635 – Research Supporting Color Coding

Anna, welcome back to another Connections podcast.

Thanks, Lisa. I'm excited to be here.

Oh my gosh, I am so excited about this series that you first suggested and we are now doing about how we are connecting research and other experts and just products and everything into what Organize 365 is doing. And if you listen to my interview a couple of weeks ago on the last Connections podcast, I talked to Kendra Adachi about her new book, The Plan, and we talked about her— how her son named his energy based on colors, based on the colors of the rainbow. So highest energy is red, least energy is purple. I've never thought about energy that way, but I do love color. And one of the first things you researched when you started here at Organized 365 was, is there any literature to support this idea of color coding? Um, at all. So what'd you find?

Yes. So we found out that, yes, there is research supporting color coding, and we're gonna get into that. But before we get going, I have a little game for us to play.

So, okay, here's our game.

Lisa has not seen my list of words, and I'm gonna have her just quickly tell us what color she associates with each one of these words or categories.

Okay, let's go, because I think I'm a little nervous.

Lisa and I were talking about how some of us think in color, and we have these colors associated with things in our lives, and I, I know that not everybody does that. So I think it's fun and fascinating for us to get a little glimpse into Lisa's brain. All right.

Okay.

So what is the color for January?

January is blue.

Okay. November?

November is brown or yellow. Yellow would be primary, but usually you can't write in yellow, so I have changed that to brown.

I like it. Happy.

Happy would be yellow.

Mad.

Mad would be red.

Science.

Science is green.

Home.

Home is blue or purple. I think of blue because I think of family, but I've changed it to purple in Organize 365 because your, your household is not actually just the people. It's actually a separate entity. So I made it purple along the way. But I've always thought of it as blue until recently.

Thank you. And vacation.

Vacations are also blue, but they're more like a sky blue, a teal blue. See, here's the problem. There are so many different blue colors that you need.

I love it. Very nice. That's my list.

Okay.

But I, I do the same thing. I'm sure that when you were a kid, you always had like your science books and notebooks were probably always green with like a green cover on the book and a green notebook, because I think there are a lot of people who operate like that, and I can just see you color coding things throughout your whole life.

I think teachers first do this. Like, if you have a teacher that's color coded, like the math teacher was always red. Like, I always associate red with math. But when Joey had a math teacher, you had to have a yellow notebook, which was really hard to find, by the way. If you have to, you find it at Staples. It's the only place you can find one. And I'm like, this is so weird. Why are you yellow? Yellow is the history color. Why are we having yellow for math and green? Yeah, like, I think my teachers just kind of picked those colors. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So if you are like a middle school teacher and you don't, nor don't currently have a color coding with your team, we highly encourage you to do this because it helps students to find the information that they need for that class right in their locker or their backpack. And then it also is just a good way to help set them up for color coding things throughout their life.

Yeah.

So, Lisa, can you remember when you first started assigning colors to things?

