Effort: The 80/20 of Housework - Not All Housework is Equal - #499

Today's mailbag comes to us from Catherine. I just thought I would share the acronym that I created based on Lisa's words. NEW. N-U-W. Get rid of old things to make room for the new. Get rid of what you no longer need, use, or want. I haven't been following the podcast sent to my phone lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not following Lisa's ideas. I've been deep into organizing my basement and attic storage areas. My husband recently went into our attic and pronounced it a thing of beauty. I am so grateful to all of you. Your efforts are truly life-changing, and I'm starting to have more and more time to pursue the things that really matter to me. More time to spend with my husband and my friends and my life goals. 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. Recording the Women's Work podcast series this summer has been So amazing. Like, it's been such a labor of love. It has been eye-opening to myself, and I think to everyone who's been listening to it. I think now that I'm 50, and I love to keep saying I'm 50, I don't know why I'm so excited about saying it, but I'm definitely 50. I think because I want to live to be 100, so I feel like I'm halfway there. I cannot believe that I may have the opportunity to live another 50 years. How amazing would that be? And also to just really be grateful for the 50 years that I've already had. And I think so often we are so caught up in the busyness and the immediacy and the perceived urgency of our day-to-day activities that we don't stop and look back and look forward. And we just keep going on like today, everything is about today, and today feels so urgent and important. And whatever is happening right now is of utmost importance instead of putting it in the perspective of our whole entire lives. And when we really look at how each generation of women looks at how they view their role in the home, there are differences. Like, there are differences for different generations, for different parts of the country, for different ethnicities, for different Countries of origin. Like, there are differences in how we perceive our role as homemaker. And in this podcast and in the next one, now that we've already made the invisible work visible and we've discussed how much work there is and who's doing it and when they did it and how it came to be, on and on and on, what are we going to do now? So what are we going to do with that information now? There is a concept that I read about probably 10, maybe 15 years ago, probably 15 years ago, the Pareto principle, the 80/20 principle. But when I first heard it, I heard it as the 80/20 rule of sales and marketing, and I read the book by Perry Marshall. So when I was reading about the 80/20 principle, it was for like how you grow an organization. And what I found so interesting when I read that book was how Perry Marshall said that the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle rule, which has been around, I think, since the 1700s, is actually a law of nature. And that even when you look at a tree, that 80% of the fruit is on 20% of the branches. He talked about roads, and if you're, if you're driving in a city, that 80% of the traffic in the city happens on 20% of the roads. And if you actually look at the 20% of the roads that have 80% of the traffic, 20% of those roads have 80% of that traffic. So it's something like 4% of all the roads in a city have 96% of the traffic. And I love patterns. I love math. I love jigsaw puzzles. And so I find it very interesting that some of the principles that we use as productivity experts actually truly occur in nature as well. And that's why I love this 80/20 principle because it has a, Root in nature. So the 80/20 principle basically says this: 80% of the fruit comes from 20% of the labor. So you can get your house to 100% organized, but also you can get it to 80% organized and people will really not even notice if you didn't do that last 20%, because the majority of the benefit of what you and your family experience comes from the first big chunk of the work that is done. I think this is the heart of the difference between being a perfectionist and being a woman of excellence. For many years I said, you know, perfection isn't a thing. It's not something you can attain. There's no such thing as perfection. And I finally realized that by stating that in such a cavalier manner and off-cuff, that people who are striving to achieve excellence and perfection It's almost like a slap in the face. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that doesn't exist. Just move on, move on. And I was like, ooh, that's not really, that's not really what I'm trying to say. Is if you're trying to achieve a perfect looking home, if you're trying to achieve a completed to-do list, it will only manifest for like seconds, maybe minutes if you're lucky. And then something else will be added to your to-do list or something will become imperfect again. I'm not trying to dismiss the intention. I'm just saying that you're gonna wear yourself out because it's not a realistic goal. And then I realized that, well, if we replace the word perfection with excellence, now that, that is something you could strive for. That is something you can attain. That is something that once attained can be maintained for a longer period of time. Because a person of excellence is someone who is continually moving and growing and reaching their goals, not striving for a perfect endpoint where they could check the box and say, I'm completely done. So a person of excellence is different than someone who is striving for perfection. And I want to tie that same concept into this idea of the Pareto principle of 80/20. What does it actually look like in reality? To be an excellent homemaker, what does that look like? What is the 80/20 principles in reality? If I was to walk in a house, what does a house that is being maintained to excellence look at that may be different than one is trying to be maintained by perfection versus one where you're not doing any of those things whatsoever? And I'm going to go through all the basic things that we do in our housework and kind of give you a temporary bar, and then you can make the bar higher or lower, but I would encourage you to set a bar for yourself as what does done look like? What is excellence for this, for this week? So let's start with what does it mean to have a well-cleaned house? Like, what does a clean house look like anyway? Before we start there, I have to tell you this story again. So when my neighbors were selling their houses, they sold their