How does the Sunday Basket work? | Organize 365 | Lisa Woodruff

Okay. Welcome everyone. I am super excited to be spending this hour with you on Sunday talking about the Sunday basket. So let's go ahead and get started. I'd like to get done in 1 hour, just so I'm not taking too much of your time. You're in the right place if you are looking for how can you take control of the paper piles, specifically on your kitchen counter, and how can you get rid of your to-do list or figure out how to get things done. That's what I'm going to teach you in this time with us together. As I mentioned in the pre-chat before I started recording, my name is Lisa Woodruff. I'm a podcaster. I have a podcast called Organized 365. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I have a product-based company where we sell the Sunday Basket and a couple of other things. And we have advertised this webinar specifically to people who do not know about Organized 365. I have 2 college-age kids. I've been married for 25 years. And I've lived in the same house since the year after we got married. This summer I came out with a book that we published with Putnam House— Putnam, sorry. Oh my goodness. Published with Putnam, which is a division of Random House, and it's called The Paper Solution. And in The Paper Solution, I tell you how to eliminate your to-do list with the Sunday basket and ditch your filing cabinet by making 4 binders that will replace everything that your filing cabinet used to do. And the Sunday basket is the first step. If after watching this webinar you want to learn more, you can learn more about becoming a— about Organized 365 and what I teach about in our weekly podcast. Can you hear my husband cheering for whatever sports game is playing? Hello, we're in the pandemic. I'm doing this from home. We have over 360 episodes on the Organized 365 podcast. Almost 10 million downloads at this point. I love to share different out-of-the-box ways of thinking about your house. Think about your house more like work and the different work efficiencies we put into work that we can put into home so we can have more time to do what we were uniquely created to do. And then there's a Sunday Basket podcast. It only has one episode, but it will be more information about the Sunday Basket that you can get after this webinar. At the very end, I'm going to teach you how to get these free weekly printables. So don't let me forget. I forgot to do that at the end of the last webinar. But let's get started and let's talk about paper. So the first obstacle I need to overcome, usually when I'm talking to people about eliminating their to-do lists and getting organized, is I have determined that what is holding us back are the paper piles and our actionable to-dos in our lives. And most people say, but Lisa, I mean, we're in a digital world. I really don't have any paper. So I would love for you to type in the chat box. Do you think that you have paper? Do you have piles of paper anywhere in your house? Just type yes or no. Is this something that you've already decided is a problem for you? Okay, you guys are all typing yes. Clearly you've gotten this far. But I think, I think that this is real. We need to talk about the fact that Really is the problem of paper, because if you're like me, I was sold 2 things. One was, we are going digital, so don't worry about paper, we're digitizing it. That never happened. And then the other message that I heard over and over again was, you should only touch your paper once. And that actually made it worse for me, because then when I did touch my paper, which I wasn't even supposed to have, I couldn't touch it once. Like, sometimes I needed to touch it more than once, which is why I had to come up with a totally different system. Now, it is a fact that we have a lot of paper, even if we have tried to convince ourselves that we don't. Maybe these statistics will make you feel more grounded and feel like, okay, I always thought I had paper, but it's not just me, it really is everyone else. 95% of all the information that is still processed in paper form— that is amazing to me. And it says 25% of people save things in piles rather than files. I think that statistic is way low, like I, I pile everything. Like, as soon as I put it away, if it's not put away correctly, I'm not going to go back and fix it, right? And you may resonate with this as well. 80% of what you keep, you never use. In that book, The Paper Solution, I talk about how 85% of what's in your filing cabinet could just be shredded or recycled, and that when we keep only what we need to keep and we know where our paper is and it is usable for us, it becomes less overwhelming. So again, I want you to participate in the chat. Do you feel frazzled, like you're pulled in all directions, like just in general in life, not just because of the pandemic, but just— I mean, there are a million things to do, right? You go to bed and you feel like, oh my gosh, I just added more things to my to-do list than I had at the beginning of the day. Like, when am I going to get on top of this? I've had days before where I take days off work, or back when the kids went to school, the kids would go to school and be like, this is it, I'm gonna spend this entire day on the house and I'm gonna get on top of this. And I was never able to be successful, no matter how much time I had, sent the kids to camp, whatever I did. I just felt like I was never getting on top of my to-dos. And some of the things that end up being side effects of living this to-do list-oriented life and never feeling like you've checked off enough and you're always adding on more than you're checking off is, frankly, in 2001, when I created the Sunday basket for myself, we had plenty of money coming in. And I was paying my bills late just because I didn't have a system for paying bills and I couldn't find them. I would spend so much time, wasted time, looking for documents that I knew we had, but I didn't know which file they were in or which binder or where I had left them last. Having to have birth certificates reproduced because I couldn't remember where I was saving birth certificates, and on and on and on. I'm sure you've had at least one experience like this before. So all the way back in 2001, and that's, I mean, you guys, that's almost 20 years ago. I had a 6-month-old baby and a 2-year-old baby. And one night on a Sunday night, my husband and both kids had gone to bed at 8 o'clock at night, and I laid out on my family room floor all of the actionable things I had stacked in this pile of paper at the end of my kitchen counter. I had everything in there from bills to pay, adoption paperwork to file, things to do for my home-based business. business, repairs that needed to be made in our house, just so many things that needed to be done. And I divided them into piles similar to what you see here, and it ended up being 40 different actionable piles. And I felt great. Now it was like 11 o'clock at night. I felt great because now I at least had my to-dos in front of me and I could see how much work I had to do. And I had divided them into these different categories of like, these