002 - The Lisa Glossary Part 2: Discovering Cycles & Seasons of Organizing

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organize 365 Podcast. The Organize 365 Podcast started in 2014. With over 500 episodes and 15 million downloads, we know there is a lot of content to sift through. This taste of the Organize 365 Podcast is just a taste of what you can find in the full podcast and is easy to share with your family and friends who want to join you on your quest to learn the skill of organizing and grow your mindset of what is possible as you move into a proactive and purposeful life. Enjoy this podcast curation of the Organized 365 podcast that will take you through all the big ideas we have uncovered in the last 7+ years of podcasting. Along the way, I, Lisa Woodruff, have created a whole new glossary of terms for us to use to define and understand the invisible work and belief systems we have from our childhoods and how and why homes function the way they do. Happy New Year. Oh my goodness. The number one question I get from people who listen to the podcast is, how do I introduce a new person to Organize 365? Lisa says so many things, like where would you even start? So 18 months ago, I recorded 8 podcasts that were called the Lisa Glossary. Basically all these words that I just kind of made up and have turned into what Organized 365 is today. And guess what? This week we are turning 10 years old. Oh my goodness. Organized 365 is 10 years old. And for the first 8 days of January, I am going to re-air these glossary podcasts that we recorded in the summer of 2020 that will tell you how Organized 365 got to be what it is today and our philosophy, our outlook, our methodology on organization. And in the 18 months since we recorded these podcasts, there have been a lot more terms and things that I have created. So for the rest of January on the Fridays, the last 3 Fridays in January, I will be recording a new Glossary Podcast, number 9, 10, and 11. We'll be talking about the Paper Solution, the binders, and the research that Organize 365 is doing now. So sit back and listen and get motivated to take back your house this year and finally get organized. This week's mailbag comes to us from Angela. Hi, Lisa. I just downloaded the Emergency Medical Binder and I had to stop over here first thing and tell you thank you. I love your heart. Your generosity and ability to meet people right at their point of need is both an encouragement and an inspiration. Thank you and keep up the beautiful work. Do you have an Organize 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your your home, your paper, and your life with Organize 365. Welcome to the Organize 365 podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you, so let's get started. Do you remember your favorite teacher and your favorite class growing up in school? I'm sure there are a lot of qualities that that teacher had, but you just were hungry for the knowledge that was in that class. You did better, you tried harder, you showed up early, you stayed later. You loved learning from this specific teacher. Here at Organize 365, we are an education company. I'm a teacher by trade, and I want to teach you to love and be really great at the skill of organizing and increase productivity. And along the way, as your teacher, I've created my own systems, methodologies, and a lot of terms. I mean, a lot of terms. There are a lot of things that I say that nobody else says, and you're like, what is a golden window? What is functional organizing? These are the things that I'm going to unpack for you in the next 8 episodes. Now, don't worry, it isn't going to be just a list of vocabulary with definitions. I have organized the next 8 episodes in order so that you kind of go from how Organized 365 started and has grown over the last 8 years, and how you find organizing and learn and grow and get organized as well. So sit back, relax, and let's get started organizing. In the last episode, I talked about how as I left my teaching job and came home to gain order over my own life, along the way I realized I was a professional organizer and started the Organized 365 company. I shared a lot about how I learned that organization was a learnable skill and all those foundational principles that have been part of the Organized 365 brand over the last 8 years. But there is a second big component to the foundation of Organize 365 that I want to share with you now that is called ages and stages and golden windows. So these are 3 things that I realized again in the first 3 years of my business when I was in-home professionally organizing in Cincinnati that made a difference in the way that I organized versus the way that other people organized or you organize yourself. And Once again, I learn best by doing things the wrong way. I don't know if you're the same way, but I learn best by doing it wrong and then learning how to do it right. And one of the things that really flummoxed me and had me thinking was I was a born organized person. Like, I literally rearranged my bedroom and cleaned my bedroom top to bottom, the closet and everything, every single weekend. Like, I loved it. When I went to college, I would help my college mates get organized. When I came home, I told you the story about organizing my mom. When I was new and youngly married with a couple of kids and we would have playdates, I would organize my friends' pantries. I would organize their family rooms. They would actually have us have our playdate in different parts of their houses, so I would keep organizing their houses. I mean, I just saw things in an organized manner. So the fact that I had such a disorganized house in the winter of 2011 to 2012, where