003 - The Lisa Glossary Part 3: From Overwhelm to a Plan

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organized 365 Podcast. The Organized 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 Organized 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 Woodruff 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 Laura. I just wanna give a shout out to Organize 365 and the 100 Day Program. 2 weeks ago, when the lines started getting long and a bit crazy— and just a bit, not full-on loony land— I looked in my newly organized medicine cabinet and I was able to make a checklist of things to buy for everyone in the family. This organization has prevented me from having so much unnecessary stress, which in turn is helping my family. Thank you. Love to all. Stay healthy and safe. 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 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 You did better, you tried harder, you showed up early, you stayed later, you loved learning from this specific teacher. Here at Organized 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. Welcome back to part 3 of the Organized 365 journey and my personal journey to getting organized. In the first 2 parts, I talked about how I, as a born organized person, learned that organization was a learnable skill and then set about to figure out how to teach that not only personally in Cincinnati but also online, and how in going about teaching the skill of organization, I realized in part 2 that why a professional organizer helps so much is not just that there is a skill to learning organization, but organization actually changes 4 times in your life as you move through different phases, and there are different seasons and golden windows that we have when we are really ready to learn these different things. Now here in part 3, I'm going to talk about what happens as we transfer from one phase to the next, how we get overwhelmed and feel like we're in chaos and we're struggling to have a plan. It's almost like life gets moving so fast that it runs us over, and then stepping up and trying to keep pace with the new change while learning this new level of organization takes longer than we think. Actually, the best example I can give is as the global pandemic hit the United States and we started sheltering in place and then businesses started closing and then my own business went to reduced hours and everyone working at home, I went from this new proactive living that I've been in in the last 7 years back to my old reactionary ways. And when life gets moving so fast that you feel like you're run over, if you haven't learned organization in the phase before this one, it's even harder to get organized. But no matter how organized you are, there is a period of time where you have to get your sea legs, you have to get your bearings under you in order to move back into productivity. And I was too close to see it at first, but the, the item that I have used every single time when life gets moving so fast that I feel overwhelmed to gain that sense of clarity and move from reaction to productivity is the Sunday Basket. Now I had created the Sunday Basket in 2016. I had already created the Sunday Basket. I had written an ebook about the Sunday Basket, I think in 2013. I had taught this concept of what a workbox was back when I was doing direct sales in 2008 in an ebook that I wrote back then that doesn't exist anymore, um, I had originally came across this idea of the Sunday basket and created it back in 2002, which is a long, long time ago. So let me take you all the way back to 2002. In 2002, I had 2 babies: a 2-year-old asthmatic hyper child, Joey, and a 6-month-old little, uh, clingy koala bear, Abby. And Joey never slept. I mean, the child still today does not need very much sleep. I I need sleep. And especially with young kids running around, plus running a full-time direct sales business from home and trying to take care of the household and everything that was going on in 2002, I needed sleep. Joey did not need any sleep. So because Joey was always awake and he was 2 and he was a boy and he would eventually be diagnosed with ADHD, you can imagine how much stuff I got done. My only saving grace in 2002 was that I would hire a nanny for 10 hours on a Wednesday. And so I had Wednesdays to myself to get done as much as I possibly could. But Thursday through Tuesday, I was a stay-at-home mom who was also running a direct sales business, who was also trying to pretend to be Pollyanna and having all the stay-at-home mom things done as well. And I remember on a Sunday night, miraculously, Joey was asleep at 8 o'clock, Greg had gone to bed early, Abby always was a good sleeper, so she was in bed, and I actually had energy. And I was so overwhelmed with my actionable to-dos just for running the household, running my direct sales business, taking care of Joey's asthma, taking care of Abby's adoption paperwork, everything. All of the to-dos that I had were stacked up on the end of my kitchen counter because I would make a nice pile. I am a piler. If it goes in a drawer, if it gets filed, I forget to do it. So I would leave it in a pile, but I would have a really nice pile, but it was literally all these papers piled up. And every single piece of paper needed something done, a form to be filled up, a bill to be paid, um, you know, a checkbook to be reconciled. Remember, this is 2002. We didn't have online banking. You know, I was still reconciling my checkbook. Of course, I was doing that up to 6 months ago. We were making phone calls on our phones. I did have a cell phone at that time, but it wasn't an iPhone. It was a flip phone. Texting was very rudimentary. We did not have Facebook. Everything