007 - The Lisa Glossary Part 7: Redefining the Meaning of "Work"

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 Organize 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 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 Pam. Dear Lisa Woodruff, as we are in the middle of the pandemic, I am finding peace and joy in my home. I thank God for you and your team, Lisa. He is truly using you and Organize 365 to change lives more than ever now. I have often wished for more of those days that are just free days, the kind of day where there is no time agenda and nowhere that you have to be. Nothing is open to pull you away from home like a snow day or New Year's Day. Now that I have an abundance of these days, I am throwing myself into my 100-day challenge. Life has caused me to fall behind and now I am catching up. I love these days where my 15-minute daily task could turn into a 2-hour organizing marathon. My kiddos love to organize too, so this is happening all over my house. I also wanted to share something that is helping me immensely during these days at home with my family. I was inspired by your podcast about time and time blocking. I may end up saying right back to you what you have already suggested in a podcast. I am time blocking my time in the kitchen. I am actually thoroughly enjoying cooking for my family. Again, because I have no time that I have to stop what I am doing. I put in 60-90 minutes late morning and get all of my kitchen chores done for the day. It looks something like this: make breakfast for the family, clean up, prep a hearty snack or light lunch item like fruit salad, lettuce salad, sandwich fixins, or soup. Prep all that I can for dinner or even finish dinner. Clean up as I go along. Empty the dishwasher. Shut down the kitchen. 60 to 90 minutes total. Then I return at 5:00 PM. Pour a glass of wine. Finish any dinner chores. Set up the food buffet style. Clean up. Call the family and enjoy a family dinner. Every night right now. I don't feel like I am living in the kitchen or that I am a short order cook. It is fabulous! Thank you, Lisa Woodruff, for teaching me about time blocking. Stay healthy, everyone! 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 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. As we get to the end of these Organized 365 stories, I have two more big concepts that I have been diving into over the past 8.5 years that really come into play in how Organized 365 approaches all of the different offerings that we give to you. And this week I want to talk to you about how I define work. And I have been careful about saying what work is over the last 8.5 years because personally I have been defining what work means to me for the last 30 years. As a child who was raised by a salesman and an entrepreneur, we were always working. And work is fun for me. Like, work is something I want to do. I enjoy work. I'm probably a workaholic, but I've, I've never looked at work as arduous or something I didn't want to do or something that was put upon me. I'm a lifelong learner, and the fact that my parents gave me a lot of freedom as a child to you know, fill up my time with the voices in my head, creating little imaginative games that Emily and I would play, or being a babysitter and marketing my skills to moms that needed people to take care of their kids, and then selling the kids on the idea that I was a fun babysitter and that we would do fun things together. I just love work. I have always loved work. But what I found really Mm, not difficult, but hard for me as a woman was what I— having other people respect what I called work as actually work. So I went to Miami University, I got a 4-year degree in early childhood and elementary education. I'm certified to teach children 0 years old through 8th grade in the state of Ohio when I held my certificates. And so I have a college degree as an educator, and I've been an educator. And the first 4 years out of college, I worked as a teacher. And ever since I quit my teaching job, which I did before we had kids because I wanted to start my own business— I was doing really well at my direct sales business. I was making as much money in my direct sales business as I did as a teacher. I wanted to be a mom. I thought that if I quit teaching maybe I would get pregnant because I wouldn't have the stress. Like, that was a thing then that people thought if you had stress, that's why you didn't get pregnant. And so I came home, and from that day forward, from the time I was 28 until probably today, I have wrestled with this idea of what is considered work. And because I wasn't working for a paycheck that was paid to me from a school district, from the age of 28 on, I have been in charge of my own income And I have always equated the value that is placed on the work that I do based on the amount of income that I earn. And so what I was very careful when I started Organized 365 in 2012, the year that I turned 40, I had just had 9 Schedule Cs on my tax return the year before, 9 legitimate ways that I made an income that I had to report to the IRS. So clearly I was working, right? But I wasn't doing one thing that was making a lot of impact. I was doing a bunch of little things that were paying little bills. And I have struggled my entire life with this idea of work for money and work as work. And I decided that I'm going to redefine work, and I have been proclaiming this to many people, and I think it resonates with a lot of you. And I define work now is whatever you spend the majority of your Monday through Friday doing. Because while I was for the last 20 years trying to make the case that being a stay-at-home mom was work, even though I wasn't being financially paid for it, I found that my older counterparts who were done raising their children and were not going back to work for a paycheck were investing their time and their talents in volunteer to the tune of 40, 50, 60 hours a week, but they too, I could hear the same things from them that I was saying as a stay-at-home mom. I'm a stay-at-home mom, I'm working. And they would say, well, I volunteer for 40 hours a week, I'm working. And we often would just say working was the thing that gave you a paycheck. And because Organized 365 has an audience of literally 7-year-olds to 77-year-olds We hit all the ages and phases in life, and, and in different ages and phases in life, it's not always work for paycheck, but we are all working. And so this redefinition of whatever you spend