Welcome to the newest Wednesday Podcast! On Wednesdays, I get to talk with members of the Organize 365 community as they share the challenges, progress, missteps, and triumphs along their organizing journey. You can see and hear transformation in action. I look forward to helping YOU get Organized!

This week I am sharing my conversation with Samantha S. She is a teacher who lives with her husband and her three kids under four years old. Samantha found that by going through The Productive Home Solution™ to organize her home, moving to a new home was easier but it also made for much less stress when both her second and third children were born four weeks early in 2019 and 2021. Samantha loves following along with the Sunday Basket® Club using the recording and is able to process her 1.0 Slash Pocket system in less than an hour each week. She says that following along with the Sunday Basket® Club removes analysis paralysis. She doesn't have to think about what needs to be done to process her Sunday Basket® because we guide her through each week! Next up on her list is to get her The Paper Solution® Binders organized.

Can you relate to Samantha's story? Has The Productive Home Solution™ helped you survive a move or unexpected event? Do you join us each week in the Organize 365® app for the Sunday Basket® Club? 

I am grateful that you are reaching out to share your stories and progress with me and with the Organize 365® community. If you are ready to share your story with us, please apply at https://organize365.com/wednesday

For more information about the programs and products mentioned in this podcast please check out these links:

Organize 365®

The Sunday Basket® System

The Productive Home Solution™ (formerly All Access)

The Paper Solution® Binders

I look forward to helping YOU get Organized!

PS - Be sure to share YOUR unique way of using #myextra5 and tag your post on Instagram so we can share your wins!

Have you seen the organization in a kindergarten classroom? It's full of cubbies and bins. Any classroom from preschool through high school is designed to function well. The environment is organized in a way that there is a place for everything to be put away. There's a place for the books and the toys. There are stations designated for different activities. Classrooms are also set up to be age-appropriate. You won't find baby toys in the middle school classroom! The classroom environment is set up so that when the kids enter, they have the age-appropriate things they need and everything is where it is supposed to be. Your home can be set up this way too!

If you are teaching the skill of organizing to someone else, you first need a picture of what done looks like. Have an orientation when you organize a space in your home. This shows your family where things are located, the rules of that area, and what it should look like when it is clean up after using that space.

Next, you need a lesson plan. You have to know the right amount of work to give to your student so that they neither become bored or overwhelmed when learning how to organize.

Finally, the person you're teaching needs to have a spark ignited to want to learn the skill of organization. You cannot create this spark in someone else, but once they have it, it's game on!

In this episode, I help you think about what your space should look like to make it function like a classroom. I also walk you through how to teach the skill of organization to someone else.

What will your first step be in making your home function like a classroom?

The Productive Home Solution™ gives you all of the information and tools that you need to organize your home so that it is age-appropriate and functions well for your current life stage. It's also set up in bite-sized chunks so you can do as little or as much as you want to do at a time. Join The Productive Home Solution™ here.

Welcome to the newest Wednesday Podcast! On Wednesdays, I get to talk with members of the Organize 365 community as they share the challenges, progress, missteps, and triumphs along their organizing journey. You can see and hear transformation in action. I look forward to helping YOU get Organized!

This week I am sharing my conversation with Andrea P. She lives with her husband, their young son, and their dog in the UK. Andrea with diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. She sought the diagnosis because while she compensated well into her adult years while she was single, life became too much when in a space of 3 years she married, bought a house, adopted a dog, and had a baby. I'm sure many of you can relate! She found that organization is a learnable skill and is now thriving!

What resonates with YOU about Andrea's story? Do you have ADHD?

I am grateful that you are reaching out to share your stories and progress with me and with the Organize 365® community. If you are ready to share your story with us, please apply at https://organize365.com/wednesday

For more information about the programs and products mentioned in this podcast please check out these links:

Organize 365®

The Sunday Basket® System

The Productive Home Solution™ (formerly All Access)

The Paper Solution® Binders

I look forward to helping YOU get Organized!

PS - Be sure to share YOUR unique way of using #myextra5 and tag your post on Instagram so we can share your wins!

Do you know your preferred learning style?

If you don't know your learning style, think back to your highest level of formal education. How did you make it through or study for tests? That's likely your preferred learning style. You may find that you use more than one learning style, but you have a natural bent toward one of them. 

There are four main learning styles:

1. Auditory
2. Kinesthetic
3. Visual
4. Reading / Writing

In this episode, I'm sharing details about these four learning styles to help you figure out which one works best for you. Then, I want you to use these learning styles to see your home (and your work) in a different way. Because I am a teacher at heart, I have created our systems at Organize 365® to work for any learning style. I explain some of the features of our products and how to make better use of those things from the perspective of your learning style. From podcasts to coworking times, from videos to written materials, I've given you the content in multiple formats to help you succeed in becoming organized.

It's your home! Focus on consuming and implementing new information in your preferred way of learning. Give yourself the grace to learn as an adult learner the way that you are uniquely wired to learn!

How do you learn best? What features of Organize 365® programs and products have you found work best for your learning style?

Welcome to the newest Wednesday Podcast! On Wednesdays, I get to talk with members of the Organize 365 community as they share the challenges, progress, missteps, and triumphs along their organizing journey. You can see and hear transformation in action. I look forward to helping YOU get Organized!

