stuff on Friday, So we do the exact same thing for the Sunday basket on Friday with a Friday work box.
00:12:55
Speaker 1: So Sunday the Sunday basket, I mean, at least in the way you're teaching it to people. It's more for household management, right, So that's not where you're processing the work stuff necessarily. So for people who are maintaining that strict separation between work stuff and personal stuff, the ideas you do Sunday basket for personal but then you also have a Friday idea for your work stuff. Right.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: Yes, again this is kind of based on an idea out of your book one hundred and sixty eight hours. You have more time than you think. When you said that if you start at eight am Monday until eight pm Thursday is half of your week, and then eight pm Thursday until eight am Monday, I was like mind blown, like are you kidding me? Like that's really half? And I was like, you're right, it is half. And so while I still work on Friday, Friday is definitely my flex day where my housework and my work come together. But Monday morning until Thursday night, like I am strictly work work even in the evenings, Like I don't do housework Monday through Thursday evenings because I know that if I really focus on my work Monday through Thursday and Friday's kind of flex, then I tend to focus more on my family and my house Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and so I actually have a better work life balance when I actually divide things out this way, Laura, I've taken it so far that we send out our weekly newsletter at seven o'clock on Thursdays, because that's when I want people to start transitioning into thinking about your household management role because it is a full time role. Like you've got a work role, household management role, I of course also have a full time student role. So I have so many hats that I'm wearing that I'm very very strict with these times, and these boxes allow me to have all the thoughts I have. So Friday, before I leave work, I touch everything and make sure that I've got it so that I can fully transotion over into my household management role, run my household management role on Sunday, make sure I get all that done fully transition back over into work.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems you'd get organized and you know what's coming in and not feel like things are slipping through the cracks. I wonder when people first hear this of the like, this sounds like, you know, I could spend my entire Sunday dealing with the stuff that's in the Sunday basket. What your promise is that it does eventually save you time, correct.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: So I mean kind of, So the Sunday basket is going to take you ninety minutes on Sunday, but you also spend that time during the week. I'm just changing when you do it, and it actually is faster than doing it during the week because you don't have the task switching. But what I've realized is, you know, every four to six weeks, I'll spend three hours on the Sunday basket. I know you guys have all just tuned out. Don't tune out. Here's the thing. We have a lot of CFO management that we do in our households that can't be done Monday through Friday, and five minutes stretches of time, and even when you're processing the regular weekly stuff on Sunday, you're going to need another ninety minutes to actually call the IRS and do whatever that is. Or our insurance guy retired, I had to get a new insurance guy.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: Like when do you.
00:15:50
Speaker 2: Do all that? Where do you schedule all that? It just takes a little bit longer time. So doing those CFO tasks take ninety minutes about every four to six weeks.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: In addition, yeah, well that's one of the reasons I do a lot of my organization on Friday is because then I can make those calls on Friday, because you know, presumably the prospective insurance people are at their desk on Friday, whereas they may not be on Sunday, which would make sense, but you have to assign a time for things that come out of something like the Sunday basket.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: Then yeah, and I mean, I work full time, so I can't do it on Friday, So I do it on Sunday. And then I do absolutely everything I can do on Sunday, and then the few things that you can't do on Sunday, I then schedule on my calendar to do, you know, first thing on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday or in a lunch hour or something like that.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: Awesome. So, Lisa, I mean you're obviously a very organized person. What is your biggest time management challenge right now? The PhD? The PhD well that little thing.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: So I schedule twenty five hours a week for my PhD because I mean, that clock is sticking and those assignments are due. I'm better at some things than other things. You know, going back to school in your fifties, it was a little rusty the first couple of terms. Last term, I took an extra class, which was great because I have less classes to do, but I really it was too much and I was really out of balance and it was the family that suffered during that term. So I have it all blocked out. I actually work Monday through Saturday. I work a six hour day on Saturday and two nights during the week. I don't do household related things that I work on the PhD. But being scheduled and knowing it was going to take twenty five hours a week and blocking out that time half day Thursday, half day Monday, all day Thursday, six hours Saturday, I've been able to do it and still travel and all the things they said I wouldn't be able to do while I got a PhD. I'm still doing all those things. But you have to be like so organized and when it's time to do the PhD, like I can't do some random organizing project instead, I have to like start reading, start writing, don't mess around.
