005 - The Lisa Glossary Part 5: Home Organization Perspective

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 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 Megan. Hi, Lisa. I'm new to your podcast and I learned about you from a talk you did on an Attitude podcast recently. I have to tell you that not only did you help me realize that I'm actually a mom with ADHD too, like I thought, but I am also like you. Organization has always been my calling, and although my home doesn't always feel that way, you explained why with the 3 phases in life. And I also fully understand your kitchen burnout because my youngest daughter was diagnosed with a metabolic disorder at 4 days old. So I have lived in the kitchen trying to learn her diet and make meals she may enjoy as an adult. Crazy, I know, because what kid would enjoy the vegetable-heavy foods that I was preparing? Thank you for all of your tips and your honest sharing. You are helping people like me every day, and I'm sure they aren't always sharing that with you. What just prompted me to write you an email was I just started on your Decluttering Negative Thoughts podcast, and I am amazed to hear that you are never ever negative when I hear you speak in these podcasts. It proves that any slump anyone is in they can claw their way out. And I just wanted to thank you for sharing your life story and wisdom with others. I will be forever grateful for listening to your podcast. Positivity is lacking so much in this world, and I just want to make sure you knew that you were making an impact. I referenced earlier how I am similar in my drive to organization. I have always found systems and all of that so rewarding, and just before finding you, I've just recently been doing a lot of the systems that you have discussed. It just made me chuckle because for a long time I felt that a part of me was lost. I love listening to your awesome tips for the parts of the home that I haven't gotten around to yet. Thank you for doing what you do and sharing your positivity, organization, and productivity tips for all of us. Do you have an Organized 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customer service at Organized 365 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 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. Today in part 5 of the Organized 365 story, we're actually going to talk about organizing the house. I know, novel concept, right? You may be thinking to yourself, doesn't, doesn't, isn't she a home organization expert? Like, we've gone through 4 whole parts, she hasn't told me how to organize anything yet. And I think that that is something that Many people think, "Just tell me how to organize this thing." And I do that inside of the 100 Day Home Organization program. I say, "Open up your silverware drawer, here's what we do. Open up your underwear drawer, here's what we do." I give you the exact, here's how you do this space inside of the 100 Day Home Organization program. However, what you get from Organize 365 is the ability to figure out how to organize it yourself. It, it's so much about thinking and mindset and ordering your thoughts more than it is ordering your spaces. If you can get your mindset right, the organizing of your spaces inside of your home will be 10 times easier. So we started all the way back in the beginning about how organization is a learnable skill. Is something you can learn. Then we went into the fact that there are certain seasons in your life where you'll become disorganized and need to get new organizational systems in place, and there are certain times of the year that make it easier to start organizing than others, which I call golden windows. Then I deviated and talked about how you could be totally overwhelmed and how the Sunday basket was the one thing that really helped me get started organizing, and that is where I suggest everyone starts because If you don't have a Sunday basket and you dive into the 100-day program here and life starts moving fast and you don't have a place for all of your ideas and all of your to-dos and all of your actionables, you are going to be so frustrated organizing your house because you're going to have to constantly stop and go handle life and come back to organizing and come back to organizing. Whereas if you do the Sunday basket first and give yourself that extra 5 hours a week from doing the Sunday basket on Sunday, you'll be able to use that extra time to get started in organizing. Last week I talked about renaming some of these spaces inside of your home with different names so that you can be thinking about your house differently, which will help you in getting organized. And this week we're finally going to start getting organized. These next 3 episodes, I'm going to talk about your home organization perspective today. Then I'm going to talk about redefining how we look at time. Remember last week I talked about how we can rename spaces in our home. I'm going to give you some new ways of thinking about your time that's going to change how you look at the same exact amount of time you had before, but you're going to look at it through a different lens. And then the third part in this home organization perspective is the meaning of work and what I define as work. Work is what you spend the majority of your