was being done in person. Errand day was a whole huge thing because you couldn't order anything online. So I was spending every Thursday running errands with the kids in the car. It was a very different lifestyle than what we imagine today. So on Sunday night, I took all these papers and I laid them out on the floor in the family room, and I at least piled them by actionable tasks. So these are all forms that need to be filled out, this is all medical bills that need to be paid, this is all people I need to call back, this is all related to orders, and I need need to place for my direct sales company, and on and on and on. And then I had slash pockets because I had been a teacher. Now a slash pocket, this is it, this is where we get into the lingo. We're going to talk about, um, in this podcast we're going to talk about what a Sunday basket does. It eliminates your to-do list, it calms your mental clutter, it delays decision-making, and it moves you from reactivity to proactivity. A Sunday basket is a basket with slash pockets that are color-coded and you use note cards. And a Sunday basket holds actionable, not archive paper. It's where you could do a brain dump and it holds the thoughts on your head in little pieces of paper. So this original Sunday basket, on Sunday night I had slash pockets. I love slash pockets. If you don't know what a slash pocket is, now I'm going to tell you. A slash pocket is a plastic 3-hole punched divider that you put inside of a binder, and they can be colored, and they have tabs on them so they can divide your binder into different sections. So I, Organized 365 manufactures our own slash pockets now, but back then I just had slash pockets around the house. Why I love slash pockets instead of folders or files is because when you put something in a file, you can't see it, and if you carry your files around, things can fall out because they're open on two sides. Slash pockets, which go in binders, are sealed on three sides, so it's like a folder because you can hold little pieces of paper, big pieces of paper, Post-it notes, whatever you want inside there, and when you carry it around not inside of a binder, things will not fall out on the ground. That was important to me. Second, slash pockets are opaque, which means they're colored, but it's not solid colored like a cardboard folder would be. So you can see what's inside of that slash pocket without opening it, and you can carry it, and you can sort through slash pockets like they are a deck of cards, and you could see what is inside of these opaque colored folders that are sealed on 3 sides, so I could use them, I could carry them around like you would a folder and not worry about things falling out, but I could look at the top of the slash pocket and see what was in there instead of pulling all the papers out or opening up a folder. It just made it faster for me. These are all things that I know now looking back that I just, I think I intuitively knew that I needed. A, because I'm a born organized person. B, because I'm a teacher by trade and I was used to teaching preschoolers and first graders and second graders, so I was used to making everything as visual and tactful and organized as I could in the beginning. So if you want to hear now, like, I've created the Sunday Basket system over the last 18 years, but it really has not changed very much from day one. I had a psychology psychologist come on the Organized 365 podcast, and we talked about the psychology that is behind the system of the Sunday basket and why it works. That's episode 258 if you want to pop back in and see that one. So I put my piles into these slash pockets, and I had 40 slash pockets. So I could have put the slash pockets on the end of the kitchen counter like I had them before, but I knew that they would slip and slide and they would fall over, and then Joey would grab my slash pockets, and then I would be a frustrated mom. And in 2002, I had a Longaberger basket addiction. Unfortunately, the company has now gone out of business, but they had this basket called a medium Longaberger basket, medium market basket, and I put my slash pockets in there and I put that on the end of my kitchen counter. So it was Sunday, I grabbed a basket, and I put my actionable to-dos in there grouped by task, and that's when the Sunday basket was born. That's why it's done on Sunday. That's why it's in a basket, and that's how it all got started. And from that point forward, it took me about 4 to 6 weeks to get caught up on my actionable to-dos in 2002. So truth be told, Greg and I had plenty of money coming in, but our bills were being paid late because I didn't have any kind of a system to pay bills at that time. And we had so many medical expenses that I just couldn't keep up with at that time. We had to reimburse for things, and then we had to fill out a form and I just didn't have all of that done. So this system, after 4 to 6 weeks of just every time I had a pocket of time, I would grab one of those slash pockets, I would do whatever was in that slash pocket, and then I would add the empty slash pocket back into my, my basket. After I did this the next week and the next week and the next week, what this looked like by the time we got to the 6th Sunday that I did it, I realized that I was a stay-at-home working mom. Greg worked outside of the house. On Sunday afternoon around 2 o'clock, he had no problem taking the kids to the park or playing with them or whatever because they were babies, and I would go sit up on my bed and I would empty out my Sunday basket and I would go through this routine. First, during the week, I would have filled my Sunday basket with things. I would have put things in there like mail that