houses within a year of each other. One was extremely clean, like she's very, very clean, but she didn't have a lot of organizational systems in her house. Actually, she didn't even have a lot of stuff either. Like they didn't have a lot of stuff and the house was very clean, but it wasn't organized. I don't know how to explain it wasn't organized. Like you just felt like it wasn't organized. And when her house was on the market, And people went through that house, they commented that the house was not very clean, and she about lost her mind because literally you could have eaten off the floors in this house because she cleaned nonstop all the time. Like everything was very, very, very clean, but the house just for some reason didn't have a feeling of order about it. But people equated that to the house not being clean. Then my neighbor's house, which was very eclectic and she was an artist and it was, it was clean, but it was definitely organized. Like there was a lot of stuff, a lot of bookshelves, but everything was organized. Everything was labeled. There was a bunch of stuff in her house. When people went through her house, they would say, oh my gosh, it's the cleanest house I've been in. And I was like, no way. 'Cause it's not, it's not as clean as the other neighbor's house. And I knew that because I knew I had watched them clean their house. I'd been in these houses many, many times. And I was like, interesting. So interesting. When we say that we want a clean house, or like if you were to walk through a model home or a home that's on the market, if the house has a lot of organization to it, even if there's a lot of stuff, we tend to say that that house is clean. But even if a house is clean but doesn't have as much organization, we tend to say that that house is not clean. And we conflate the meaning of clean and organized in what we are looking at in a picture. And I just want to draw that to your attention because I think that we strive to make order in our houses by making it cleaner. And the harder and harder we clean our floors, mop our floors, get our laundry done, clean our dishes, we feel like, okay, this will give us this order feeling that we're looking for. And then we're like, I just don't feel like this house is clean enough. And we keep cleaning. But really what I think we're looking for is more organization and order. Like where our eyes are looking for ways to know where do things go, things to be labeled, things to look— So just something that I've observed in how people talk about cleaning and organizing, and they tend to do the opposite action to the one that they actually want. So I'm going to talk about housework and cleaning, but actually I realize as I'm talking about the 80/20, what I give you is an organized feel, maybe not the 100% done of cleaning that you think is going to give you the organized feel. So this is for me. For me, this is how I figured out how to do the 80/20 of cleaning and organization in housework in my house. And the first thing that makes me feel like my house is not clean and organized is when there are piles of things and when I cannot see clear spaces. So the first 4 categories we're going to talk about Basically all have to do with how much of the floor can I see? How much of the counter can I see? How much clothing is put away? Can I— like, how straightened and tidied is my house? Basically is my plumb line of how clean and organized my house is. So I'll start with clean floors because clean floors were probably the first thing my mom ever taught me. And when we were told to clean and organize our bedrooms, which is what our mom told us to do on Saturday morning, Her definition of clean and organized was that she could run the vacuum cleaner in the room when we were done. As a matter of fact, that's the only thing I remember. And I remember parroting this to my children as well, like, go in your room, clean and organize your room. As long as I can run the vacuum, then your room is clean and organized. And this idea that we would be able to see the carpeting in our room or the floor in your kitchen That is what clean and organized looks like. So the 80/20 of floors for me in my house means that you can vacuum the space. Like, I'm not going to have to lift things up. Like, there's nothing on the floor that I'm going to have to move. I can freely go in, vacuum the space, and leave. To me, that means that the floor is clean and organized. Now, I like to take this one step further. And then say like, okay, so if I can walk in any space in my house and I can run the vacuum if I want to, then I like to create an additional rule. So the 80/20 principle of clear spaces on your floor is that the standard is you can run a vacuum. And then the secondary point that I put into the 80/20 is how often do I want to run a vacuum? Because if I just Stop at, if the floors are clear enough that I can vacuum, then immediately my mind adds to my to-do list, now you must vacuum. If you can vacuum, you must vacuum. Like, my brain just is like, so let's go, let's vacuum every day. And growing up, that was the expectation. I had to vacuum our house every single day. Every day. Can you imagine? Every day. My sister and I, we thought about dragging a 2x4 across the carpet because we knew it didn't need to be cleaned. And we thought maybe that would save us some time, but then we knew it wouldn't give the pattern lines that Dad was looking for, so we just went ahead and vacuumed anyway. I mean, the fact that we even thought about ways to get out of vacuuming is hysterical to me. So because my standard of vacuuming was that floors needed to be cleaned and vacuumed every single day growing up, once I got married and I was trying to meet that expectation, and then I realized my husband did not have that expectation for me, And I was just putting it on myself because of my childhood situation. I had to rewrite my script. And that's what I hope you've been doing over this summer as you've been listening to this whole podcast series, taking a look at the scripts that you have created for yourself or your family of origin or the TV shows or the media or whoever. Somehow you have this unrealistic, unending to-do list in your head of what it means to be an excellent housekeeper. And what I really encourage you to do is rewrite that script, because if you do not take the time to rewrite these scripts in all these areas I'm telling you today, you're never going to get to what I'm going to tell you about in the podcast episode next week. And that is where all the juice is next week. So this week we need to do the hard work of figuring out what is the minimum