Your Most Productive Year Ever Masterclass : November 5, 2021

Welcome everyone, thank you so much for joining us for this masterclass. Let me see if I can— hold on. Um, thank you so much for joining me for this masterclass today. We are going to be talking about Your most productive year ever. And that's what we all want. Like, we all want to be productive, positive, working towards a goal. My name is Lisa Woodruff. I live here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm the founder and creator of Organized 365, and I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my story because we all kind of have the same story, right? Of the journeys that we are going through in life. So, I said I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati is the chili capital of the world. If you live in Cincinnati, you are either a Skyline or a Gold Star Chili fan. I am a Skyline girl. I hope everyone could stay with me on the webinar, but this is a picture Joey took, my son. He works here in the warehouse. He took a picture of this when we went out to lunch a few years ago. I have a new grandbaby. I should probably put him in the slide, but Hunter is our puppy baby. And so you'll hear Hunter sometimes in the background of my podcasts and definitely in my Insta stories. And I love onion rings. I mentioned that grandbaby. I used to go get onion rings, I don't know, 4 or 5 times a week. Now I'm going today. Today I get onion rings, and it's been a solid week since I've had them before. So, um, I should have lost more weight by now. That's all I have to say with that. So Organized 365, this is a company that I started almost 10 years ago, and I'll be telling you that origin story. And basically, I am obsessed with the process of running a household. What does it mean to run a household? How do we run a household? How can we do it more efficiently, more productively? I look at different generations and how they run households, and I share all of these thoughtful things I think about over and over and over again in the podcast. And apparently you guys like it because we have over 13 million downloads. I also was a teacher before I became the owner of Organized 365. And so I'm a content-producing machine because it's kind of like lesson plans, and any teacher is a content-producing machine. So I've created 4 books over the last few years. I'll be talking about some of those as well. So Organized 365 this year has really turned the corner from my just observing what I know to be true in my own neck of the woods and my family and my friends. And we're really starting to figure out like what is true for most people and how do most people run their homes and when do they feel organized and do they think that organization is a learnable skill and, and how are they organizing their paper. And what I found was there really isn't any research out there. Like nobody cares about us at home. Like nobody's researching how we're getting our to-do lists done at home. There's very, very little research. The only research we could actually find was from the '80s by Good Housekeeping. And then you have to go back to the '50s. So not a lot of research. So this year we started doing our own research, like third-party research that has been already cited in academic journals. And when you do research, you have to define what it means to do housework. And I didn't realize there is no definition of housework. Like, I've already given you the answer here. But if you were to think about what housework is, you probably would not have hit all 4 of these. And before we ran our study, we had to look at like, what is the work of running a house? And once you define the work, then who is doing the work? So the first kind of work of doing the house is obvious, and it probably came to the top of your mind. Which is cleaning. Like when you think about doing housework, you're like, oh, I got to clean the floors. I got to vacuum. I've got to do the dishes. Like I had to clean the house. It's very obvious. Most people equate cleaning their house with housework. The second item that I identified, I think is more nuanced. We all know that it is part of a home, running a home, and that is the tasks of daily living. Anything that is for you as a human being. The cleanliness of your house is about the dwelling that you're in, and you can outsource that. Somebody else can clean your house, or when you live in assisted living, someone else will clean the whole unit. But the tasks of daily living are of the person. Wherever you go, wherever you live your entire life, from when you're born until you pass away, you will have to have laundry done. You will need to be fed. You will need to be bathed. These are the things that are of the person. And as a woman who chose to be a stay-at-home mom, like, I love, love, loved my years of being a stay-at-home mom, and now I'm choosing to be a corporate woman, I realized, well, I'll be darned, those tasks of daily living that are of the person, each individual person in my household, somehow those became my responsibility because I chose to be the head of household and the primary caretaker at home. And it has been like a pulling off of me to get my adult children and my adult spouse to take care of their own tasks of daily living, like Okay, if we're all gonna eat dinner together, great, one person might make the meal for everyone. But if we're on our own, we're on our own, we're all independent adults. That was an interesting thought I came across. Another thing that is part of housework is home maintenance. This is only if you own your home. If you rent, you don't have to do this kind of housework. So this kind of housework is an investment of dollars today for the hope of increased dollars in the future, which Oh my goodness, if you want to make money on your house, sell it in 2021. Like, it's crazy out there. You can make lots of money on your house. You know, improve the light fixtures and you can increase the value of your house by like $10,000. So a little investment of money today or maintaining your home today will give you a potential increase in dollars tomorrow. And then the 4th thing that we do at home that is completely optional, you do not have to do it, you will be able to live your entire life if you do not organize your home, is home organization. Some people look at it as like a passion project. Some people look at it as something that helps them function better at home, but it's, it's totally optional. And that's what I kind of dive into is home organization. The interesting payoff of organizing your home is that home organization is an investment of time today for a future return on time. It's like compounded time. over time. So that's what we'll talk about today. Now, in that survey that we did, the research that we have done, we found that 84% of men and women in the United States believe that organization is a learnable skill. 