are people I need to call, these are bills I need to pay, these are things I need to mail, these are things I need to return, these are You know, like I had them all in like to-do actionable piles, but it was 11 o'clock at night. Now I was tired. The next morning my husband was going to work. I had these 2 babies. How was I going to go from this unsorted pile of paper at the end of my kitchen counter to actually getting something done? And at that time I had— personally, I had these things. If you look up in the little circle where I am, I had these things called slash pockets because they're binder inserts. I was a teacher, and so I had a lot of organizing supplies, and I took every single pile and I put it in its own little plastic slash pocket. And I grabbed a basket I had around the house and I put the slash pockets in the basket. I put it on the kitchen counter and I went to bed. The next day when I got up and my kids had taken a nap, and Joey only took a 20-minute nap, I grabbed one of those slash pockets. I ran through all the calls I had to make. The slash pocket was done and he woke up and I was like, Praise God, this is going to work. Like, I know I'm probably 6 weeks behind getting caught up on all these actionable to-dos, but now I have a plan. In the past, when I would have gotten that time from a nap, Joey would have woken up and I would have just figured out that I needed to make phone calls, and then he'd be awake and I couldn't make the phone calls. I wasn't making any traction. That is the system that I want to teach you today. But before we get started, I would love for you to categorize for me So I can see in the chat, do you feel you're an organized person or an unorganized person or you're somewhere in the middle? I'd love to see if my— what my guess is, is true. OK, I love that answer. Used to be organized. OK, not at home. I like that one as well. And I'll tell you why. Somewhat organized in the middle. What I determined as an in-home professional organizer in 2011, 2012, 2013 Was I am a born organized person. Like, I've just always been an organized person at different times. Like, 2001, I was disorganized and I created the Sunday Basket. In 2011, my life was falling apart, I created Organized 365. And what I determined in working with people in their homes is that organization is a learnable skill. Like, you're not born with it. You're not born organized or unorganized. Everyone is born, and then you learn. You learn to talk, you learn to walk, you learn to be organized. It's just like anything else. And as soon as I realized that, about 2013, 2014, I was like, oh, game on. I'm a teacher. If this is something that can be taught, then I'll figure out the curriculum and I will teach people how to get organized. But there was another thing that I noticed as I was helping people get organized along the way. And what I noticed was, if you get organized in one phase of life, like you're an organized child, you may not be organized in your 20s and 30s when you have children of your own, or you go out and you start working full-time, or you start traveling the world, or whatever you do in your 20s. Yeah. and 30s. And if you can get a system in place in your 20s and 30s, it all becomes unwound as soon as you turn 40 and you enter your 40s and 50s. And I was like, well, if organization is learnable and you learn it, why are people unlearning it? Like, how do you get unlearned in organizing? That doesn't make any sense. Like, I haven't stopped learning how to talk. And what I determined was every 20 years, the organization that you need for those phases of life is different. Like, so as a child, you need to organize your school and your bedroom. As a 20 and 30-year-old person, you need to organize your life outside of your home of origin and organize all the things that are being accumulated. As you move into your 40s and 50s, you're usually in your prime earning years, you're in your car a lot, you're traveling, you're just not home very much. So any home organization that used to work for you doesn't work when you're not home very much in order to do all those systems. And the Sunday basket is the one thing I kept going back to that would reorient me and get me organized as I went forward again. So you are not alone. Like 43% of Americans categorize themselves as unorganized. And there's a study that says 80% of the clutter in our homes is just a result of disorganization, not a lack of space. And we find this time and time again in the 100-Day Program. Most people who go through the 100-Day Program find out that their house really isn't too small for them. They just weren't using the space properly. And there were a lot of things that they could declutter. And we know that disorganization impacts your health and well-being, even more so in the pandemic when you're at home. Even like, I work from home, so I was like, how is this really changing my life? I've always worked from home. Yes, but I didn't have everybody home with me all day, every day while I was working from home. That's the difference. It's the quantity of people in your house. Or similarly, like, my sister has always worked from home for us and organized 365, but The pandemic has made that even more lonely because after work she doesn't go out, and some of the ways where she got socialization before the pandemic started aren't there. So your home environment really does impact your health and your well-being. I already talked about organization being a learnable skill. So let's get into how do we get organized? How do we learn this skill? There's one more myth I really want to bust for you before I explain how the Sunday basket works. And this is the idea that you cannot buy time. Like, I've heard this so much, I even quoted it myself in my own podcast for the first couple of years. Like, you can't buy time. Time is the only thing that is limited that we don't have enough of. And I found this to actually not be true. I found that we actually can buy time. And the way that you buy time is by planning. And for every minute that you spend planning, you get 3 to 4 more back. Oops, sorry, sorry, sorry. You get 3 to 4 minutes back in execution. Let me explain this so you believe me. Have you ever, before you go to bed, picked out what you're going to look at the weather and pick out what you're going to wear the next day? That takes what, 2, maybe 3 minutes? The next morning when you get up and you take your shower and you get out of the shower and then you see your clothing there. Don't you think that saves you somewhere between 6 and 8 minutes? Just put on the clothes and keep going. Like, it totally does. You don't have to check the weather. You don't have to think about where you're going. You don't have to think of— you just get dressed. Similarly, if you make yourself a list before you go to bed— hey, these are the 3 calls I need to make tomorrow, I need to do a load of laundry, and I need to thaw the turkey— you get up the next morning, you get dressed, you look at that list, you go, great, I'm gonna go start a load of laundry, I'm gonna move the turkey in the refrigerator. Like, you just do. You don't