acceptable value that we can have that will check this box off so that we'll get our time back. Because let me just tell you, let's be clear, you can vacuum your house every single day for the rest of your life. I mean, it looks good. It really does look good. I do like the way it looks, but I would much rather have that 20 minutes every single day to put towards what I'm uniquely created to do instead of picture-perfect vacuum lines that will be gone within an hour. I mean, if you have a dog or a cat, it'll be minutes. If you have a baby, what's the point? You see what I'm saying? Like, what is this expectation that we're trying to hit and for what purpose and for how long? So number 1, clear floors means that you can run a vacuum. So then I add this rule as to how often I will run a vacuum. And my personal rule is once a week. Currently, that once a week is on Thursdays when we have somebody that cleans our house, so I don't even vacuum right now. But as you may hear in my voice, I'm recovering from COVID So I've been stuck in my house for a month, so I'm back to vacuuming my own house again. And then I remind myself, that's right, I do it or somebody else does it, but we only do it on Thursday and that's the only day we vacuum. Now I have a little caveat to add. Little baby Grayson is gonna be 1 year old, like in a hot second, which means that he's crawling and toddling and spitting up and just all the things that babies do. Well, when you have a little baby like that, my rule changes back to you vacuum the family room every day. So the whole house is vacuumed once a week, but the space that he spends in, we are now vacuuming that every day or every other day. But it's not my responsibility. It's not my baby. So we got a stick vac and now we can easily vacuum that space every single day. Creating these 80/20 rules are not created in concrete. You can change them, you can modify them, but the key here is you must think it through. You must consciously make these decisions and not just all of a sudden start vacuuming every day and not realize that you're spending this much time doing it. Should you do it? Do you want to do it? Who should do it? How often? You need to ask yourself these questions as you move into different phases of life. Okay, so first thing, floors. How, what does a clean floor look like to you? If it involves cleaning the floor or vacuuming, how often is that going to happen and when is it going to happen? Next, let's move on to clean countertops. And I also like to say like flat surfaces. So knowing that a floor needs to be clean enough that I can walk through the room and vacuum it, My next trigger point is countertops. And in our kitchen, we have a lot of countertops. So clean countertops to me mean that the dishes are washed, all the counters are wiped down. I just feel like I have expansive space when the counters are clear. I live with other humans in my house. The other humans in my house do not like to do dishes. And because they don't like to do dishes, they just leave their empty cups, plates, bowls, whatever, sometimes all over the first floor. Sometimes they get it closer to the actual sink area, but they just let it pile up because they really don't care if we have like a mountain of dishes over there by the sink until we've actually run out of every single possible thing that they could cook with. They're not going to stop and do the dishes. That's why it always ends up on me. And I can handle it for a time. Pretty much the only dishes that I put over in the sink area are my coffee cup, and that's it. I don't cook at home. Like, I don't. It's my coffee cup. And when I start to get to the point where I have no more travel cups, I'm ready to do the dishes. Also, we're pretty much out of dishes, pots and pans and everything else by the time we get to that point. So when I was a stay-at-home mom, I would clean off the counters morning and night. Like I did it twice a day and I did all of the cooking. But as you heard in the podcast episode where I worked my way out of a job, I don't do anything related to food except for the dishes now. I don't make the grocery list. I don't buy the groceries. I don't do the cooking. I don't clean out the refrigerator. Like I just don't do these things. I did them for 20 years, but I don't do them anymore because I want my time. So I could do what I'm telling you in the next podcast episode. And this is constant. I'm going to keep saying it over and over and over again. You only have so much time. You are in control of how you spend that time. Your unrealistic expectations that you have for yourself of how your house will look on a minute-by-minute, day-to-day basis.

Mm-hmm.

robs you of time that you could use differently, which we're going to talk about next week. And until you really wrestle with this enough, till you get to the point where you say, you know what, I really like the way it looks when my kitchen is completely clean and all the dishes are done, but not to the extent of not living out my unique purpose in life. So I'm going to live with dirty dishes. So I can make a bigger impact on the world doing something that only I am uniquely created to do. And the only way I finally did this was getting out of the kitchen. I am almost never in my kitchen. If I'm on the first floor, I'm sitting out back on the deck 'cause I can't see the dishes there, or I'm upstairs watching TV doing a puzzle, or I'm in the living room rocking the baby, or I'm playing on the family room floor with the baby. Or, you know, like I'm just not standing in the kitchen. If I'm standing in the kitchen, I'm doing the dishes because I can't just stand there and not do the dishes. I'm not saying that I'm in my kitchen looking at dishes and not doing them purposefully, but I have to remove myself from where the work is in order to not do that at the detriment of how I could otherwise be spending my time. And you heard that right. I will go upstairs, take a hot bath, do my puzzle, and watch TV instead of doing my dishes. Call me a teenager if you want. I don't care. My life is not to make sure every single dish is done every single time someone in my family dirties one. But here's the 80/20 I'll tell you about the clear counters. The floor, the counters, the laundry, the straightening, and the tidying. These are the first 4 that we're going to talk about. They are never-ending. You know it, and I know it. As soon as I get that kitchen clean, as soon as I get the last dish done, I get the dishwasher started, I wipe down the counters, everything looks immaculate. I go upstairs, I take my bath, I come downstairs. Do you know what I see?

Yes.

