Productivity Madness | Final 8

Welcome back to Productivity Madness. It's time to take these 16 Organized 365 products down to 8. Let's go! Oh my goodness, we had 1, 2, 3, 3 really, really close matches. Like, I'm so glad so many of you are voting because we were really, really close, and we had one upset. Like, I am just like shocked. This one product is like I am going to stay in the game. I'm gonna stay in the game. So hopefully you'll stay to the end to see which product that is. All right, let's get started. In our first round, we have the Sunday Basket, and she is going head-to-head with the Sunday Basket Club. Now the Sunday Basket, I mean, she's our first seed. She won 2 years ago, so she has changed her outfit again. She's now in the classic navy, which is actually the color of my Sunday basket. And this time, I mean, she just came straight in from the home front. She's like, you know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand I'm in the playoffs. I understand I'm favored to win. I got work to do. So like, she's actually loaded down with just her daily mail. Now, if you're a woman, how often do you show up during the week and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I realize I have to go to the board meeting. I have to go to the PTA thing. I need to go meet with the contractor. I have to go talk to whoever. But you know what? I'm coming straight from this to this to this. Like, I'm juggling all the things. I'm wearing all the hats. That's how the Sunday Basket showed up today. Like, she literally showed up with the mail that has come in from the street, all of the ideas that her homeowner had of things that needed to be done, coupons that she's saving. Just in case, maybe, maybe she'll get to go to Talbot's this weekend. Credit cards, things to read, things to return, batteries to change, dog medicine to buy. I mean, she's just busy. She's busy. She's keeping track of all this, plus every household project, every person that comes in and out of this house that breathes and has a heartbeat. Like, she's here, she's playing, but she's got things to do. So, you know, it's wonderful and all that I've decided to have Productivity Madness. Last for multiple weeks. She's just gonna start coming in her day clothes is what she's decided. Now, the Sunday Basket Club is part of the Sunday Basket. When you get the Sunday Basket, it comes with this physical box. It comes with these slash pockets. It comes with an online course. It comes with the Sunday Basket Club. The Sunday Basket Club is a coworking time, 90 minutes on Sundays starting 5 o'clock Eastern. It's inside of a private app that we have. No one needs to know how disorganized you actually are. We're all disorganized. Everyone. If we would just start sharing how disorganized we all are, we would all feel so much better and be able to support and lift each other up. But, you know, society's not ready for that yet. So I've created my own private app. So we don't even have a Facebook group. You go in this private app. No one even has to know that you're taking care of your clutter. And in the Sunday Basket Club, Michelle and Monique, Spend 90 minutes on Sunday literally saying, okay, step 1, take everything out. Step 2, open all the mail. Step 3, look at your week coming up. So it is— I would say the Sunday Basket Club is why the Sunday Basket works for so many people, because they need— do need that accountability, that camaraderie, that community piece that goes with the Sunday Basket. And like I said, this is a lifetime purchase. You make— you buy the Sunday Basket once, like you could be in this community for the, for the lifetime of the product, which will be my lifetime. Let's just put it that way. Well, the Sunday Basket Club is part of the Sunday Basket, so it makes sense that people are voting for the Sunday Basket over the Sunday Basket Club because you know what the Sunday Basket's like, just throw it in there, just I'll deal with it on Sunday. So she is moving on to the next round. Oh, I can't wait to find out what she's going to come in. next round because she has, um, 4 more colors that she can pick. So we'll, we'll see what she picks. Next up, we have the Slash Pockets, and they are going against the Weekly Planning Sheet. Again, these are all components of the Sunday Basket, so you get all of this inside of the Sunday Basket. It's not like you really have to make a choice, but if you had to make a choice, would you pick the functionality of these Slash pockets where you can put lots of information inside. You can keep track of all your projects. You can take those notes that you've written down, put them in there. They're sealed on 3 sides so you can put different sizes pieces of paper in there. I like to print out my emails. I tend to put my printed emails in there. And then they have different colors. So you've probably seen, you know, a rainbow set of slash pockets at your office supply store, but you have not seen at your office supply store 5 red, 5 orange, 5 yellow, 5 blue, 5 purple. And as a preschool and kindergartner teacher, this is what I know. We are all kindergartners in things that we do not have mastery of. Like when you become an Olympic athlete or a super productivity expert, you can use like anything. Like you could hand an Olympic athlete, you could say, here are moccasins, we want you to go run 100 miles and they will because They've honed their skills so much that it's no longer about the supplies. They