the majority of your Monday through Friday as being your work allows us then to use some of the things that make us productive in a work setting, productive in our volunteer, in our direct sale, and our stay-at-home mom, if our— in any of those, in our caretaker, in any of those roles that we find ourselves in, in different ages and phases of life, those are our work. And that is what is valued as work, whether or not it is attached to a paycheck. So work in Organized 365's eyes is anything that you spend the most of your time on. And defining my work that way has helped me see whatever I spend the majority of my time on as something that is worthy of being planned, optimized, productive, positive, invested in. Like, I have invested in being a great stay-at-home mom by going to conferences about being a mom. I have invested in being a great volunteer by watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts about how to help organizations with volunteer people. Like, there are a lot of ways that you invest in the things that you consider your work even if it does not have a financial paycheck associated with it. The second thing that I noticed in this changing the definition of work is that whether or not, no matter what you do during the majority of your daytime, being a homeowner, living in a house, being an adult is work. And there, there is work associated with that. So there's a Pew Research Institute study that shows that it takes 26 hours a week to maintain a household without children. Without, without children. And when I first read this, it's probably like 7 years ago, I thought there is no way, that is fake, that cannot be true. And Greg— I tracked Greg's and my time based on just what they considered household-related tasks, which is cooking, cleaning, laundry, yard work, house maintenance, paying bills, all of those adulting things. And Greg and I, because we had children, our list was 36 hours for the week. I was like, oh my gosh, no wonder we're exhausted. No wonder that we don't have enough time. It's because our work of owning a home takes a lot of time. Now granted, I did that study in the summer, so in the summer we were doing yard work that takes hours, you know. But when you really start adding up cleaning your house, doing laundry, shopping, preparing, and cleaning up from meals, just shopping, preparing, and cleaning up from meals. How many hours a day do you spend doing that? A lot, right? And so when I started to realize that that was work also, I now look at my life and the multiple hats I wear as actual jobs. So I have my Organized 365 hat, I have my household owner hat, I have my parenting hat, And then I have my hat just for who is Lisa as a person, which usually ends up being my entrepreneur hat. These are all legitimate jobs that I have, but only one pays me a paycheck. And the more I was able to wrap my head around the fact that it's not that I work at Organize 365 and I have a couple kids in a house— like, having a house is a job, being a parent is a job. Whether your kids are little and home with you all day or off at college, when, when they have a sore throat, when they need help, they need help immediately. And it is a job. You're permanently on call for the rest of your life. Looking at those things as jobs, in the past, I would think that that made them clinical and cold. And you couldn't— I could never say my, my job is to be a parent, or my job is to be a homeowner. Like, I wanted to be the heart of my home. I wanted to create a home that people love to come to them. My family felt refreshed and rejuvenated, and, and that they loved being inside of our home, that it was a place you wanted to come on holidays and weekends, and home, you know, the definition of home. But the more I really dove into the idea that it actually is a job— these things don't just naturally happen. It— they're not your favorite foods in the refrigerator magically. Like, you have to plan that, you have to purchase those, get those in your house, prepare them, make the dessert, have whatever your family needs there that they need there. And they are jobs. The thinking of these things as jobs for me then allowed me, like I said earlier, to add to those things the same level of planning and foresight and productivity that I did in all my other areas. So how I did this first was 18 years ago when I started the Sunday basket, and I filled up my Sunday basket with everything direct sales related and adoption related and household related, and I started going through that Sunday basket over and over and over again. After doing that for 4 or 6 weeks, I realized, you know what, I want to start to separate out my direct sales business from my mothering and my household duties. And the Sunday basket became anything Joey, Abby, Greg household related, and I started a second basket that was for my direct sales company. And in doing that, in separating out those baskets, that was the very first work box. Then I hired the babysitter so I could work all day Wednesday on that basket, and I started doing that every Wednesday, and I would do the Sunday baskets on Sunday. After I did that for about 6 weeks, I was able to hire an assistant that worked on Thursday, and she ended up getting a basket as well. And this basketing of my life started to show me the different buckets of work that I was doing and give me a container to put all of my ideas and all of my actionables and a physical representation of how my time was being spent and where my priorities were, when really it— from the outside, it looked like every day was the same. Every day was Groundhog Day in 2002 for me. Like, I was home with itty-bitty babies and a phone, not even a cell phone, just like a regular phone, and workshops in my basement a couple of times a month. Like, I basically never left the house. I was always at home doing something with babies and direct sales related. But these baskets, this Sunday basket, which is where I plan my family, and the direct sales basket where I plan my Creative Memories business, and then the assistant basket where I could put anything for her to do, started to give me that structure inside of my home to organize my work based on whichever hat I was wearing. And I find that the Friday Work Boxes that we have now do the same for you. So Friday Work Boxes came along before Organized 365. It was probably 2005, 2006. I wrote an ebook that doesn't exist anymore called 10 Steps to Organizing Your Direct Sales Business. And