00:17:57
Speaker 1: Absolutely carving out the time for it. For sure. We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Lisa Woodroff. Well, we are back. I am interviewing Lisa Woodruff, who is the owner of Organized three sixty five, a company that will teach you how to organize your life. She studies household systems of how people organize all the work that goes into maintaining a household. So, Lisa, I wonder if you could share just a quick tip or two something that you use in your life that has made you more efficient or helped you save time.
00:18:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very simple, and you're going to say, oh, can't make that big of a difference, so you're going to resist doing it, But I say, just try it for a week and see what happens. So my first one is to literally write down everything you think or you want to do on individual index cards, so just grab a back of index cards or you know, a small notepad. Don't use sticky notes. That doesn't work as well. But literally I have to get in so I want to get my haircut. I want to start a five to ozho one C three. It doesn't matter how big or how small it is. Every single thing goes on an individual card. And the reason why is number one. You'll just record a lot more if you have to record it on a list. See my big Which list does it go on? Which order? Am I going to do it? Just the individual cards? If it can wait till Sunday, it goes in the Sunday basket. You process it on Sunday. And I found this writing one thing down on one card very freeing because I just write everything down and then also you may find they're done. You can just toss them and then you can also group like items together and they become a project. So stop trying to use your brain to remember things and just allow it to process things. That would be my first one.
00:19:40
Speaker 1: I love it one in the second.
00:19:42
Speaker 2: One is very Laura vanderkam Esk, which is like record everything on your calendar so the thing that you might be missing on your calendar, which people in my audience usually say once they start doing it, they can't believe it is your drive time, like how much time you spend driving. I have multiple calendars. I have a forward facing corporate calendar. I have a corporate calendar where I schedule out all the work that I'm going to do that is not meeting work so that people can still schedule meetings with me. And then I have a personal calendar. And more than that, those are the only ones we'll talk about now. So every single day, all day long, I am recording how I use my time, like I have a perpetual time diary that goes back like five years in Google calendar, because I want to know how much time I'm spending on everything. And with the PhD, I've been really, really purposeful and making sure I spend time with my husband, time with my daughter and my grandson who live with us, so that I'm still making sure that I hit those family components. They think they're not getting enough time, I can tell you exactly how much time they're getting. They're getting ridiculous amount of time. So everybody's getting time, and I know where my time is going, so write it down. If you're not good at scheduling in advance, sometimes it's helpful to schedule after you've done things, so you can see where your time went, and then you can start making modifications to how you're spending your time after you see where it's going.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: I love it well. I'm a big fan of time diaries. Longtime listeners know that I've been tracking my time for about nine and a half years now, so it's good to see where it all goes. And again, yes, I can show how much time I've been spending with everyone, and they may have their own impressions of it. But we can't claim zero because that is not true. Of course, we can't claim other things that might be over the top, because I do not spend my entire life emptying the dishwasher, much as I sometimes think I do. My time logs will show otherwise, even if that is the story I am telling myself. So, Lisa, I wonder if you can share something you've done recently to take a day from great to awesome. I mean, maybe this is something you've done with your family, with your grandson or something like that.