have the mindset, they have the physical strength, they have the wherewithal to do these Herculean efforts. We are kindergartners. We're like, please tell me I can be organized. Please tell me there's a simple system. I understand it won't necessarily be easy, but if you have a simple system that literally anybody can do, Maybe with the support of the Sunday Basket Club and you literally mail me fun products, maybe I too can do it. And I say, yes, you can. But you need to have the right school supplies because if everything you buy is like this and you have to memorize what all these different colors mean versus just getting the right school supplies, it's just, it's literally 100 times harder. So these are our slash pockets. The slash pockets, I mean, when I started manufacturing them all one color so I could really explain how I was organizing at home, that is when the Sunday Basket really started to take off 6 years ago. Now the weekly planning sheet. I realized this week how much I plan. Like, my planning has planned. I spend so much time planning. And you know what? I'm done apologizing for it. I'm always like, well, I plan here. I'll tell you a little bit about how I plan, but really I plan all the time. Ask anyone you know that is productive or you see that they really are successful in something. It did not happen by chance. It did not happen by accident. They planned it. They planned it. They had obstacles they had to overcome. They replanned it. They pivoted. They changed. They kept going. They kept persevering. Planning, planning, planning. Is not optional. And planning is not something that you can do it. And then, you know, once you get good at planning, you don't have to do it anymore. It kind of be like saying, once you get a good, healthy habit in the, in the food you're going to need to fuel your body, which does not happen by accident, right? Happens by planning. That then you wouldn't have to plan your meals going forward. Yeah. Try that. See what happens. All of a sudden you're not as healthy. You're not as well. You're not the ideal weight for you. Like. No, you have to plan. You have to plan everything and you have to plan your household life. Just because everybody else isn't doing it doesn't mean we don't have to do it. So I literally sit down and I look at my Google Calendar and I physically plan out my week. So is it the planning out your week on paper or the slash pockets that are the essential productivity tools? This one was a landslide. Like the slash pockets didn't even have to stand up. They just stayed here laying on the court going, yeah, we win. And the weekly pad's like, but I'm really, really good. Like, I know you have a digital calendar, but if you would really just, just write me out each week, you would see where your week is going to fall apart before it actually falls apart. And the slash pockets go, we know, but we won. So the slash pockets are going to move on. They're going to move on to the next round. It'll be interesting to see, can the slash pockets on their own beat the complete Sunday basket system. That's what we will find out next week. You will have to come back and vote. That's our Sunday basket. Um, I don't know, I don't know the proper terms for these things. Quintile, quartile, I don't know. The Sunday basket section. We're going to move on to the home session. In the home session— session, section, whatever— this is where we have Swiss cheese organizing. And I keep mentioning this every single week because it is spring and you are mice chasing cheese around your house and you're like, yeah, Lisa says it's going to take a couple years. Lisa says I have to organize the house in a certain order, but I'm going to show her. I am going to put all my effort in this weekend or all my effort during spring break. So many of you are on spring break, and I am going to take back this house and I'm going to get it done in 10 days, and I'm going to show Lisa it doesn't take a year. I can get it all done in 10 days. And to you I say, I love that enthusiasm. You go, you get, you declutter as much as you can, you organize as much as you can. And when you get to the end of that weekend and you get to the end of that 10 days and you realize you're not done, come back because you can get all the way done organizing. But the order in which you get organized matters. Clearing out the yard, doing the garage, cleaning out the kitchen, cleaning out the kids' bedrooms will feel great. However, one month later it will all be a mess again. So the order in which you get organized is inside of the Productive Home Solution. We start in September with your personal organizing, then we go to storage organizing, then right now we're in the middle of family organizing, and in the summer I talk to you about organizing your information management and your paper systems. You can use our binders and our Sunday basket if you want, or you can create your own, however you want to do it. It is systematically going through all of those different areas in all of those different seasons that really helps you get all the way organized in the Productive Home Solution. Now this was— I mean, the Productive Home Solution did not expect to be going up against the Photo Program. The Photo Program is kind of a sleepy Organized 365 product. It's been around since like forever. It's a hold-on from my past career. Being a Creative Memories consultant. But you guys are like, no, we really, we really