have to think, you just do. And that planning really does add a lot of time for us. The other one that I have found to be true, and I could not believe this was true, but now people are like, oh yeah, it's true for me too. You tell me if it's true for you. The average American spends a total of 55 minutes a day looking for things. Looking for things. And I thought, there's, there's no way. I don't spend an hour a day looking for things. You don't think you do because, I mean, it's just part of your everyday. Where did I put my glasses? Okay, there are my glasses. Oh, where are the car keys? Okay. Where did I leave my coffee? That's the thing. I'm still like, where did I set my coffee down? You go, you start looking, and all those little 2 minutes here, 3 minutes here really add up. When I finally got my home organized, I had gotten $500 cash out of the bank and it was still in the bank envelope, and I set it down inside of a laundry basket, but I didn't remember setting it down inside of a laundry basket. And I tore my house apart top to bottom for hours. It still was a week later when I finally found that, that envelope of money. And at the end of the 2 hours, when I still could not find that envelope of money, I thought to myself, oh my gosh, I don't look for things anymore. I could all of a sudden realize that I don't spend this time looking for things. Turned out that, you know how you can nest baskets inside of one laundry basket on top of the other on top of the other. When I did laundry the next time and took the laundry basket off of the stack, there was that envelope of money under it. Unbelievable. I realized that I had stopped looking for things, and it's freeing when you stop looking for things and you have more time in your day. You know, you have more time of— you have time to think. So that's what I want to teach you. I want to teach you how do you get more time in your day so you can think. And yes, this Sunday Basket System definitely is going to take you 1 to 3 hours on Sunday, but the bottom line is You're already doing this anyway. You're already getting the mail, you're already making to-do lists, you're already making the calls, you're already doing all of the things that are inside of the Sunday basket. You're just doing them as you remember them, as they become urgent, as they become missed. You don't have a plan for the things I'm going to teach you. And your time and money are intertwined. Organization will always save you money because it will give you time. And once I realized that, I was like, okay, I'll invest the time. in organization, because then I can use the time to save us money or get us money in the future. So we're going to get started by getting organized with your paper, because like I said, paper is more insidious than we think. And the reason I start with this is because if I said to you, okay, I am going to take away all your roles and responsibilities tomorrow, and I'm going to give you a full, you know, 12-hour day with optimal energy, like you're not going to run out of energy at 2 o'clock. Do you think you can get caught up on all of the things that are coming at you? And the answer is maybe. Maybe you could get part of the way finished. But what I feel, especially as the female head of the household who is a wife, a mother, in charge of the household, in charge of our company, in charge of the dog, in charge of the everything, is that I start my day with a plan. Do you start your day with a plan? Like, do you have a list of like, okay, these are the things I'm going to get done tomorrow? The problem is not having a plan. We We all have a plan, even if it's just mental and not written down. The problem is, as soon as anyone that you know realizes that you're breathing and you're awake, they add things to your list. You get a ding of a text message, you checked Instagram, there's some DMs there, there's email in your email inbox, the phone rings, the front doorbell rings. Like, there's just this never-ending onslaught of other people's objectives that come to us. And that's the problem. That right there is the problem. And when you realize that that is the problem, not the paper pile, not the to-do list, this right here is going to be mind-blowing for you. You have a plan of how your day is going to run and everybody else derails your plan. And here's how they derail your plan. They send you a text message and ask you if you want to go to lunch next Wednesday. You're like, okay, well, they texted me, so I need to give them an answer. So you stop and you check your calendar. Okay, yes, I am available Wednesday, or I'm not. So if it's yes, then you schedule. If it's not, like, no, but I could do Friday. Don't you know we're in a pandemic? We're not supposed to go out to lunch. You know, you're doing all these things. By the time you're done with that text message and everything you just did there to reply to that text message, how much time do you think you just lost? 5, 10 minutes? It's not the 5 or 10 minutes. What were you supposed to be doing with that time? Changing laundry, starting dinner, getting to work. Now you're done with all that. Now you're late for work. So you didn't start the laundry and now the laundry is off for the entire week. That is what happens if you have children like this was so evident to me when kids were little, or if your kids are schooling from home with you and they come in and kids always pretend like they are urgent and important. I need new batteries in this toy right now. I'm like, no, you really don't. Look around you. We live in Disneyland. You can pick something else to play. But I would stop what I was doing. I would change the batteries. I would give the toy back to the child who then would proceed to play with something else and not the thing I changed the batteries in. Again, what happened? I stopped doing whatever I was doing. And we're reacting, we're reacting to our world all of the time. We need to have in place— how do we change the batteries in the toy, reply to the friend with the DM without derailing our entire day? That is the Sunday basket in a nutshell. The to-dos, the mail, the tasks, they're streaming in. And you need a way to stop this flood. You need a levee that will hold this water back so you can catch your breath, make a plan, and get it done. This little box, this little box is your levee. This is all you need. Like, this is as big as it needs to be, and it works miracles. It works so many miracles for you. It is not going to end. I am not eliminating your paper. I am not stopping the mail from coming in. I am not stopping your roles and responsibilities. I am just holding it back so that you can get a handle on getting it done. So the first week that you do this, it's going to feel very weird because you are used to responding and reacting to everyone around you, and they are used to you responding and reacting to everyone around you. And you are going to have to learn how do you decide what is urgent and important, and how do you delay as much as possible to Sunday. And then on Sunday, You will respond to and you will delegate, do, and delete everything and plan your week. By making