In this solo podcast episode, Lisa Woodruff explains why most people feel stuck in a cycle of temporary organizing and how the sequence in which you tackle different areas of your life determines long‑term success. She uses a visual metaphor of pink cubes to represent personal spaces (closet, bedroom, backpack) and then walks through a phased, year‑long plan: 1) Personal routines and closet – a deep clean that stays organized for 5‑10 years; 2) Paper and actionable documents – a 3‑4 month project to set up binders, a Sunday‑basket routine, and a filing system that can last a lifetime; 3) Storage rooms – clearing, labeling, and using clear bins and shelving, a system that can remain functional for decades and move with you; 4) Kitchen – seasonal organization that aligns with cooking habits, providing a base that stays tidy for about a third of the year; 5) Family and first‑floor spaces – a 6‑week effort that sustains order for roughly 120 days, after which quick weekend refreshes keep it functional; 6) Children’s rooms – teaching kids to treat their rooms like mini‑apartments, reducing future chaos. Woodruff emphasizes that each phase builds on the previous one, creating a “bite‑size” approach that spreads effort over a full year, with periodic maintenance (weekly, seasonal, quarterly) delivering exponential time savings. Listeners are invited to the full podcast for deeper details.
Chapters
Today on the podcast, I'm sharing with you how we get disorganized and then how we can actually get organized. So I'm going to do a little teacher story for you. First, we're going to start with these little pink cubes. So these pink cubes represent you, like your personal organization— your closet, your bathroom, your bedroom, your backpack or purse, your transportation. These areas can get unorganized as we go through life. Next, we're going to add in the things that are related to the memories that we create as we are humans and transition from one stage of life to the next, like our childhood memories, things that come out of our bedroom of origin, um, just all the things that we collect throughout life that end up in our storage rooms. And along the way, the older you get, the more you realize you're going to have some paper that is going to come along. It's going to start with like school papers you want to save, and then it'll be medical and financial papers. And you'll just have all this random kind of paper— to-do lists, important papers, unimportant papers, just all kinds of papers. And when you're in your 20s, this is the amount of stuff that you will need to organize. And then you will move out of your family home of origin, and you will move into an apartment or a condo or a dorm, and you'll start having to maintain bigger spaces than just your bedroom. You have to do the kitchen and the shared bathroom, laundry rooms, you know, any communal spaces that you have in your house. And you'll end up, you know, in your 20s headed into your 30s with all of these pieces that need to be organized in your life. And then if you are blessed, you'll add in kids. And when you add in kids, you know, they'll come with a few things when they're born and a couple more things and a couple more things. And then you'll probably add in maybe another kid, and then they'll start bringing stuff home from school. And, and pretty soon, before you know it, this is what your house will look like. And you will wake up one day and you'll be like, this is it, I am going to get organized. And you will start getting organized by picking up the playroom or picking up the kids' rooms. Or if you don't have kids, you're going to start in the kitchen, and maybe you're going to do a little bit of the laundry, and then you're going to get the living room and dining room straightened up so that you can vacuum it. And you'll be at the end of your weekend, and you'll have this organized, but you'll still have all of this left. And you know what will happen during the week before you get to the next weekend? Whatever you organize with the kids, totally not going to be organized by the next weekend, right? And then we use the bathroom, and we use the living room, and we use the kitchen, and then all of a sudden this is where you are the next weekend. And you're like, but I tried so hard, and I work on organizing all the time. Like, it's all I think about is getting organized, and I feel like I'm always working at home. Like, I'm Not sitting around watching Netflix or reading a book. Like, I am always working at home. Why? Why am I not making any progress in getting organized? And it's the order in which you're trying. So you can, like, I mean, until the cows come home, you can reorganize the kids' bedrooms and their dressers and their playrooms, and you can get your, your stack of organizing all the way up to where you're like halfway organized with the kids. And you can even maintain this for like 3 to 4 weeks, and then all of a sudden you'll go out of town, or somebody gets sick, or you have extra ball games, and they change diapers, and they change things, and also you're back to this again. You're like, what the heck? Fine, fine, I'm gonna do it the other way. I'm gonna do the kitchen. I'm gonna really get the kitchen organized this time. I got the living room, dining room, playroom. Like, oh my gosh, look, look at how far I got on the first floor areas of our house. Like, I did so good. And this will stay organized for like a week, maybe 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and by the end of 4 weeks it's all— it's all— you're like, what? What is going on? How do I do this puzzle? What is the solution for organizing my life? What order can I do this in where one, it stays organized longer, and sometimes I don't have to do it at all ever again? Here's the order. I'll tell you right now, you can head over to the podcast to learn more. First, you start with yourself. About every 5 to 10 years, you're going to need to redo your morning, afternoon, evening routines, really deep clean your closet, uh, getting ready in the morning, and your bedroom. But once you do it, it will stay organized for like 5 to 10 years. So once you get yourself organized, which seems so counterintuitive because, because can you see the mess? Do you see it? I see it. And you know what? It's not going anywhere. No matter how hard you try, it's going to be like this. But if you put your personal organization together, this will all of a sudden stay. Now you've got this. Maybe this takes you 4 or 6 weeks to do. That's okay. It's gonna stay here for like 5 years. Okay, so the next thing you're gonna do— oh, here's another one that is gonna stay organized. You're like, you know