00:21:46
Speaker 2: Kin you know, as we were talking about tracking our time and making sure that our family gets enough of our time. I would say that now that I'm in my fifties and I embarked on this PhD, my family was not like, yay, my mom, that's gonna go do it. And I was like, yeah, that's great. I'm doing it anyway, and I'm doing more of that. I'm doing it anyway. Like I now do jigsaw puzzling, even with a PhD. I'm doing jigsaw puzzling from like seven to nine pm after I take my long bath, and I have nights where I don't do the PhD at all, and also I don't put my grandson to bed, and I don't empty the dishwasher or do the dishes. Like I literally am putting myself on my schedule. And my kids are grown, so they're older. But I think that we all should be able to you know, I school Instagram for half an hour and I don't care, and I put it on my calendar. It's okay, Like we are worthy of being put on the calendar just for something we want to do that doesn't have to have a financial or a productivity value to it.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: Absolutely, though, I love the idea of actually putting thirty minutes of Instagram on the calendar because then it's chosen. It has a start time and an end time, and you know how it will fit with your day, as opposed to randomly picking up the phone to look at Instagram and then you know, yes, a similar time could go or more, but you feel bad about it because there were other things you felt you should be doing as opposed to it being what you have chosen for that time.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I allow myself now to just have fun time. Another thing I do is I play this silly little game on my phone when I'm sitting around with the family and we're just kind of talking instead just you know, eyeballs on everybody, I just get out the phone. I'm like playing this mindless game while we're chatting and the grandson's running around. Like the kids play on their phone all the time. Why can't I play on my phone every once in a while. So a couple of days a week, you'll just see me like for thirty minutes playing this game until it tells me how to pay them two dollars and ninety nine cents. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm done for the day.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: Now, done for the day. Now, that's the dividing line once they start charging you exactly. Lisa, what are you looking forward to right now?
00:23:47
Speaker 2: I'm really looking forward to the research I'm going to be able to do and to be able to create more systems like the Sunday Basket, and also to make them more generalizable and more accessible to everyone. So I am looking on starting a five oh one C three. That is one of my little index cards because I am starting to realize how everyone needs operational systems at home. I'm talking to people in Habitat for Humanity here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm talking to the Free Store Food Bank. I'm talking to a group that moves people from homelessness into households, and I'm really saying that once we move people into households, or once they graduate from high school and they're on the Free Store Food Bank, like how are they going to run their household? There are some management things that everyone needs that are not being taught, and I feel that's part of how people fall back into homelessness or are not able to be self sufficient, especially if you're young and you are a single mother, which when my daughter gave birth, forty percent of women in twenty twenty one, we're single women giving birth and so you know you don't have that marriage structure, that cohabitating partner with you to help you in the household. There are a lot of needs out there that are not being addressed because they're not being.
00:24:59
Speaker 1: Looked absolutely well. I know you will add to the discussion a lot on that. So, Lisa, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you?
00:25:08
Speaker 2: Sure? The company is called Organized three sixty five. I have a podcast that's been running for ten years and I'm most active on Instagram under Organized three sixty five.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: Awesome, Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us, and thanks to my Before Breakfast listeners for sticking around for these longer episodes. I hope you are enjoying them. Feel free to send me feedback at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. And in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one. It's part of my interview series where I talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and they share tips that will hopefully help the rest of us have better days as well. So today I am excited to welcome Lisa Woodruft to the show. Lisa is the owner of Organized three sixty five, a company that teaches people how to make their lives better. She is the creator of the famous Sunday Basket method of life organization, which we will talk about, and she also has all sorts of great other projects going on in her life. So Lisa, welcome to the show.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Laura, I'm excited that you are here. Maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about you and how you wound up in this line of work.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Well, part of it was reading your books. They really helped me conceptualize time differently. I've always been a person that has wanted to squeeze every second out of every day, very creative, and when I turned forty, I decided to start my own company that someday would hopefully employ people. So I've been doing this thirteen years, podcasting for ten and I've really dove about as deep as you can get into as to how do we manage our households? How do we look at that both from a business lens and as a home owner or somebody who lives in a household, but also from an academic lens, and how can we create operational systems that make it easier for everyone instead of everyone having to reinvent the wheel and create their own systems inside of households.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to that end, you actually went back to school to research organization from sort of like a psychological you know, organization management persons. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. What led to that.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in twenty twenty one I hired someone who had a PhD. And we did academic level research in order to figure out how much housework are we doing or what is housework? And I didn't know much about academia, and as we were doing our study, we stumbled upon the fact that there is no definition of housework anywhere, not in academia or anywhere, and After we did our study, we found some significant results, and I realized that if I wanted to keep researching this, I wanted to be the researcher who did it. So at the age of fifty one, I went back to school and I'm getting my PhD. I'm at the end of my second year and getting ready to start my dissertation. And I'm so glad I did because there's so much amazing, awesome research and literature out there already. But we have not truly defined a lot of our household management roles or operational definitions, and so the studies are not really comparable. And the studies talk a lot about the problem, but we aren't doing a lot of applying where we're applying a solution and then seeing if that solution is significant, And that's what I really want to do.