a once-a-week task where you go through all of the actionables that just came at you, you make better decisions for your time, better decisions for your energy, better decisions for your money. You delete more because you see how much is on your plate and you don't try to fit 10 more things in. You're like, you know what, none of those fit. I'm not doing any of them. And you delegate more. You're like, okay, that's great. I can school from home and work and clean the house and feed us. I can't do all of these things. So which one would the family and I like to have? Would you like me to not feed you? Would you like me not to clean the house? Would you like me not help with schoolwork? Would you like me not to have a paying position? And that's real, you guys. This totally— how many women have stepped out of the workforce in 2020 because they are needed to school their kids from home? I mean, there are article after article after article about it because we only can do so many things. We cannot do everything. So let me show you exactly how the Sunday Basket system works. This is the Sunday Basket. It is a box. It comes in 10 different colors. You pick whatever color you want. And if you look up in the little picture, you'll see, see how it's divided. See how these slash pockets are being held up and there's this like Holding place here. There's a divider in this box. It's not just an open box. It has a divider in it. And on this side, you're putting all your mails and your actual to-dos. And on this side, we're holding up some slash pockets that I'll talk about in a minute. So, okay, Lisa, this is an expensive system to do your mail, and I pay all my bills online. Like, I don't even have mail to do, so I don't understand why I would even need this system. I agree. This is not a system just for mail. Here are the things that I have inside of this basket. Okay. I am a gumaholic, and when I run out of gum, I'm not very happy about it. And I order it from Amazon, so I usually have enough to make it to Sunday. But I want to remember on Sunday I need to order gum. This is not urgent or important, so I will take my gum container and I will put it in the Sunday basket, which just reminds me on Sunday that I need to buy more gum. Everyone in our family has Subscriptions and they have vitamins, and it takes me a while to fill all of those. And I used to do them hit or miss. Now I only do it on Sundays. So when you have an empty pill container, you put it inside of my Sunday basket. I fill pill containers, I order pills on Sunday, and I do anything pill related. And I get enough prescriptions that I can now fill 3 weeks at a time so I can stay on top of it. This is a great one. Like, I just today got a wedding invitation. I opened it up and I thought, oh, how fun, a wedding. And actually, this is the one I just got, and it actually says, I'm sorry we invited you to our wedding, but because of COVID we can't have you anymore. Well, I'm still sending a gift, right? So this goes in my Sunday basket. I don't have to send a gift today. I mean, you could write a check and send it anytime. This goes in my Sunday basket. Just because I opened it on Friday doesn't mean I have to buy the gift on Friday. On Sunday, I will mail out that gift. Um, When my kids were away at college, I would buy little treats when I was out during the week, and then I would package them up and I would send them away on Sunday. So here's the little envelope for that. And on and on and on. So it is not just your mail, it is all of the actionable to-dos that come into your house. This is your inbox. This is your centralized location for everything that does not have to be done right now, but You don't want to forget to do it. And so a way that I found for this to work really well is I use index cards. I mean, I have a bazillion index cards. They're all over my house. And whenever I have any thought whatsoever, if it doesn't have to be done before Sunday, I write it down on an index card and I throw it into my Sunday basket. And then I go through those on Sunday as well. The Sunday basket creates a physical representation of your inbox. It gives a place for you to put all of those notes. Right now you probably have notes about like, oh my, you know, this person wants this for the holidays, I need to buy this for Thanksgiving, I need to return this thing, I need to make sure that that order— I have to track that order. You have all these ideas running through your head. If you can get them out onto paper, even just written down on index cards and in a Sunday basket, a centralized location, it gives those tasks a place to live that is not your brain. We spend so much time using our fabulous brains that are God-given and so creative and can literally create vaccines for a pandemic as to-do lists to remember to get milk at the store. Like, do you see how you can't do both of those things with your brain? And until you get all of these actionable to-dos off of your brain, Your brain can't come up with the unique thing it was created to do and, and change the world. And you may say, that's why I have to-do lists, but to-do lists don't work. And the reason why to-do lists don't work is because your brain knows you're not going to get all that done. You're not going to get all those to-dos done. And I'll be honest with you, you're not going to get everything on Sunday done either. So you need to have a way for those— some of those actionable to-dos, like where you want to travel when the pandemic is over. saved for the future. So we're gonna give that— give you ideas for that here in a minute. Alright, so you may be saying, why Sunday and why a basket? Like, why did you come up with those things? Well, the reason why I do Sunday is because Sunday is the day— like right now I'm talking to you, they're downstairs, my family's downstairs watching football, eating, doing whatever they do. They don't need me right now. So this is the best time in my life after you know, Sunday lunch and before Sunday dinner, that's a perfect time for me to go through everything that's come in this week and plan my week. I just— I've always, as a child, loved to plan on Sundays. You don't have to choose Sunday. You could do it Monday afternoon or Thursday night or Saturday morning or whenever you want to. You just have to have the same exact day every week because then your brain will trust that you will actually get the things done. And why a basket? You need a basket because you don't just have papers on the end of your kitchen counter like I had. You have things that need to be returned, books that have to go back to the library, pill containers that need to be refilled. So it's more than just mail, it's actually items too that will fit inside of that Sunday basket. Now I kind of touched on this already about what Sunday Basket 101 is. It is slash pockets. So these are slash pockets that we manufacture here at Organize 365. You may have seen these at an office supply store. They're just Binder inserts and they have rainbow colors. We have a specific designation for each color. What you probably have not— well, I know you have not seen it at the store— are where