Have you ever thought about how much your home is a business? 

Our homes are businesses. The entire US economy runs on the economy of your house. If the American family is doing well, the American economy is doing well.

When I talk about our homes as businesses, I don’t mean that you should be just going through the motions and checking boxes or anything even similar to that. In this episode, I share how you can use tools and systems (similar to what you would do at work) to gain a bigger impact and less stress at home.

A business usually has a CEO and COO. Your home most likely does, too. Sometimes you may be acting as the CEO and COO, sometimes you may just have one of those roles.

The CEO creates the strategy of the company, manages the capacity and resources, and plans for execution. Some of the things you may do as the CEO of your home are:

• During your weekly Sunday Basket® routine, you look at what constraints you have in the upcoming week, what needs to get done

• Planning your week and trimester in advance

The COO plays a critical role in running the day-to-day actionables that will accomplish the strategy the CEO has created for the team. 

The key to success is that the CEO and COO are both operating proactively and strategically. Making choices about what to work on, how to spend time and money, and what experiences and impact they want to create within their household.

In this episode, I deep dive into how The Friday Workbox® operates for your business and apply this to how the Sunday Basket® helps you run the business of home and family. 

I’d love to hear your feedback on this one! Do you see the parallels between running your home as a business?

Come learn how to plan like the CEO of your home!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Productive Home Solution™ Planning Day

• The Productive Home Solution™

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Friday Workbox®

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

On the Wednesday podcast, 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 learn the skill of organization, too!

Today I’m excited to talk with fellow podcaster, Sarah Hart-Unger.  Sarah hosts the podcast Best Laid Plans, co-hosts the podcast Best of Both Worlds with Laura Vanderkam, is the mother of three children, married to a surgeon, and works as pediatric endocrinologist! So, needless to say, she stays busy! Organization and planning are a big part of her ability to do so much and we will be talking about the systems she has in place.

First things first, we talk about parenting! Sarah is experiencing a golden window because her youngest child just turned 5! For parents of children younger than 5, things are just changing so frequently every 6-8 weeks that it is hard to catch your breath in terms of getting organized.

We discuss how when you go through different stages and phases of life, you learn how to use your organization and time management skills in different ways.

Sarah is a big believer in functional organization. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but it needs to work for you! She shares how she is ruthless about getting rid of things and enjoys knowing where things are. 

Organizing her time is one of her favorite things to do. Mine, too! We dig deep into how planning your home life by quarters just does not work. It creates weird cut-offs like July. Who wants to start a new plan in the middle of summer? You need to have your entire summer planned out. The quarters of the year aren’t actually new energies. The Organize 365® approach to planning is by trimesters.

Planning allows you to make room for your own explosive growth! We both discuss how during busy seasons of life, our respective calendars and planners bring us a sense of peace and allow us to have more capacity. Do you have a plan that you love to look at? That gives you peace, not stress? That creates calm in chaos? Do you have a plan for the upcoming trimester and summer season? 

Sarah also shares how she has organized her children. We discuss a very hot topic - how to organize kids’ artwork! Check out the episode resources if you want to share the Kids Movie Sarah references with your kids as well!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Productive Home Solution™ Planning Day

• The Productive Home Solution™

• The Sunday Basket®

• Lattice Binder for kid’s artwork

• Organize 365® Kids Movie

• Learn more about Golden Windows and Season of Organizing

• Watch the video on YouTube to see the sneak peek of Lisa’s Weekly Planning Sheet

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.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

There is administration time related to getting your PhD.

The Sunday Basket® and the Business Friday Workbox® teaches you there are invisible tasks you do at home and work. Once these tasks are made visible, you can eliminate as many as possible. 

Mid-semester, I realized I need PhD administrative time. Listen in as I review what types of administrative tasks I have while working on my PhD.

• Planning my work 

• Organizing my email

• Signing up for teacher office hours 

• Cleaning up Zotero files

Next week, I will share with you how I took a pause and reoriented myself.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Follow my journey on Instagram - Check out the PhD Highlight Button

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Friday Workbox®

• Zotero

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

Are you playing Checkers or Chess? Of course, you are playing Checkers. We all are. But, some of us are playing (and winning) Chess, too!

In today’s episode, I breakdown how you can “play” the game of life better with an emphasis on strategy. 

As I breakdown the “game of life” in this episode, we discuss:

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• Marie Kondo’s life with three kids

• Generational norms

• The strategy of living life with a planned approach

Which leads us to the free Organize 365® blitzes. These blitzes were designed to help you get ahead. They may seem like “small wins” but they have a huge impact on how we look at our time in a more strategic (chess-like) way. These blitzes teach us how to incorporate forward planning into our game of life.