love the photo program. And once you get organized, once you get done, you have so much more time. That is when it's great to really dive into that photo program, take back all those actual physical photos. Mine go all the way back to 1890, and I have them in photo albums. It was like such a great season of my life when I did my photo albums. But photos are optional. Organizing the house you live in saves you minutes every single day. Organizing your photos is kind of like a gigantic project you get to check off your list. Does not necessarily change your day-to-day and the time that you have to do what you're uniquely created to do. And maybe for this reason, I don't know why, but this was another landslide. The Productive Home Solution will be moving on to the next round. The photo program is great. We would love to have you do the photo program. But sadly, it will not be going into the next round. And last in this home category, we have the self-published Organized 365 books. In order of publishing, first I published The Mindset of Organization. The Mindset of Organization came out of organizing homes in Cincinnati for 6 years and realizing that your physical age and the generation that you are a part of informs how you organize a house. Here in Cincinnati, we don't have a lot of diversity of homes. I mean, they're all just about exactly the same. I mean, they are— they're like almost exactly the same size. They have almost the exact same rooms. The only difference is if you have a living room and dining room or a great room, like, woohoo! I mean, there's just not a lot of difference in the homes in Cincinnati. The difference is the people that are in the homes in Cincinnati. So it was real easy for me to see when I was organizing you know, a woman that was about to give birth to twins, or I was organizing a 65-year-old woman who had been widowed 5 years ago and was ready to get remarried, or I was organizing a corporate professional in her late 40s, like they would all have pretty much the same size home. However, how they were using that home was completely different. And I started to realize that I could put in different systems in different homes Based on how they were using their kitchen, their entertaining spaces, and their bedroom, bathroom, and closet that would support the lifestyle that they were in, the phase of life they were in. And then as I started organizing families, so I would organize mom's house and then I would organize her daughter's house, and then their storage rooms would collide and they would have to share them. And I started watching the interaction between mother and daughter or grandmother and grandchild or grandmother and, you know, in like 3 generations sometimes. Mm-hmm. I was like, oh, they're talking about the same item, but the way they're talking about the item is different based on their generational lens. So I cover all that in The Mindset of Organization. We actually have a book club coming up on this one in April. The second book I wrote was How ADHD Affects Home Organization. Now, How ADHD Affects Home Organization, my kids were both diagnosed with ADHD when they were in grade school. Only one of them still has that ADHD diagnosis. But I did my normal and did a bunch of research on ADHD, executive function, how it impacts learning and kids because it affected my kids. And as I was doing that, I started to realize that 50% of the people I was organizing either had an ADHD diagnosis or self-professed that they thought they had an ADHD diagnosis. And I noticed that what I put in place as a schoolteacher And what my kids' schools were putting in place for them, I could put those systems in place inside of homes that would support whether or not you had an ADHD diagnosis, reducing the executive function load inside of households for people based on which executive functions needed the most support. So there are 8 executive functions and I tackle 6 of the 8 in here about how you would support those at home. As if we were supporting them in school or in the workplace. And then finally, in 2022, the summer of 2022, I wrote my memoir. I know it's not as fancy as it sounds. Basically, in 2012, when I quit my teaching job and started Organize 365, 6 years before there were any of these products, I had to organize myself. I was the most disorganized I'd ever been. I was depressed. I was overweight. We were in such financial debt, like Just everything in my life was falling apart except for my marriage. And this is the story of month by month by month, my recollection of how I felt, what I did, how I made it out, how I changed my mindset from 100% negative to almost all positive. Like, it was such a Herculean effort. I really put myself through my own personal professional development training school. And I did it by physically working out in my house, physically removing stuff, physically creating order out of chaos, physically making that house change from a former stay-at-home mom of little kids to a new entrepreneurial mom of middle school and high school age kids. And so that I wrote in 2022, and it talks about my year in 2012 when I was 42 years old. So these self-published books, I mean, they're edited, but you know, they're self-published, you guys. So not like you're going to see these on the New York Times bestseller or anything, are really organized podcast episodes. Instead of listening to all the podcast episodes, you can listen to these in a more organized format. Those