An ice cream scoop, another Plate, another bowl, and it's never-ending. It's not like, okay, I'm going to get this perfectly clean and then no one is going to dirty a dish for another 12 or 24 hours. No, no. If we're awake, we're eating, we're drinking, we're constant. It's constant. So the 80/20 of clean counters. When I decide that I am going to clear off the counters in the kitchen, I do all the dishes. I start the dishwasher. I wipe down the sink, and then I leave it where the counters can be clear, but the sink can start to fill up again. What do I mean by that? We have a little plastic Tupperware container that we keep inside of our sink, and in our sink you could put silverware in there so that it doesn't mess up the sink. doesn't stain the sink or whatever. And so that's where we throw silverware. And the reason why I have this little plastic bucket inside of the sink is because when I go to do the dishes, I fill that little bucket up with really hot soapy water. And then by the time I go to wash that silverware, the silverware is pretty much already washed itself. But because I like how a clear counter looks, I have created that little bucket inside of the sink. And I have trained my family that when they make peanut butter and jelly, they throw that knife in that little bucket. Or if they get a scoop of ice cream, they put that scoop in that little bucket. And when they do that, then they don't set it on the counter or they don't just set it randomly in the sink. And then when I go to do the dishes, I can wash the silverware faster and the other dishes are in there. Also, once the kitchen counters are clear, people tend to, in our family, put the dishes and the silverware in the sink until the sink gets too full, and then they put it on the counters. Sometimes after I've just cleaned the kitchen counters, I'll walk in and I'll see somebody has put a dish near the sink. I will walk over, I will put that dish in the sink. All of a sudden my counters are clear again and I walk away. Do you see how this is different? I don't go, oh my gosh, another dish, another 2 spoons, I'm gonna wash them and put them— no, I'm not a martyr. Like, no.

I like clear counters.

So anything I could do to get clear counters, I will do, and I will add things into the sink. Now, because of the high inflation, the high gas prices, my kids being 21 and 22, we are starting to cook more from home than we have in the past. So I actually am not doing the dishes only 2 or 3 times a week. I am doing the dishes more like 4 or 5 times a week, and that's okay. I'm in a new season of life. We have different goals right now for our family, and so my rule for clear counters is that I will do the dishes 4 or 5 times a week instead of 2 or 3 times a week. Also, because Grayson is crawling and he's, you know, getting into things, I'm in the kitchen with him more and I have more time to clear off the counters. So the 80/20 of the floor, you can walk, you can vacuum, I'm going to do it once a week. The 80/20 of clear counters, The counters are clear. That's okay if the sink fills up, and I'm going to clear that off 4 or 5 times a week. Next, let's talk about laundry. I know you'd rather not, but let's talk about it anyway. So my 80/20 for laundry is that I want all of the laundry done to the best of my ability one time a week. And for me, that's always going to be on a Friday night or a Saturday morning. So I'll start the laundry on a Friday. And I'll usually have it finished up by a Saturday. And that's just my cadence. I gather everything that there is to wash. I get all the extra hand towels, all the things that we're gonna wash. I start the loads, I fold them, I put them away. Again, as soon as you get the laundry done, what happens? The baby spits up, you have to wash your jacket, you change your pajamas. Like, the laundry is never-ending. So to say I'm going to get my laundry completely done, no. Where is your baseline each week? Mine is sometime on the weekend, I want to be able to draw a line in the sand and say like, okay, everything has been cleaned for a week. Now it can accumulate in the hamper in our closet until next weekend. If you don't remember or you haven't heard before, the best way to be able to do your laundry one time a week is to invest in more socks and underwear. If you have enough socks and underwear for your family, you definitely can go a whole week for your laundry. The next thing that will tend to run out if you have really minimalist wardrobes would be pants. You're going to run out of pants. So for my kids, I remember I would get 4 pairs of pants and then we'd have socks and underwear. We always had plenty of shirts, but we would run out of socks, underwear, and when they were younger, we would run out of pants. Okay, next, straightening and tidying. For me, my house feels organized And clean when it is straightened and tidied and I can have family over. There are 2 different ways that I have created systems that I do that regularly straighten and tidy my house. One is a 20-minute tidy and the other one is a 2-hour tidy. I'm going to explain both of them to you and then I'll explain to you how often I use them. So when I first started doing this, this is when the kids were younger. And I just wanna be perfectly honest with you. When we were first married, I could get the house cleaned and organized. Once we had kids, like my house was like never cleaned and organized unless we were having a party. It was the only time. I remember my mother-in-law, who is a perfectionist and has been able to maintain that, I don't know how, came over when the kids were little. I think they were like 2 and 6 months. There was laundry on the floor. There were toys. It was like Toys R Us had thrown up everywhere. There was papers. It was just like sheer chaos. She walked in and she sat on the edge of a chair and she just kind of looked at me. I said, well, this is what it was like when, when, you know, your kids were little, right? She looked at me and she was like, no, no, it was not. And I was like, ew. My mother-in-law is the sweetest person on the planet. She comes over all the time now. She could care less. But back then, I was trying to achieve perfection, and she would have really liked for me to have been the perfect wife. Now she thinks it's great that Greg cooks and we have a great relationship, but back then I felt very judged and I was not meeting my own expectations, Greg's, or hers at all. And I was like, how? Like, like, it was impossible. It was just impossible for me to have a straightened and tidied home with kids that little, working from home, doing everything I was doing. It wasn't a realistic expectation, and I didn't understand being a woman of excellence versus a perfectionist. So I didn't understand there was a different level. But I do remember it must have been the time of the Olympics because I remember the Zamboni machine coming out and making the ice all perfect when the figure skaters were going to skate. And I remember deciding that I was going to be my own human Zamboni, and that I was just going to start, and I was just going to go around the house and