I legitimately didn't even know where to find things, where things had been stored, why I put things where I put them. Like, I was so disorganized, I didn't even know where to start. I had such a hard time with that because I used to be organized. And I just figured it was a matter of time was the fact why I wasn't organized. But the fact that I couldn't get it done in a weekend or I couldn't get it done in a month, and I felt like I was falling farther and farther behind in my organization didn't match my image of what organization was. Either you were born organized or not born organized. And if you were born organized, as I was, then I should be able to devote, you know, a weekend, a week, a month at least, and get this house organized again. But it was not happening. Along that way, as I was organizing other people's houses in the Cincinnati area, I was observing different things that I was doing in different houses. Specifically the different ages of my clients. So I would go in and I would organize a woman who was home with her kids, and then later I would organize her kids and then maybe organize her parents at a different house. And I noticed that one of the things that was unique to my organizational ability was that not only could I organize an 8-year-old or a 38-year-old or an 80-year-old, But I also was starting to change the communication between mother, daughter, and grandmother. And I was able to see how, when I had the opportunity to work with 3 different generations in the same family over a prolonged period of time, how an 8-year-old looks at their things versus a 38-year-old versus an 80-year-old. And I was starting to notice that there were differences in how I organized their physical space, like Everybody's physical space has some similarities. We all have somewhere where we sleep, somewhere where we store our clothing, somewhere where we eat. We may be in an apartment or a large farmhouse, but all of these different houses had similar elements to them, which were taking care of our basic needs and then our entertainment. And the number of people in our house may change the layout of our house or how big our house is. The area of the country may change what our house looks like, but for the most part, everyone was meeting some basic needs inside of their house, which were sleeping, eating, dressing, getting ready, entertaining, and sometimes working from home. However, how an 8-year-old versus a 38-year-old versus an 80-year-old used those same kind of spaces were totally different. And I'm a very analytical person, and so I just started to make lists in my head and started to, to make different observations. And one of the early observations that I made was basically with a mom or her kids. So if I was organizing a woman in her home, I was usually organizing it because she didn't have a lot of time. She had to manage the entire house. She was in her car a lot driving the kids everywhere or going to another job. Sometimes there was or wasn't a spouse involved, and then we had to deal with those kind of things. And so we were into organizing the entire house. When I got to organizing the kids, if it was my job to organize the kids' bedroom, in the beginning, Mom and I would go in and organize the child's bedroom. And I noticed that a couple of things happened. First of all, there was immediately, like within 30 minutes, there would be a tension in the room between what Mom wanted saved in that room and what the child wanted saved in that room. And after a couple of sessions like this, I realized that to organize a child's bedroom, I needed to only be working with the child and not the mom because a mom's expectations are different than a child's expectations inside of that room. So I had another client and she was overwhelmed with her own house and she said, "I want you to organize my girls' rooms." I said, "Fine, but here's my rule. I will do a session with each of your girls. It's 2.5 hours each. I'll do one and then I'll do the other one, but here are the rules. Number 1, it's only them and me. You can't be in the room." She was like, "Fine." I said, number 2, they're allowed to get rid of absolutely anything they want to get rid of. Now, they won't take it to the trash or donate it like you. If you want to keep it, you can keep it in your storage room. You own the entire house. But if they don't want it stored in their bedroom, they don't have to keep it no matter what, even if Grandma gave it to them. And they were— she was like, okay. I said, and you know, uh, we might have some modifications for how we organize the room, or we might need— you know, usually I would have them get a cube system. So I'd look at the room, I'd be like, yep, we need a bookshelf, or we need a cube system, before I even get started. They'd be like, fine. She was like, fine, whatever, just fix it, just fix the rooms. And I had so much fun. What I noticed with children versus people in midlife versus people that are older is that everyone looks at their stuff differently. And as I was going down these rabbit holes of these different phases of life, I noticed that they also matched generational thought processes. Now, this is a great time to be listening to this podcast because many of us who are in our 20s, 30s, and 40s, even though we had the Great Recession of 2008, we're, we're buyers. Like, we consume a lot of stuff, we have a lot of stuff. But this global pandemic has literally shut down the world economy. As Ryan Lanier says, the world is closed. I think I love that. I'm just gonna keep saying that, like, it's so true. Like, the world's closed. When the world opens up again, we'll do whatever. Like, we have been brought to a grinding