came in through the mailbox, which was a lot at that time. I would have written notes to myself on note cards like, um, Joey needs a new prescription, I need to schedule a haircut, I need to make a well check appointment for Abby. Anything that I thought about that needed to be done, I would write on index cards and I would throw in this Sunday basket. I also would put things in there that during the week needed my attention but didn't need to be done immediately, like if Joey's toy needed new batteries, I would put in the Sunday basket. I would do that on Sunday. If I had gone to the store and picked out something for a project I was doing, I would put that in the Sunday basket to wait until Sunday. And what I was teaching myself was that I had way too many things to do all week long. I was not getting my to-do list anywhere near done at all. And so absolutely every single thing that could wait until Sunday, I made wait until Sunday in this basket that I kept on my kitchen counter. Pieces of paper of ideas out of my head, physical objects that I had picked up at the store or had come in the mail went in this basket. And then on Sunday around 2, I would go up on my bed, I would take my Sunday basket up there, and at that time it was a Fountain Coke, and I would be happy. And I would turn on my TV, and I would completely empty the Sunday basket and set the empty Sunday basket next to me. I would open all the mail, I would, you know, refill all the pill containers, everything that I needed to do. I would take the mail once it was opened, I would shred or recycle it. If it was actionable, I would put it into the appropriate slash pocket. And then after all of my mail had been done, all of my index cards had been put in the right slash pockets, and there was only slash pockets in front of me, then I would take every single slash pocket and I would touch it and I would say, "Can this wait until next Sunday?" So even if it was a form to fill out, a bill to pay, even though I was sitting there and I had the time to do it, if it could wait until the next Sunday, I made it wait until the next Sunday for two reasons. Number one, it would take me like 90 minutes to 3 hours to do this every Sunday, and eventually Greg would need me with the kids, and so I couldn't get everything done. But also, if I allocated my time and my money to whatever was requiring my attention, like a bill to be paid or a charitable donation request or whatever, that Sunday, maybe I needed the money for something else by the next Sunday. So I pushed everything that I possibly could to the next week to free up a little bit of time in this week for the unexpected to happen. So I would pick up the slash bucket, forms to be filled out. Do any of these forms have to be filled out before next Sunday? No? Okay, it would go back in the basket. And I tried to put as much back in the Sunday basket undone as possible to free up this week for things that I knew were going to happen or unexpected things that would happen. Then I would go through our money. I would pay all of our bills that needed to be paid this week. I would make grocery list or make errand list for whatever needed to be shopping. Oh, and I told you I did that on Thursday. I didn't. I always did my errands on Tuesday. That was the cadence back then. I would do Sunday basket on Sunday. On Monday, I would take any phone calls that needed to be done out of the Sunday basket. I would do those, and I would do all the actionables that couldn't be done on Sunday. I would do them on Monday because remember, it was 2002. On Tuesday was errand day. I would start in the morning and I would run my errands, and I had a system for running my errands because nothing could be bought online, so we would start in the morning. I would drive to the furthest out location that our errand was, and then I would run errands all the way back towards home with the kids. Wednesday was the day I had my babysitter for 10 hours, so from 8 to 6, I could get done anything I needed for work, and within 6 weeks of doing the Sunday basket, I created a second basket for my work tasks Anything that could wait until Wednesday stayed until Wednesday. When I would sit down on Wednesday morning, I would plow through everything in that basket, and at the end of that day, I would go through what was left, and everything either waited until next Wednesday or it got done on Thursday with my assistant. So I hired an assistant on Thursdays for 5 hours. She got a basket, so at the end of my workday on Wednesday, any tasks that she could do, or as I was working on Wednesday, anything I could delegate to her went into her her basket, and then on Friday— Thursday and Friday I was with the kids. So let me see, where does that leave us? Wow, that was 18 years ago with little kids, so those of you with little kids, I don't talk a lot about what my life was like then. I got to the point where on Fridays then I would go through my Wednesday basket for work, and I would go through my assistant's Thursday basket for work, and I would set us up for work the next week, And then on Sunday, I would do my Sunday basket for household tasks, and that is where the origin of the Sunday basket on Sunday and the work— the Friday work box, which used to— I used to do on Wednesdays, came from, and how I tell you, you end up needing more baskets. So once I had my assistant, she had her own basket, and the nice thing about that is if I went on an errand on Tuesday and let's say I bought new address labels because my assistant on Thursday was going to be sending out newsletters, and I probably picked up the copies from the copy store. When I came home Tuesday night, I would put the labels and I would put the copies in