keep picking up messes and picking up messes and not. Stopping until I could get everything picked up. And this is a mental idea that I have all the time. Like, if you watch that machine go out and clean the ice, like, it goes through these different patterns, and when it's all done, then the ice is all perfectly perfect again for people to come out and start skating. And so that's the idea I have for myself. The whole idea was just to never stop moving, because when you are Picking up a household, like the first floor of a 2-story house, it's chaos. Like, you go and you pick up a dish and you take it in the kitchen, and then you realize you have a rag that needs to go in the laundry room. Now in your laundry room, you change the laundry and you're like, oh yeah, this thing needs— that I bought extra needs to go down into the basement. Now you're in the basement, you're like, oh, this thing needs to move over here. And, and you're just moving around the house and it almost looks like you're doing this in a very chaotic fashion. But you're not doing it in a chaotic fashion because all of a sudden you turn around and you realize, oh yeah, everything got put away. And so that's kind of what I call the Zamboni sweep. So I do this in 2 different timeframes and 2 different times of day. So the first one is a 20-minute evening Zamboni sweep. And how I always start this one is I start by clearing the counters and clearing the floors. And then making sure the piles are in as few locations as possible. I'm consolidating the chaos into fewer locations, but I'm not trying to eliminate the chaos because that would take 2 hours and I don't have 2 hours. This is something I've never explained before, but I think it's a big difference in how I get a lot of time during the week. Whereas many people feel like The job isn't finished, and so they can't really rest. I have a weekend tidy and a weeknight tidy, and I did this all the time when my kids were younger. So the weeknight tidy is, can we clean up the floor so that it can be vacuumed? But we don't actually do the vacuum. And can we clean up the counters so that they can be cleaned? And I usually do clean them, especially when the kids were little. I did actually clean the whole kitchen. Because it does make your next day go better. And then third, how do we consolidate what is left into fewer locations? So currently, here are my 4 locations that I will Zamboni sweep into pretty much every other night. One is our kitchen counter, our long kitchen counter. I have my Sunday basket at one end, Greg has his at the other. So if it's anything for Greg, it goes on his side of the counter. If it's anything for me, it goes on my side of the counter. And then anything for Abby goes on the kitchen table. I was trying to give her a countertop that didn't really work for us, so now I just do the kitchen table. And whenever I am cleaning stuff up, if it's for Abby, it goes on the kitchen table, and then I'll just say to her, please clean up the kitchen table. That way it's not nebulous, like this part of the counter but not that part of the counter. Like a kitchen table, it's pretty obvious, like everything on that table is yours. If it's not on the kitchen table, then I haven't delegated to you. And then the last space, which you probably have, is the laundry room counter. So it's not in the kitchen, it's off, off the side, but that's for projects and things that are going to be done in the future that we don't need in our eyesight that would be in the kitchen, but are off over to the counter. So this evening Zamboni sweep, which I probably pretty much do every night, whatever is Greg's is on his side, whatever is mine is on my side, whatever is Abby's is on the kitchen table, and whatever is a longstanding project, I try to move off into the laundry room. What would end up in the laundry room? Things that I want to donate, things we've already bought for Grayson's party, but it's not time for Grayson's party, laundry that needs to be done, items that need to be returned, things that are too big to go in the Sunday basket. And then on my end of the kitchen counter, I have my Sunday basket, which is where obviously all the mail and the small things go. And then there are other things that start to accumulate around the Sunday basket. So like the Windex bottles right now that I'm refilling, or we bought a new Swiffer thing, but it's not a Swiffer, it's a reusable Swiffer. So the reusable pads, because I haven't talked to Abby about those and where those are going to go. New N95 masks, because we all have COVID. Like those are on the counter in my area with my Sunday basket because my Sunday basket is overflowing because we've been quarantined because of COVID So you get the idea. So I am not trying to have my house look perfect. I still have these piles, but these piles are in smaller areas. That is the 80/20 of straightening during the week. Then we get to the Zamboni sweep on Saturday, which usually takes me about 2 hours. So to clean the house takes 2 or 3 hours, to do the Zamboni sweep takes a couple of hours, the straightening and the putting everything back where it needs to go, and to do the Sunday basket takes 1 to 2 hours. So most of my Saturday is spent being domestic. I tell Greg I'm going to have a domestic day. So I'm recording this on a Friday when we have COVID, and our house looks like a bomb went off in it. That is my definition of it. There is stuff everywhere, everywhere, because we've all been sick, etc., etc. I just keep saying to Greg, I cannot wait till this weekend when we're going to take back this house. And we're going to put everything where it needs to be. So that will be that longer 2-hour Zamboni time. And that's where I'll do more like I told you in the very beginning, where I will start at the top of the house and I will pull all of the laundry downstairs and I will start the laundry. And I will start at the top of the house and I will vacuum and I'll bring downstairs any dishes. I'll bring downstairs anything that I need to take back to the office, anything that needs to be returned. I'll bring down all the trash, I'll do the cleaning, and then I'll end up on the first floor of the house. And when I'm on the first floor of the house, then I will do the dishes and get the dishwasher going 'cause my laundry is already started. I'll start the second load of laundry and I will keep bopping around like a Zamboni until everything is cleaned and put away where it's supposed to go. And this is when I will go in the laundry room and I will do everything that I've put in that counter area. I will do everything that I've put near my Sunday basket. I will do my Sunday basket. If Abby has not picked up everything off of the kitchen table at that point, this is when I grab a laundry basket. I put everything in the laundry basket, I carry it downstairs and I put it in the basement. And then I'm like, great, my part's done. And I love this part of 80/20. The people that you live with, that you cohabitate with, may not want to get cleaned and organized in the same timetable that you want to get cleaned and organized. That's fine.