00:03:06
Speaker 1: Well, that's really exciting. Yeah, I mean it makes sense. It's an area that just people have not done a whole lot of research into. I mean, obviously there's a lot of sort of feminist writings back in the day of housework being something that people spent time doing, but I doubt it has been approached from a very systematic perspective in that I always love studying time use and so just even seeing how people spend their time in their homes. It's just this area that everyone does, and yet it wasn't deemed worthy of study. I mean probably because it was mostly women doing it. I mean, I guess that would be one of the reasons.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, And to your point, there are so many studies and instead of looking at how we utilize households when we move from our childhood home to our own home, like from eighteen to eighty years old, all of the studies strip away people who are single parents, strip away people who are not married, and they narrow all of their studies to married couples with children. Because you're right, it's all rooted in feminist literature coming out of the late seventies and early eighties, and so we have a lot of theories about why women do more in married couples. Do you realize that only forty percent of the United States is married, and less than that even have children. So there's sixty percent of the adult population that really has not been studied at all.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, fascinating, And I know you're going to come up with some great stuff on that, but let's talk a little bit about how Lisa organizes her days. So tell us a little bit about your morning routine.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so simple, and I like that it's so simple, and I talk about that all the time because I think often we can think that our morning routines have to be really elaborate. It's very simple. I take a shower. I either curl my hair or I don't curl my hair. That's a twenty minute decision right there. I wear the same makeup every day, seven days a week. I'm one of those always has makeup on. I grab my protein bar and coffee and I'm out the door.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: Awesome. And then what do you do once you get to work?
00:05:09
Speaker 2: So this is what I realized. I have a morning, afternoon, and evening routine at home, and I have a start of the day, mid day and end of day routine at work. And those six routines really create a scaffolding for me. So when I get to work, I like to say that I'm going to jump right into work, but I never do. I always make a coffee, I walk around and I talk with the other team members that are here. I check Instagram too many times, I check my email, I get everything situated and it's usually about thirty minutes before I actually hop into my first meeting or whatever I'm going to work on for the day.
00:05:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell me a little bit about Organized three sixty five of the business, because you said, you know, one of your goals starting it, you wanted to employ people, and obviously you have a team. Now what exactly does the business do and what does that team look like?
00:05:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I was a school teacher and a former stay at home mom, so I do not have any business training whatsoever. So when everybody said like, oh, you could have products, I was like, Okay, you can create courses, Okay, you can have a podcast. I'm always like yes. I said yes and to everything. So we do a lot of things here at Organize three sixty five. We have trademarks, patent patents, copyrights, but basically we're an adult school. So if you want to learn the skill of organizing as an educator, I've created wrap around services. So you mentioned the Sunday Basket, which we'll talk about. Every single product that we have has a physical component like you're getting your school supplies or your office supplies. It has an online teaching component where I have courses and lessons that go along with the physical product. And then we have a community aspect, so there are co working times for all the different products, so you can get online every week and literally do that activity with someone live.