halt, and we will never look at everything we used to do the same way. Like, our patterns of life will be changed. All of us that are alive during this time will be profoundly impacted by this 2020 pandemic experience, just like the people who are alive during the 2018 flu were impacted by that, just like the people who are alive in the '30s during the Great Depression were impacted by that. Just like how the people who were alive during different— any big huge thing that impacts a whole country or a whole generation at one time will change your behavior going forward. Because of that, if you look at the different generations, they also have different views about stuff. So if there are people alive in your family that are 85 and older and they are part of the Silent Generation, they were raised right after or during the Great Depression. And so they likely don't have a lot of things. They tend to have high-quality things. They tend to invest their money in really nice pieces that they want to keep, but they don't tend to have a lot of stuff. And they, they value the items that they have purchased. They don't want to just declutter them. They don't want to give them away because they know how hard it is to earn money to make those things. Because for so many years, like, there was like no money. Like, I'm reading a diary from a, um, lawyer in Ohio during the Great Depression where he wrote down, and like, the money went down to nothing. Like, there was like a whole period of time, a year, where the banks are closed and they have no money and they're like trading pieces of paper. I just— it's so hard for me to even read it and think about what it would have been like to live during that time. You keep those thoughts with you as you go through your entire life. So People who are 85 and older who lived at all close to that Great Depression have a much different viewpoint on what a physical item is worth or means. Then we have the baby boomers who were born into plenty and have, until this global pandemic, really had the most money, the most wealth, the most opportunities, the most power of any generation in all of the United States. And they are used to, when they make a decision in doing something, the world saying, great, we're ready for this, we're ready to do this. They have lots of stuff, lots of houses, lots of cars, lots of businesses, lots of political power. They just have lots of stuff. They just have a lots of stuff, and their stuff is meaningful to them, but not in the same way that it is for the Silent Generation. I am part of Gen X, and we are anywhere from about like 41 to 54, I think right now is the, is the age range for Gen X. We are the smallest generation. We're in between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials, and there are quite a few reasons about that, but we're a smaller generation. We're a very independent generation, and we tend to mix the Baby Boomer and the Millennials' philosophies. We don't really have a big, uh, we don't tend to dig our heels in very much on anything. We kind of go with the flow, like whatever people want to do. Some of us save a lot of stuff, some of us are minimalist. We kind of go either way. Millennials are another large population, and they're anywhere from like 25 to almost 40, I believe, right now. They're not just coming out of college, they are firmly in the workplace. And up until this point, millennials have been very much in the gig economy. They, uh, value experiences over physical items. You have a lot of minimalists that will be millennials, and they are now starting to really grow their families and settle down into houses and jobs as well. And then you have Gen Z, which are my kids, and they are the ones that are graduating from college, in college, and high school right now. And they are a very artistic generation, very similar to the Silent Generation that is 85 and over. So these are different generations that I have obviously learned way too much about. And you can hear just in my description how a physical item given to each of these 5 generations has much different meaning based on when they came of age, what the economy was like, and just the mood inside of the United States especially. I haven't researched— generations are different in different countries. I haven't researched them much outside of the United States. I did that research after I had this phases mentality. So my original thought was there are 4 phases that you go through in your adult life. Starts with childhood, which is birth to the age of 21, and then you go into the accumulation phase, which is 22 to 39. And in the accumulation phase, you're accumulating houses and spouses and kids and jobs and pets and whatever you decide to make into life in your 20s and 30s. You start accumulating all of those things. So when you move out of your childhood bedroom or your dorm or whatever your childhood experience was, and you move into the accumulation stage and you get your first apartment You realize you don't have any cleaning supplies, and then you move into your first house and you're like, oh, I need to cut the grass, I don't own a lawnmower, I don't have a vacuum cleaner, I don't— like, you just— every single thing that you want to do in your 20s involves going to Home Depot first, or Target, or somewhere. You have to buy hammer and nails, you have to, you have to acquire all of the things that go with leaving your childhood bedroom. Now if we go back to that childhood phase, in the next podcast I'm going to tell you how I have renamed different spaces inside of our house in podcast number 4. I call that your mini apartment because when you're a child, you're just in charge of your bedroom. And that came