That's fine.

They don't have to. But also, their clutter does not have to stay in the main general living areas. Everyone has their own bed in their own bedroom. And so I started this probably when my kids were like 9 or 10, that I would just get laundry baskets. And they used to have color-coded laundry baskets. And I would walk through the whole house and collect anything that was theirs that I didn't want in the main living areas, I'd put it in the basket and I put the basket in their bedroom and then they could organize it or not, but it wasn't in my space anymore. So that's another example of 80/20. I don't need to put everything away for all of my family members. I just need to make sure that it is no longer in the areas where it does not need to be. So straightening and tidying, what is my 80/20? My 80/20 is for me, As a supposed empty nester, but I'm not, and a full working woman, I will do this 20-minute at night Zamboni sweep a couple of times a week. Whenever I'm like, okay, I need to pick this up, I will pick it up and I will put it in these general piles. And then on Saturday, I will get my house to where I like it. We have our house cleaned on Thursdays, although we haven't for the last month. 'Cause of, thank you, COVID. So usually Wednesday night, everybody picks up their stuff. Thursday, the house gets organized. If it could stay organized on Friday, I get to enjoy a pretty clean and organized house on the weekend. And then with a baby in the house, it just, it just does not stay, obviously. So I just live with that. What I would say about this area of straightening and tidying that leads to the 80/20 Is that you need to learn to live with 20% of piles because you're not living in a museum. And I, for a long time, used to feel like a failure if there were any piles in my house anywhere. And that's not really realistic because this is the house that we live in and we are constantly working and doing things and eliminating things and improving things and bringing things in and taking things out and— There's just a lot of movement of stuff inside of a household. So if you can keep the general living areas where you could see the floor and you could vacuum it if you need to, and the counters are cleared off pretty much, then you can live with some piles until the weekend, as long as you have some time on the weekend to go through those. All right. What is the 80/20 of the Organized 365 programs and services? I want you to stop looking for one more thing to do every night before you give yourself permission to read a book, take a bath, do a puzzle, watch TV, go for a walk, pet your dog, whatever. For decades, for decades, I had such a never-ending to-do list of all the things that I could do, should do, possibly could do, in a perfect world would have done, In my house that I would get to the end of the day, we would be done with dinner, I would have clear countertops, my floors would be clean enough that I could vacuum them if I wanted to, it wasn't a laundry night, and it'd be like 6:30. And I would say to myself, okay, well, I have time, so what more can I do on this to-do list? And I have finally stopped doing that. It was really hard to stop doing that because I always wanna improve the look and feel of my home, and I really enjoy taking care of our home. But I finally, and I don't really remember when this was, I would say this was a few years ago, I finally realized that, well, if it's never going to be done, then it's okay for me to enjoy my evening. And when I really looked around, everyone else in the family was enjoying their evening. Joey was playing video games, Abby was off doing whatever she was doing, Greg was watching TV. Like, no one else was consulting the list to see what's one more thing we could do for the family, for the household. Like, I was the only one doing that. No one was asking me to do it. No one was even noticing when I did do it. And so I finally just stopped doing it. And it feels Really weird. It feels really, really weird to know that you can clean the house, you can pick up the toys in the family room, and you're not going to. You're going to walk right over them and you're going to go do a puzzle. You're going to walk right over them and you're going to go out and get ice cream, or you're going to like be a teenager again, I guess. That's all I have to say about that. And I was finally able to do this because of the Sunday basket. So the 80/20 of the Sunday basket, and I think sometimes if you have a Sunday basket, you're trying to do it to 110%, you're trying to do it to perfection you're trying to make sure that you're getting an A+ in the Sunday basket. The Sunday basket is a lot easier to do than I think sometimes we realize. And the Sunday basket is supposed to be a relief valve, not a pressure cooker. So a win for the Sunday basket is that you put all of your actionable to-dos in the Sunday basket until Sunday or whatever day you end up doing them. And then when that day and time comes, you completely empty the basket, the large part of everything you've dumped in there.

Mm-hmm.