00:06:46
Speaker 1: And many of those activities are about organizing the household, organizing paper, things like that. Yep.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: So we have weekly for the Sunday Basket, which is planning your week. We have weekly for the Workbox, which is planning your work. We have weekly for our Productive Solution, which is organizing your home. And then we don't have weekly for the paper. We usually do those in weekend retreats or we have certified organizers. So we'll walk you through taking your file cabinet and turning it into binders.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, We're going to take a quick ad break and then I'm going to be back with Lisa talking a little bit more about how you might organize yourself with some of her tips. Well, we are back for those just joining us. This is before Breakfast, but this is a longer version of the show. Once a week or so, I am interviewing interesting people about how they take their lives from great to awesome and the tips they have to help us as well. So one of Lisa's great products over at Organized three sixty five is called the Sunday basket, And obviously you can get an actual basket, but it's also a method of organizing your life. So tell us what the Sunday basket is and why people find this useful.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: So, as I mentioned in our last part of the episode, you know, one of the things that I've realized inside of households is that there are no operational systems. Like you move into a household, you literally have no furniture, you have nothing like you have to build everything from scratch, and that includes your operational systems. So the Sunday basket is a kindergarten simple easy way to take all of the decisions that come at you during the week, save them for Sunday, and make all of your decisions at one time and plan out your week. Many productive people already have a similar situation or process that they do that they have created on their own. The difference to the Sunday basket is that you literally could just buy it and it comes to you in the mail, and I walk you through how to do this in a very simple, easy way, and it's basic point it's just taking your mail, your decisions, going through your text messages, your email on Sunday, making all your decisions and planning your week. However, the longer you use the system, the more you realize that you can organize all the things we do as household managers. Like if you do have kids, their school things can be in there. We have slash podcasts for any ongoing household projects that you have going on in there, anything for yourself personally, because often our projects at home can't be done in one week. If you're going to do remodeling, you're going to have to save money for that for years and then it's going to take months to do it. Where do you put all that stuff while you're doing it or while you're waiting? And that's the problem that the Sunday basket solves.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: So it's a physical spot where you corral all the things that you need to deal with. So you know, as an example, I spend time signing children's permission slips. Presumably those would go in the basket and then I sign them. But you say corraling like your text messages, what does that even look? I mean, because we have a basket, my text messages are on my phone. I assume most peoples are there. How does the basket interact with the text messages on your phone? Yeah, so this.
00:09:51
Speaker 2: Is you know, and I am going to be doing my dissertation on the Sunday Basket. I believe that it improves your working memory and reduces task switching and opens up your capacity during the week and reduces your cognitive load. And it does that by not having to remember everything in your head. So part of the Sunday Basket process is you literally go through your text messages over the last week and make sure you reply to everything. You go through your email, or you get to the point where you're used to going through your email and realize, oh, this is something I could do on Sunday. You literally print it out and then most of my Sunday basket is notes to myself. Like if we were on video, you would see tons of notes around me. I've written six to myself this morning of things I need to remember to do but don't have to be done immediately. It's kind of like a to do list, but they're all on individual pieces of paper. That way, you can write notes anywhere, and you can also toss them when you're done with them.
00:10:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're actually if you think, at some point during the week, you know, I should reach out to Bob to see you know about the neighborhood association thing for X, Like you write that on a piece of paper, you stick the paper in the Sunday basket, and then on Sunday when you pull that out, you call Bob. Exactly how that works.
00:11:03
Speaker 2: Yes, And that's what we all do, except for we write it down on a piece of paper or we text ourselves a message, but we don't trust that we're.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: Actually going to do that.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: So then our brain is like, call Bob, Call Bob. You're like, forget it. I'll just stop everything I'm doing right now and call Bob. So I don't forget to call Bob. And so once you create a better system for having thoughts or getting requests at any time and delaying those decisions to Sunday and knowing you'll actually do it, that's where the increased mental capacity comes during the week.