out of this whole thinking about how we organize our space. Many children can organize their bedroom, but then when they become single or parents in their 20s and 30s, they can't manage a house because it's too big of a space and vice versa. After you leave the accumulation stage, 40 is the age where you enter into survival. It doesn't matter if you have children or don't have children, work from home, don't work from home, don't work at all. Um, when you turn 40, it is a very definitive experience. And I have talked to many women who agree with me. You go into 39, you think, oh, 40 is the end of my life. Like, I can't believe I'm going to be 40. That is so old. And then you turn 40 and within 3 to 6 months, you're like, this is the best thing ever. Why didn't anybody tell me how great 40 is? Like, there's just something that changes inside of your psyche when you turn 40 and you move from this accumulation mindset into survival. And the reason why I labeled it survival is because when I labeled these phases, I was spending 25 hours of my week just driving kids to school, only driving them to school. And then I was making an income and taking care of the house and taking care of my father who was passing away, and I just felt like I was smushed and sandwiched together, and I was just trying to survive day to day to day. There's just so much that goes on in your 40s and your early 50s that is hard to catch your breath, and it is hard to get any extra time. And then the fourth phase of life is downsizing and legacy, which I say starts around 55. It may start earlier or later. These are all just, uh, general time frames, but most people move from childhood to accumulation to survival and then into downsizing and legacy. And downsizing and legacy usually happens when your last child leaves home, or you decide to take a different career move in your 50s, or you really just start thinking about, you know, I'm in my second half of life. I don't know how much longer I have. I want to make a really big impact on the world and in my family and in my community. And this is the unique way in which I am able to do that. And in order to do that, I want to downsize and streamline what's going on at home so I have more time to live into my unique gifting and purpose. So those are the phases of life: childhood, accumulation, survival, downsizing, and legacy. You can go to back to podcast 78 to learn a little bit more about that. And in 2016, I published my first Amazon book called The Mindset of Organization: Take Back Your House One Phase at a Time, where I went into these, uh, phases. I talked about moving through most of those phases myself. I incorporated a little bit about generations and what it takes to get organized in each of these different phases. So that was the key. If you're organized in your 20s and 30s and now you're in your 40s and you cannot figure out why you're not organized now, or you were organized until your last child went to, to college and now you're 55 and you cannot figure out why you cannot get anything done, it is not because you don't know how to be organized. It is because you're still trying to organize your house and your life based on a prior phase. So you cannot take your childhood organization skill and have it work inside of an accumulation, um, phase of life. So your house is bigger, your responsibilities are bigger, you don't have enough stuff, you have to buy some stuff. And likewise, if you did fine in your 20s and 30s when the kids were young or in grade school, or you were working in your career and then you got married, or you, uh, were a digital nomad or whatever, and now all of a sudden you've turned 40 and for some reason, even though you haven't added any other people, it's just not quite working anymore, it's probably because the amount of demands on your time in your 40s and early 50s is bigger than any other time in your life. And so what you used to be able to fit in the nooks and crannies, you can't anymore. So for me, I was in my car all the time. And because I was in my car all the time, the household maintenance and cleaning and organization that I used to do naturally within my schedule in my 20s and 30s, was no longer able to happen because I was in my car from morning to night. By the time I got home, I was exhausted, and so things were falling by the wayside. Likewise, and this is ironic, but 55 and over is the hardest age group to get organized. And I always thought, well, when the kids are gone, when you retire from work, you have all of this time, you should be able to get organized. And here's what I have observed: Not so. You're like, great, I don't have to drive anybody anywhere. I don't have to, you know, show up for that job. I am in charge of all my time, and because I'm in charge of all my time, I don't want to do the organizing. I want to spend it some other way. So they're actually— even though you have the most time, 55+, you choose to use your time differently because you don't want to be stuck at home just doing the routine things every day. You want to get out and do what you were uniquely created to do. So every phase has something a little bit different to it. So that's the phases of life and why sometimes organization in one phase doesn't work in the next. The second thing that I observed is that there are actually 3 stages to any organization. So in each phase, you have to go through all 3 of these stages. And the stages are decluttering leads to organization leads to increased productivity. Productivity, that's what we all want, right? Like, if I write a post or podcast on productivity, the downloads and the readership goes through the roof. Because we all want productivity. You