day doing. So right now, let's dive into home organization perspective. About maybe it was a year, year and a half ago, I heard the Bill Gates quote that said, "In business, we overestimate what we could do in 1 year and we underestimate what we can do in 10 years in business." And I thought to myself, having been in business 8 years, I thought, "Wow, is he right?" I totally overestimate every single year how much I'm going to get done in my business. Like, my goals are way too big and they don't get achieved. And yet when I look back on the last 8 years, I never thought I would have the business I have today 8 years ago. And I can't even imagine what the business is gonna look like 2 years after this. And so I have taken that quote and I have modified it for us. And it is this: we overestimate what we can get done in one weekend or one week of focused organizational effort in our house, and we underestimate what 1 year to 18 months of continued day-to-day organization will do. Your story might be like mine. Whenever I would get overwhelmed, whenever I would feel out of control, whenever I wanted to take back this house, I would get up on Saturday morning, first thing Saturday morning, just throw on a t-shirt and shorts because I was gonna be sweating and I was gonna be moving and I was gonna declutter everything possible and I was gonna get this house back in shape by Sunday night. When I was younger, before we had kids, sometimes I could do it, sometimes it would take a whole week. And then as I got older and added more obligations and responsibilities and people to my house, I couldn't do it. And in the, the January of 2012, I knew that there was no way that I could get my house organized in a weekend or a week, or I didn't even know how long it was going to take. It took me 18 months. And it wasn't 18 months of 15 minutes a day. Sometimes I organized for 3 or 4 or 5 hours a day. And your house may not be where my house was in January of 2012, but it's probably somewhere in between. And what I have found in observing other people is this is what we do. We let our houses go and they get to the point where we just can't take it anymore, and we decide that no matter what, I am going to get up early on Saturday and I'm going to put the whole weekend in, and by the end of the weekend this is gonna be back to the way it was before or better than it was before. And it very, very, very rarely can we do that, especially if we've transitioned from one phase of life to another or from one catastrophic event or we're coming out of something like that. Now, if your house was organized and you had a party or you went away for a month and you came back and you're just gonna take a weekend to get back to status quo, you could totally do that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when you said, that's it, I have had it. I cannot live this way anymore. This house has got to get organized, and it is going to happen starting today. It's going to take you a year, and you need to have that kind of a mindset going in. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Your home did not get cluttered in a day, and it is not going to get uncluttered in a day. So you have to be realistic with your expectations. Now, along with that, I'm going to tell you a couple of other things that I say all the time, and there are 3 things: there are no organizing police, progress over perfection, and there are no organizing emergencies. Let's take them one at a time. There are no organizing police. You might say, what is she talking about? Oh yeah, you think they're out there. You think there are organizing police out there, and they are clouding how you make your decisions, the expectations you put on yourself, and the stress, frankly, that you're under because you think there are these organizing police. You might say, what are you talking about? I do not think there are organizing police. Some of us think our organizing police are our mother-in-law or our mother or our friends or our neighbors or just our own mind. And when we go into a space, any space, and we set out to declutter and organize it, we are not walking into that space as I would be walking into your house going, how can I make this decluttered and organized and functional? We're walking into that space thinking, oh, if I don't have this thing on display, my family member is going to judge me. If I repaint this piece of furniture, a family member is going to say, oh, you've taken the value out of this furniture. If I— you see what I'm saying already? You're like, oh, I might have organizing police. When you go in to organize a space in your house, or you're setting back to take back your house and get your house organized, there are no organizing police. Even what you think— you may have a few critical family members or friends who will actually say things like that to you, but most likely they won't because they're not thinking about you as much as you're thinking about you. I say this to Craig all the time. No one's thinking about you. Uh, he's like, it's not very nice. I go, yes, but you're so worried about what other people will think. Nobody's thinking about you. So if you're wondering, oh, if I change the shade of this room from this color taupe to that color taupe, what will people think? They're