are going up against another planning thing. There's a theme here. I like to plan. 3 times a year I plan my house. The next time I plan my role as a household manager will be, I think it's the first Saturday in May. Yeah, the first Saturday in May. And I literally walk through all the different parts of my life as a person, as a mother, as a wife, as a homeowner, as all like all the things like, how am I going to spend all of the hours that are not work hours? And I do that in planning day. You guys like the books. You love the planning day. Planning day is moving on to the next round. Okay, we're gonna move over into the work category. In the first category of work, like, I cannot believe the Launch Binder has made it this far and that the Launch Binder is still here. I mean, way to go, Launch Binder, helping people hashtag adult. That is so great. So as I mentioned last time, the Launch Binder is the bridge organizational product that bridges you from organizing your childhood bedroom. That's the kids program. How do you learn to organize your childhood bedroom? And I love that you guys are commenting inside the app. You're like, absolutely, I did so much better in the Productive Home Solution because I put myself through the kids program because I got it for my kids, but I watched it for myself. Like, It is the foundation. Like learning the grammar school of organizing is organizing your bedroom. Organizing a child's bedroom is different than organizing adult bedroom, but not really. It really, the only, the biggest difference is adults have the whole house to put their stuff in. Kids have to cram it all in one room. That's really the biggest difference. After the Kids Program, before you get into all these adult products, we have the Launch Program. The Launch Program is designed for 16 to 25-year-olds. And in that 16 to 25-year-old timeframe, you're deciding how are you going to launch out of this childhood bedroom into a dorm room, an apartment, a condo, living with a friend, getting married, or whatever you're going to do. And in that process, you need to do 2 things. One, you need to move from living out of your backpack and just going through your backpack on Sunday to starting to do this Sunday basket system. And we start you out simply with just a Sunday basket that's going to be a catch-all. That you're going to go through on Sunday and you're just going to do the basic 5 slash pockets. Like, we're not going to overwhelm you. We just want to really set up this lifetime habit and system of collecting and sorting and processing every single Sunday. The second big part of the Launch Binder that builds on the kids program is, in addition to knowing how to organize your space in the kids program, which is now going to become a dorm room, an apartment, a condo, a little bit Bigger of a bedroom, bathroom, closet scenario, you're going to add on maybe a laundry room or laundry outside of your place that you're living, and you're going to add on probably a kitchen or needing to go get food every day. Like, those things are going to be added, and then probably a family room type thing. You're going to need to do the information management. Like, how many of you, when you left home, you're like, The first time you got sick, what'd you do? Hey, Mom, Dad, here are my symptoms. What do I take for that? Am I dying? Do I go to the doctor? Like, when you're at home and you're sick and you go to your parents, they're like, okay, and they just hand you medicine. They take your temperature or whatever. They make you the soup and you like, you just get to be sick. As soon as you leave your family home of origin, you're now like in charge of yourself while you're sick. That's like— Whoa, I don't know what I take. I don't know how many I take. My parents hand me that. And every family has its own, you know, like thing that they like. Does your family like Advil? Do they like Aleve? Or do they like Tylenol? Like which one is your go-to? I know in our family we have a go-to. I always prioritize this one and then occasionally I'll use the other 2. Your family has a preference as well. Your kids don't know that. They just know what color the pills are that you usually give them. That is not as helpful when they go to the doctor. And also, when you're sick, you're not very clear-headed. You think you're dying. You always think you're dying. You're not dying. You're fine. But you need to know this information. So inside of the Launch Binder, we really— it's really a conversation piece. It's a way for young adults to interview their parents and get the information they need in order to decide how they're going to run their own lives. In their medical, in their financial, in their living, in their— how much clothes they buy. So that is the kids program. The Business Friday Work Box organizes your paid job other than school. We already— I'm sorry, Teacher Work Box. The Teacher Work Box is over there. They're like, we're busy grading for the end of the year. We have spring break next week. We aren't talking to you right now. They're over there. They're fine. They're just working for their summer, right? The Business Friday Work Box is all other jobs, all other jobs other than teaching. Whatever you get paid, whether you're an employee or you're an employer, everything that you need to organize, the invisible work of what you do at work is inside of the Business Friday Work Box. I'm going to tell you more about this next time