cannot get productivity if you aren't organized, and you cannot organize if you don't declutter. There is an order to this. You have to start with decluttering, move to organization, and then to increase productivity. These podcast episodes that I did back in 2017, I believe, are the most downloaded podcasts I've ever done. 144 is all about decluttering, 145 is all about organizing, and 147 is all about increasing productivity. And I go really in depth into what the difference between each of those, but I'll go through them quickly here. Decluttering is easy. It is the thing you hear the most about. It is what you naturally do when you've had it. We're gonna get organized this weekend, you say. We are gonna get organized this weekend. And then what you do is you declutter. You do not organize, you declutter. And what that means is you grab a trash bag and you go into every room, and if it is not breathing or moving, it gets in the bag and you take it out. And you feel great at the end of that weekend because you've moved a whole bunch of stuff out of your house. You've gotten that physical release of decluttering. And the things you have gotten out are the things that are broken or not needed or cluttering your space, and you feel so much lighter. Like, decluttering is physical, uh, but it's not as mental as organizing is. And once we get that decluttering release, we feel like, oh yes, I got rid of a bunch of stuff in here, I'm organized now, I can move on. And this is the danger of not going to the true stage of organizing. If you do that, if you go through your house over a weekend and you declutter and you're like, oh, I feel lighter, and then you find yourself repeating that pattern about every 6 to 12 weeks, just depends on how fast the clutter accumulates in your house. If you keep going through that decluttering, decluttering, decluttering cycle and you never move to organizing and increasing productivity, two things happen. Number one, you over-declutter. So because you want that release and you want that feeling of, "Oh, my house feels cleaner and lighter and I can go ahead." You move into a space and you look to declutter things, and even if there isn't something there to declutter, you're like, "Well, I use that, but maybe I don't need it," and you start to get rid of things that maybe you don't even want to get rid of because you want the house to feel more organized. That's the first telltale sign that you need to move out of decluttering and into organizing. And the second downfall about decluttering is thinking that it's one and done. Marie Kondo is amazing. Like, her— she has gotten more people to declutter than anyone I know, and I think that is awesome. But organization is not a one-and-done experience, and pulling everything out and decluttering it is not the answer for most people. Now, if that worked for you, awesome, that is great. The Organized 365 audience, that might have gotten them started. It really works well in your closet, but there are a lot of spaces in our American homes that she never addresses and doesn't give you the step 1, 2, 3 on how to declutter those spaces, and so those spaces end up staying cluttered because you don't know what to do next. So that is decluttering. It is easy, it is physical, we do it on the regular. I'm going to skip organizing for a second and I'm going to jump to increased productivity. Productivity is when you can get more done in less time. It's when you find the shortcuts. It's when you're able to, um, what I call task stack and batch and do things like that. Productivity, for the most part, especially until recently, has been predominantly shared by men. Most of the productivity books that you can read are done by men, and the majority of them are digital. And what I have observed is that for females especially, and just in general humans, We are very analog creatures. We are not digital. Now, I have never worked in an office, and I know if you work in an office or if you had secretarial training growing up, you understand filing systems and digital systems better than I do. However, I can program my website. I'm pretty techie. Like, I could— I can do pretty well at the whole tech and online, and I run an in-person and virtual company, and I use all the spreadsheets and all the different things. But my brain is analog. My brain is not digital. And, and they've done study after study that shows that if you write something down with your hand, you are 7 times more likely to remember it than if you type it. And as an educator, I see this in children. Like, the more we make children go digital— and my children do very well with digital because they have learning disabilities, it helps them with spelling and all of that kind of stuff— But physically writing something down with your hand, uh, is helpful in making that brain connection and moving things from an abstract idea into a more concrete thought inside your body. I don't know how to explain it. I'm not a therapist or psychologist. I just pretend to be one on this podcast. And so what I learned in getting people organized and helping them increase their productivity, often You need to download into an analog form whatever you want to be made productive, and then you can upload it back into digital after you have created the productive system. Let me give you an example. Um, when I was planning out these 8 podcasts, which is a lot of podcasts, we collected, uh, from everyone on the team all the different Lisa-isms that I say, all the different things that need to go in a Lisa glossary, things that you don't hear anywhere else. And so a new Organized 365 a native listener might not understand what the saying is. And so they got a whole