In the next four months, you are going to experience Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, tax day and the summer season. These things are coming whether you plan ahead or not. But, if you do join our blitzes and planning day, you’ll be able to approach the next four months with a planned and strategic approach. This will allow you to enjoy summer experiences with your family, sign your kids up for their favorite camps, purchase plane tickets before they sell out and look forward to your summer. Playing Chess allows you to get out of the reactiveness of the Checkers game.

Organize 365® Planning Days allow you to do the mental work ahead of time so you can enjoy the upcoming season. I hope you’ll join me!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Routine Reset Blitz

• Organize 365® Home Planning Day

• The Productive Home Solution™

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

On the Wednesday podcast, 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 learn the skill of organization, too!

During this month we have been talking to women about how women in their 30s are getting it done. Stephanie represents women that are not working from home. She began her career as a corporate executive before she left to continue to grow the company she founded with her husband, Vince. She and Vince have 4 kids, 11, 9 (twins), and 6.

She worked from home for the last couple of years, but got physical space last Spring and she is back working in an office. She enjoyed her time working from home, but realized she needed more thinking and planning time and has since moved into a physical office space.

She moved to a condensed schedule, Monday to Thursday available for meetings and in the office with Fridays off, to give her the ability to have some parts of a stay-at-home mom. Never being able to fully work on just Austin Fowler, she has found time saving activities. Her time is very full with her own business and a family of 6 so it is important to her to plan and prepare for her weeks and weekends. She is very disciplined and uses her Sunday Basket® and Friday Workbox® to plan while using her bags to pack and prepare.

Listen in to find out what things work well for Stephanie and her family during this season of growing children and a growing business.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• AustinFowler.com

• Instagram @austinandfowler

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.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

Are we really talking about clothing again? What does this really have to do with getting a PhD anyway?!

Organization unlocks our time and productivity unlocks our capacity.

I’m using my PhD as the example for these stories, but everything I’m sharing with you is how I am taking past organizational strengths, learning, or habits that I have had or am developing now and how I’m refining those in order to get more time and have more capacity.

The way in which we free up our time in order to be able to do the next thing, that’s organization. As we organize, we create a habit. A habit is just doing the thing you’ve already organized without consciously thinking about it. In order to really get more time, you have to over analyze some basic habits to figure out if there is a more efficient way to do these things and somehow create this new habit and put it on autopilot so we don’t have to even think about it.

This brings us back to clothing!

Listen in as we talk about how creating a uniform for the different hats you wear will help you to transition into the role that you're playing and mentally enter into that space. 

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Follow my journey on Instagram - Check out the PhD Highlight Button

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

There is no such thing as perfection.

There just isn’t. Don’t let social media fool you. What about those pictures you see as you're scrolling your phone? Those aren’t real. Perfection isn’t real. But how do we get our brain and subconscious mind to understand this? 

When you see me, you are getting the 100% real me. I don’t use filters. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know how to use filters. It’s important for me to show you the real me. What you see is what you get.

I am not a perfectionist. I am a woman of excellence. This episode is going to help you understand how you are also a person of excellence and what that means.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do..therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

The habits taught through the Organize 365® systems and courses lead us to be people of excellence. These same habits help us free our brains and time to do what we are uniquely created to do.

Habits are so purposeful. Negative habits tend to happen naturally. But positive habits rarely happen naturally. I want you to think about your habits - are they helping you be a person of excellence? Are they allowing you the time you need to do what you are uniquely created to do?

I want you to choose a life of excellence over perfectionism. Don’t expect perfectionism from yourself or others. A person of excellence is able to focus on substance, richer conversations, better solutions and live a more productive life.

A word of the wise, choosing not to be a perfectionist is not an excuse to be lazy. You still need to strive for excellence. This will look different depending on your phase of life and priorities. 

I want to leave you with three things in this episode:

1. Perfectionism is not a thing.

2. Excellence is a great middle ground for you to strive for.

3. You will never be done working on yourself, learning, growing and creating the person you want to be. It’s a journey.

As you think about your journey, I want you to also think about your home and the three seasons per year within your home. You need different things in those seasons. A person of excellence is continually improving and evolving the way they organize and use their home and time.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Productive Home Solution™

• The Paper Solution®

• The Friday Workbox®

• Aristotle Quotes

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

On the Wednesday podcast, 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 learn the skill of organization, too!

Welcome back Andrea to the podcast. Andrea, 37, is married to her husband, age 41 and together they have 4 children, 2 girls and 2 boys ages 11, 8, 7, and 5. Listen in as we talk about how she stays organized in her 30’s with a young family.