because the Business Friday Work Box is moving on to the next round. And I'm sorry, Launch Binder, you're going to have to go support all of your sisters over in the audience because Business Friday Work Box is just going to keep moving on. Now also in that business category, this was such a close race. I honestly cannot believe how close this race was. Last time I talked to you a little bit about the income and expense binder. This is a way to organize— oh, are you falling? You don't like to be— you don't like to be in the big show? This is the way that you organize all of your monthly income, organize your monthly expenses, and keep track of your mileage For taxes. And the uniqueness of this income and expense binder is I've organized it so that all the expenses perfectly match the Schedule C on a U.S. tax return. So if you are an LLC, or if you haven't even made an LLC yet and you're just filing as a sole proprietor, you get a 1099, or you just run— you're like, you're in a direct sales company. Mm-hmm. But you file your taxes as part of your personal taxes, this will 100% let you do everything you need for that Schedule C. You literally at the end can either hand this whole binder to your CPA or just hand, you know, add them all up and hand 4 pieces of paper and they will be like, oh my gosh, all my clients need this. This is like the easiest, easiest, easiest way to organize your income expenses and your mileage, save the most money on taxes, and do it on a monthly basis without trying to recreate the wheel. Like when I created this, Every single year in February, I was like, how do I do taxes again? And I'd have to like get all my energy up, and then I'd have to gather all the paper. I'd be like, what category is this? Where does this go? Like, it took so much longer than it needed to take. And now with the income and expense binder, you just do it monthly, and by the end of the month, you have everything you need. At the end of the year, you just total it all up and you are done. The income and expense binder. Almost beat out planning day. You know how I love planning. So 4 times a year I plan my work as an employee and an employer, and I think about what our project's going to be. I'll tell you more about this next round because the income and expense binder is going to step to the side graciously and allow the Workbox planning day to move on to the next round. All right, our last category paper organizing. And, you know, I talked last time about how we are always going to have paper. Like, paper is not going anywhere. We're not this paperless society they promised us in the '90s. That, that didn't happen. That isn't going to happen. But another way to think about paper is information management. So when you think about information management, sometimes it's going to be paper, sometimes it's going to be mental information, sometimes it's going to be computer-based information. But when you can have that information in a binder that someone else can take and read, it just, oh, it helps so much. Whenever you need to give information to another person that is personal, you're not in a good place. Pretty much. It's not like you like go out for coffee and you're like, you know what? I was thinking I'd go over my whole medical history with you, friend. Pour yourself a latte. Let me start with when I was born. Like, no, if you're giving someone your whole medical history, that's because they're trying to figure out what is going on right now and how to help, right? If you're going through your whole financial picture, unless you're like moving to a new wealth manager, which is great, you're probably trying to take care of someone else's finances or support them in some way. If you're giving everyone everything that's going on with your house, you're probably moving. Right? You know, so there's a lot of things going on. We don't just normally sit down and in casual conversation go through all of our private information. So when you're doing that, if you can have a binder that you hand to the other person and they can flip through and read, first of all, you don't have to audibly say all of it. So then maybe you could pretend that this isn't actually even happening. But secondly, it takes a lot of the emotion out of it. Like when you have to say your story, You add in like, oh, and I meant to take baby aspirin, but I didn't take the baby aspirin, so maybe my cholesterol would be better. And you start to shooting yourself, and and then you're like, and then other people ask you a question, and even though you're telling them your medical story, or you're telling them your financial story, you're like, why are you asking that? That's private. They're like, because I need to know. Like now, all of a sudden, you're like, paper takes the emotion out of this stressful situation that you're probably in. Now, the operations binder. Not usually stressful. This one's fun. Like, the operations binder is so fun. This is the one that you usually aren't going to hand to anyone else. This is like your lesson plan for your personal life. This is like all the things that you put on the Pinterest board or you email yourself when you're late at night watching Instagram so that you can remember, or like you save. Like, I save all these fun things on Instagram that I want to do with my grandson. These are all those ideas of things that you want to do. Memory making, travel, holidays, cooking, baking, gardening, yard stuff, all goes in