00:11:31
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, I talk about this some with One of my favorite tips for people is to batch the little things. And I tend to create what I call a Friday punch list for me Friday is when I process a lot of these things. It's just a time that works for me, but I can see that Sunday would work for other folks. And I create a list of all the little things that are non urgent but I need to get to And the idea, which I think is what you're getting at as well with Sunday basket, is then I don't have to devote mental space to calling Bob the rest of the week because Bob is on the list for Friday, and I have a time when I know I will attack everything on the list that I have, you know, delegated the little things I'm batching for Friday. So is that the same mental process there?
00:12:19
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely. And you're a very productive person and you're so far down on your productivity journey. How you got to the point where you knew to do that and then had a cadence for that? The Sunday basket is the kindergarten version, like, how do you get from having all these thoughts and being so overwhelmed and so far behind you don't know what to do to you know, living an ultra productive organized life like Laura, how do you even learn that? So it also teaches that skill. You can do the Sunday basket any day of the week. We don't choose Friday because we do all that for our work stuff on Friday, So we do the exact same thing for the Sunday basket on Friday with a Friday work box.
00:12:55
Speaker 1: So Sunday the Sunday basket, I mean, at least in the way you're teaching it to people. It's more for household management, right, So that's not where you're processing the work stuff necessarily. So for people who are maintaining that strict separation between work stuff and personal stuff, the ideas you do Sunday basket for personal but then you also have a Friday idea for your work stuff. Right.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: Yes, again this is kind of based on an idea out of your book one hundred and sixty eight hours. You have more time than you think. When you said that if you start at eight am Monday until eight pm Thursday is half of your week, and then eight pm Thursday until eight am Monday, I was like mind blown, like are you kidding me? Like that's really half? And I was like, you're right, it is half. And so while I still work on Friday, Friday is definitely my flex day where my housework and my work come together. But Monday morning until Thursday night, like I am strictly work work even in the evenings, Like I don't do housework Monday through Thursday evenings because I know that if I really focus on my work Monday through Thursday and Friday's kind of flex, then I tend to focus more on my family and my house Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and so I actually have a better work life balance when I actually divide things out this way, Laura, I've taken it so far that we send out our weekly newsletter at seven o'clock on Thursdays, because that's when I want people to start transitioning into thinking about your household management role because it is a full time role. Like you've got a work role, household management role, I of course also have a full time student role. So I have so many hats that I'm wearing that I'm very very strict with these times, and these boxes allow me to have all the thoughts I have. So Friday, before I leave work, I touch everything and make sure that I've got it so that I can fully transotion over into my household management role, run my household management role on Sunday, make sure I get all that done fully transition back over into work.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems you'd get organized and you know what's coming in and not feel like things are slipping through the cracks. I wonder when people first hear this of the like, this sounds like, you know, I could spend my entire Sunday dealing with the stuff that's in the Sunday basket. What your promise is that it does eventually save you time, correct.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: So I mean kind of, So the Sunday basket is going to take you ninety minutes on Sunday, but you also spend that time during the week. I'm just changing when you do it, and it actually is faster than doing it during the week because you don't have the task switching. But what I've realized is, you know, every four to six weeks, I'll spend three hours on the Sunday basket. I know you guys have all just tuned out. Don't tune out. Here's the thing. We have a lot of CFO management that we do in our households that can't be done Monday through Friday, and five minutes stretches of time, and even when you're processing the regular weekly stuff on Sunday, you're going to need another ninety minutes to actually call the IRS and do whatever that is. Or our insurance guy retired, I had to get a new insurance guy.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: Like when do you.