Okay, I read this question. I was like, all right, I have a couple of stories. You would imagine. Okay, so first of all, the oldest, the furthest back, other than like, you know, math was the color for— red was the color for math, and the teachers would assign a color. The first time I assigned a color for things was when I would study. So I was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 17. And then somebody changed that to ADHD a couple of years ago. But either way, I have a hard time memorizing things. So like, for example, my daughter and my sister, Abby and Emily, like whenever they're together, I will call Abby Emily and Emily Abby. I do it all the time with names. My husband and my son, I mix up their names all the time. I know it is annoying. Like I know what their names are, but I just, whatever, that part of my brain is like not connected. And if I can verbally process, like if I can tell you about what I learned, I can express what I've learned. But if I have to do multiple choice, it's my worst. I'm horrible because I can make a case for every single answer there as a possibility. And if I have to tell you in just like a sentence or 2, a fill-in-the-blank answer, I'm horrible at this. So I had to study really, really hard for tests in school because I'm just terrible at them. And the way that I would study is I would write out the answers over and over and over again. And then if I had to do multiple choice or memorization, I would do flashcards. So I would put the word on the front and I would put the definition on the back, and I would just go through those over and over and over again. And sometimes there were just so many that I would take white flashcards and I would put different categories in different colors. Like if it's people, it'd be blue. If it's going to be like places, it'd be green so that I could get through more content. The problem is I'm such a visual learner. is I would memorize the card, not the content. So I remember at the end of one of my classes, I got the answer wrong. I knew I got the answer wrong, and I went up to the teacher. I was like, it's on page 72. It's in the second line. It's the third word. And she was like, okay, but you have to know what the word is. I'm like, but I don't. But don't I get credit for like knowing where it's gonna be? And she's like, no. I was like, dang it. And so, and so I would have to trick myself, like when I made these index cards. If I made some on Wednesday and the rest on Thursday, my handwriting might be a little bit different. Well, I would know as I was going through the cards which cards were made on Thursday and said, I'm so weird, you guys, so weird. So I'd have to rewrite all the cards again in order to learn. So anyway, that was my first time of like really learning that this color coding, and this is how I would memorize things. So my second example of that would be color coding would have been when I first had Joey and Abby. So 2 kids, 18 months in age. 2 of everything, right? And I gave them each a color, a boy and a girl. So it's pink and blue. That's like not really fun or different or novel or anything, but it's really easy to buy things in pinks and blues. And I would know that they both got their medicine, or they both got their milk, or who hadn't finished whatever. And then as they got older, I'd be like, no, no, that's your cup. Go pick it up because it's blue, or it's, or it's pink. I did that for a while. And that I think most people do that when they have children. They assign everybody a color, and once you have 2 boys or 2 girls, and you're like, oh, I guess you're purple, or you're green. Now we're moving on to yellow and orange and all these different colors. But I think I really noticed the power of color coding most when my kids were little. They were probably entering into school, and I was working part-time at a school as a tutor, and my job was to help kids who were you know, I was— I've always been like a support staff, reading help, whatever. So I was helping this student who was really struggling in spelling. And like, I can't spell. Like, I still cannot spell to my— to this day. I don't understand spelling. I learned whole language instead of phonics. I still don't understand phonics, even though I've taught people to read. Like, I just don't get it. So I'm a terrible speller. Now I have to teach this kid how to spell, and he's failing every single spelling test. And I'm like, What are we going to do? Like, how are we going to learn this? So I got out markers and I had us start writing the words. Like, if you were spelling a word and in the middle would be a TH, we'd spell it in black with the TH in red in the middle. And then— and he did a little bit better on the spelling test. I was like, how else could we do this? And I was like, well, let's just break every single word into syllables and let's just do the first syllable in red, the second syllable in green, and the last syllable in blue, or however many it is. And he started acing his spelling tests after we did that. All we had to do is break the spelling words into syllables, practice writing them in various colors, and then he could ace the spelling test. And that's the first time when I really realized that, oh, chunking something by color really can help people learn something to the point where they're able to know it. I still, you know, like you're spelling the word Wednesday. For me, it's Wed-nes-day. Like every time I write it out, it's wed niz day. The word there, like they're going to the park, is the I-R. I cannot spell the word there normally. I have to think about how it is spelled because I just don't know how to spell. I— it's just not a part of my brain. And so my dad used to say words to me that way because my spelling was so bad. My spelling was so bad when I was in 8th grade. My parents did not have the money, but they bought this thing called a Franklin Speller. It was like $100, and this is in 1983 or something. It's a $100 little computer, and you were supposed to spell the word phonetically, and then it will tell you how to spell it correctly. So I'm typing the word in there, and my dad— I would take it to my dad, and I'd be like, it's broken. He's like, what's the word? And I would put how I spell it. He's like, you can't even spell wrong right. Like, you can't even spell incorrectly in order to get the correct. And so, I mean, when I'm in 8th grade, I'm like, I can't even spell wrong right. Like, this is just not a skill that I have. However, I was able to teach somebody else by using color.

I love that. Yeah, I think color really does help, and that actually relates to the study we're going to talk about in a little bit. Great. Before we get to the study, can you tell us about— I mean, when you were developing the products within Organized 365, you could have done a lot of different things, but you chose to make color coding a really important part of the process for the Sunday Basket and the Friday Work Box and how we process information. So can you explain, like, why was color so important to you that you decided to manufacture all of the slash pockets? And how did you choose the colors?

So these are great questions. I love— and I love these questions.

Okay.