they're all the same color. See how these are all the same color? And we have these that are pink, purple, blue, and green. And as a home organization professional, I have figured out that in addition to tasks you do every single week, which the rainbow ones we do every single week, There are 4 other categories of projects and to-dos and ideas that you have that we sort out into these 4 colors. The reason why I love slash pockets— and here's one that is full— I love them because they're opaque, so you can kind of see through what is inside of them. I love that they are sealed on 3 sides because that way you can add in little index cards and things like that, and they're not going to fall out like they would in a file folder. I like to be able to see through my things, and then we have manufactured our own colors so we could teach you more organizational systems using the same product. Now I will give you one caveat: don't go finding all your paper like out of your filing cabinet and put it in your Sunday basket. Your Sunday basket is only for active paper. So I want to explain the difference between an active project and an archive project. So an active paper or an active project is a to-do list item, an ongoing project like anything related to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's— that's all active right now. Any regular maintenance task like regular bill paying, regularly monthly tasks, anything that you will do in your house, that goes in your Sunday basket. And an idea— and this is the game changer— most people don't start the Sunday basket Because it's a way to organize ideas. But after 6 weeks, it is the thing that makes the Sunday basket better than any other system because it harnesses all of the ideas that you have that just makes your life better. So then, what is an archive paper? An archive paper is a paper you do need, so it's not the 85% you should get rid of. It's like birth certificates, wills, 401s, anything related to your vehicle. You don't need this actionable paper. But if you were to get in a car accident, then you grab the insurance and the information on your vehicle. If you were going to go get a passport, you would need to have your birth certificate. This is paper that you would go and find, like you would go retrieve out of a binder and use and put back in that binder. It's like an archive system, but it's not needed on a day-to-day basis, and it's not part of an ongoing project. So that's the 2 things. Binders are to replace your filing cabinet. They are your reference. Binders. The Sunday basket is for everything that is active and in use. So let's take a break right here. I'm going to ask, are there any specific questions you already have? I'll kind of scan the chat. And then I'm going to walk you through again— I've kind of done it, but I'm going to walk you through again— how would we start doing the Sunday basket system? I'm just going to wait one second and see if there are any questions that pop into the chat. Okay. The first thing that you're going to do— okay, binders are in the all-paper, the paper solution. I talked about binders in here, how to create the binders and what to do with binders. We also have them in our shop. So what I do with them is I store them right here, right in my office, and I used to keep them in my kitchen. This is like Our entire financial life in one binder. So whenever I think I need anything financial, I just come get it off of this bookshelf and then I put it back. So you could store them anywhere. You don't have to store them wherever you had your filing cabinet. OK, so we're going to get started. The first thing that I want you to do is to go on a scavenger hunt. You're going to want to grab a basket. I suggest a laundry basket. And actually, if you fill 2 laundry baskets, You are doing this correctly. A+ for you. You're not going to start with a cute little basket like this when you get started. I want you to go in your purse, in the car, your nightstand by the bed, in the laundry room, on any flat surface in the garage, walking into your house, in the kitchen, on the dining room table. No, I'm not seeing inside of your house. This is what my house looked like. We have Papers everywhere. Like Suzanne saying, what about articles and future project directions? Yep. Anything actionable does not mean you're going to take action in the next 6 weeks on it. It means that in the next 2 years you want to take action on it. Put it all in there. Like I have stuff in here for— I want to do photos in January and February. I have those in my Sunday basket. Let me look. Oh, I have all these dating ideas that we can't do now. We're going to go to Italy. Can't do that now. But it's all still in my Sunday basket because it's all actionable. For sure, anything that you have for Thanksgiving, anything you have for the holidays coming up, receipts of things you've bought in case they need to be returned, lists of things that you're buying for people, food that you want to prepare, cookie dough stuff, all of it, all of it goes into one basket. Um, and the ideas is huge, you guys. If you have school-age kids, you buy So many index cards, right? And they don't always use all the index cards. So you take the index cards—they're super cheap—and just write down. Just sit there with a cup of coffee and say, "Oh yeah, that's right. We need to get new Christmas lights, and I need to get my hair colored, and we need new carpet in the family room, and the dog needs his filantic medicine." Just write it all down. Get it all out of your head—all of the ideas—and put them in the laundry basket. This is your one. Central location for all of the ideas. The first time you do the Sunday basket, it's not going to take an hour, it's going to take a while. Give yourself 6 weeks from now until January 1st to really get this up and running. And with the holidays in there, give yourself till February 1st. There is no organization police. I'm not coming to check to see you get this done in time. This is a habit that takes about 6 weeks to work. This will eliminate from here forward this, did I remember to do this? What was that thing I was going to do? Because you will literally, if you're like me, you will start walking around with index cards everywhere. I don't— like, I'm giving this presentation to you guys, I don't have any actionable to-dos in my brain because I don't allow my brain to do that anymore. My brain is just here for conversation, connection, big thoughts. If I have an actionable thought, Every single one gets written down. And then once they're written down, you can eliminate them, you can systematize them, and you can get a lot of time back. Here's the one rule I want you to have going forward. If it can go in the Sunday basket, it must go in the Sunday basket. And this is the biggest shift in your thought, because here's what you're going to want to do. You're going to start the Sunday basket and then you're gonna have an extra hour on Wednesday and you're gonna say, oh, I've got an extra hour, so you know what I'll do? I am going to— Go back to your old habits. No, I want you to train yourself. If it can wait until Sunday, it