Andrea discusses her focus of functional organizing for a family of six. We also get to hear how interesting her time and scheduling works, and what she does to make the different seasons of her life work within a schedule. 

We all know feeding a family can be challenging and the desire to make the right food choices is a priority. Andrea shows us her process of making food changes in her family when change doesn’t come easy for anyone.

Andrea mentions the quote “Build a life you don’t need to escape from” and how she and her family have built that life where she feels energized and isn’t looking for a vacation to bring her rest.  She doesn’t feel the need to take days off to recharge her batteries, because it seems to work itself into each and every day.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• AndreaDekker.com 

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.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

Have you wondered why you don’t seem to have enough time in your day? 

I use my Google calendar to organize my time, everything that would naturally occur in my life gets a time block on my calendar, including commute time. Then when I look at my week, I can play with those time blocks. Am I spending enough time in certain areas or too much time? 

I’ve been able to see all this time in my calendar and I’ve gotten better at estimating my time for my classes and assignments. This allows me to figure out where I have extra time and where I don’t have enough time.

Have you asked yourself, why don’t I get everything done?

Or do I have the capacity to take on something new?

Start looking at the pockets of time on your calendar that do not have anything associated with. Document how you use that time for a week or two and then you know if you have time you can actually give to something new and maximize your productivity.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Follow my journey on Instagram - Check out the PhD Highlight Button

• Google Calendar

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

Let’s break down one of the fastest spreading organizational news stories I’ve ever seen - Marie Kondo is admitting that her home is no longer tidy and she’s embracing it!

The news of Marie Kondo’s house being no longer organized spread like wildfire. This was not an accident. Marie Kondo is a worldwide sensation. She did an amazing job marketing her book and herself. She’s a renowned organizer and businesswoman.

Here are some past episodes I’ve done on Marie Kondo:

• Why the Magic Art of Tidying Up Doesn’t Work for American Women

• What Do You Do with Items that Don’t Spark Joy?

• How Marie Kondo is the Atkins Diet of Organizing

We all can feel better knowing that Marie Kondo is saying perfection does not exist. Although, if you have been following my podcast all this time, you know that I have always valued progress over perfection.

In this episode, I take the conversation in the media about organization a step further.

• What does it mean to feel organized?

• Can you recognize and observe organization or is it a feeling? Is organization the ability to quickly take action?

• How do we know when we are organized or when we are no longer organized?

Your home and your organizational systems should be a representation of YOU. What’s important to you? What works for you? What doesn’t work for you? 

I LOVE my home. I love how I decorated it. I love how I organized it. I love what I’ve saved over the years. And I want you to love your home also. I want you to love the stuff you are maintaining, dusting and living with. I want you to look forward to being at home, walking around your own home and loving the things you see on the walls, shelves, even inside your storage room.

Organization and being organized is SO much more than minimalism. 

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Productive Home Solution™

• The Paper Solution®

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Friday Workbox®

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

On the Wednesday podcast, 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 learn the skill of organization, too!

Meet Jamie and Jason Balmet in Oklahoma running a small business, raising 7 children, and homeschooling:

• 10 year old twin boys

• 7 year old twin boys

• 5 year old girl

• 2 year old boy

• 3 month old boy

Jamie and Jason are currently in the accumulation phase and we talk today about how they handle this phase of life with home and work. We discussed how their housework is divided, they’ve got a great mix going on, and how the kids are involved in this.

They have some great tips on how to get the kids involved at home. One of the tips for this was to talk a lot about their family vision and how that plays into giving responsibility to everyone in the family.

Listen in as they tell us how their family began traveling full time to now putting down roots in Oklahoma. We also get to hear about how they organize things at work and home and how different their systems are; Jamie loves her paper and Jason is all about the digital side of things.

Because their business blends with work deadlines plus having family time, the communication aspect is key for the two of them. Being honest with each other about their needs and their  mental space is important to keeping things running smoothly.

How have they gotten to this place in their lives? They are very clear on what their goals are. Working in the business and on the business and being purposeful and intentional with planning plays a large part in how they have been able to succeed.

Tips from Jamie:

• Be clear on your vision 

• What are your family values

• What are you saying yes to and what are you saying no to

• Planning meetings annually and quarterly about

• • Business

  • Homeschool

  • Family

• Be realistic with your time

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• eMyth by Michael E. Gerber

• The Productive Home Solution™ and Planning Day

• Finding Joy in Your Home   

• Finding Joy in Your Home Podcast 

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.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

This week I am talking about how I organize my assignments. Some of the things I use are Organize 365® Slash Pockets that are colored red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. These slash pockets help you organize the basic tasks you do at home and at work inside of a Sunday Basket® or a Friday Workbox®. These organize the everyday events, not the projects.