I took that middle basket for Creative Memories and I systematized how I was organizing my work in baskets. And I organized my work by buckets. There are 4 things that make any business strong, and those are the 4 colors that go into our work boxes. And I would teach, I would speak on this, I would go into homes in Cincinnati and I would organize only home offices in direct sales. That's all I did at first. And I would organize everyone's business based on these 4 buckets. Number 1, pink, is your leads. So how are you marketing your business? And back then it was not social media, so it was what trade shows are you doing? So, so funny, you'd stand in line at the grocery store. This is what you're told to do. I never was able to do it, but you'd stand in line at the grocery store and you'd turn to the person behind you, be like, oh, I noticed you have cereal in your box or whatever, and you'd strike up conversations with people in public. I was, I was never good at that. I joined other organizations where you meet other people so you could introduce them to your direct sales product. And there were a lot of ways that we were growing our direct sales businesses by getting in touch with other people in person so we could introduce them to our products. So for Creative Memories, I would go and I would speak at women's groups about why it's important to make an album for your family and how these albums make your children feel loved. And then people would come to my workshop. So that was pink. That was how you got your leads. Then purple, that was the color of your customer list. And I, I love— you know me, I love customers, I love my team. I would have anywhere from 100 to 200 customers at any one time in Creative Memories, and I would call every single customer every single quarter. So I had a list of all of my customers, and 4 times a year you got a phone call from me. And I would call you 3 times. So if If I called you and it went to your voicemail, I didn't leave a message. If I called you a second time and it went to your voicemail, I did leave you a message. And if I called a third time and it went to your voicemail, then I would leave a message. And I would do that for 2 quarters, and if I didn't get you on the phone by the third quarter, then I would take you off of my customer list because I was mailing out a traditional newsletter. So my customers, I'm a productive person. And when I say I'm a productive person, I like to sell things. Like, I love to get you intoxicated by the idea of getting organized and to come into the Organized 365 journey, but I'm not a salesperson that's trying to hit a number. I want you to do the Sunday Basket and the 100-day program because I know that your life will be transformed through the organization you will achieve through our programs. I don't want to do it so I could say 2,000 people are in my program.. And I remember talking to a business coach, it was probably 4 years ago. And she said to me, you know, like 80% of people who buy programs don't do the programs. I said, oh, that's not acceptable. She said, what do you mean that's not acceptable? I said, that's not acceptable. Like if you buy the Sunday Basket, you need to do the Sunday Basket. I'll give you everything you need to do the Sunday Basket. You need to do it cuz then you get the transformation cuz then you'll do the 100-day program. She goes, but Lisa, that's not how things work. Like literally you could have You know, 6 times more people buying your 100-day program if you would just do XYZ. I said, I'd rather not. She said, what do you mean you'd rather not? I said, no. I said, if they're not going to do the program, then I don't want them to buy it. She said, so you are going to tell people not to pay you $500 if they're not going to do the program? I said, yes. She said, why? I said, because I, I don't, I don't want to sell tens of thousands of this program. I want tens of thousands of people to actually be transformed through organization. And if it's not the right fit for you, I don't want you to buy my programs. I don't want you to buy it. And so that's how I was with Creative Memories also. If you bought an album for $36, you were going to get a call every 12 weeks. And so I would call you and I would say, hey, this is Lisa, how are you doing? And I would, I would make notes. I knew what your kids were doing. I knew what was going on in your family. And I would say, you invested in making this album, would you like to come to a workshop? Um, how can I help you get started? What do you need next? And often they wouldn't need anything next because they hadn't started on their album, but they knew I was there to help them when they were started. And after calling numerous times, people would start coming to the workshops and do their albums, or they would say, you know what, I'm not going to end up doing this, please don't call me again, or you can call me again in a year. And I hated that. I would rather not sell an album than sell an album that was just going to sit in a closet and not get completed. I'm a compl— I want to help you get completed. I don't want to help you get started. So So purple in your work box is nurturing your customers. And whenever I would get to 100 customers, because I'm calling everyone every 3 months, I would literally start to get hot flashes sitting down and making these calls because I take my customer service so seriously. I only have so much time with these babies. And so I would say, I need more people on the team so that more people can service these customers. So I, because I can't fit 100 people in my basement, I can only fit 12. And even if I do 2 workshops a month, you see what I'm saying? So as soon my workshops would get full to 12, as soon as my customer list would get over 100, I would start circling my workshop. And I would go over and be like, hi Jodi, all these people here know you. These 5 people all know you. They'll all come to your house. You become a consultant and you just service these 5. You don't even have to do home shows, I don't care. Just do the workshop every Friday with these 5 people. And so then Jodi would become a consultant and she would start doing that. And then all of a sudden I would have half the amount of people in my workshop and I get new people to come into my workshop. And this is how I built Creative Memories. I only did 1 to 2 parties a month. I maybe did 12 parties a year. I didn't do a lot of parties, but I did 14 workshops a year, and