So I am extremely intentional in every single thing I do, because I come at every problem from the lens of a teacher. If I was just solving a problem to solve a problem, I'd just do it for you, or I'd have you have me do it. But a teacher wants to take what they know and teach someone else so that they can do it without the teacher. And so that's how I've created everything. And before I even started Organized 365, back in like 2005, 2006, 2007, I was a leader in a direct sales company, Creative Memories. And in that direct sales company, I made money. Most people in direct sales companies don't make money, but I did make money. And I realized that if I wanted to have this be a business that made money, and I kept earning the trips, which my husband really started to like, that the people that signed up under me in Creative Memories also had to make money. And when you run a business, and it'll move into Organize 365, when you run a household, there are so many things you can do. And someone— it was not me, but someone in Creative Memories had this worksheet that was called How to Get an A in Creative Memories. Like, there are a lot of things you can do, but only these things count as work because these are profit-generating things. I can't remember what leader it was, but we all used it. We all taught our downline how to get an A. Like organizing your sticker book did not count, but calling a customer or following up or delivering an order did count as work. So you could work all that you wanted, but these are the only works that you could do that counted as work hours. The rest was hobby work. So we knew that from the beginning. But even on that list with my consultants, I would find that they did some things on that profitable list and they avoided some others. And every single person who makes money in direct sales has a good balance between getting new leads and nurturing new leads and new clients, making them into VIP customers. And then once they're VIP customers, getting them to start their own unit, and so on and so forth. And I found that once you had a customer or a couple of customers and you were in business and you were making, you know, maybe a couple hundred dollars a month, you were pretty happy because you had a workshop and your workshop was full. And so you didn't do the harder work, which was finding new people who might wanna make scrapbooks. And you would just spend more time with your customers, but then you wouldn't make money because you'd buy little gifts for your customers or you would do things that were not profitable. So you didn't make money, but you had a business and you were doing the right things. So the way in which I taught my downline how to be profitable and how the leaders who were earning the trips were making the money is they weren't just servicing their customers. They were also getting new leads and taking their customers and turning them into team members, which was pink, purple, and blue. So first you need pink. You need these new possibilities of people who want to do or want the service that you provide. And then they become customers. They become a customer when they give you money or they sign a contract that makes them a purple person. They're no longer in the pink category. If you don't have enough people in the pink category, when your purple people are done with having their house organized or their scrapbooks done or whatever service that you provide, Then all of a sudden your business stops because you didn't have any new people to become purple people again. So this pink purple, this idea that people could have new leads while servicing current customers, so when their current customers finished, they would have new customers that would come into their business, was such a hard concept for consultants to understand and grasp that I made it this pink and this purple. And until you learn how to do pink and purple well, you're not able to grow a team. Because what I saw some of the leaders in the company doing is they would have great customers. They would build this really big workshop base. Maybe they're making $1,000, $1,500 a month and they'd be like, great. And then all of a sudden these purple people would be so well-versed in the company that they would be ready to start their own little offshoot and they'd become a blue consultant. But the consultant who had the great business and recruited ended up losing their leadership because they didn't have enough pink people to replace the purple people who became blue consultants. Do you get it, Anna?

Yeah, that makes so much sense.

