In this video Lisa Woodruff frames August as the pivotal preparatory month for household productivity and profitability, positioning the homeowner as the CEO of their home. She revisits the "Back-to-School Blitz," urging viewers to keep it in their "Sunday basket"—a weekly capture system for ideas, opportunities, and decisions. Woodruff explains why weekly execution alone is insufficient and introduces a trimester‑style planning rhythm (May, August, December) that mirrors quarterly business planning. At the end of August, she outlines a two‑day preparation phase followed by a four‑hour "Planning Day" where a workbook guides families through assessing energy, finances, life phase, opportunities, and obstacles, then translating those insights into concrete goals and an execution planner. Throughout, she stresses the dual skill set of a household CEO: managing weekly tasks while also strategizing long‑term projects, and she positions the Sunday basket plus Planning Day as the essential tools to achieve that balance.
Chapters
Welcome to the second week of August. As you can see, our calendar has not changed very much. There's not a lot going on externally as far as in the world in August, but there's a lot going on in August in your personal life. August, December, May— these are very personally organized, heavy months. Lots of things you need to plan in there, and that is why we talked last week about why you need a Sunday basket. You need a place to hold all those opportunities, all of those decisions. I wanted to take a minute here and remind you that the Back-to-School Blitz is still live and active for you, your family, friends, and colleagues. You could still download this. You could still do the Back-to-School Blitz. The Back-to-School Blitz is very, very active. It should be in your Sunday basket. And even if your kids have already started school, if you have children, that's okay. There are a lot of things in the Back-to-School Blitz you could still do between now and Labor Day. And if you're like, yeah, I don't have kids, so I skipped the Back-to-School Hello! I did the back-to-school blitz for me. I had fun going shopping for me and getting things for me and getting my haircut and getting me new shoes and like all the things that my mom used to do for me when I was going back to school, I did for me because, you know, nobody's doing that for me anymore and maybe it's been a while since you bought new underwear, let's just say. There are some things that we tend to overlook and that we need those as well. So again, in the beginning of August, you're not seeing a lot. We've got these stars going down our Fridays, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. We're counting down to the 10 most productive weeks of the year. August is a very preparatory month, ready for the productivity and profitability that's coming at homes and in businesses in September, October, and November. You better bet that any business worth its salt has been planning for and is ready for the profitability and the productivity that is coming in September, October, and November. But we, as entrepreneurs in our home, as CEOs of our home, we also need to be capturing that productivity and profitability that's in the air. And just, it's just that general fall ready for productivity energy in our households as well. So I'm going to talk to you about your second role in your household as the CEO. So the CEO in the household, first role is you're going to be doing the Sunday basket. Just rearrange our backdrop a little bit. You're going to be doing the Sunday basket. We talked about this last week. You must have a way— must, I'm going to stress, you must have a way to receive information, to have ideas, to be working on projects, to be given opportunities that you can review on a weekly basis. All CEOs will either be their own executive assistant or have an executive assistant where they look at all of the opportunities that have come their way to see which ones are the most advantageous to follow up on next week. Like, that is what you need to do. However, once you've been in business even just a little bit, you cannot run a company week to week to week to week. It's exhausting. You won't make much traction. You're always wondering, have I done enough? What's— where's the money going to come from next? Like, you cannot run a business on week-to-week productivity. You must run a business on quarterly planning. So in business, we plan 4 times a year. At home, that makes absolutely no sense. Like, nobody's going to implement a plan on July 1st or October 1st. That makes no sense whatsoever. So at home, we plan by trimesters, and trimester planning is we take those little bit chaotic months of May, December, and August, and we use those to go, okay, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I'm going into a season where I'll be less overwhelmed. What— let's take stock. Like, what's my energy level? What's my physical level? What's our financial level as a household? What is the phase of life that we're in? What are the opportunities that are presenting themselves to us? And what are the obstacles that we need to factor in as we're planning this next 4 months? And then at the end of August, you have 2 opportunities. One is prep, which is a 2-day prep getting ready for planning day, and then we have a 4-hour planning day together. And in the podcast this week, I talked to you all about this planning, all these different pages, and how I walk you through in this 4-hour live— yes, there is a recording, a replay recording— to really plan out the goals that you have as the CEO of your home, as the household manager. This is essential. A Sunday basket is essential because I want you to be able to have some breathing room in your week. I want you to be able to have a request or an opportunity come your way and say, yep, I'll think about that on Sunday. You learn how to defer things until Sunday and make better decisions weekly. This will— I mean, it's, it is just Amazing. It is revolutionary to realize you don't have to do things as they are presented. However, after doing this for a period of time, then you're like, okay, well, I'm just a task rabbit. Like, I could do a lot more tasks, I can do a lot more tasks faster, but almost all projects at home take longer than 1 week. So if you're only doing 1-week planning, 1-week planning, 1-week planning, you get a lot of little tasks done, but you don't get the bigger things done. That's where planning day comes in. You want to plan bigger projects, you want to have bigger personal initiatives, you want to do bigger things as a family, you're going to be doing planning day. These 2 things together, the Sunday basket and planning day, really supports you as a CEO. Chief executive officers are able to do weekly planning and execution while also strategizing and planning for the future. Those are 2 very different skills, and a qualified CEO will be able to do both. They don't lose sight of the weekly. While thinking about what is long-term. And at home, we fall into the daily. Pushing us into weekly is like a Herculean effort, and almost no one is planning at the strategic level that I teach you to plan at in household management. As you saw as I flipped through this, this is not a planner. This is a workbook. We're going to go to work. We're going to figure out where your time is going, where your time needs to go, what your goals are, and in the very end, there is a planner to execute those goals that you plan as the CEO of your home.