huge Google Doc, and I read the Google Doc, and then I printed it out, and then I cut all of the little Lisa-isms into tiny little strips of paper. And then I physically moved these little tiny strips of paper of all these things that I say into different piles, trying to figure out how can I organize this in order to tell you the story of Organized 365 in as succinct manner as possible that makes the most sense and yet covers the majority of these terms that I use that I literally just made up. And we thought it would be 4 podcasts, and when I had all the little teeny tiny pieces of paper on the floor, I realized it was 8. And then I glued those little tiny pieces of paper onto bigger pieces of paper and then took my notes in order to record these podcasts. So the decluttering, first I had my team give me my whole list. When I printed that out and I cut all those little pieces of paper apart, there were duplicates and there were things that weren't truly unique to me. They were things that I say often, but they aren't things that I created. Those things ended up in the trash. So I decluttered. Then I organized. I organized all those little pieces of paper on the floor into different piles. And then I increased productivity. I put them on a bigger sheet of paper. I wrote the rest of my notes. And now I'm recording the podcast. And you may say, well, that doesn't seem like increased productivity to me. Well, but it is, because if I recorded one podcast and then I organized the notes and I did the next podcast and then I organized the notes and then I did the next podcast, it would take me 3 times as long as how it's taking me right now. Because I did the act of laying out all 8 podcasts at once and then laying out the notes for all of them at once, I'm able to tell you that in episode 4 I'm going to tell you something else. And in the last episode, I talked to this, which is going to make your experience listening to these podcasts better and my thought process as I share them with you more succinct as well. So increased productivity comes again from organization. It is this middle piece of organizing that very, very few people focus on. The person I would say that focuses on organization most is Julie Morgenstern. That's where I learned Organizing from the Inside Out, which was her 19— book that was published in the late 1990s. So this idea of not decluttering and not making something increased productive, uh, digital, but the act of taking that list, printing it out, cutting it into little pieces of paper, and dividing it into 8 piles before I recorded the podcast— that's the piece most people miss. That's the piece very few people teach. And the reason why very few people teach it is because It's individualized and you really have to teach it from the heart of a teacher. You can follow— there are a lot of people that talk about decluttering, there are a lot of different systems for decluttering, but I'll tell you, they work. Like, you Google how to declutter a space, watch the blog, watch the video, watch the podcast, go into that space, you can probably do it. How to organize that space, how to organize your mind, how to organize your life, that's different. How to increase productivity is, all right, so you have pared down what you have in your closet. What is going to be your uniform for work? When are you going to pick out your clothes for the week? That's increasing your productivity. How to organize that closet of clothes is a little bit more challenging, especially when you have to ask some questions. Is this a child's closet? Is this a professional woman's closet? Is this an older man's closet? Is this a closet that is shared by an entire family? Is this a single woman's closet? Like, You can't just say, "Organize my closet." I need to know a lot of questions. Decluttering doesn't involve asking a lot of questions on the front end. You know you have to pare down. When you get 20% gone, yeah, you have to ask some more questions in order to make more decluttering solutions, but organizing is a lot of thinking and processing and moving through. Okay, so we have the phases of organization, and then we have the stages. And when you move from childhood to accumulation, you then have to go through the decluttering, organizing, and increasing productivity stages again. When you turn 40 and you move into survival, you have to declutter, organize, and increase productivity again. Now, if you do this through the Organize 365 100-day system and you go through your entire house, which we do 3 times in 1 year, which I'll tell you about in another episode, um, you will in that 1 calendar year firmly move yourself into increased productivity for the rest of that phase. You won't need to do the decluttering, organizing, increase productivity at that level again until you move to the next phase of your life. The last thing that I want to talk about in this podcast are golden windows. So we've talked about phases of life, we've talked about, uh, the stages of organization. Now I want to talk about golden windows. And golden windows is a term that I coined to articulate when the best time for you to start organizing is. So I'll often say, you know, like, if you're interested in getting organized, start now, because when your motivation is high, you are going to be the most successful. That is absolutely true. However, there are a whole bunch of other times that I also know are perfect times for you to get started, and sometimes your golden windows overlap. And when you have multiple golden windows overlapping at the same time, time, that's really a good time to get started because you need to get organized for more than just a weekend. You need your energy