I am using colored slash pockets, productivity tabs, and highlighted documents to keep track of everything within my courses.

Red: Research Lab

Orange: Wednesday Class - Psych 501

Yellow: Thursday Class - Psych 502

The game changer for me was creating the excel spreadsheet with all assignments and reading ordered by due date and color coded. I cannot explain how much more grounded I felt when I could see in totality everything I needed to do inside of a 2-page spread. This gives me the extra buffer I need by allowing me to stay ahead.

If you have different moving deadlines, moving pieces, or moving parts that need to be done over a period of time, it may be helpful to put all of those into one big document in order of when things need to happen, versus keeping things separate in separate categories of your life.

What would happen if in very busy seasons of your life you would use this one big document to go by what is due next versus what role you are playing in your life?

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Follow my journey on Instagram - Check out the PhD Highlight Button

• Organize 365® Slash Pockets 1.0

• Sunday Basket® 

• Business Friday Workbox® 

• Kolbe

• Organize 365® Productivity Tabs

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

When I started this podcast series looking at how I’ve used the Sunday Basket® over the years, I thought I’d be sharing with you the tactical details of how I use the Sunday Basket®. What I realized is that the Sunday Basket® is a habit. Like brushing your teeth, making the bed, getting ready in the morning. Things we didn’t do at one point and eventually they become part of your everyday life and routines. And that’s what the Sunday Basket® has become. It’s part of my everyday routine.

In this episode we are back in my present day life. My kids are now adulting. Their day to day needs are off my plate. I’ve outsourced a lot of the tasks that have to do with my home and I have a whole team at Organize 365®. 

Presently, my Sunday Basket® is running like a well-oiled machine. And it’s serving its purpose for Grayson, my grandson, as well. I end up with lots of toys that need batteries on Sunday. I drop those in there throughout the week and all the incoming mail. My Portable Sunday Basket® goes back and forth between my home and my office. I have a slash pocket for calls that need to be made during business hours and things that can’t be dealt with on Sundays.

What has really increased over the years, and if you listened to the previous episodes in this series, you have probably noticed the evolution of my Friday Workbox®. I have multiple Friday Workboxes® and pretty much always have. I used to have Friday Workboxes® set-up for different income streams. Now I have Friday Workboxes® for departments, teams and initiatives within Organize 365®.

But the biggest shift in my life right now is the transition I just made to becoming a student again. This was a big decision for me. And as I was trying to make the decision to take this leap, I asked myself “what if?” What if I do get my PhD? How will I feel? What if I don’t do this? And I decided, definitively, that if I didn’t say yes to this at this point in my life I would be disappointed. I would still want it four years from now. And this is the time to do it. To jump in with both feet and go for my dream of becoming a PhD.

So now I want to ask you, what if? What if you had the real Sunday Basket® with the playbook, the properly color coded slash pockets? What if you had access to the Sunday Basket® Club every Sunday as your accountability and success partner? What if you came to Planning Days with me and truly planned out your goals, assessed your routines and created a plan for your upcoming trimester? What if you took the courses inside The Productive Home Solution™ and learned to be organized while getting your entire home organized? What if everything in your home had a place and you had more time? What if you had a Friday Workbox® and Friday Workbox® Planning Day to help structure your work and deliver on your projects with ease? What if you knew what you were uniquely created to do?

Keep moving forward and keep making progress and thinking about what is possible.

I can’t wait to continue this series in five years. I’m excited about what’s to come for me and Organize 365®!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Sunday Basket®

• Friday Workbox®

• Portable Sunday Basket®

• The Productive Home Solution™

• Home Planning Day

• Work Planning Day

• Embrace - Discover what you are uniquely created to do.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

On the Wednesday podcast, 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 learn the skill of organization, too!

Listen in as Emily and I come back together for the final episode of our podcast series. The things we are talking about we regularly talk about privately, but we feel that what we are sharing is meant for more than just ourselves. 

People really don’t talk about this: how you stay organized at home, how you survive hard things, how you transition through unexpected events. I am such a forward motion focused person, I’m always thinking about what is next. And this is what excites me and lights me up.

We talk about what you are uniquely created to do. It is not necessarily ONE thing, it is always evolving, changing, and growing. The Organize 365® mission is to help you get organized so that you have more time so you can do what you are uniquely created to do. My only goal is to show you the invisible work that you’re doing and you can decide if you want to continue doing it or not, organize it, habitualize it, or declutter it, so that you can get time to do what you are uniquely created to do. 

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Friday Workbox®

• Victim’s Assistance in Akron

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.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!