When you look at the leaders and they're like 12 in any company, they're like 12 that have this figured out and then they're like 100,000 other people. But the 12 who have this figured out, they're always doing things that are bringing new pink people into their business, nurturing them into a consulting, you know, customer relationship, getting them really bought into the mission, vision, and values, and then spinning them off into their own little units and refilling their workshops. And I had gotten really good at that. So I taught my team how to have a good balance of pink and purple work so that they could become the leader that they wanted. Because all of the money in direct sales is made in leadership. It is not made in selling the product. All of the money in direct sales is made in leadership, is not made in selling the product. So if you're in a direct sales company, you might be like, oh yeah, you got to get to the blue. You got to get to the blue work. And you cannot do blue work if you don't understand pink and purple. and don't have that going. So you needed all these hats, plates spinning. And I would teach people how to do this. I would go in, in 2006, 2007, 2008, I would organize people's direct sales home offices. And in there I would then say, where's your pink work? Where's your purple work? Where's your blue work? So these colors are specific. Pink is the work. It's new, it's you-oriented, it's a lead, it's a possibility, but there's no money and there's no contract there. Blue is what you're going towards. You want a team that is profitable, that you are working on this blue team. Blue and pink together make purple. So your customer in the middle is what those 2 things make. So pink is your heart of your business. That's you. Purple is your customers. You treat them like royalty. That's also why they're purple, like they're like royalty. They get the VIP treatment. And then blue is your team. They've gone in on a different level of commitment, and they are loyal. They're loyal to the brand. They're loyal to you, and you need to be loyal to them. And as your business grows and you get to the point where you have a team, your focus is no longer on selling customers. Your focus is on your team, and they sell customers and they get leads. And that's how business works. And I figured all that out in direct sales because I really needed my business to be profitable, and I needed my consultant's business to be profitable in order for my business to be profitable. So then if you fast forward a little bit, I went into the pit of despair, went back to teaching. Oh, Creative Memories went bankrupt twice, whatever. Now we're just 2012. And I know I'm supposed to be my own business owner. I'm like a 4th generation female entrepreneur. Like, it's just I was supposed to have a business. I knew that way in the past. I just didn't. I thought it was direct sales. I thought it was other things. So I'm starting Organize 365, joined a new direct sales company. I'm doing the pink, purple, blue, green. I'm like a leader instantaneously. I get to the end of that first year. I've made no money in the company, even though I recruited 50 people. I recruited 50 people into this organization and I was not profitable. And I know how to be profitable, which tells me that it was not possible. Yeah, the business doesn't exist. Wasn't possible to be profitable in that company. I tried to talk to the leadership, found out later I never got to the leadership because somebody that was a gatekeeper was knocking me back down. Anyways, doesn't matter. But during that first year in business, I was doing blogging. I understood SEO. I joined 31 Gifts at that time. I was able to not break any of the contracts and market 31 Gifts online and become a leader in that company. But the leadership, the people who were in leadership didn't like what I was doing because I wasn't doing it their way. They made such a stink at the home office. The home office called me and I said, what am I doing that's not in the contract? They go, you're doing everything correct in the contract. You're doing exactly what we hope everybody will do, but they just can't handle that you're doing it, that they didn't do it. And so we're going to have to have you stop. I'm like, what are you talking about? So it was the end of 2012, my first year in business, where I was like, okay, my expertise is in building a business through a direct sales platform using somebody else's product and marketing that and building a team that will market that. And I understand how to grow a team, but these companies that I'm partnering with don't understand that the world is going towards SEO and don't understand how to have a profitable company, and they're not listening to me. And That— I mean, I guess that's fine. I guess I'm just gonna have to do it on my own. At that point I realized I was an in-home professional organizer. So I'd been organizing in homes, and I'd already started to grow a team of doing in-home organizing. That's when I circled back to the Sunday basket idea. I'd been teaching the Sunday basket for 12 years. I made an ebook about it. I was teaching people how to do it for the next 3 years using a Longaberger basket and whatever, like Avery slash pockets you could get at the store. And it was too confusing. People couldn't do it because they would have like 35 slash pockets in their Longaberger basket that were all slouched down, and they were all random colors, and it just felt like they moved their pile from their kitchen counter into a basket. It didn't really help them. I thought, okay, well, as a teacher, how I would teach this, starting with direct sales, is you need to take all of your work, and if it's a lead, it's pink. If it's a customer, it's purple. If it's a team, it's blue. And then you need this color green because direct sellers are notorious for not doing their income and expense until April 12th, and then they realize they made no money, which does you no good. So they had to have this like weekly accountability of bookkeeping and you needed all 4 of these colors. The problem is you couldn't find these colors anywhere, like they don't exist. I was like, am I going to actually manufacture Slash pockets just so people can figure out how to run a business? Well, once I figured out how to do it for the Sunday basket, I was like, I, I guess I do. I could no longer teach what I was teaching because the materials didn't exist to make it easy to do. It was kind of like making those index cards back in the day where I would know if I made it on a Wednesday or Thursday instead of actually knowing what the content was. I was like, ah, so I manufactured the 1.0 slash pockets, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Because what I was doing was I was going to Walmart, all of the Walmarts in Cincinnati, and we were buying all of the basic slash pockets they had in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and we were cutting them open and taking out the Walmart thing, and then we're mailing that out and calling that the Sunday Basket 1.0. And the thought occurred to me, if Walmart changes the order of their rainbow, all of my work is not going to match. So I ordered, and I had to order 6,000 sets, or 10— no, 20,000 sets of 1.0s. Do you know how expensive that was, you guys?