Discard as much as possible. Sort everything else into the basic slash pockets, whether it's something that needs to be done now or it's a project for later. Definitely take action on those 1.0 slash pockets, specifically any bills that need to be paid or anything that needs to go on the computer. And then pick 3 things out of the Sunday basket that you can get done this week and be done. The rule of the Sunday basket is that I think we tend to overlook. Is that if it can wait until next Sunday, it must wait until next Sunday. And I know I've gone through seasons, and I feel a lot of you who have a Sunday basket do this every single week where you go, I can't be done with my Sunday basket time until I do every single actionable I could possibly do right now so that it's not there in the future. The reality is I want you to do less. I want you to get your Sunday basket done faster. I want you to not do everything that's in your Sunday basket. And you may say, well, what, what's the point of that? The point was to put it on Sunday so I could get it all done. Kind of. The point was to put all on Sunday so you're not doing it during the week, so you can free up your mental capacity and your bandwidth in order to love your life and deal with the unexpected that comes your way. But not that you would then do it all. I still think we put way too much on our list to do entirely. And when you look at your Sunday basket, you're like, uh, I really don't want to do this thing, but it's in the Sunday basket. I have to do it. Really? Who even knows it's in there? Does anybody know it's in there? What happens if you just get rid of it? What if you did it 50%? What if you had somebody else do it? Do you have to do these things? A lot of these things that we put in our Sunday basket, that we're putting on ourselves to do still don't have to be done. Could just be discarded. Just because you got a piece of mail doesn't mean you have to process it. Just because you made yourself a note doesn't mean you have to do whatever that thing is. And then think about, would your other family members do this? Would your friends do this? Would you ask somebody else to do this? How much can you get rid of? It's not about doing it all. It's about doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. And so I give you full permission this week when you do your Sunday basket to just say, you know what, we're not changing cable providers. I'm not going— even though it may save us $5, I'm not going to do whatever this thing is. I don't want to volunteer for that activity. I'm not going to read that book. I don't want to take that class. Like, just go ahead and get rid of some things. You don't have to do everything. The biggest 80/20 of the Sunday Basket is if it can wait until next Sunday, it must wait until next Sunday, because then that way you open up your time this week for the opportunities that are going to present themselves in real time. The next 80/20 is how we have reorganized the Productive Home Solution. So if you were listening to the Productive Home Solution orientation, which we've played in a podcast episode now, or you watch the webinar or the replay, which you can find at organize365.com/orientations. One of the things I love about these orientations that we are creating this fall is it's reorienting you to the Organize 365 products, services, and courses that we have and how we've changed those over the last 10 years, but also the order in which you do things Is important. And I always knew that. Like when I created the 100-Day Home Organization program, I knew that the kitchen was where you spent the majority of your time and then your closet. And so I ordered the tasks in the order in which they helped me transform my life when I was a mom of middle school-aged kids. But now that I've reordered the activities for any person anywhere in the world in any size dwelling, I realized that there is a different order we should be doing these tasks in based on the transformation that I hope that you achieve, which is long-lasting organization. And the research that we've done in the last 2 years has really informed all of these changes that we've made inside of the programs. You can only solve a problem That with the knowledge that you have at the time. So when I started Organize 365, I was 40 years old. I had 9 and 10-year-old kids. I was starting a new business as an in-home professional organizer, and I was organizing myself as a 40-year-old woman in Ohio with middle school-aged kids who was working from home. 5 years later, after I had done a lot of in-home professional organization and started the podcast, And the kids were in high school getting ready to go to college, I had seen a lot more homes. I understood how women use their space better. I understood more generations of how they use their spaces. And I was like, okay, what I had created for organizing homes in the first 5 years of my business was very kid-focused. I pulled the kid stuff out into its own program, and I created a program to organize A home for a family without children. And that was the 100-Day Home Organization Program. Then over the last 5 years, I have become an empty nester and we have done research. And I now have been able to survey thousands of families all over the United States in different demographics, economics, all these things. And what I've realized is those of you listening to the podcast, you're already organized. You already are organizationally minded.

Mm-hmm.