must wait until Sunday. You're training yourself and you're training your family members. If the batteries don't have to be replaced immediately, like if you have a 2-year-old with temper tantrum, replace batteries. If you don't, put it in the Sunday basket. I will tell you, families learn really fast to put things in Sunday baskets so they get acted on on Sunday. Kids also are really funny. They will put things in your Sunday basket like, buy me chocolate chip cookies, go on a walk with me. Like, they, they figure it out super fast. If it can wait until Sunday, put it on Sunday. One, because you will make better decisions when you look at all of the demands on your time. As things come in individually, you decide if you can do them based on the energy level and the money that you have in your bank account that day. If you wait until Sunday, you will start to make week-long decisions on your energy level and the money you have in your bank account for the week. You start to delay decision-making and you start to make better decisions. But the second reason why it must wait until Sunday is because this simple little system is going to gift you 5 hours every single week, Monday through Friday, in your day. And I do not want you using this brand new gifted time to go back into reactive mode and doing all the things the way you used to do them. So if it takes 90 minutes to do the Sunday basket on Sunday, once you've been doing it a while, and you get the gift of an extra hour Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, what are you going to use that hour for? I want you to think about what you're going to use that hour for instead of just adding more to-do list items onto your to-do list. Now, if it's a to-do list item like I really want to repaint the laundry room, or I want to create a better laundry system, or I want to go through all my kids' clothes, that's a project. Great, use the time for a project, but don't use it to just try to get ahead on your to-do list or you'll fall back into that old trap. Okay, so Barbara's saying, what do you decide— how do you decide what and when these things get done? Of course, not all of them can get done on Sunday. What I find is 90% can get done on Sunday. They really can. Like, other than a few places that you have to call on Monday morning, pretty much you can order everything online. You can— we create an errand folder. And then you pick an errand day. So anything that has to be done out of the house, like returning things, returning library books, dropping off dry cleaning, that becomes your errand day. So you end up doing phone calls on Monday, errands on whatever your errand day is, and almost everything else in your Sunday basket can be done Sunday afternoon. And once you try to do it, you'll find out you can do it. The other thing is you'll stop doing so much housework and so much stuff around the house because you'll flat out run out of energy. And the item has to wait until next Sunday to be done. And once you start listening to the Organized 365 podcast and I help you change your mindset on this, you'll realize that some of the things that you're doing around the house don't even need to be done. They can be done less frequently. And nobody in the house really notices you're doing them, and you don't even remember why you started to do them in the beginning, and they don't really bring you joy either. And so you stop doing them. Okay, great. So the weekly sort, I kind of started going with you a minute ago when I showed you all of the things that are in my Sunday basket. You pull out the mail, you open it all. I just— if you go on Instagram, I just did a little quick how I was opening my mail here. Throw away everything that you can and recycle. I do all my bill pay at once. I do all my pills, and then I do all of my— make my errand list. All of those things are going to be done. You go through this whole process of sorting out your mail and going through this Sunday basket routine. When you purchase the Sunday basket, you will get a box in the color of your choice. You will get a set of these rainbow slash pockets. And then you also get all 4 of these slash pockets. So that's the physical stuff that we mail to your house. But you also get on-demand training of videos that walk you through step by step this process. Like, you can literally pause the video and go through what are the things I do every week, what are the things that I do with my projects, and a bunch of printables that we give you, you know, if you like to fill out little forms and things like that. But what's really awesome is recently we added in a virtual coworking time. So every Sunday, it'll start here in a couple of hours. There are professional organizers that come into a Facebook group that you'll get access to, and you literally have a 90-minute coworking time with them to help you go through and get your Sunday basket done. And then we also have 120 certified organizers in the United States and Canada that offer virtual Sunday basket classes where they can either do it one-on-one with you and walk through your Sunday basket after you've done it a couple weeks and you have some some specific questions, or they can just do it inside of a small group. There's a little bit of a fee for that. So what are these things that we're going to do every week? What are these rainbow slash pockets that I talk about? These 1.0— the reason they're called 1.0 is because I had to order a large quantity. So these were the first ones I could afford. So I labeled them 1.0. And these are the ones that we do every single week. So where are mine? I keep dropping mine. So we have a slash pocket for this week, anything we know that has to be done this week. So it's Thanksgiving, so anything related to Thanksgiving is going to have to be done this week. Then the orange tab is for anything computer or calendar related. This is where you go through your calendar online or in a planner, see what you did last week, do any follow-up that needs to be done, plan what you need for next week. This is really important when you go through your kids' schedules as well. So anything that can be done on the computer. Like ordering from Amazon or anything calendar related. Then the errand day, like I told you about, you're going to plan out all the things you need to do on your errands. You're going to do them all on one day after work, before work, get up early, take 2 hours off of work, however you want to do it for your errand day. The green one is money. That's the one that takes me the longest, where I plan out our money for the week, get money out of the bank, reconcile our checkbook, go through all those things. And then blue has a couple of different designations. Most people use that as a waiting for folder. So right now, waiting for would be a lot of the items that you're waiting for the holidays for that you have placed online orders for. Where do I listen to the podcast? Literally, the Organized 365 podcast is available anywhere you could find podcasts. We're on Stitcher, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Google Play. I think we're even on Pandora. Like, we're