I can't imagine.

Because slash pockets are only made in China. The machines are only— everything's— so it's my first international order. I order it, it comes over the day it lands in the United States. Walmart changed their order from red, orange, yellow, green, blue to red, green, yellow, orange, Blue, whatever. Like, they changed theirs. I was like, that's exactly what I thought might happen. So as soon as I ordered that, then I needed to order the 2.0s, which was 5 pink, 5 purple, 5 blue, 5 green, which was 4 times as expensive as ordering 1.0s. Luckily, I don't have a problem with the credit card, and I like— and we just ordered them. And I was like, okay, well, we're in now because I have enough slash pockets to like make a house out of them.

Okay, I have a question though. When you ordered all of these, where were they delivered to?

Were these in your garage?

We need to know.

So glad you asked. The first order, yes, came to my garage. I'm like, how many could this possibly be? And I ordered them through a broker who brought them in the back of his van. And all of a sudden we're unloading these in the garage, and I'm thinking, oh, it's gonna be like a little bookshelf. No, it's like the size of my car. And I like to park in the garage, and I'm like, oh, oh, this is a problem. This is gonna be a Problem. This is right when the company was— I was changing it from an LLC to a C corp. This is when I hired 7 people in 7 weeks. This is when I created all the mission, vision, values that you've been hearing about. This was the year of 2017. All this happened in 2017. So then I had to, like, go rent a place. So I got a 400-square-foot office And I put in this shelving, this HDX shelving, and we moved all the slash pockets over there. I also ended up ordering all the Sunday baskets and all the binders. But then I placed this 2.0 order, which was gonna be the size of, you know, like 4 cars. I was like, well, it's not gonna fit there. That's when we went to a 1,500-square-foot warehouse where we were for a couple of years. So I, when I did this, when I invested in these slash pockets, I don't think to— Greg never asked me any questions about money ever. I don't think he knows how much this cost when I did this. And it was like a huge bet on myself. Like, okay, well, I've been selling online courses and ebooks and I had a podcast and I was like, I literally can't keep moving forward in teaching this concept without these office supplies. So I'm going to order these slash pockets. So pink, purple, blue, green made total sense in the direct sales work box that I was selling, which is how this all started. Now I needed to move it into the Sunday basket, and obviously we needed to keep the same colors because I am not Rockefeller. So pink, purple, blue, green. I'm like, all right, well, if I was going to take all of the Sunday basket colors, what do pink, purple, blue, green mean? Well, green is obviously financial, and then blue is the color of family. So in any system you're in, blue is always the color of family. Green is always the color of financial and administration. This is when I realized that purple was the color of the house. Pink is the color of me. Purple is the color of the people who live in my house. Pink and purple together make— pink and blue together make purple. Purple is the color of the house. This is when I realized that, oh, the house is a separate entity from me. The house, the house needs to have maintenance. The house needs to have, you know, all these things. And so I could separate these from me. And these slash pockets really started helping me do this. And I manufactured pink because I'd already manufactured pink. So I threw it in the Sunday basket. And of course, that's my personal goals. Here's the thing, Anna. I put together my own first Sunday basket in 2000. This would have been 2019 when we first got the first 2.0 Sunday basket, which came in defective, by the way. Anyways, so I put it together, and I'm labeling all the blue, and I'm labeling all the green. I'm taking an extra set of green because I have so much debt, and I'm labeling all the purple, an extra set of purple because I have so many organizing projects, and I get to the pink. No clue what to label those. I had no personal goals. I hadn't done anything. That's why I was like, oh, we really need these big slash pockets. But I have zero goals for myself. Like, all of my goals are people goals, house goals, financial goals, business goals, whatever. So that's where the— that's where the, the colors came from. That's how they went into the products. And then, and then we just had the binders, the household binders. That's a good story too. Can I tell that story?

Yes, please.