that, that's all I ever did. And I was always in the top 5% of the company because every single person who made a purchase for me got followed up with every quarter. And of my recruits on my team, only one purchased the kit and didn't get started in the business. Every single person I ever signed up actually had a viable, profitable business. Like, I just don't understand. I don't understand playing a numbers game in direct sales. I don't understand playing a numbers game in an online company. I don't, I don't look at people as numbers. I look at whatever I am offering in my business as a transformation possibility. And my job as your teacher is to show you what is possible and then support you along the way in order to make that transformation. So the work box, pink are the people who don't know that your product exists yet and you want to introduce it to them. And if it's a good fit for them, they become purple. Then purple are your customers and you need to invest all your time in your purple. And as a direct salesperson, what I noticed was most people on my team and that I knew in direct sales were better at one than the other. They were either better at getting leads or they were better at taking care of customers. I was better at taking care of customers than getting leads. I didn't go out and find very many leads, but if you showed any interest whatsoever in Creative Memories, I was going to, um, make sure that this either was or wasn't a good opportunity for you. If it wasn't, no problem, that's great, I'm so glad that you at least heard me out. And if it was, I was going to encourage you and motivate you so that you too had hundreds of albums done. And I had many people who had hundreds of albums done like I did. After I realized that to be a leader in direct sales, you had to be really good at both pink and purple— leads and customers, leads and customers, leads and customers. There was then a third component that I was good at, and I found most of the people in my peers as leaders were not good at, and that is what we call the blue slash pockets, which is your personal development and building a team. Getting someone interested in your product is one skill set. Once they are interested and they made a purchase, making them feel that they can do this and providing all the support they need to accomplish that is another skill set. The third skill set that I needed to learn in direct sales, and we do in every single business we do, whether it's volunteering or professional organizing or whatever business you're in, the third skill set is your own personal development and the building of the team. And so this was a three-prong part of my work box in direct sales. So first was personal development, believing that I was capable of being a leader, that I was worthy of being a leader, and to increase my ability to lead people. And 2004 to 2008, I mean, I just dove deep into the work of John Maxwell, um, and some other leadership gurus about how— what does it mean to be a good leader? And a good leader has nothing to do with me or you. Being a good leader has everything to do with the people that you are leading. And I love John Maxwell's definition of leadership, and it's the one I have always used.

And if you ask me what a leader is, I will him.

Leaders have influence. Like, leadership is not a title. It is not something you can buy. It's not something that you can be promoted to. It has nothing to do with your rank inside of your direct sales company. Leadership is influence. And if you influence people, you are a leader. So you could be a 5-year-old kid and you can be a leader because you have influence. And you can be the CEO of an organization and you cannot be a leader because nobody follows you and you have no influence. Like, if you want to know if you are a leader, look behind you and see if anybody's following. And if you have influence over anybody's actions. And so as a leader, just like I didn't want anybody to sign up in Creative Memories who was not going to complete an album, or I don't want you to join the 100-day program if you don't really want to get organized— like if you want to buy the program just to see how I set up a program, I'm not interested in that. I, I want you to get the transformation from the 100-day program. Same thing with a leader. Leading people and having influence and having people follow you is a huge responsibility. And it's really easy to say, oh, I have this idea, follow me, we're all going to do this. That's not the kind of leader I am. The kind of leader I am is I want to know as much about you as possible so I can get you to achieve the most that you are able of doing. And Emily and I had this conversation the other day because I've mentioned many times that I do all of the personality assessments on our team. And so we were having a conversation. She said, you know, it's kind of spooky how much you know about me because you've had me take all of these personality assessments. And she said, I've worked in other companies, Lisa, they had— they have you take all these personality assessments. She said, I have never in my life ever had somebody have me take the personality assessments and then research the personality assessments and then analyze their relationship to my relationship in that assessment and 10 other ones. Like, I understand how the Organized 365 team works at a nano level. Like, I mean, I just, I feel like, just like I feel my responsibility to customers, I feel as a leader, my responsibility not is to lead people to my vision, but to pull out of people what is unique in their gifting that helps magnify the vision that I have for Organized 365. And I feel that way about you. So you may think, is she doing this for me? Oh yes, I am definitely doing this for you. The reason I interviewed Gretchen Rubin about the Four Tendencies is so I could understand what the Four Tendencies are. I am a Questioner. The grand majority of you are Obligers. Once I learned that you're Obligers and Upholders, now that I know that, it's even more important that I not say something to you that would cause you to oblige or uphold something that you don't want to uphold. So I'm very careful about what I say because I have questions and I'm thinking through things, but you're thinking, oh, Lisa said that I should do that. And now that I know that, I say less so that you have less feeling of things you need to oblige and do. You know, I am an Enneagram 3 or 8. Very few of you are