my assistant's basket for Thursday. These baskets are not only for going through things during the week or a convenient nice place to put your mail, but they are a worker for you. Like, they delegate physical items as well as your ideas and your to-dos into the right basket. So when you— when I would go down in the basement and I would work on Wednesday morning, everything for 6 days that I had thought about that was related to my Creative Memories business had been put in that basket. So yes, I spent the first hour going through the same process on Wednesday morning that I did on Sunday afternoon in my household binder or basket, I would take out— I would open the mail, I would put it in slash pockets, and then I would plan out what I was going to do that day. As I got better at this, I would actually do that on Tuesday night, so when I started on Wednesday morning, I gained another hour of working, and I literally was able to run a full-time business on one 10-hour day with a nanny because I was so focused and so productive on that Wednesday. I got enough done and delegated 5 hours of work to my assistant on Thursday It increased my productivity adding these baskets in tenfold. I mean, I can't even tell you, within 6 weeks of using the Sunday Basket, I felt completely in charge of my house. I was not paying anything late. As a matter of fact, we started saving money. And then as soon as I added on that nanny day, it was within 6 weeks that I hired my assistant for 5 hours. And then within 6 weeks of her working 5 hours a week, my business got more profitable and I started adding on more classes and more recruiting. There is a quote that says, "For every minute you spend in planning, you save 3 to 5 in execution," and I know this to be true. Now Organized 365 was in the middle of doing a Sunday basket, um, time study when the pandemic hit, so all of our results are going to be skewed. We're still going to release that study, but all the results are going to be skewed. And people who have done the Sunday Basket and have gotten through 6 weeks agree with me. You doing the Sunday Basket on Sunday not only gets your to-dos done and gets you to plan your week and all of that, it gives you this extra amount of time during the week— 5 hours during the next week— which is available to you for however you want to spend it. But for me, it has always been available for additional opportunities as they come their way that I did not anticipate or unexpected events, which we know are going to happen eventually, which gives me the bandwidth and the clarity and the peace to be able to be the calm in the storm that we know is coming. Now, I accidentally said back there that it was a binder. I used the word binder, and I don't want to confuse you. I do not use binders. I use baskets. I'm looking at many baskets. I have a corporate work box. I have a Sunday basket. I have a portable Sunday basket bag for the Embrace conference that I'm scheduling. I have a work box for the book tour I still plan on doing. I have a work box I'm looking at for Abby's homeschooling that we're finishing up, and I am doing all of her graduation information in. So I do boxes and I do slash pockets, and while slash pockets were originally designed to go in binders, mine almost never do. And the reason why is this: if you put your slash pockets in binders instead of in baskets like I do, first of all, you have to open a binder in order to get a slash pocket, which may seem like no big deal to you, if you've been diagnosed with ADHD, it is a big deal, and it's just another step. Like, anything that, that impedes us from taking action is another hindrance. So a binder that needs to be pulled down and opened, that is a whole step we can eliminate just by having loose slash pockets inside of a basket. Secondly, when your slash pockets are in a binder, they're set in a certain order, and you have to flip through those slash pockets in order to get to the flash pocket you need, which means that sometimes you get distracted by a slash pocket that's in the front and you never get to one in the back, or the ones in the front get more attention than the ones in the back do, or maybe this week you had a different priority than you, than you had last week, so why are they in the binder at all? Having your slash pockets in an open basket on your desk, on a kitchen counter, in your bedroom, in your school room, wherever, allows you to take all of the basket, all the slash pockets out of the basket very easily. And then you pick them up one at a time. Can this wait? Can this wait? Can this wait? It's a very quick process. Can it wait till Sunday? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And I go through my whole entire pile. If it cannot wait until Sunday, I put it in a pile in front of me. I don't stop and take action yet. I put everything that can go back in the basket back in the basket. And then that leaves me however many slash pockets that I need to do either today or this week. It could be 5, it could be 20, however many it is. Then I take the slash pockets that are left in front of me and I look at each of them and I say, does this— can this be done today? So if it's on Sunday or if you're doing your Friday Work Box, can this be done today? So one that always can be done today and I always reconcile on Sunday is my money one. So I go through the money, I look at our bank accounts, I pay bills online, I allocate where the money is going to go this week, and then I put that one away. I don't let that one hang out until the rest of the week. I try to get as much done on Sunday as I can. Again, I'm trying to free up time for unexpected opportunities and unexpected events that are going to happen. When