to sustain itself. So the first time I thought about this was we have a 100-day home organization program which I launch 3 times a year, and I really analyzed when was the best time for you at home to follow a virtual program to get organized. And I realized there were 3 different times a year when you would naturally want to do that. Yes, January is one of them, but it's actually not the most popular one. The most popular one and the golden window of the entire year is Labor Day weekend. Labor Day weekend. And the reason why is because when you are going into the last 4 months of the year, there is just a natural energy that comes in the United States with the coolness of fall coming that makes you want to organize, to be productive, to finish things by the end of the year. It is the strongest energy, and you really can tear through projects in September and October that would take much longer to do any other time of the year. The second most powerful Golden Window we have is January. Everybody's making New Year's resolutions. The top 3 are to get organized, lose weight, and pay off your debt. And so that is a natural time when you've got the whole world encouraging you to also get organized. And then the third Golden Window, which I was partial to because I was a teacher and is not always as strong for everyone else but is really strong for anyone that follows the school year, is summer. Summer is when I as a teacher, or even I as a parent when I wasn't working, was able to really move forward on some of my big household goals that weren't able to be done during the school year. So January, June, and September, those are natural golden windows. I'm sure one or two of those really stuck out to you. You're like, oh, you're right, I do go through everything every September, how interesting. So we are, we're very habitual creatures, so those are just natural golden windows that we have. Next is when you're changing phases. So when you're moving from childhood to accumulation, when you're moving from accumulation to survival, when you're moving from survival to downsizing and legacy, which I said can vary— it doesn't have to be at 40, at 55, it could be around that time frame— you just get this natural desire to really go through everything, declutter and organize and increase productivity for your next phase of life. Some additional markers inside of those phases of life will be when your last child goes to all-day school. When your last child goes to all-day school, whether you work outside or inside of the home, that is a year where you get some added time and you're moving out of that baby phase. Like, you don't need sippy cups, and there's so much that you can get rid of when your last child enters full-time school. It's a big decluttering and organizing year. The next one was when your youngest child goes to middle school. Again, now you don't need anything grade school related. And when your last child goes to college. All of those transitions will cause you to do the nesting that you did when those babies first came into your house, which speaks to different life events. When those babies come into your house, you do that decluttering, organizing, increased productivity, right? And even if your children are adopted, as mine are, you get that same energy. It does not matter if you give birth or not. You have this nesting energy that comes when you have a new baby. Another one would be when every single time you move into a new house. Now, for those of you that move like every 1 to 3 years, you may be like, yes, I'm exhausted from this moving into a new house energy, and yours may be a little bit lower than other people's. But when you're moving from one house to another, you're like, oh, if I have to pay to move it, I don't want it. Like, you declutter it a bunch, you organize what you have left, and you move it into that new house. New jobs, weddings, all of those are going to have you moving into one of these golden windows. And then there are some golden windows that aren't happy golden windows, but they are also golden windows as well. And that would be after a divorce or after the death of the spouse. But what I found, um, observational about those is when you get divorced and when your spouse or your parent passes away, it is a golden window for decluttering, organizing, and increasing productivity. But it is a delayed golden window. And it is ironic, but it's almost always 5 years after the death of a spouse or a parent where all of a sudden you're ready to declutter, organize, and increase your productivity. Uh, divorce can be different. It's sometime between 1 to 5 years, and it is definitely spurred on if you have found a new love interest. I cannot even tell you how many organizational clients I had because they had found a new love interest and they were ready for their next phase of life. So as I'm saying that, you might be like, oh my gosh, we are moving next year and I'm getting a new job and whatever, and oh, my Golden Windows are all stacking together. That is a perfect time to jump into the 100-day program. We're not going to talk about that for a couple more episodes though. The next thing I want to talk to you about in part 3 is why I had the time to get organized, and I did not even realize this was the thing that was allowing me to get organized. Until someone else pointed it out to me. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to this Organize 365 playlist. You can find more information about these podcast episodes at organize365.com/glossary. I invite you to dive deeper into your organization journey by choosing another topic-specific playlist or listening to our latest revelations on the Organize 365 podcast.