Enneagram 3 and 8s. So I'm like, okay, then I'm not talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs. That is good to know. My messaging will be different. One of the most interesting conversations I ever had on the podcast was the psychology of the Sunday basket. I can't remember what episode that was where we had a psychologist come on and she said, I know why the Sunday Basket works. I was like, great, can't wait to hear it. And she said, you hit every psychological button, like you, you hit every kind of learning style, like every single way that people learn, or it's all in the Sunday Basket. There is so much, um, real life research in the Sunday Basket that it works for everyone because there's so many different ways that you can do it. So that is your your personal development, your team is the blue. Understanding your customer and understanding yourself and your team so that you can get the best out of everyone so the transformation that you're trying to get through your product actually happens. And the second part of that blue/pockets in the work boxes is your team. And your team is your hired team like my first assistant in Creative Memories and now my corporate team at Organize 365. And building a team is was, wow, so hard. Um, my favorite thing ever to do, but it was much easier for me to figure out how to get a lead in a business or how to create a product that somebody wanted to buy. Taking real-life people and finding skill sets that match the weaknesses that you have in your business and then motivating and encouraging and inspiring those people towards a similar vision is, it's a skill. It's something to be worked on and learned and developed over time. And then the fourth part of a workbox is green, and that is the administrative tasks, the money-related tasks, and the repetitive tasks that need to be done weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually in your business. And when I looked at these four things— pink, purple, blue, and green— which is how all of our workboxes are set up, in every direct sale leader that I knew, they were— you were either good at pink or purple. If you got good at both leads and customers, you naturally became a leader in a direct sales company. Then the leaders that people wanted to follow, which in direct sales you can't switch leaders, so that's hard to do, but the leaders that people wanted to follow were people like me who looked at what the goals of the people on their team were and helped them achieve those goals. Here's another thing I didn't— you guys, I'm so odd. I'll never forget, 2004, I was doing these goals for myself. I think I had a team of like 18, and I said to them, okay, it's January, so by the end of January you need to have your coaching call with me, you need to set your goals for them for the year. Um, and they were like, I don't, I don't know what a goal is. I said, no problem, we'll do it together, we'll do it on the phone. And I mailed them in the mail their list of what their goals were going to be for the year. Not their goals, but like this worksheet where they had to figure out like how many classes they did last year, how many they want to do this year, if there was an financial goal they had, if there was a personal development goal they had, you know, like why were they doing this Creative Memories business and how could I help them achieve that. And then we would get on the call and we would talk through them, and then I would speak into them and I'd say, but you told me that you wanted to earn $400 a month because you wanted to send your child to preschool. They're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. I was like, okay, so here's how we can do that. And we would make a goal, and then every single month I would have individual coaching calls with every single person on my team to make sure that they were meeting their goals. And some people on my team was— they wanted to do this as a social outlet. They and their mom did it, and they did one workshop a month, and they just needed to make their quarterly minimum of $500 in order every quarter, and that was their goal. I didn't care what people's goals were. Like, I was not attached to what their goal was. They could have any goal they wanted, and I was there to hold them accountable to that goal. And then the green was what almost every single direct salesperson I knew, myself included, ignored and did not do. We did not keep track of our income, our expenses, our receipts, what we needed to do weekly, monthly, quarterly. We just left all of that into a shoebox, and then in February, we all tried to figure out what we had done the year before for our taxes. It was, it was terrible. And when I realized I was not the only one doing this, that literally everybody was doing this, then I created a system for all my fellow direct sales people to organize all of their income and expenses. And this is all now in our Workboxes. So that's what you get when you get in the Workboxes. And when other direct sales leaders like myself could learn to do their pink and purple, their leads and their customers, and then to do their own personal development and build both an internal team of recruits and add on a personal assistant and get that, um, their repetitive tasks done and their money done, there was no stopping those leaders. I mean, those leaders went straight to the top. They made $100,000 because all 4 of the pieces of their business were solid. And in any direct sales office I went in and we organized the physical space and they were like, how do I organize my inventory? How do I organize this? I would take them through these 4 things: their leads, their customers, their team, and their money. And in doing that, their businesses would just double and quadruple because they were hitting on all of the different areas. So that's where Workboxes came from, was before I started Organized 365, trying to replicate in other people's businesses, both inside of Creative Memories and a ton of other— I've been inside of so many different direct sales companies, I know how most of them work. I've actually been a consultant for like 20 of them and a leader in like 5. Um, once you know how it works in one, you can literally go to the next one, the next one. So when I started Organized 365 in 2012, of those 9 Schedule Cs I had on my tax return, 4 were different direct sales companies that I was making enough money in that I needed to claim that on my taxes. And so I took