was the last time you went through a week and there was not a single unexpected opportunity or unexpected event? Never, right? So that— it's a given. Your time cannot all be planned out to how you want to use your time. There are going to be unexpected positive and negative events every single week. So I go through, let's say there are 12 slash buckets in front of me, usually 10 out of 12 I can fully finish on Sunday. The 2 that I cannot, let's say there are phone calls to be made that need to be done on Monday, and then let's say there's a follow-up project for somebody else later this week, those 2 I leave out on my kitchen counter in front of my Sunday basket and I put those on my calendar. So I literally go over to my calendar and then I'll say make phone calls Monday 10 to 10:30. I'll put that block on my calendar and then whatever the other project is, I'll literally go on my calendar or in my planner and I will block that out. So the Sunday Basket, I said it eliminates your to-do list. Yes, it eliminates your to-do list because to-do lists are usually a list of all the things you don't want to forget to do. And while to-do lists can help, and sometimes I still make to-do lists. Often to-do lists, whenever I look at them, you're going to read every single thing on that list. It's going to remind you of everything you still have to do, and many times all of those things on those to-do lists do not have equal priority. Some of those are written on there just because it's a great idea you don't want to forget. Some of those are written on there because it's something you're going to do in the next month. Some of those are written on there because you do it every single week. Laundry, dishes, empty the dishwasher. And some of those things written on there are truly new projects that have a deadline and they need to be done. So like, for example, random to-do list, things that need to be done every week: do the dishes, do the laundry, empty the dishwasher, clean the toilets, all those cleaning and household maintenance things. You could have a cleaning and household maintenance task list. I did mine on Thursdays, So while my assistant was in the basement and I was upstairs with the kids, I also cleaned my house on Thursday. So I would have grabbed that list out, checked it off, and put it back in my basket. I wouldn't have had a separate to-do list for that. Ideas. Ideas are what usually end up on our to-do lists, and we write them on our to-do lists because we don't want to forget them because they're great ideas. And that is something that the Sunday basket solves the problem of the best— having a place for— like, I just saw today, a great Mother's Day idea for my mother-in-law, but we already bought her a gift. So I took that and I printed out the picture that I saw and I put it in my Sunday basket as a Christmas idea. I'm recording this in April, but she's really hard to buy for. So where would you put that information for the next 8 months, right? You don't have a place to put that information, but in the Sunday basket you do. And then it can literally, for 8 months, can this wait till next week? Can this wait? Yep, yep, yep. And I'm gonna get to like October and be like, "Nope, I wanna order that. I wanna make sure that I have that done." Where do you put that kind of stuff? That kind of stuff, for me, sometimes would have ended up on a to-do list. Every time I rewrote that to-do list for 6 months. You laugh, but look at your to-do list. There are some things on your to-do list that are really just ideas you don't wanna forget about. Then there are things on your to-do list that need to be done this week, but it doesn't matter when they're done. And then there are things on your to-do list that need to be done this week, and it does matter when they're done. And when you start using the Sunday Basket after 6 weeks, when you get to Sunday, you will see those two different kinds of tasks, and you'll be able to do one of two things with them. One, you will take those tasks that need to be done by a certain date, and you will give them a time block on your calendar like you would have done when you were in school. For your homework before you were gonna have an exam or before a project was due, or in college when you had to plan out how you were going to get all of your assignments done before the end of the year. Why do we stop doing that when we're adults? I don't know why we stop doing that. So if you have a meeting with a financial advisor on Tuesday and you need to review your financials on Monday, then put a time block on your calendar from 5 to 7 to review your financials, or better yet, just do it on Sunday and get it done. But if you don't get it on Sunday and your meeting is on Tuesday morning, you need to find that slot on Monday so that you have your homework done before you have your meeting. And then for things that it doesn't matter when it gets done, then you need to batch those tasks together. So let's say you have on your to-do list things that doesn't matter when it gets done. Um, all right, I have to add— I'm just making up a to-do list. I need to add minerals to my, my tower garden. I need to clean the toilets. I need to, um, go through Abby's schoolwork, you know, whatever it is. Personally, what I do is I would just be like, I'm not even going to write this on something to do this week. I'm just going to get up and go add minerals to the tower garden today on Sunday. So I try not to put things on a to-do list, all those little things that take 5 to 10 minutes. I take an extra hour after my Sunday basket and I go do this. I fill the pill containers every Sunday, I put money in envelopes every Sunday, I would— now that I have a tower