not thinking about you. Paint it whatever color you want. Paint it purple if you want to. You would be surprised. The more bold you are with making your house the way you want it to be, the more comfortable you will be in it, and the more you will love it, and people will feel the energy of your love, not the color choice you have on the wall, or where you decided to put a knick-knack, or even if you decided to keep the knick-knack at all. There are a few select people who will make judgmental comments, but it is more a condition of their expectation on themselves not their expectation on you. So what would you do if you had the freedom? If you weren't worried about the organizing police coming in and making judgments or making you feel a certain way about your house? Maybe you would do some of the things that I mentioned in the past episodes and really turn your living room into an office. Get rid of your dining room entirely. Take up all the carpet and refinish the wood that's underneath. What would you do if you weren't worried about what other people thought? You were only worried about what you thought. Those are the organizing police. The second thing is progress over perfection. And I didn't originate progress over perfection. I heard it in my past life, but I say it often. So some people think it did originate with me. And this is the idea of just get started and do the next step. Just get started and do the next step. We aren't going for magazine perfect. We aren't trying to get our house in Better Homes and Gardens. We're just trying to get it organized so we can have more time to do the things that we were uniquely created to do. So get started and take the next step. You don't have to know what this room is going to look like at the end. You don't have to know, uh, how this house is going to look like when you're done. What is the next thing that you could see right in front of you that needs to be decluttered or organized? Take 15 minutes and do that. And then if you have more time and energy, do the next thing, and then the next thing. And then the next thing. And just do what you see in front of you, or the next step in the 100 Day Program if you're in that. If you follow the 100 Day Program in order, your house will get organized because I've ordered it to do so. And so you don't have to worry about what the order is or what happens next. Just do the next thing. Just do the next thing. Just do the next thing. And if you listen to the Wednesday podcast episodes, you hear over and over and over again, when was the first time you realized you were organized? It's not like you do week 1 and then you're organized. It hits you out out of the blue. When I could find that paper that my husband asked for. When I walked in the kitchen and there were no dishes on the counter. When I went in my closet and I was able to get dressed and it didn't take me 25 minutes. It will surprise you the thing that will help you realize that you are organized, but it will happen. The next one, and I created this rule more for my team than for anybody else, but now I quote it pretty often, is that there are no organizing emergencies. I'm not proud to say it, but when my company was younger, I thought that everything was super, super important and that everything had to be done immediately so that my business would be successful. And I was very naive in growing a business and I was very, I don't know, egotistical maybe. When I first started Organize 365, there would be like, I don't know, 10 people on the website a day, like not very many people at all. When I first had the podcast, there would be like less than 100 downloads per episode, like not many downloads at all. But whenever there was something wrong on the website or wrong with the podcast or wrong, I would stay up until 1:00 AM trying to fix it. I would contact my virtual assistant and be like, "We have to stop everything and do this right now." Even if it was like a Sunday afternoon, I would, like it did not matter the time or place. If anything was wrong, I would drop everything and I myself would stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning trying to fix it or calling whoever could fix it and be like, "We have to do this right now." Or if I had somebody on my team, it was like, we had to get this done, it was so important. Now, literally, the entire website can be down and I'm like, "All right, did we let the website company know? We did? Okay, I'm gonna go back to this barbecue or whatever I'm at." Like, I don't worry about it. Here's the thing that I have come to realize. There is no such thing as perfect. There are always going to be things wrong on my website. I mean, we have like 1,400 pages on there. We go through these pages, and by the time we're done going through the pages, it's time to go through them again. There are always going to be things that are outdated, misspelled, links not working, this doesn't work. And right now, what time are you going to hear this? You're going to hear this early in June. We're in the process— I'm recording this in April— of moving our website over to a completely customized website. And in the months leading up to this transfer All kinds of things are breaking on the old website that we are finding and fixing, but it's like more stuff is— you