You are someone who is interested in professional development. You're someone who loves to learn. You are going to get organized no matter what. But the majority of Americans do not have at their disposal the information about how to get organized or what does organization look like or how do you learn the skill of organization. They may not be podcast listeners. They may not be readers. They may— Like they just don't have the same things at their disposal. And I started to realize that when I first got organized, it was because I wanted to organize my kids and my life with my kids. Then I started teaching how to just organize a house whether or not you have kids. Add kids, don't have kids, fine. But what I realize now is unless you have a burning desire like you do and I do to live an organized and productive life, It's a lot of work, and it's too much effort to actually devote a whole year to getting your house organized without being able to really see a concrete fruit of that organization much quicker. Most people won't do it. It's kind of like if I said that you had to do all of these things to lose 20 pounds over the course of the next year, and you would be healthier, and you'd be able to be off of all of your medications or whatever. But you had to do this whole thing for a year. Some people, of course, would do it, but very few, because Americans, we like, you know, a quick win. We like to know that, like, we're on the right track. Like, we like to see the 5 pounds drop. We like to see, you know, another notch on our belt loop. We like to realize that we can get off of our medication, like, within days instead of years. Like, we really don't like to take a lot of time to do things. And what I realized was People who usually end up completely organized and productive with more time and then go on to take that time and do something that they're uniquely created to do are very tenacious, and they are willing to put in the time and the work in order to have the transformation that they desire because they know that it'll be worth it in the end. And my desire now is not only to support those of you that have that tenacity and that drive to get organized. But what about the millions and hundreds of millions of Americans that don't? And yet they probably can benefit even more than you and I in living an organized and productive life because they've never experienced that before. They don't even know what it is. They don't even have people in their lives that are organized that way. They're so used to living a reactive life that they don't even understand what it would look like to not live a reactive life. It's not like they were productive at one point and they lost it like I did. It's that they've never seen that modeled to them. Their parents weren't organized, their friends aren't organized, they never had the time or money to invest in that. How do we reach all of those people? And that's when I realized, okay, we need to, A, reorganize the order in which we help people get organized. So that they can have wins. And then when I did the research to find out if I was right about my assumption that people actually did not feel like they were organized in different areas of their life, I was blown away at how bad it is. Like how truly bad it— like I was like, you know what? I feel like I'm always trying to strive towards organization and I can't fully check off like, am I storage organized? 'Cause I've got a bunch of stuff shoved down there. So it is, but it isn't like. So I don't ever feel like I'm fully organized. Do other people feel that way? Oh my gosh, do other people feel that way? 87% of those surveyed believe organization is a learnable skill, yet the highest acceptance or done rate we got was 18% of people believe that they're paper organized. What? And everything else was lower than that. Like, so it's learnable, but I didn't learn it, so something's wrong with me? Okay, I've got to change my teaching then. Because if it's learnable, then there has to be a way for you to learn it. So the 80/20 of organizing your entire house is this. Number 1, get yourself organized. You can do this in a month or 2. You can get your closet, your bathroom, your bedroom, your purse, your wallet, your backpack, your diet, your routines. You can get that all dialed in within 8 weeks. Boom. You are personally organized. Take that winning and lump it into the next thing, which is storage organization. Again, this can take 1 to 2 months. Boom, you're done. This is your at-home store, the things that you have already purchased. So this is your store edge, your at-home store where you keep things you've already purchased but you're not using right now, but you might need in the future in a very organized shelving and bin system that— wait for it— lasts forever. Again, the first 4 months of getting organized, if you do your personal organization first and your storage organization second, your personal organization will stay organized for up to 5 years, and your storage organization literally can stay organized forever if you do it right. Who's teaching this? Like, let's go with this. Everybody wants to talk about how to organize the playroom and the kitchen. Oh my gosh, shoveling snow in a snowstorm. You're going to be doing that for the rest of your life, but let's get some big wins out of the way. Let's get your personal organization really organized for this season of life that you're in, and then let's organize your onsite store in your storage area so you know what you have when you need it, which will save you time and money. And then the next 80/20 is to go ahead and jump into those binders and do that paper. A paper organizing retreat is the 80/20 of paper organization. You go to one weekend, you do the big purge, you get rid of 60 to 80% of the paper that you have, it gets shredded, you're done with that. You divide everything you have left into your binders and your projects, and you usually get one of those binders or projects done, and then you go home with the rest of them divided and ready to go. Like, Organizing your paper will stay organized for at least a decade, but many of the systems that you set up when you move from a file cabinet to a binder, again, will stay organized forever. All you'll need to do is maintain these systems a couple of times per year. So you can look at right now, you could set your goals right now. I'm going to get my Sunday basket. I'm going to get that up and running. I'm going to get my personal organization done in September and October. Then in November and December, I'm going to organize my storage. I'm going to go to a paper organizing retreat. Boom. By January, you've gotten 3 out of 4 of the categories done. Like, done. That is amazing. This is a much more doable system that you and your family and your friends can do. And this is the 80/20. Then you move into family and communal systems. Which that is going to stay organized depending on your size of your family for whatever stage you're in. If you have kids under the age of 5, this is like dishes and laundry. Organizing your kitchen and your playroom and everything on the first floor of your house is an additional dishes or laundry type activity for you. It's just a never-ending Zamboni sweep of moving things through there just because the sheer quantity of humans that are in your house. The quickness that they're going to go through different stages. As they hit school years, you can get those family and communal spaces organized 3 times a year. As they hit high school, you could probably get them organized twice a year. And then once you become an empty nester, that's where you can really get these systems organized, set it and forget it. It's not my fault you have this awesome, wonderful family that you're growing, which is— Chaotic and fun and memorable and messy. And it just is. Like, having perfect playrooms and kitchens and anything that's on the first floor of your house when you have kids is just an unrealistic expectation. The memory-making that you're gonna have, that is the 80/20 that you're supposed to be doing, not the perfect organizational systems. All right, hopefully this has really helped you in managing your expectations of what to expect for yourself, what to expect for your family, how you can reduce the effort and the quantity that you put into some of these never-ending tasks that are going to keep coming back week after week after week, like clear counters and floors and Sunday baskets, and take your efforts and put them into the things that really are going to move the needle, like getting your personal spaces organized, getting your storage space organized and getting your paper organized, it will really unlock a whole bunch of time. And oh my goodness, next week I'm gonna tell you what I've been doing with that time.