garden, I would add minerals, I clean the dog's food bowls, I wash the washing machine, like any of those things that are routine tasks, I batch them and I add them to Sunday. They may be done every week or they may be done once a month, but that's when they get done. They get done on Sunday. For things that cannot get done on Sunday, I guess I just pretend like I'm still in school and I open up my calendar, my Google Calendar, and I literally time block anything that is going to take my time during the week. Am I going to do it before work, during work, after work? Am I— if I have a whole bunch of little tasks that need done, let's say we're planning a graduation party, which we aren't anymore, but you know what I'm saying. Back when we were allowed to plan things, I would put a 2-hour block of time on my calendar, let's say Wednesday afternoon, to order, plan, and get ready for a graduation party. I will time block that. So time blocking things on your calendar. So this is how the Sunday Basket eliminates your big to-do list that you're used to. It clears your mental clutter, and the reason the Sunday Basket clears your mental clutter is because if you do not have a Sunday Basket, even if you have a to-do list, your brain is talking back to you all day long. Just— it's hard for me to remember this now because it's been about 3 years before I— since I've had any talking back to me at all. But it used to be when I was— if I think back to that 2002 self, I was— well, first of all, I was younger, so I had a lot more energy. But I had these babies who had constant needs. I need new sippy cup. I want you to change the channel. I need new batteries. Play with me. Take me outside. My diaper's wet. All these things. Crying. Hungry. Time for nap, what time is it? What schedule are we on? I had all of that going on. Then I had everything going on with my direct sales business, which back then was on the phone. So the phone was ringing, I would talk to my friends on the phone. I also had to clean my entire house by myself. So, which now, you know, anyways, I had all those household responsibilities. Then I had all the computer work related to working on the business. Then I had to schedule the babysitter both for pleasure and for work. Then I had to figure out what the assistant was doing. And in all of those things that you hear me doing, My brain was also saying, "You need to get a haircut. Did you remember to call your mom? Oh, Mother's Day is coming up." I'm glad that she mentioned that. We totally forgot about Mother's Day. You know, like, all these constant reminders, and I would run over and I would write those things down, and I would write them down, I would write them down on this to-do list. Once I started the Sunday basket, I would still write those things down, but I would put them on index cards and I would throw them in the Sunday basket. And you'd be like, "Why? That's so many index cards. Why would you waste all those index cards?" The reason why I went to index cards instead of a list is because, well, one, I would lose the list, and two, when you get to a list of a whole bunch of things, like, when you look at a list, your brain is going to jump around to like, I need to cut my hair, that's a personal task. I need to file my income taxes, that's a family financial task. I need to reorder product for my business, that's a business task. And your brain is trying to go personal, financial, work. But when you have index cards and you're just tossing them in the Sunday basket as long as they can wait until Sunday, and you get to Sunday and you sort your index cards like decks of cards into piles into these slash pockets, then all of a sudden you can look at all of your financial tasks at once, all of your personal tasks at once, all of your business tasks at once. And when your mind— it's like back in school again, If you had to go over your spelling test and then edit your grammar and then do addition and then write your spelling words 10 times and then do one more page of math, like, you would not do schoolwork that way. You wouldn't flip from subject to subject to subject. You would do all your math, then you do all your spelling, then you do all your grammar, and then you do all your history, and you may take a break in between doing that homework, or you may decide to do spelling homework on and grammar homework on Monday and math on Tuesday. You see what I'm saying? Like, you would chunk it. That is what the Sunday Basket helps you do with your daily life tasks. And in writing all of those ideas down on index cards, then it gets it out of your brain. And what you'll notice when you do the Sunday Basket at first, and I don't know why this is the thing, but it's usually the thing, If you need a haircut, which I'm recording this while we're still in lockdown of the pandemic, which is #everyoneintheworld right now, when you get your Sunday basket, you will see 4 different index cards that say, "Need a haircut," right? Because your brain doesn't want you to forget that you need a haircut. It's okay, that's no big deal. Don't judge yourself. Your brain is doing what it's needed to do up until this point, which is remind you of things that you might forget. As you start using the Sunday basket successfully, your brain will know, oh, she gets her haircut every 6 weeks and she books her appointment after the last appointment. Like, I never have to remind her about haircuts again. And when your brain doesn't have to be your to-do list, your brain is going to empty up and it's going to be free to make bigger decisions and be the, the workhorse that it's meant to be to help you find new positive solutions to the problems and the situations that you face. So the