this idea of the Sunday Basket and the 100-day program when I hired 7 people in 7 weeks in 2017. It was because for years I had been saying, work boxes are coming, work boxes are coming. And I knew from, you know, 10 years prior what I wanted to be in these work boxes. I just didn't have time to sit down and create them. So thank you, Mary, for getting them out of my head and into paper. Now, the work boxes are called Friday work boxes. So we have our Sunday basket that we do on Sunday, and then you have your Friday work box you do on Friday, and specifically Friday at 2 o'clock. Like, what? Yeah, well, of course there's a reason for this. So the reason it's Friday at 2 o'clock was because I was doing these Friday boxes with my direct sales leaders and other direct sales people. I was not calling them Friday Work Boxes, but it was always on Friday. And the reason why we did it on Friday was because if you work a corporate job or a 9-to-5 job, you know, after lunchtime on Friday, how much gasoline do you still have in the tank? Very little, right? Like, you've been working all week, you might have a few projects that you need to finish up by the end of the day, but pretty much after lunch, like, you're done. My Fridays are very light. I do a little bit in the morning, primarily meetings, because I can really do a meeting anytime, anywhere. I like people Friday after lunch, like, I don't put anything on my— if something ends up on my calendar Friday after lunch, uh, it just doesn't. Nothing, nothing Friday after lunch. So Friday around 2 o'clock ends up being the perfect time in a corporation to do this Corporate Work Box. And that's what I was teaching my professional organization clients, when to do this work. I said do it Friday afternoon. And the reason why we don't want to do it Friday afternoon is if you're in a corporation, you're not allowed to leave till 5. So if you're not allowed to leave till 5, but we also know you're not going to create some brand new project at 3 o'clock on a Friday, let's move into our corporate workbox time. And the corporate workbox time is the time that A) we don't prioritize and plan on our calendar, but B) it's also the time that if you were to do it on Friday, your Monday through Thursday starts to get so much more productive and you will immediately see the results. So Friday at 2, Just like the Sunday basket, you've been dumping things in your corporate work box all week long. You empty it out. Doesn't matter which one it is— volunteer, direct sales, school— doesn't matter. You empty it out on Friday. You go through all of your notes. You open any mail. You put anything on the calendar that needs to be put on the calendar. And this is also when I go through my email. So Friday afternoon, you go through your email and you try to get to email inbox zero. And if there is something in your email, it has a couple of couple of things that can happen to it. One, if it's a project that you didn't get to this week but really needs to get done, then it becomes your first thing on Monday that needs to get done, and I actually physically put it on my calendar. I need to finish this report. I need to do this call. I need to call this person. The second thing I look at in my email inbox is what meetings do I have coming up next week, and I email all of those people on Friday to say, hey, we've got a meeting on Tuesday. Is there anything else you need from me for that meeting? That way, that email will come in by Monday morning, and so if I need to do any research, print anything out, get anything ready for that meeting, I could do it on Monday morning instead of right before the meeting on Tuesday. And then 3 is to look through the correspondence that's been going back and forth during this week, and I make a couple of decisions. One, you know, we're never going to get anything to 110%, so if I've been going back and forth on somebody about a project, is it close enough to being done? Can I call this done? Is this good enough? If it's good enough, I'll be like, great, I got what I need, thank you so much, and I'm going to call this project Is this project done? Do I just need one more thing? Do we need to start this project all the way over from scratch? Is this project bigger than we can get done during this time frame? Do I need to move it to a different month, to a different quarter, to a different year? Do I need to just say, you know what, this is bigger than we thought it was going to be, so we're not going to do it anymore? I make all those kinds of decisions on Friday when I do my corporate WorkBox. Okay, so now we know the Organized 365 definition of work is anything that you spend the most of your time on, and over time I developed both a home basket, my Sunday basket, and a corporate or direct sales or entrepreneur work box. And then I also developed work boxes for other people inside of my company as I continued to hire other people on. The third thing that I started to do, as I realized that my role as a parent, my role as a homeowner, and my role in my work for pay were all three different jobs, I started to denote that on my calendar. So when I started the system, I was using a paper planner. I now have been using a Google Calendar for about 3 or 4 years, maybe 5 years, and I put everything on my Google Calendar. I don't have a to-do list anymore. If it's something that needs to be done, it either goes in my Sunday basket or my corporate work box, which means it's going to be done on Sunday or it's going to be done on Friday, and if it is not done one of those two times, like recording this podcast. I literally, even though nobody is involved but me, I have on my calendar record podcast number 7 in the Organized 365 story, and I put it on the calendar. And the reason why I put it on the calendar is one, because it takes an hour. I need to at least block out an hour in order to record this, upload it, send it to my audio engineer, and I need to physically see that on my calendar so I know it gets done. And number 2, I was supposed to do this yesterday and I decided not to do it yesterday, so instead of rewriting it on a new to-do list, I drug it on my calendar from yesterday to today because it's still going to take an hour when I do it. It's not like all of a sudden it's going to take less time or more time, and when I look at my calendar, I need to see the blocks of how I'm spending my time both in my corporation, in my household, as a parent, all the different roles that I have.