know when you're ready to move and you're like, "Oh, can we just move already?" Like, more stuff is breaking and then we're spending time fixing stuff that we know is only going to be fixed for a couple weeks before— oh, you get the idea, right? And I realized that in order to take the pressure off of myself and my team and my company, I had to make a new rule, and I made this rule about a year ago, and the rule is there are no organizing emergencies. Like, if our entire website is down, is it inconvenient? Yes. But is anybody gonna die because of it? Absolutely not. So while it's inconvenient and you maybe have gone to a link that is broken or isn't working while we're trying to process through things, I can either say, 'Oh my gosh, this is an emergency. We have got to, you know, all hands on deck. It's Sunday afternoon. Everybody who's not working now has to work. We have to fix this.' Or I can say, 'There are no organizing emergencies,' and add it to the list of things that need to get done, and we get things done as soon as we can. Like, we obviously don't, like, ignore things that need to be done, but at the same time, I don't create chaos in my company anymore, and you don't need to create chaos in your family either. There's no organizing emergency. There's no reason that you have to be organized by Monday. There's no— like, even if you're having a graduation party at your house— I know I'm still using that example even though we're not having one. Uh, it's hard for me to think of what we would be having at our house that people will be coming over to. I am still going to try to have a graduation party on July 5th, so I'm thinking about a graduation party. Even if I have a graduation party on July 5th, here's something that I know. Those people are going to be on the first floor of my house. They are not going to be in my bedroom, the old kids' bedroom, the upstairs bathrooms. They're not going to be in the basement. They are only going to be on the first floor of my house. So even if that's my organizing emergency, that this house has to be ready for that reunion or that graduation or that holiday or that whatever— yeah, but only the first floor of your house, not your storage room, not your attic. Not your garage, not your bedroom, like only the living areas of your house. Keep your garage door down, lock it. Go in the garage door and unconnect it so nobody can accidentally put it up and somebody sees what's inside of your garage. And then make sure your living room, dining room, kitchen, and your backyard are good. You're good, you can have a party. That's only like 20% of your house, you can get that done. There are no organizing emergencies. We tend to feel like we need to have our house as clean and organized as it would be if we were having a baby tomorrow and we nested and spent a whole year prepping this house for this new life. No, we're only going to do that a couple times a year. The rest of the time, it's going to be as good as it can get in the main living areas of our house. Another perspective, um, word I've come up with, or quote I've come up with, is the 24-hour rule. The 24-hour rule is a rule I made for myself probably 15 years ago, and it was a rule that I created to reduce the amount of guilt and give myself permission to let go projects and ideas that were good but were not going to get done. And so as a collector, I'm a collector, and I love to create projects. My husband will say, uh, what do you have to do today? I was like, oh, well, I was thinking about this, this, this, and this, and this. And he goes, "Hey, you realize those are all projects you just created in your head?" I was like, "Yeah, isn't it fun?" He's like, "None of that even existed yesterday. You're just gonna create these projects." Like, I like to create work, as Greg says. And so I would create work, like I would collect recipes of things that I wanted to make one day. FYI, I hardly ever cook. I would create, I would keep magazine clippings. We would use it on Pinterest now. We didn't have Pinterest then. Magazine clippings, things that I printed off the internet for crafts I wanted to do for kids, or things I would teach if I ever went back to teaching, which I'm not going to do, or things that I might want to do around our house that haven't gotten done yet. And as I was going through my paper and as I was getting organized in our house, I had a hard time getting rid of things that maybe one day I might want to do. And so While I didn't necessarily get rid of things that I already had, that was a different process, what I decided was no new things were going to be added to these piles that I was having such a hard time getting rid of. And I created the 24-hour rule. So the 24-hour rule was if I was looking at a magazine, if I was on a website, if I was reading a book, if I was talking to a friend, if I was in a store, and I wanted to buy something, print something, tear something out, I would then say to myself, are you going to take action on this thing within 24 hours? So if I was tearing out a recipe, was I going to buy the ingredients and make this thing in the next 24 hours? If I was at a store, am I going to start this craft in the next 24 hours? If I was talking to a friend, am I going to start working on this idea within 24 hours? And if