literally anywhere. Search in Organized 365, you will find it. Okay, so that is like every week you go through your mail, you go through those basic things. That is a— if that is all the time you have, that will keep you on top of your actionable to-dos you're doing right now. The 2.0 version of the Sunday Basket, you may want to wait a while to start. And this is where you really start to get traction with that extra time that you're going to get during the week by doing all these activities on Sunday. And each of these colors Have a different designation. So purple slash pockets are for household-related things, blue slash pockets are for your family-related things, green are for any additional money that you want to divide out, and pink are for you personally. So if I was going to go through the purple slash pockets, most people would say in their purple slash pockets, like, here are things that I need to add into my binders. Maybe another section is household improvements that you want to make. Another section— I'm trying to look at mine here. Um, household improvements that you want to make, cleaning checklists. If you're doing the 100-day home organization program, anything that's related to your house— think about your house like it's a child. What does this child need? It needs to be cleaned, it needs to be cared for, it needs to be maintained. Anything related to that would go into a purple/pocket. If you're going to move That would be a slash pocket. The green slash pockets are for any financial related things. So like we have a couple of LLCs and we have a 401 and we do charitable giving. And so all of those have different slash pockets. So it's a way to keep your money organized throughout the year as you go through. Blue is for your family. So I mentioned I do not have a slash pocket for my husband, although when I started I did. And I did that for a couple of years because we were so far behind on being on the same page on things like I had just totally taken over the house and the kids because we were drowning and I was making all the decisions on my own. And so I created a slash pocket for Greg and I would put any questions on there. And then Saturday morning I would grab that slash pocket and we would grab coffee and we'd just sit on the back patio and I'd say, okay, do we want to send the kids to private school? Like, do we want to switch to whole wheat bread? Like whatever ideas I'd been thinking about during the week, we started to have— started to come together and make more of those decisions together. Each of my kids have a slash pocket. So you know how you have information at the beginning of the school year, or they're in a Brownie troop, or they have their friend's number? Any of that kind of stuff that's actionable goes in their slash pocket. I've had a slash pocket before when I was the power of healthcare and power of attorney for my father. I had a slash pocket for him while I was trying to keep up with that. And then when he passed away, I created a whole nother Sunday basket for his estate. date that I used for a year. So it could be family members where you are the caregiver for them. And also in these family slash pockets, this is also where I will label like our annual trip to the beach in the summer. I might use one of these for Christmas. So it could be family-related activities, a reunion, things like that could go in blue as well. Now, this is something that even I hadn't thought about when I created the system. I was like, well, I want a color for me. And then 2 years ago, you know, 5,000 packages of these arrived in my garage, and I was like, okay, I've got my Sunday basket. I've been doing it for like 17 years. I'm a Sunday basket pro. I created the system. And I have it all done, and I figured out the pink and the purple— the purple and the blue and the green and the 1.0s. And then I opened up my first package of pink slash pockets, and I had no idea what to do. And I was like, what in the world do you put in your slash pockets? And that is when I realized this system grows with you and is so impactful for the life that you want to live, not the reactive life that you are currently living. Not that your life is bad. My life was great. Like, my life has always been really good, but I wasn't putting the same effort into my personal development, my growth, my hopes and my dreams as I was into my spouse, my kids and my house and my business and everybody else I knew. Like, I knew what their hopes and dreams were, and I was actively working to make those happen, but I was not doing the same for me. And any finances or time that came into our family, I immediately deflected right off of me and over to the kids and my husband. And I started Organized 365 when I turned 40, 9 years ago. And now that I am approaching 50, I realized that my kids are in college. They've taken everything. Like, it's my time. It's my time. And what do I want to do? Like, What do I want? Like, what is my style? I didn't even know. And so this started— like, I started a clothing one, and that's when I found out I like White House Black Market clothes. And for years, that was all I bought because I didn't know how to shop in other stores. And what are my hobbies? I started doing puzzles again. I went and rode a horse a couple of weeks ago. I was like, oh, I think I would like to do horseback riding lessons. Like, we— take so much of our time and we give it to others, but we don't pour back into ourselves. And now that I'm approaching 50, I realize that, yeah, we wake up, we wake up in midlife and we go, who am I? What do I like? We, we've totally forgotten. So the pink slash pockets will probably be the hardest for you to fill out, the hardest for you to label, but they're the most important for your long-term happiness. Like, do you like to knit? Then put all of your knitting ideas in there. Like, I had one that was labeled puzzles for a while, and I just kept puzzle catalogs or things to read, places to visit, dates to go on. Those are the things that I have those labeled with now. So I already mentioned to you that you are going to save time. We actually were in the middle of a time study with over 100 participants when COVID sent everyone home and totally ruined my test results. Because we know you save 5 hours a week doing the Sunday basket, but because the pandemic happened and everybody got sent home literally in the middle of that 6-week cycle, it totally ruined our survey. So we'll have to redo that after the pandemic. But what I really want you to think about that most— this is a great system. It works. I'm a teacher. I was a Montessori teacher. My kids went to Catholic school. I've been a public school teacher, like This works for people who have ADHD. This works for people who are 20, for people who are 80. It works if you're a visual learner, if any kind of learner you are— kinesthetic, audio— like all of the different modalities are in the Sunday Basket. It 100% works. That doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. You can watch this webinar and go make something on your own that is going to help you get more time in your day. But my question to you