Okay. So that was supposed to be 3 binders. It's supposed to be a medical, a financial, and a household operations— household reference. And I wanted household reference, you know, like for your manuals and all that kind of stuff. But the team we had at the time wanted a household operations binder, like how do you plan parties and holidays and meal plans and recipes and all of these things? And so that's what they gave me back. And I was like, This isn't what I wanted. I want a household reference binder, but this is good. We'll keep this too. So that's why we have 4 binders, is the operations one is the one that they created that, yeah, I needed all that stuff, but I wasn't getting to that stuff because I didn't have the time or the money. I needed the reference because the house was falling apart around me. I needed the medical because everybody was at the doctor every other week, and I needed the financial because do we even have money if anything happens? And so this is how I was cleaning out people's file cabinets in Cincinnati. They didn't have things that went into operations binder, which is why I didn't think we needed one at the time. I was trying to clean out their file cabinets into these 3 binders, but the operations one was bonus. So we manufactured those. And it wasn't until our 3rd binder manufacturer— by the way, binder manufacturers are going out of business faster than anything in the world. It's very scary. So we have to keep changing our binders because binder manufacturers are going out of business so fast. We color-coded them. So now they match. Red is medical, green is financial, blue is household operations, and purple is household reference. So the colors go through all the systems. As I continued to be an in-home professional organizer, and as I started to create the systems I needed in my own house, I realized how many more invisible work systems need to be created. And that's how everything just kind of mushroomed from there.

It's so cool to hear those stories. And it's really funny to me that the Household Operations was the last binder that you created. And I'm pretty sure that this year in March Madness, that was the number one product that people loved. Like, people said that they just Loved it. And that one March Madness was that Household Operations. Like, yeah, we really do need it.

Yes, we do need it. Yes.

How fun! Thank you for sharing those stories. It is, yeah, so much fun to hear all the backstories about how things were created. And like, I— when this comes out, I will try and have you post on, um, Instagram a picture of a palette. You guys, if you have not seen one of these palettes, like how big these orders of slash pockets are, like it is Okay, I have the original pictures.

I have the original pictures because, okay, first it came out of the van. I do have that picture. Then when the— I think the Sunday basket was the next thing that came on a pallet. So this was delivered where we had the 400-square-foot office warehouse. But mind you, it's like an office, like, you know how you go into an office building and you rent a 400-square-foot office down a hallway, and I'm having a pallet delivered there. So you know where the pallet gets delivered, right? In the parking lot because there's no dock door or anything. So this truck comes up and it's gonna deliver a pallet. Also, I don't have a dock door, so I had to have a, a kind of truck where it could bring the pallet out and then lower it down.

Yes.

And then I don't have like a pallet mover thingy, so I'm trying to unload the pallet as fast as possible and run it inside while this pallet is blocking people in the parking lot. I'm like sweating profusely doing all these things. Like, as you grow a business, you have no idea what you're doing, and then you realize that you've ordered something or something's on its way and you have no idea how to undo it. Like, it's, it's really fun, but also it's really crazy. But I do have those pictures. Okay. I was not around when—

I was not around at the beginning. What was the first color of Sunday Basket that you got?

Oh, so the first color, and it was a cardboard box. Because we didn't think we could do sewn boxes.

Yes.

Our, our prototype was sewn, but the cost to make a sewn box was prohibitive. And so we did cardboard boxes, which the glue ended up failing in those. So all the cardboard boxes eventually just started to peel away. I mean, like the first product, it was so expensive and everything just fell apart. And they had like a— they were a solid I think it was red, gray, navy, red, gray, navy. There might have been a couple more colors, and then we went to a lattice where we like made our own paper, and we had some of the lattice ones, and those are the ones that the glue wouldn't stick on.

Okay, I have seen some of these. That is so cool.

It's all in the back. We have a whole— we have a whole archive bin, because, you know, I'm a Creative Memories person. So someday when we have our own building, we'll have like one of those cool walls we're able to walk through, and you'll be able to see like a walking timeline. I've saved everything.