Have.

Now, I don't always put my laundry on there or cleaning the house, but sometimes I do. And when I first started this, for sure I did. And the number one thing I found as a professional organizer I needed to teach people to do was to put on their calendar how much time they were driving their kids everywhere. It's the number one way people lose time, and they cannot figure out how this happens. And it's when your child goes to middle school. When you have a child go to middle school, and high school, all of the sudden everything gets all off-kilter in your house and you cannot figure out what happened. Like, you have the same job, you have the same kids, they go to the same school, and you're like, why all of a sudden am I dropping the ball? Why is— why am I not getting everything done? What has changed? And because we don't put driving time on our calendar, you look at your calendar, you see nothing different. You go through your Sunday basket, you see nothing different. You're like, what is going— where where, where is all my time going? I cannot figure out where all my time is going. So the first year Joey went to high school, that happened to me. And halfway through the year, I was like, I have got to figure this out. And I had a client who was feeling the same thing, and I had her track her time, and I had me track my time. She was spending 40 hours a week in the car, and I was spending 25 hours a week in the car, and we had not accounted for that anywhere. That is a part-time and full-time job. I'm a chauffeur. I'm a chauffeur. I did not want to be a chauffeur.

How did I become—

that's now my work. Middle school, high school parents, you are a chauffeur, and then you need to do that 100 hours of driving time before the kids get their driving license, and then you are a part-time worrier while they're doing the driving and you're not doing the driving. This is how our work changes. Anything you spend the most of your time on is your work. Work. All of a sudden, for 6 years, I was a part-time chauffeur, and you might be as well. And when you start putting things on your calendar instead of a to-do list, everything that needs to get done gets on the calendar. At first, it can be overwhelming because you're seeing where your time is being spent, but your time was being spent there anyway. And what I have found to be true for the majority of us is not that when we do a time study, we find out we're spending more time on social media and watching TV than we thought. It's that we are doing more household-related tasks and driving and shopping and cooking and cleaning than we thought. So don't be afraid of doing a time study in that you're going to lose your Instagram time. Do a time study so you can figure out where your work time actually is so you could start to consolidate it and make changes there. Okay, this is getting really long, sorry. A couple other things I wanted to talk to you about with work, whatever you spend the most time on. Another concept I have that I got— I don't remember, I've heard it in multiple podcasts, I don't know where the original came from— is this idea of good, better, best goals. So I am an optimist, I'm an internal optimist, and I set goals that are bigger than anybody on the planet could ever achieve. And if I get even remotely close to that goal, I'm like, yay, I did it! And I realized once I had a team, they were like, you never hit your goals. I'm like, and they're like, we would like to hit one, please. Could you give us one that we could attain? And I was like, well, that's so little, that would be so boring. I just don't think that way. I don't think in creating in a, uh, I hit the goal, boom, I get the sticker or whatever. I like create these, these goals that are so huge that along the way I find all of these things. So I learned for my team's sake, and it's been great for me too, to have good, better, best goals.

Goals.