is, when you get this time that you get from planning, because planning always gives you time, What are you going to do with that time? What is it that you want to do? What are your pink slash pockets? What do you want to have more time to do? And Organize 365's mission is to help you get organized with functional systems in one calendar year so that you can go out and do what you're uniquely created to do. And I think that's one thing that all of us have been thinking about in 2020. What is it That we are uniquely created to do inside of our family, inside of our home, personally, professionally? What is the thing that you want to go out there and do and change the world? We've had so many people in the Organized 365 community write books, start charities, start businesses with their children, start their own businesses. Like, it is so fun to watch and see what people do when they have the time and freedom to do different things. So the, or the Sunday basket is always step one in getting organized for me. I used to start by having you go into our 100-Day Home Organization program, which helps you get your home organized in 100 days, and it's a never-ending lifetime value proposition. So you can go through it over and over and over again. But what I found was people be all excited and they'd be ready to get their home organized. And they'd get to week 2 and they would fall off. And I was like, why are they falling off? And it was because they didn't have a levy in place to hold back all of those actionable to-dos. And even though they had designated that 5 hours a week to get organized, it all got eaten up by reactive living and all the things that came flooding at them. And so then I realized you— it works best if you have the Sunday basket first, and then you have the time to go ahead and organize the rest of your life. I already mentioned this. The Sunday Basket Club is our virtual coworking space every Sunday that will help you hold you accountable for getting your Sunday basket done. I mentioned this a couple of times. I want you to figure out what do you want to do with your time that you're going to have from the Sunday basket. And the last thing I want to say is that we here at Organize 365 believe in giving you grace. It took me a long time to give myself grace. And once I finally did, it was the— it was so freeing. We are so hard on ourselves. We expect perfection of ourselves. We do not stop because the kitchen isn't good enough. The house isn't clean enough. The to-do list isn't done. And so because it's not done, even if we do take an hour and scroll Instagram, we feel guilty about it. I don't want you to feel that way. Like, our homes are a place that we live. It's not a museum that we are trying to create for someone to look back in the future and say, oh, that is the perfect house. First of all, no one's coming in our houses at all anymore. But even when they did, no one's judging you. They're just happy to spend time with you. So instead of being a perfectionist, I would love for you to claim being a person of excellence. And excellence does not have an end perfectionistic Um, you could be excellent and not a perfectionist. There is no such thing as perfect. You're never going to get your house to a perfect status. So we need to learn to come to grips with the fact that we are in progress. And we don't want to stop having a to-do list because you know how boring that would be if we didn't have any more ideas or things or passions that we wanted to pursue. We want to be multifaceted, but we need a system that will work with us As we work through our lives of excellence and keep going through that progress without that unrealistic expectation of perfection or the judgment that we don't allow here in Organize 365 because we give you grace. So the way you get started is you go to organize365.com/shop, or if you're on the Organize 365 page, there's a place to go to Sunday Basket. You can look in there. You can also go to sundaybasket.com. That's how you get the system. The system is mailed out to you, physically mailed to you. If you are international— I know we have a couple of international people— there is a way to get shipped internationally. You need to find a shipment forwarding service. It's ridiculously expensive to ship international right now. There's nothing I can do about it. I really don't like it, but there is a physical component. And then there's an online dashboard where you can get that on-demand training that'll be unlocked Immediately, and then you'll get added into the Sunday Basket Club Facebook group within a couple of days so you can start attending the Sunday Basket. And just to review, what comes in the Complete Sunday Basket System is the 1.0 slash pockets, the 2.0 slash pockets, which are the 5 pink, 5 purple, 5 blue, 5 green, the dashboard training, the And the Sunday Basket Club. And here are all of our fun colors. We, we added 4 more colors last month, so there is a beautiful color there. Anything that you want that will match your kitchen or your office or wherever you like to keep your Sunday basket. I recommend keeping your Sunday basket in the kitchen, especially the first year that you're starting, because if it's in the kitchen, which is where you usually are, you will drop a lot more note cards in there. If you have to walk to your bedroom, walk to an office, walk to the dining room, You might hesitate to actually write it down and drop it in there. So that's where I consider doing that. I'm going to answer all of your questions here in a minute, but thank you so much for staying all the way to the end. You can get your free weekly printables. They should be in your email inbox. So even though I didn't mention it at the last webinar, everybody gets them anyway. The last part of the Sunday Basket system, after you go through all those slash pockets, is to actually plan out your week on paper on purpose. Even if you use a digital calendar, this idea of Thinking about your time in time blocks is something that will develop over time as you use the Sunday basket, as you start to think about your ideas as concrete things that are on little pieces of paper and your time as little blocks of time that can be moved around on your calendar. Productivity is a skill that comes from the act of being organized, and so there are things that you learn as you do a Sunday basket 6 months later, 9 months later, 12 months later, like Yeah, I'm, I'm still doing the Sunday basket every single Sunday, 19 years after I created it. All right, I would love to go through and answer any of the questions that you guys have. I'm gonna go ahead and stop the recording. If anybody— oh no. Oh good, I'm so great. I'm like, what just happened? Stop my PowerPoint. Told you I'm not great about the tech part. If you're watching the recording and you have a question or I don't ask answer your question right now, just email customerservice@organize365.com and Emily or Michelle or Pat, they will answer your question. Like, they love to like read through your whole story and, and answer any question that you have. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop the recording.