this binder. And maybe that is why— I cannot believe it. The operations binder is moving to the next round. I'm like, are you kidding me? I cannot believe the operations binder is still in the game and it beat out the productive or the Paper Solution book. The Paper Solution book. You can learn how to make your Sunday basket, your binders. Like you could do it on your own with the paper basket, the paper basket, the Paper Solution book. But no, you guys are like, no, we like having our lesson plan binder. We like having a place to put all of the fun things that we wanna do. And it could just be an evolution of the Organized 365 brand in that you guys, these products, uh, started being created 6 years ago. You're using them. You have more time. You're doing what you're uniquely created to do. And for you, that may be spending more time on your family, doing more of those fun things that you want to do, that you've always wanted to do, that you've never had the time to do or you've never planned to do, and now you're doing them. So you need to go through that operations binder in order to get that done. Okay, last in this category, we have the financial binder and we have the paper organizing retreat. So the financial binder, like I was talking about with the organize— the household operations binder. Mm-hmm. The financial binder gives you your entire financial picture. Yes, your 401. Yes, your will. Yes, your life insurance. Yes, you know, all, all the insurances you have to have. But also the credit cards and your monthly bills and all of those other things are in the financial binder as well. Your future money and your current money. And so often when you look to a financial resource, You're usually either dealing with your current day-to-day money or you're focused on your future money, and this binder really blends those 2 very well. The paper organizing retreat is when you guys— I mean, I had a picture in my head that you would do it, but now that you actually do it, it still kind of shocks me to this day that you will literally load your car full of paper. And I always say, put more in, put more in. People will come with like 8, 10, 12 boxes. They'll get halfway through the day and they're like, you told us to put more in. I should have put more paper. Put more paper in. Put it all in your car. Bring it here. We sort it. We do the big sort. We get rid of as much as possible. You shred it in these locked shredding bins on site. You don't have to take it with you. Recycle what you need to recycle. You're going to leave with just the papers that you need in order to do your binder, in order to do your Sunday basket. We now have people who are coming back to the Paper Organizer Retreat We had 2 or 3 people at the last paper organizing retreat that said, we're coming back till we're done. Like, until every binder is done and every box is done, we're just going to keep coming back because I won't do it on my own. I won't sit here and sort it. You know, you, you feed us chocolate, there's coffee, there are professional organizers here that motivate us, inspire us, answer our questions. It's just, it's my thing. I'm just going to keep doing the paper organizing retreats until I'm done because it's portable. I can bring it here. I know I'll get it done. I have to do the Productive Home Solution at my house, but I'm going to do this onsite with you. Organize 365 has 3 paper organizing retreats per year. The next one is in June. We also have one on the calendar for September you could sign up for already. Certified organizers have these virtually and in person all the time, all over the United States. Just go to the Organize 365 website, scroll to the bottom, click the big pink button, and find a certified organizer near you. Well, you are coming to the paper organizing retreats and you are liking them, but push come to shove, you need the financial binder more than you actually need the paper organizing retreat. So for that reason, the financial binder will be moving on to the next round. You guys have all weekend to vote. Go back now to the Organize 365 website, go up to the top, click on the Get Your Bracket. It will now serve up to you the next voting You're gonna be voting between the Sunday Basket and the Slash Pockets. I mean, the way you guys are voting this year, I, I can't even predict what's gonna happen there. The Productive Home Solution course versus Planning Day. Remember, those used to be sold together. They have gotten broken apart as of this week. The Friday Work Box that organizes your work versus the Work Box Planning Day. So are you gonna— that's, you know, that's the same, uh, competition we have over here. The course versus the planning day. This is the course versus the planning day. Oh, maybe we're on to something here. And then we've got these 2 binders, operations versus finances. I'm just still gonna say operations. I'm still blown away that you are going into this final 8 round. Like, way to go! It's about time that all of the organization that we do as household managers— we are where the merriment of the holidays come from. All the fun dinners that you have, you know, the fact that we go on vacations, all of that planning, all that invisible work that has to happen before those fun events happen, that is all housed here in the operations binder. So that is, that is really, really exciting. That's it. That's all we've got. I will be back next week with the next round. Bye everyone. Bye.