I wasn't going to find the time in the next 24 hours to do the thing, then I didn't tear out the page, I didn't purchase the thing, I didn't commit to the committee. And that was huge because instead of reducing the clutter of what I already had that I was having a hard time letting go of, it stopped new things, new obligations, new expectations on my time and on my energy from coming into my life that weren't going to get done. The hardest one was books. I am a bookaholic. I love books. I have always loved books. I love how they look on a bookshelf. I love books. When I started organizing my house in 2012, I had a bookshelf in almost every single room in my house. I had 3 in the loft. I had 1 in each of the kids' bedrooms. I had one in my bedroom. I had two in the living room. I had two built-in in the family room. I had three in the basement, two in storage areas and one that was in a basement family area. All of those bookshelves had books on them and they all had different kinds of books, reference books, biblical books, homeschooling books, teaching books, business books, books, pleasure books, and 80% of them had been read. Like, it wasn't like I was just buying books and not reading them. The majority of them had been read. And to pare down my bookshelf to what I now have only in my living room took me 5 years. Slowly, I would get rid of one bookshelf at a time. I would go through, I would read any of the books that hadn't been read, I would pare down to just a select few in that category, and then sometimes eventually I got rid of all of them. One that I'm thinking about right now that was in my storage room was a whole shelf. Oh, I forgot everything that was on that bookshelf. So it was a 72-inch high bookshelf, white melamine bookshelf, solid filled. The bottom two shelves were full of folders of ideas from teaching preschool. I hadn't taught school in, I don't know, 14 years by the time I did that. Oh yeah, 14, preschool, 16 years. But these folders had everything I would need to teach a unit inside of preschool, and I had 22 of them. I eventually ended up selling them on Craigslist to a daycare center in Kentucky and delivering them on our trip to Florida one year. That was the bottom two shelves. The middle shelf was all homeopathy books. So I was really into homeopathy when my kids were growing up, and I had all kinds of books including the Materia Medica, and I had ordered books direct from India. I know, you guys, I'm a nerd. I am a nerd through and through. And I had a hard time getting rid of those books because I think those books really made me think that I could be my own physician. And I do have a lot of medical information that helps guides doctors as they take care of our family, but I have given up the idea that I'm going to be my own doctor. And I remember I probably had 50 books And at first I was able to get rid of 10, and then another 10, and then another 10. And I think I still have a couple. I'll have to go down and see, but I think I still have the Materia Medica, which is like the, essentially the homeopathy Bible. Like, it's, it's like the book that doctors would use, and a couple others. But getting rid of those books, choosing to not have those books, was giving up a part of me. And I'm not saying you need to. You don't, you don't need to get rid of those books. But it was something that was difficult for me because I love to consume knowledge. I love to learn. I love to grow. I love to research. I love to know more and more. Like, Joey had to do something for, uh, he had to do a contract for law, and I had researched law at one point where I probably could go to law school. He's like, Mom, how do you know all this stuff? I was like, I don't know, I was interested in one year and I just went all the way down the rabbit trail. And that's just the way I am. Like, if I want to know something, I know so much about it that I'm dangerous because I think I know a lot, but I don't know as much as true professionals would know in any field. But I've gone down those rabbit trails in many different ways. So the 24-hour rule for me with books became: I am no longer allowed to buy a book unless I will start reading that book within 24 hours. And I buy Audible books, I buy Kindle books, and I buy physical books. And the rule is I have to start reading the book within 24 hours. If I'm gonna buy an Audible book or a Kindle book, I literally have to start reading it as soon as I click purchase. Because if I'm not going to start reading it when I click purchase, then the odds are of me reading it become less and less and less as time goes on. And if it's delivered instantaneously, why would I use my Audible credit, or why would I buy a Kindle book if I wasn't ready to sit there and read it right then? And making that rule for myself did not stop me from the amount of books I consume. I think I read 4 last week, but it stopped me from buying 16 last week, which is what I used to do, and then having a couple that wouldn't be read. Now, do I have books come sometimes, or buy a Kindle book or an Audible book that I don't finish, or that once I get started I'm like, eh, that isn't what I really wanted? Absolutely. And I do not feel guilty about that. I think buying books is the least expensive way to educate yourself and get more knowledge