00:15:50
Speaker 2: Do all that? Where do you schedule all that? It just takes a little bit longer time. So doing those CFO tasks take ninety minutes about every four to six weeks.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: In addition, yeah, well that's one of the reasons I do a lot of my organization on Friday is because then I can make those calls on Friday, because you know, presumably the prospective insurance people are at their desk on Friday, whereas they may not be on Sunday, which would make sense, but you have to assign a time for things that come out of something like the Sunday basket.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: Then yeah, and I mean, I work full time, so I can't do it on Friday, So I do it on Sunday. And then I do absolutely everything I can do on Sunday, and then the few things that you can't do on Sunday, I then schedule on my calendar to do, you know, first thing on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday or in a lunch hour or something like that.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: Awesome. So, Lisa, I mean you're obviously a very organized person. What is your biggest time management challenge right now? The PhD? The PhD well that little thing.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: So I schedule twenty five hours a week for my PhD because I mean, that clock is sticking and those assignments are due. I'm better at some things than other things. You know, going back to school in your fifties, it was a little rusty the first couple of terms. Last term, I took an extra class, which was great because I have less classes to do, but I really it was too much and I was really out of balance and it was the family that suffered during that term. So I have it all blocked out. I actually work Monday through Saturday. I work a six hour day on Saturday and two nights during the week. I don't do household related things that I work on the PhD. But being scheduled and knowing it was going to take twenty five hours a week and blocking out that time half day Thursday, half day Monday, all day Thursday, six hours Saturday, I've been able to do it and still travel and all the things they said I wouldn't be able to do while I got a PhD. I'm still doing all those things. But you have to be like so organized and when it's time to do the PhD, like I can't do some random organizing project instead, I have to like start reading, start writing, don't mess around.
00:17:57
Speaker 1: Absolutely carving out the time for it. For sure. We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Lisa Woodroff. Well, we are back. I am interviewing Lisa Woodruff, who is the owner of Organized three sixty five, a company that will teach you how to organize your life. She studies household systems of how people organize all the work that goes into maintaining a household. So, Lisa, I wonder if you could share just a quick tip or two something that you use in your life that has made you more efficient or helped you save time.
00:18:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very simple, and you're going to say, oh, can't make that big of a difference, so you're going to resist doing it, But I say, just try it for a week and see what happens. So my first one is to literally write down everything you think or you want to do on individual index cards, so just grab a back of index cards or you know, a small notepad. Don't use sticky notes. That doesn't work as well. But literally I have to get in so I want to get my haircut. I want to start a five to ozho one C three. It doesn't matter how big or how small it is. Every single thing goes on an individual card. And the reason why is number one. You'll just record a lot more if you have to record it on a list. See my big Which list does it go on? Which order? Am I going to do it? Just the individual cards? If it can wait till Sunday, it goes in the Sunday basket. You process it on Sunday. And I found this writing one thing down on one card very freeing because I just write everything down and then also you may find they're done. You can just toss them and then you can also group like items together and they become a project. So stop trying to use your brain to remember things and just allow it to process things. That would be my first one.
00:19:40
Speaker 1: I love it one in the second.
00:19:42
Speaker 2: One is very Laura vanderkam Esk, which is like record everything on your calendar so the thing that you might be missing on your calendar, which people in my audience usually say once they start doing it, they can't believe it is your drive time, like how much time you spend driving. I have multiple calendars. I have a forward facing corporate calendar. I have a corporate calendar where I schedule out all the work that I'm going to do that is not meeting work so that people can still schedule meetings with me. And then I have a personal calendar. And more than that, those are the only ones we'll talk about now. So every single day, all day long, I am recording how I use my time, like I have a perpetual time diary that goes back like five years in Google calendar, because I want to know how much time I'm spending on everything. And with the PhD, I've been really, really purposeful and making sure I spend time with my husband, time with my daughter and my grandson who live with us, so that I'm still making sure that I hit those family components. They think they're not getting enough time, I can tell you exactly how much time they're getting. They're getting ridiculous amount of time. So everybody's getting time, and I know where my time is going, so write it down. If you're not good at scheduling in advance, sometimes it's helpful to schedule after you've done things, so you can see where your time went, and then you can start making modifications to how you're spending your time after you see where it's going.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: I love it well. I'm a big fan of time diaries. Longtime listeners know that I've been tracking my time for about nine and a half years now, so it's good to see where it all goes. And again, yes, I can show how much time I've been spending with everyone, and they may have their own impressions of it. But we can't claim zero because that is not true. Of course, we can't claim other things that might be over the top, because I do not spend my entire life emptying the dishwasher, much as I sometimes think I do. My time logs will show otherwise, even if that is the story I am telling myself. So, Lisa, I wonder if you can share something you've done recently to take a day from great to awesome. I mean, maybe this is something you've done with your family, with your grandson or something like that.