what, I'm gonna grab all the paper, all the paper we have from all over the place. And this one is going to take 3, maybe 4 months to do. Clean out the file cabinet, do all your actionable to-do papers. It's going to take quite a bit of time, but once you get your paper organized and you have it in binders and you have a predictable schedule for going through your actionable to-dos, paying your bills, doing everything related to paper and the mental piles that are in your house, which is the Sunday basket and the binders, let me just tell you, when you're done with this 3 to 4 months of work This will stay organized. Brace yourself for the rest of your life. For the rest of your life. Like, you might say, but no, no, I have more kitchen counter paper during the week. And I'm like, yeah, but on Sunday we do the Sunday basket, and you can maintain this stack indefinitely. You'll lose a couple of pieces, and as long as you do that Sunday basket routine on Sunday, your binders will stay maintained. Your actionable to-dos will stay maintained. All of a sudden, look, look, now we're, we're starting to make some progress. Oh, Lisa, do I get to do the family spaces and kids now? No, no, you do not. Now we are going to add on to this success, and we're going to go where nobody wants to go. We're going to go down to storage, and in the storage spaces, we are going to grab all of the bins, and we are going to empty out all of the empty boxes that are just left there for no good reason, and all the broken things that we put down there thinking we were going to fix them or need them later. We're not. And we're going to set up a solid system. We're going to set up shelving and clear bins that we can pull on and off, because our storage room is actually going to be a functional store of things we've already paid for that we could just go back and reference. Once you get your storage room organized well and in a way that you can use it like a store How long do you think your storage room will stay organized? Decades. It can stay organized decades, and here's the beautiful thing. As your life continues to grow and change and evolve, when you move from one house to another, from a condo to a house, and a house back to a condo, or whatever you're going to do, or into a storage unit, this storage system will move from location to location to location. It will stay organized. It will not even need to be packed. It's already in bins. It will move. All of a sudden, here we are about six months into our organizing journey, and yes, this still looks like chaos because hello, you live in your house; you don't live in a museum. If you have children, welcome to it. There are other humans; they're hard to organize. But at the end of six months, you've got yourself organized. You've got all your paper and your actionable to-dos organized. You have your storage room organized. Now, now is when we can layer in that activity that you're currently doing, and you're like. Do you want to organize your kids, or do you want to organize the house that you live in? Let's start with the house that you live in. Now you're going to deep dive the kit, organize the kitchen. You're really going to make this kitchen match the season of life you're in. It's grilling season, it's crock pot season, it's turkey season, whatever season it is, cookie baking season. All that stuff's in your kitchen. You're going to move out everything that's not in your kitchen, and you can put it in your organized storage. You can have a bin for off-season, like Turkey stuff, grilling stuff, cookie stuff can all have its own bin. It comes out of the store into the kitchen when you need it and back into the store when you don't need it. So now your kitchen is perfectly functioning. You're thinking about the diets that your family are on now and the special foods that everybody needs, and you're creating a great drink cabinet. Now your kitchen, once you organize it this way, it'll stay organized for about 1/3 of the year because you're going to have to add in from your storage. The turkey and the cookie making stuff in the winter, and the, the barbecuing stuff and the s'more stuff in the summer. So you are going to have to do seasonal organizing, but your base stack is going to stay organized, and you could just keep organizing on top. Now you're going to really go into the family room, you know. Okay, here are the people that are doing, uh, different passions in our house. We're going to get it all set up for this next 120 days for their passions. And I can actually get all of my family spaces organized in about 6 weeks, and that will last me 120 days, a third of the year. And then it will start to fall apart— not the whole stack, about this much of the stack is going to fall apart. And instead of taking 6 weeks this time, in a couple of weekends, maybe 3 weeks, you can get it all back to built again. You'll take another 120 days A few pieces will fall off again, but now you'll be able to do it in one weekend or one week. You literally will be able to clean and organize the first floor of your home. And if you're not in a first— a 2-story house, just think about what's on the first floor of a house. That would be your laundry room, your kitchen, your family room, main bathroom, living room. Now, now, after one year, this stack is going to stay done, but you know that you're going to need to invest, you know, a couple of weekends 3 times a year to really get this back in order. Now, now you're ready to go. Now you're ready to tackle the kids if you want to. Here's the other thing, kids change so often. If you just put them in the kids program and they learn how to organize their bedroom as a mini apartment like I teach them to, and they maintain that, as long as you're maintaining the rest of the house, Most of the struggles that you've had with kid organization will actually go away. So head on over to the podcast today. We're talking about bite-sized organizing. The order in which you organize your house really, really matters. It's not just getting it all done or continuing to go until it is finished. To do this plan, to get all of this organized, it's going to take, you know, 365 days. It's going to take a solid year of effort. But it is worth it because organization is time spent today for an exponential return on time in the future. And that exponential return on time is being able to know that these areas of your house are always in an— in a way that you can get them reorganized within 1 week. And the kids, they're going to grow and they're going to develop, and as you model this, they will then have this in their adult home as well. So head on over to the podcast to learn more.