So a good goal is, if you don't achieve this goal, you have failed. Like, you have got to achieve this goal. A better goal would be like, wow, if, if we really get an A+, this is what that would look like. And then a best goal would be, if the heavens align and angels come down and sing, this thing might happen. Like, you might end up on Oprah. Good, better, best goals. And I set good, better, best goals for myself in many, many areas. I have a financial income goal inside of our company, there's a good, better, best goal for that. That's usually if we're going to sign people up into the 100-day program, a good, better, best goal for that. Just anytime when you can say, this is the thing that I want to do and I want to have this achieved, what's the good, better, best goal for that? So another one that I've set good, better, best goals for is weight loss. I don't really have to lose weight. This is the whole thing where I go back and forth. Do you have to lose weight? Back, whatever. I've been 10 pounds heavier than I am now, and I've been 10 pounds lighter than I am now, and I like 10 pounds lighter than I am now, but I'm also fine with the weight I am now. Like, this isn't something that I'm married to, I have to do this. But a good, better, best goal would be— a good goal is where I am now, I'm 10 pounds lighter than I was. A a better goal would be 5 pounds lighter than this, and then my best goal would be 5 pounds lighter than that. So 20 pounds low off of my high would be my best goal. But right now I'm at a good goal. Like, I lost 10 pounds a year ago and I haven't gained it back. I count that as a win. A better goal would be 5 more pounds down, and a best goal would be 5 pounds down from that. So when you have good, better, best goals, you can celebrate the wins on your way to achieving an ultimate goal Or you could say, you know what, I know that I said I wanted that best goal, but I've decided that this good goal is pretty much good enough for me, and I'm happy if I just maintain this goal as well. And the last thing I want to mention in this one is just this concept of passion projects. So before I was able to articulate this idea of your work being the thing that you spend the most of your time on, I was trying to articulate that I love scrapbooking, and the fact that I scrapbook, created all these photo albums for my family, and that is what I spent the majority of my time on. Scrapbooking is a passion project for me. It was a career at one point, now it is a passion project. And a passion project is anything that you could do and time just passes. Like, you could do it all week. If I said you could only do something all week long, you could do it all week long and you would love it. And there's not necessarily a financial reward, but there— it just lights you up inside. You just love doing it. Most adults have 1 to 3 passion projects. I would say jigsaw puzzles are probably a passion project of mine. Learning and reading is a passion project of mine, and scrapbooking is a passion of mine. And when you have a passion project, that is the thing that when you go to declutter, there's nothing to declutter because everything related to that thing you love. For some of you, cooking is a passion project. For some of you, your fashion Your shoes are a passion project. For some of you, sports are a passion project. Whatever your passion project is, that is the thing that you love doing, you would spend the majority of your time doing. And when you go to organize that, I tell you, you don't have to get rid of anything because your passion project has all the pieces and parts. As a matter of fact, I say go ahead and buy the expensive organizer that was created for that unique get the sticker organizer for your scrapbooking. Go ahead and get the organizer that's going to go in the garage that's going to organize all of your sporting equipment for whatever you're interested in. If you like fishing, get the tackle box that will hold every single fly the way that you want them held, because you're not going to get rid of anything because you love everything related to that. Okay, so this is a little bit longer of a podcast. And this is the one, you know, as a parent— and I do not give any parenting advice— but as a parent, when my kids were going to psychologists early on, a psychologist said to me, children do not want to displease people in authority, their parents, their teachers, whatever. And if they are, if there is a problem between authority and children when they're young, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years old, Then we need to look at the environment and what is going on for the child to act out in that way, because children naturally want to please adults. And as a teacher, I knew as a preschool teacher, children naturally love learning, and somewhere along the way they stop loving learning. A lot of them. I didn't. I could have, based on some of my past experiences I shared, but I didn't. I love learning, and so I know this to be true. We all love to work, we all love to learn, and we all love to make other people proud of us and happy. These are things that we innately have as children, and over time sometimes these things go away, but you can get them back as an adult. You can love learning again, you can love work again. Sometimes how we define work and how we organize our calendar makes us feel like we are trapped or that there is more to be done than we can possibly do. And for me, being able to realize that driving was a job, parenting is a job, homemaking is a job, working for pay is a job, volunteering is a job— when I put the word job or work on top of all of those, it gives them all a more equal weight as far as their— as far as my permission to treat them as such. So if I call my parenting work, I don't mean that I'm put upon and I have to parent. I mean it's an important thing that I'm doing, and so I am going to give it the same weight that I would my 4-pay job. If I put on the label driving my children to school as work, I could put the same weight on that as preparing dinner at home because I'm connecting with my children on an emotional level and I'm meeting a need that they have to get to school and back so that they can do different sporting events or go to the school that is best for them that might not be closest to us. So this idea of thinking about everything that you do as work, whether it's financially compensated or not, allows us to level out about how we spend our time evenly so that things that are for pay and not for pay can have equal weight and merit and priority, and then we can make them productive. All right, next week I have the last in my 8-part series, and I want to talk about special circumstances that impact your organization. Thanks so much for tuning in.

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.