This week I am sharing my conversation with Sarah K. She lives with her husband and two of her adult children. Sarah shares how she tamed the paper monster! She used to dread her husband asking for a receipt or important paper, but not anymore. She went from 13 (yes, 13!) file cabinets down to 1/2 a desk file drawer and organized binders. Now she can find the papers she needs for her family, her home, and her rental properties quickly and easily in her Sunday Basket®, Business Workbox®, and The Paper Solution® Binders. I also love how organizing became a family project for this tight-knit former homeschooling family.

What resonates with YOU about Sarah's story? Are you dealing with medical issues in your family or drowning in paper?

I am grateful that you are reaching out to share your stories and progress with me and with the Organize 365® community. If you are ready to share your story with us, please apply at https://organize365.com/wednesday

Angela Watson is here again! If you're a teacher and you don't know Angela, you need to meet her! She was a classroom teacher for 11 years and has spent over a decade as an instructional coach. She has a podcast called Truth for Teachers and created the 40 hour Teacher Workweek program to help teachers take back control of their time.

In this episode, Angela and I dive into what's going on in education and the classroom post-pandemic. A survey from the NEA says that 55% of teachers are looking to retire sooner than they had the previous fall. That's a scary number when the typical attrition rate for teachers is 8%. Education Week says that teachers work an average of 54 hours a week and half of that time is spent on non-teaching time work. Angela's surveys have found that the average in her audience is 62 hours per week. Teachers know when they go into this profession that work doesn't end at 3pm, but at the same time, teachers are being taken advantage of because of their deep care for their work.

What's the solution? How can teachers work fewer hours and be more productive? Angela and I have both spent a lot of time working on different angles of this issue so we chat about ways to fix this problem! It comes back to boundaries and organization.

Angela's contribution to the solution is the 40 hour Teacher Workweek program. One of the things she does in this program is help teachers understand the difference between hobby work and required work. We have a long discussion about what hobby work is and how to cut back your work hours by reducing this type of work. Using Angela's program, most members have been able to cut 5 hours off of their work week in the first month in the same way that Sunday Basket® users are able to save 5 hours a week after using the system for 6 weeks!

My contribution to the solution is the Education Friday Workbox®. This system compliments Angela's solution by helping you organize the administrative and paperwork side of teaching. Instead of missing deadlines and spending time looking for important papers, you have more time to focus on the lesson planning and the teaching that you love.

I love talking with Angela! I hope you teachers out there find help and hope in these solutions!

For the final episode in this series about the Education Friday Workbox®, I'm talking with Kate McDonnell. Kate is single and lives with her cat in Colorado. She has been a teacher for over 15 years. Her career started with teaching science but her background is in computer programming. She now teaches many different technology-related courses in different formats with a schedule that changes every week.

Kate is also a certified organizer. You can find out more about working with her here.

In this episode, Kate and I discuss the challenges of teaching and organizing so many different classes and then the administrative work that goes along with that. Kate loves using the portable Sunday Basket® to carry her Slash pockets and papers with her to her various schools. We also talk a little about managing email. You know that I'm not your digital organizer, but I do have some tips for organizing email. (I share even more about email organization in the email course inside of The Productive Home Solution™.)

Learn more about the Education Friday Workbox® here.

Registration for Teacher Camp is now open. Click here to learn more and sign up.

In this final week of the series on spaces to organize, I'm talking about the second optional space to organize: memories and photos. Now, I don't personally believe that this is an optional space to organize for me and my family. It's kind of a passion of mine!

After you have sorted through the four essential areas of paper -- medical, financial, household reference, and household operations -- you're still left with a lot of paper that I categorize as memories and photos. What do you do with all of these things?

In this episode, I explain that there are different levels of final organization of memories and photos that you could choose to end at from simple boxes of collated photos to photo albums and binders. I love creating topic-based albums: holidays, vacations, birthdays, etc. I also personally love creating binders and albums because my family is more likely to pull them off the shelf and look at them over items kept in a box. Organizing your memories and photos can be such a source of joy for your family as they look back at the family history you've gathered and fun memories from their lives.

In our Saving Your Story Photo Organization Program, I walk you through sorting all of your photos, eliminating duplicates, and creating final albums with those photos. 

Is organizing memories and photos optional for you? What is keeping you from organing this space?

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about the updated Education Friday Workbox®.

This week, I'm talking with Michele Vinje. She's been an educator for over 28 years in the same school and the same building for her entire career. She has taught various history and economics courses to sophomores, juniors, and seniors over the years. 

You can hear more of Michele's personal story in her transformation episode. Michele is also a certified organizer. You can find out more about working with her here.

In this episode, Michele and I discuss how the education system has changed since the pandemic. We talk about how the Education Friday Workbox® is a place to hold all of those administrative tasks that are important but not urgent so you can get to them once a week and before something is due. Michelle describes how the Education Friday Workbox® frees up your brain and that it is a system that is inclusive for all educators and administrators but customizable for anyone in the education world. And don't forget about the colors! The colored Slash pockets make it easy to find a category of information quickly.

Learn more about the Education Friday Workbox® here.

Registration for Teacher Camp is now open. Click here to learn more and sign up.