In this inaugural episode of the Organized 365 weekly book‑review series, Lisa Woodruff shares why Laura Vanderkam is her favorite author and how Vanderkam’s two books—168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) and I Know How She Does It (2015)—radically reshaped her perception of time and her business strategy. Woodruff walks through the simple arithmetic from 168 Hours that reveals roughly 62 discretionary hours per week after accounting for sleep and work, and she illustrates how that insight helped her recognize that many high‑earning professionals actually have far more free time than they believe. She then discusses I Know How She Does It, which profiles six‑figure‑earning women and shows that they still carve out quality self‑care by delegating household and child‑rearing tasks. Woodruff relates this to her own journey: moving from doing all her own housekeeping (as a former housekeeper) to outsourcing those chores, which freed her to scale Organized 365, launch a podcast, and step into the CEO role. The review highlights two core lessons: (1) your role defines how you allocate time, and (2) believing you deserve high‑quality self‑care is essential. Woodruff ends by inviting viewers to subscribe for more reviews.
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Welcome to our new Organized 365 weekly book review. Now this is the first video, this one will probably be a little bit longer. Actually, most of the videos in January will be a little bit longer than February and beyond because I'm going to share with you some of my favorite authors and also some of the authors that have most impacted who I am today and how I've grown Organized 365. So I'm starting out with favorite author number 1, which is Laura Vanderkam. So this is just a sampling of Laura's books. I have all of Laura's books on Audible, on Kindle. I'm a big Laura Vanderkam fan, and the reason why is because Laura is the one that opened my mind to how I see time. I see time differently, and every time I read one of her books, it helps me look at time even more differently. So the first book I ever read from Laura Vanderkam was this first one, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. It came out in 2010, and I probably read it in 2010. I usually get Laura's books as pre-order. Like I said, I'm a super fan. So when I read 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think— and I've turned so many people onto this book, and they have the same revelation as well— it is amazing how much time we have. Now, you may be watching this video and thinking I have no time. I had no time when I read that book, but after reading that book, it just changed the way I looked at all of my time. Now, here's how I looked at time before I read Laura's book. I looked at sleeping time, I looked at working time, I looked at at-home time, and I figured, you know, I didn't really even think about sleeping time at all. I definitely thought about school or work time, and then home time just seemed like, I don't know, a couple of hours. But after reading her book, I realized that if you take 168 hours and you subtract out 8 hours a night of sleeping, which I wasn't doing, that is 56 hours. It leaves you with 112 hours left. Already I knew if you took away working time, you were going to have a significant amount of time left. So I took away 50 hours for myself for work because while my work at that time was 40 hours a week, I had a commute. So it was 50 hours a week that I was spending working. Newsflash, that left 62 hours a week. I was like, 62 hours a week? Well, this explains why some people can legitimately have two jobs and still sleep. Like that's a lot of time. Sixty-two hours a week in addition to a full-time job and sleeping eight hours a night. Now, yes, you have to do self-care and you have to cook and do laundry. But sixty-two hours? If you divide that by seven, that's nine hours a day. Now, most of us are not working every single day, so you're going to divide that differently, which means on the weekends I started to realize I didn't just have five or six hours on the weekend. Without sleeping, I had 16 hours every Saturday. 16 hours every— that's a lot of time. What was I doing with the time and how was I using that time? So that first book really got me thinking about time differently. Then in 2015, I'd already started Organize 365. I'd been in business about 3 years. I was a professional organizer. I had consistent income. I was starting to hire people into our team. And she came out with a book, I Know How She Does It. And I Know How She Does It is time studies of women who make 6 figures or more and how they spend their time. And I was very intrigued with this book when it came out. I got it on preorder. So, all right, if you are these people who are working 6-figure jobs like lawyers, doctors, accountants, business owners, they're working at least 40 hours a week. So I know that based on the math from book number 1, They have about 62 hours that they're not working if they're working 50 hours a week, including commute time. And that's one of the things that Laura noticed, that people think that they're working 55, 60, 70-hour weeks, but the majority of people are really working like— I can't remember the exact statistic, but like 43 to 45 hours a week. They're not actually working 60, 70, 80-hour weeks. That's extremely rare. At the time when I was reading that book though, I have 2 cousins that are accountants and they were working at the big firms. And they were legitimately working 60, 65 hours a week. They did not have enough time to like do laundry. They had commute time in front of that. They were exhausted. Like, both of my cousins were so exhausted and literally had no personal time. And being able to see people who really legitimately did not have time to go to the grocery store or wash their own clothes because they were working so much showed me what a true 80-hour week looked like and made me realize that I was not doing that. Even though sometimes I would have said that I was, I definitely was not. One of the number one takeaway I took from I Know How She Does It was that all of these women still had time for self-care. And at that time, I was, you know, I was doing the self-care that I would say I'm doing today— hot baths, reading, doing a puzzle— but I felt so much guilt every time I did it. I didn't really enjoy it. And it was really low-quality self-care. It was like 30 minutes of a puzzle here, or, you know, 15 minutes to run out and get a fountain Coke or whatever it was that I wanted. Like, I was getting really cheap, low-level self-care. And these women seemed to have really good routines for self-care. Like, they were working high-power jobs and they had family and they were getting like a run-in a couple of times a week and they were working out. They were doing really things that— big things that were moving the needle. And I realized that I was using a majority of my 62 hours that I had being a housekeeper. And most of the women that Laura had in her book, I Know How She Does It, had help. They had help with the housekeeping. They had help with the child rearing. Now I know maybe you are where I was, where I was like, I will raise my own children and clean my own house. Thank you very much. Like, how dare you outsource the care of your children? But the more that I thought about it, You know, you're watching this because I grew the company Organized 365. And if I continued to do all of my own laundry and all of my own toilet bowl cleaning, I could not have continued to grow Organized 365. I was maxed out in 2015 with an executive assistant doing in-home organizing with in-home organizing professional organizers. I had just started the podcast. I had a blog, but I was not reaching as many people as I reach now with the podcast and the book tour and the YouTube. Videos. Like, I reach a lot more people today because I don't clean my own home. I have somebody else clean my home, and I'm not too good to clean my own home. I used to clean other people's homes. Like, if you know my story, I was a housekeeper. Like, so I was a housekeeper, and I realized I was my own housekeeper, and I outsourced my own housekeeping. From 2015 to 2018, I grew my income, but from 2019 and beyond, I stepped into my role as the CEO in Organized 365. And I improved my quality of self-care. So the 2 things that I got from that book, one right away and one 3 years later, and I know how she does it, is number one, how you are spending your time is what your role is. So if you are a stay-at-home mom and you're cleaning the house like I was, because I did all of these things, that is your job. Like, that is part of your job. And the way to get higher quality self-care is to one, believe that you are worth it. Which I'll tell you about in some other books that taught me that I was worth higher quality self-care. And then 2, even knowing what that was like other than going to an expensive spa day. What is self-care? I learned those in some other books. So this is what you're going to get from me when you are listening to me about books: a little bit of a review of the book, what I know about the author, how it's impacted my life both personally as a woman, as a mother, as a business owner. So I hope that you will subscribe and tune in. And I'll be giving you another book review on Monday.