Sunday Basket eliminates your to-do list, it clears up the mental clutter, and it allows you to make delayed decision-making. So what is the benefit of delayed decision-making? The first time that I noticed that's what the Sunday Basket did for me was with charitable requests. So Greg and I have always given generously to charities, and when people make requests, we're like, okay, yeah, sure, money in the checking account, we'll write write you a check. When I started doing the Sunday basket, I was like, you know, I had this— this 'you've made a charitable request, we have money in the checking account, we'll give you money' thing. I don't think that's the best way to be deciding how we're giving our, our charitable money out. So I, for a period of time, I would say to myself when I got done with my finances and I would look at the charitable requests that had come in, I would say, 'Can this wait until next Sunday?' And I realized it could. Like, most of the charitable requests that were made of us were not like, "If we don't get your $5, we're going to starve to death and die." And I was like, okay, so that doesn't need to be an immediate decision. And as I started letting these charitable requests pile up inside of our slash pocket, Greg and I, when he would receive a bonus or we would have a gift or was end of the year giving, I would go into the Sunday basket and I would pull out all the charitable requests that had been made of us and we would look at all of them and we would pick one or two and we would give a more significant contribution made out of a thoughtful, purposeful place versus reactionary, "Oh, you want some money? We'll give you $25 and you get $50 and you get $10 based on whatever is in our checking account." We became much more purposeful about it and when bonuses would come in, we went straight to that pocket and be like, "Great, now we can fund some of these charities." 'Which ones do we want to fund with this bonus?' Versus in the past, it'd be like, who would make the request right before, right after a bonus would come in, would be the person that got the money. And delayed decision-making allows you to make more purposeful and more impactful decisions because you have time. The other thing that I noticed happened when we had the Sunday basket was I would delay making some decisions. And I remember doing this with a client when she was doing the Sunday basket. And in her Sunday basket were like 8 different specials she had gotten from moving her TV cable from one company to another. And she said, "I've been keeping these for 8 months. And you know what I've decided? I don't want to switch." So instead of— she had saved all this stuff and every flyer that had come in to make the switch for 8 months. And after 8 months of having not made the switch, she decided, "I don't even want to make the switch." So sometimes you'll keep things in your Sunday basket for a long time, but because it can wait until next Sunday, you make it wait until next Sunday, and eventually you realize, "I really just don't even want to do the thing at all," and you get rid of all of it. So that is another benefit of delayed decision-making. All 3 of these things— eliminating your to-do list, clearing your mental clutter, and delaying your decision-making— are the steps that move you from living a reactionary life to a proactive life. I love teaching you how to organize your home, and we'll be talking about that as we get into future parts in the Organized 365 story. But the Sunday basket, and the reason why I have you start at the Sunday basket, is because this is the skill, this is the thing that is so uniquely Organized 365, and this is what has helped me in my transition when I had 2 babies. In the year that I turned 40, I I went into the Sunday baskets when I get overwhelmed 3 times a year, as everyone does going into the holidays, the May and June time frame, and the August-September time frame. I use every basket and work box I have to get me organized to go into that next season of the year. These 3 seasons that we have, I don't use my Sunday basket and my work boxes as much in October or February or July, June, July. Those are times when our, our lives pretty much are running on autopilot. But as we transition to each of these seasons, I pull out my Sunday basket and work boxes every time, and I use them faithfully because they help me be proactive and not reactive. So I went over what the Sunday basket is. Our Sunday basket is, um, 9 inches wide by 9 inches high by 13 inches. I guess it's 13 inches wide, 9 inches deep, 9 inches high. I'm, I'm not an engineer, obviously. It holds a slash pocket. It's basically a little bit shorter than a binder would be. That's how big the Sunday Basket is, and it's 9 inches deep. And in our Sunday Basket, we have a patented divider which is 1/3 of the way through to hold up your slash pockets tall in the first little third And then the two-thirds, either in the front or back, however you want to set it up, it can be set up either way, is where you dump in everything that can wait until Sunday before you take the time to take everything out and put it into the slash pockets. So a quart of paint, your mail, all of your index card ideas, uh, the, the toy that needs a new battery in it, the pills that got picked up from the pharmacy that don't need to be put into pill containers until Sunday, all of that, all of that goes inside of the Sunday basket, the larger portion. And then on the weekend, you open those all up and you put them in slash pockets. I told you what slash pockets were. I told you about the note cards. Okay, another thing, color coding. So when I created the Sunday Basket as a physical product in 2017 and we