00:21:46
Speaker 2: Kin you know, as we were talking about tracking our time and making sure that our family gets enough of our time. I would say that now that I'm in my fifties and I embarked on this PhD, my family was not like, yay, my mom, that's gonna go do it. And I was like, yeah, that's great. I'm doing it anyway, and I'm doing more of that. I'm doing it anyway. Like I now do jigsaw puzzling, even with a PhD. I'm doing jigsaw puzzling from like seven to nine pm after I take my long bath, and I have nights where I don't do the PhD at all, and also I don't put my grandson to bed, and I don't empty the dishwasher or do the dishes. Like I literally am putting myself on my schedule. And my kids are grown, so they're older. But I think that we all should be able to you know, I school Instagram for half an hour and I don't care, and I put it on my calendar. It's okay, Like we are worthy of being put on the calendar just for something we want to do that doesn't have to have a financial or a productivity value to it.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: Absolutely, though, I love the idea of actually putting thirty minutes of Instagram on the calendar because then it's chosen. It has a start time and an end time, and you know how it will fit with your day, as opposed to randomly picking up the phone to look at Instagram and then you know, yes, a similar time could go or more, but you feel bad about it because there were other things you felt you should be doing as opposed to it being what you have chosen for that time.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I allow myself now to just have fun time. Another thing I do is I play this silly little game on my phone when I'm sitting around with the family and we're just kind of talking instead just you know, eyeballs on everybody, I just get out the phone. I'm like playing this mindless game while we're chatting and the grandson's running around. Like the kids play on their phone all the time. Why can't I play on my phone every once in a while. So a couple of days a week, you'll just see me like for thirty minutes playing this game until it tells me how to pay them two dollars and ninety nine cents. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm done for the day.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: Now, done for the day. Now, that's the dividing line once they start charging you exactly. Lisa, what are you looking forward to right now?
00:23:47
Speaker 2: I'm really looking forward to the research I'm going to be able to do and to be able to create more systems like the Sunday Basket, and also to make them more generalizable and more accessible to everyone. So I am looking on starting a five oh one C three. That is one of my little index cards because I am starting to realize how everyone needs operational systems at home. I'm talking to people in Habitat for Humanity here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm talking to the Free Store Food Bank. I'm talking to a group that moves people from homelessness into households, and I'm really saying that once we move people into households, or once they graduate from high school and they're on the Free Store Food Bank, like how are they going to run their household? There are some management things that everyone needs that are not being taught, and I feel that's part of how people fall back into homelessness or are not able to be self sufficient, especially if you're young and you are a single mother, which when my daughter gave birth, forty percent of women in twenty twenty one, we're single women giving birth and so you know you don't have that marriage structure, that cohabitating partner with you to help you in the household. There are a lot of needs out there that are not being addressed because they're not being.
00:24:59
Speaker 1: Looked absolutely well. I know you will add to the discussion a lot on that. So, Lisa, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you?
00:25:08
Speaker 2: Sure? The company is called Organized three sixty five. I have a podcast that's been running for ten years and I'm most active on Instagram under Organized three sixty five.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: Awesome, Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us, and thanks to my Before Breakfast listeners for sticking around for these longer episodes. I hope you are enjoying them. Feel free to send me feedback at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. And in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