It's so cool. Oh my gosh. Okay. I love hearing all this. I think people are going to love hearing all these stories. Okay, so that circles us back around to a research study that I found. So I found some different resources, but this study was to me the coolest. So we're going to break it down super simple for us. But it was by Lambertske and Dwyer, and they did a study. They were trying to figure out if there were some visual cues that could be integrated into teaching something so that people could remember and retrieve that information when they needed to. And so they used medical students. And if you're looking at— if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see a picture of the heart, and they labeled different areas of the heart in different colors. And so like half of the sample, half of the participants had the color version and half had the black and white version. And the findings of the study were not like super groundbreaking, but they did find that for those people who learned the information and studied the information with the color-coded system, they had an easier time retrieving that information. So this tells us that if we're learning the system with the colors— so if you're teaching us how to use the Sunday Basket and you are teaching us the colors that go with these different things, As we are recalling information in our head, we're going to see it in that color. So it comes out in a couple different ways. Like, um, for me, if I am at home and I'm trying to remember things that I wrote down in my planner, I color code them like you do during planning day to match the colors, and it's easier to remember it for me. Also, when you go to find information in your Sunday basket and you're, you're thinking, okay, I remember I put it in a 2-point Oh, but it was related to my son, so I know it's going to be a blue. Then when you go to your Sunday basket, you just go straight to those blue slash pockets, and there's way fewer steps in finding that information. And so I just like this study because it's talking to us about how, you know, words have power, but color has this significant power in helping us retain and retrieve information.

Yeah, I had something I wanted to read out of the study. But as you're saying that, obviously, if you have a Sunday basket and you have the slash pockets, you're understanding what we're talking about. But I, I like, I like to take everything back to kindergarten because I have a degree in early childhood and elementary education. But I just think that when you go to a kindergarten classroom, it is just such a great example of the amount of structure that we need. We don't need too much, and we don't need too little. But a kindergarten classroom is like the perfect amount of structure. So if you think of the toy room at someone's house, which looks like Disney World just threw up everywhere, and you were to go in that room and you would say, go find all of the cars, you know, be like sorting a jigsaw puzzle, it would take you a long time to find all the cars. But if you're in a kindergarten classroom and you said, why don't you go get me some cars? You would go over to the toy shelf, you'd grab the bin that has toys, cars in it, and then you look for the individual car that you need. That's kind of what the colors do in household management in all of these systems. So like, okay, I need to find some information. The information is medical related. I'm gonna go to the red binder, and then I'm gonna look for whatever information I need, as opposed to I'm gonna go to the file cabinet and I'm gonna try to find this information that I need. If you go into the Sunday basket, which is everything that's actionable, which is a lot. And again, like you said, you wanna find a school calendar. Okay, school is kid related. It's blue. I'm only gonna look at blue slash pockets. And this is why I went ahead and paid to manufacture these red, pink, purple, blue, and green slash pockets, was because you could have 25 slash pockets in your Sunday basket now. But you had one set of rainbow, which we do every week, and then you had a pink category, a blue, a purple, and a green category, and you could deep dive into one category at a time. But it made those 5, or if you add in more slash pockets, 10 slash pockets, one category. It's the car bin. Now you're finding the exact car you need versus I have 25 or 40 things I'm working on, and I need to just find whichever one. There's so much cognitive load in finding the right slash pocket before you're even gonna take any action on it. And so this categorization of the activities that we do in work, in home, in school, and all these different things allow us to do a lot more with a lot less cognitive load. At least that's what I believe.

Yes, I agree too.

I agree. So we agree. We don't have a science on it. So this study was done— I think you have the front page. Was it 1978? 1983. We had to dig deep, you guys. There are a lot of studies from the late '70s and early '80s that interest me that just haven't been studied for a long time. And it's so— academia is kind of funny. Academics kind of follow a line of thought, and then as that line of thought changes, they keep following that line of thought. And around the late '70s, early '80s, a lot of feminist academia, feminist studies started in academia. So a lot moved into, well, how does this affect men versus women? And they went into that line of thought, and then they lost some of these just like, is this actual, you know, is color coding valuable? It would have moved on to like, well, do women see more color than men or things like that? And that would have been where all the research funding would have gone.

Yeah, there were more studies, but everyone just kept citing this study. So I think—

The same. And then that makes this— is this then a seminal study?

It is. I would say it's a foundational work.