in a very organized thought, thought their way. Like, you're listening this podcast, I'm having thoughts and I'm changing what I'm thinking as I'm going through this podcast. When you buy The Paper Solution, that's been written and edited and published, and you are getting the best of my thoughts without any ums and rabbit trails and any of that kind of stuff. So when I want to go to the source, I buy a book. So that is the 24-hour rule. Will I take action? Will I start the craft within 24 hours? And, and the reason I had to make this rule was because I told you in a couple episodes back that when I started the Sunday Basket, my kids were babies, and there was, there was the internet, but we didn't have iPhones, we didn't have social media, and we didn't have things that would be delivered to the house. And so when I would go to the store, when I would go to Meijer with my kids, I would buy them little Happy Meals, and I would push them in the stroller, and I would pull the cart behind me, and I would buy all kinds of stuff. And the reason I love to go to Meijer was because I could, I could drop my photos off to be finished in the 1-hour photo. That's how old I am. I could get our prescriptions there. I could get paint there, I could get craft supplies, I could get office supplies, I could get things for, you know, jobs around the house. They had like a hardware section. I could get pet supplies, I could get clothes, I could get the kids' shoes, I could get groceries. I could get absolutely everything done inside of that store except for dry cleaning. That's the only thing I could not do on my errand list at Meijer, and that's why I would go to Meijer and I would buy everything possible. Because when I left my house on Tuesdays for errand days, With a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old, I bought everything that I was possibly going to need for a week because I didn't want to leave the house with them again and go to another store. All the way back in the phases of life, this— I was in the accumulation phase, so I needed to buy paint and rollers and all of this stuff. I am now in the survival phase of life. I do not need to be accumulating. And I had gotten so used to on Tuesday making a big old list of things to buy so that I would have it in the house when I needed it when my kids were little and they were in grade school that I was still still doing that when I was in my 40s. And what was happening was I wasn't getting those projects, but I was buying the items like I used to when I had toddlers because I didn't want to have to go back out to the store again. But I also changed my purchasing to Amazon. And so instead of having to make a list and bundle up kids and go to a store and get everything in a cart and put it in a car and bring it home, as soon as I had an idea I wanted to do something, I'd put it in my Amazon Cart, click, buy, ship, click, buy, ship. And then all of a sudden things were getting to me really, really fast without much of a barrier of getting that thing. I didn't have to leave my house. All I had to do was think I wanted something and it would show up at my door within a day or two. And that's when I started buying more than I could actually physically do. And the year that I stopped buying things until the current projects that I had were done, I saved a ton of money, I got a ton of stuff done, and I cleared out a lot of clutter out of our household, which were a bunch of projects that I had purchased but I hadn't finished. And unfortunately, when you make this shift from buying for future projects to buying just in time, there is a glut of projects that you've already purchased that need to be finished, but you don't have the high of having just purchased them and being excited about it. So now it's more kind of like homework, but you've already bought it, so you have those projects that you can do And it teaches you that now I just buy things when I'm gonna do the project. I used to buy in advance, now I don't buy in advance. All right, so those are the perspectives that we need now that you're getting into organizing your home. You're going to overestimate what you can do in a weekend or a week, but you're gonna underestimate what you can get done in 12 to 18 months. It's only gonna take 12 to 18 months to get through your entire house and get you all the way organized top to bottom, including your filing cabinets. But it's not going to happen in a weekend. So you need to have a different perspective on time. There are no organizing police, so just do progress over perspective and take the next step. There are no organizing emergencies, so don't put an external pressure on yourself that this has to be done in a certain amount of time. Just take the next step, keep going. If you're working on your, on your organizing, you are making progress. And remember the 24-hour rule, so you stop bringing so much into your house, get done what's already in there, so that there's space for your new projects when you want to get started on those. All right, next week I'm going to talk to you about some different perspectives on time, how to order your time, how to order it by year, by week, by day. How do I get so much done in every 24 hours? See you next week.

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