started selling it in 2018, I manufactured my own slash pockets. And the reason why I manufacture my own slash pockets is because the Sunday Basket system comes with 25 slash pockets. The first set is 5 slash pockets, They're called 1.0, and they're red, orange, yellow, green, blue. These slash pockets are the ones that you do first. Some people spend a couple of weeks doing only these slash pockets, and then they add on what we call the 2.0. So you could do it all at once, or you can do it over time. The 2.0 slash pockets are the ones that I talked to you about that would hold that idea, like for your mother-in-law for Christmas idea, if you find it in April and you're not going to order it until October. That would go in a 2.0 Slash Pockets. So the rainbow 1.0 Slash Pockets are the same for everyone, and the 20 additional Slash Pockets that we call 2.0 are individualized for you and your family. The 20 2.0 Slash Pockets come in 4 colors: 5 pink, 5 green, 5 blue, and 5 purple.. And in the training that comes with the Sunday Basket System, we teach you that pink are slash pockets for you, purple are slash pockets for your house, blue are slash pockets for your family members, and green are slash pockets for your money. And then in our weekly 90-minute virtual Sunday Basket Club, which is part of the purchase of the Sunday Basket System, you can go through your Sunday Basket online with a professional organizer and ask your questions as you go, as you're learning the system. So the color coding will help you as you get deeper into the 2.0 project portion of the Sunday Basket. The Sunday Basket holds actionable, not archive papers. So if you're like, what do I do with my filing cabinet? We're going to get to that in a later episode. What about binders? This has nothing to do with this. This is not your filing cabinet. This is not binders. These are— this is your kitchen counter paper. These are actionable papers. These are things that need you to do something and then they can get back out again. This is not where you keep all your recipes, all your ideas, um, all your tax documents. This is not a filing system, it's just for your actionable papers. I also mentioned brain dump. So on occasion I will say a brain dump, and what I mean by that— I don't even know where I originally heard that idea, maybe it's a teaching term from college when I was a teacher— but a brain dump Do you remember when you used to have to write papers in school and they would have you just sit there and free write all the ideas that would come out of your head? Or you would do a map and you would say, okay, I'm going to write a story about oranges, and then you would write everything that came off of that middle center. Oranges, like, they're orange and they're round and they're juicy and they're grown in Florida, and like everything you knew about an orange. A brain dump is similar. So when you're starting the Sunday Basket, or when you are really overwhelmed and you feel like you're just spinning like a top and you don't know what to do, this is when I grab a whole stack of index cards and I literally sit there and I just write down everything that comes to my head on an index card. And I can go through a whole stack of index cards. Don't worry, they're like 50 cents. It is worth it to do with index cards, not a sheet of paper, because of the next step. And I write down every single thing until there is literally nothing left in my brain. Sometimes that's 10 cards, sometimes it's 150, and then, and I'll just keep writing, writing, writing, writing, writing until there's nothing left in my brain, and I'll say, "Anything else? Anything else we're worried about? Anything else I need to remember? Anything else I need to do?" And I just keep writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. Now when I have all of these index cards, I can lay them all out in front of me and I group them by task. Okay, these are all financial, these are all work, these are all kids, these are all errands, these are all whatever. And then I can put them in slash pockets or I can take action on them. So that was what a brain dump is. A brain dump is when you just write down everything that is weighing on your mind on index cards. Some people do it in journaling, like if you want to journal through your thoughts. This is more the actionable when you're like, oh my gosh, I have so much to do, I don't even know where to start. We just write them all on index cards. So the terminology, the Organized 365 unique terminology that we went over in part 3 is what a Sunday basket is, what a slash bucket is, what a note card is, how to eliminate your to-do list, what delayed decision-making is, what actionable paper is versus archive paper, how to do a brain dump, and color code it. You know, it is really fun that my team has come up with all— they're like, Lisa, you have all this lingo. We gotta share all this lingo with people. It is amazing when you are creative and you really dive into your passion project, you too are going to come up with a story that goes with whatever you are creating, and you can create your own terminology and your own way of doing things as well. So I'm super excited that you are along the journey with me and you are following Organized 365 and you're listening to how this story has progressed. In part 4, now that we know that I created the whole Sunday basket out of my head and I've created all these different terms, I want to talk to you next week about how I have renamed the spaces in your house to help you see your spaces differently so that your house functions better. 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/podcast. 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.