So these seminal studies then are referenced back and over and over again, and then people build on those. Okay, so what I wanted to read to you again at the end of this, it's called The Instructional Effect of Coding. It says the primary value of the color code was in providing a structure for physical discrimination and associative meaning in self- I think that's so cool. What I'm learning in my PhD is adult education is always self-paced, so this is going to match what we're doing really well. Back to the study. The observed results thus are consistent with cognitive theories maintaining that learning is enhanced in those aspects of the stimulus situation in which the learner does have a set or code for responding. That is, when color is used as a peripheral clue Or when a non-code strategy is used to embellish the central stimulus in self-paced materials, learning is enhanced. So I think it's really cool.

Really cool.

Here's another thing. Thus, the more visual, color-coded, and instructional materials enabled greater conceptual acquisition, greater availability at retrieval, and a memory decline rate similar to that of the black-white instructional treatments. So it not only helps you learn, but it also helps you retrieve. And I think that is so important when we think about household management. The household management entity is devoid of operational systems, period. Like, there just aren't any universal operational systems. So in creating these universal operating systems like the Sunday Basket, the Paper Solution, and Planning Day, all of these go together like Granimals or Jim— uh, jimboree clothes where like everything, once you learn one system, the next one becomes easier and easier and easier because they all build on these same foundational principles. There's one other thing that I built into all of these systems. Thankfully, I mean, it was intentional, but I can't believe how awesome it is now that I did it, is every single system was created to be done independently by the learner, you. So when you think of the Sunday Basket, I tried to think, what are all the things you would need? So we mail you a Sunday Basket box and the slash pockets and the workbook, because I don't want you to have to go out and try to find school supplies. It's kind of like you're in school and you got the kit where you wake— you come into school, first day of school, and there's just a box of school supplies on your desk. You didn't have to go to 18 million stores and find everything. So you have the right supplies. Then you have the course material, which I created, and then I make the course material so that any independent lesson can be watched independent of every other one, because I know how you are. You're gonna go to the area that you wanna learn about most, and you're gonna skip things and rewatch things and do whatever. You know, we're self— we're adult learners. We like to be in control of how we learn. So you're gonna pick and choose what you watch. So I make every single video complete enough that you could do that step without doing any of the other steps. And then we created the community where you could do coworking in most of these programs so that you feel like you're connected to other people as you're learning. And then I created the certification so you could find people that would work one-on-one or in small groups with you. Because I know when you're learning things, you sometimes need a tutor or small group instruction. Raising my hand, I have another stats class, and I finally found a stats tutor online on Reddit from a post like 5 years ago. I was like, do you still tutor people? And he was like, yes. I said, great. So then I was like, I was like, I want to go over my data from 2020. I want to go over my data from the research practicum. I want you to help me in this class. Okay, I'm going to do this study with this other university this summer. I want you to help me with this. And then I want you to help me to figure out my methods for my dissertation. And then he wrote me back a 2-page paper. And I was like, okay, great. Apparently, we're on the same page. But it doesn't matter when you are learning something new at the PhD level, at any level. You sometimes need people who have done this before you who can make it shorter, help you do it. And so, so these systems have been set up so that everything that you need is inside of the program. And then everything is there based on whatever kind of learner you are. So like I mentioned, I'm a verbal processor. So that's the podcast, or you could be in small groups and you're talking to people about it. If you are someone who likes to read, we print out the workbooks and there are all kinds of worksheets that you could print out. And so we really try to hit all those different learning styles in all of these products. They're not just operational systems for the household. They are learning materials to learn these systems and then be able to use them.

We've talked about throughout this episode so many different ways that color is utilized within Organize 365 systems and products. And I just think my last bullet point I think is important. Yes, Organize 365 products are colorful, but I think it's really important to understand that the color is intentional. The Organize 365 products, yes, they look pretty and they're colorful, but like the color is done with intention and with a lot of thought and purpose behind it. And so Lisa, even though you didn't know back in the day when you first started doing this, you were on the right track to align the company and the products with research about color coding.

Yes. Thank you so much, Anna. I am really loving these Connections podcasts and being able to dive deeper and, and also go back and tell some of the historical stories, cuz some people have listened to the podcast all the way through, but I don't even know if I told those stories. Yes. In the podcast. So who knows? I always have more stories to tell.

Well, thanks for sharing. I'm sure everyone's gonna love it. Talk to you next time.

Yep, we'll see you guys next time.

Bye.