86% of women believe organization is a learnable skill. I think we should just take a moment of silence for Americans agreeing about anything. It's like we should be like, yay, Americans could come together and agree to 84, 86% on something. And you know what they agree on? Is that organization is a skill and you can learn it, and that's what I want to do as a teacher. Now, I have studied Maslow's hierarchy and I have watched what happens inside specifically American homes, and what I find is we all know 2 years ago that all of us as a collective world went to meeting our own safety and physiological needs. And we meet those needs by making sure we have enough toilet paper and we have enough food. And then we move on to our safety needs, which are like making sure everyone in our home is family and making sure that our culture and our family is good. And you build up from there. And building up to the highest level of your possible attainment, your esteem, your love and belonging takes a lot of time because anytime your security or your physiological needs are compromised, you go back down Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's like the game Chutes and Ladders. A pandemic comes, back at square one. Someone gets a flu, back at square one. You decide to move, everyone's back at square one. And you're constantly trying to go up Chutes and Ladders. And this is why often at home we don't tend to get to self-actualization, but you do in school, or you do in work, because the building and the psychological and safety needs are met by outside people, and then you are left to use your time for love and belonging and building your esteem. We want to get you there. First, I want to recognize that we all have hit our surge capacity, myself included. So Ann Mastin, who has a PhD and is a psychologist, has, has coined this term surge capacity. We as a collective world all would like to go on a vacation. So I just want to acknowledge That this whole idea of getting organized today, while it's even more important than it was in 2019, we're all left a little depleted without as much reserves in our tank and just a little bit more overloaded. I know I sleep a lot more now than I did in 2019, and I think our bodies just need it. The, the amount of change that is coming at us at home and work and society and life is just overwhelming. So you probably feel like you're spinning a lot of plates. We all feel like we're spinning a lot of plates, and the problem is one will come crashing down. And for me, you may be the same, for me, and I found this is true for other women that I talked to specifically, when one of those ridiculous amount of plates that we are spinning— I mean, look at how many plates you're spinning, you're doing so many things— just one of them falls. And all of a sudden we take it as like, oh my gosh, I have done something wrong. There's something wrong with me. I can't keep it together. And we start to give ourselves negative self-talk. I just want to call that to your attention because I want you to stop doing that. Like, like, stop doing that. You're amazing. You're fantastic. Look at all the other plates you're spinning. And I want to help you have less plates to spin and also make sure that they don't crash to the ground for you. So in this masterclass, and this is going to take a while, I'm going to talk a little bit slower than I usually talk. This, this is me slow, by the way. You're going to learn about how I define a year, and I want to really help you see time differently. It will really help you. I want to talk about what you do and don't have control over. You have a lot more control than you think, but there are a lot of things you also don't control. Then I'm going to teach you how to find more time in your days, and then how to use that time you find to put in organizational systems, which will just multiplying your time. So it was probably 6 or 7 years ago when I realized that a calendar year for me is actually 3 small years. And these 3 small years each have a different energy, a different feel, a different purpose. And so I want to call them to your attention and see if they're true for you as well. The first one is January through May. You may already be thinking about this year, the actual new year that's going to start in January. Oh, what's your New Year's resolution? going to be? How much thinner are we going to be? How much more money are we going to have? How much more time are we going to have? Oh, it's going to be so much in the future. The possibilities are endless. And then you get into May or January and you go on that New Year's resolution. And for me, somewhere between March and April, I'm like, man, I'd kind of like to pick a new year, a new New Year's resolution. I'm kind of tired of this one. I got that big project I wanted to do done. And then you end up in May with all the graduations and the craziness that goes on, and you start to look to your next year, which is summer. It doesn't matter if you have kids, you're 92, if you're 14, doesn't matter how old you are. We look at summer differently than we look at anything else. So if you are not in a school system, it's usually Memorial Day to Labor Day in the United States is what you consider your summer. In Ohio, those are pool hours. For those of you in the South, you never close your pools, but up, up north, we only have this small window of going to the pool, and that pool defines when my summer is. If you're a single 50-year-old corporate employee, you know that you still spend your summer days differently than you do the other days in your year. This is when you'll travel to see family, you'll go on more vacations, the sun is out really late at night, you'll do more yard work. There's just Different things that you do in the summer. And then we round that out after Labor Day with the last 4 months of the year. We're right in the middle of this most productive time of the year. From the beginning of September to the middle of November is the most productive time in the American calendar. And so that is another season. So these 3 New Years each have an energy to them. We're about to start with New Year. So the new year has a decluttering energy, the summer has an organizing energy, and the school year has a productivity energy. And each new year builds on the last, so in one 365-day year, you actually get 3 chances to go through the organizational cycle that I'm going to talk to you about. So in the poll over there in the chat— we don't have a poll, just type in the chat— do you actually plan this way? And I realized it's not because I have children, it's because I was a kid. Like, this is how the American school system is set up. You go to school August, September-ish, you run hard until the holidays, you have a nice little winter break, and then you hammer down when you come back in in January and get done what you really need to get done by March, because April and May is a whole bunch of field trips and exams. And then you have a summer break. So is this actually— when I mentioned it, are you like, wow, yeah, I guess I kind of do that. I didn't realize it though. And, and I went to the point where I would actually buy different planners. I would buy a planner in January, and then I would create one in the summer, and then I would buy a school calendar even though I wasn't in school in the fall, just so I could have a new planner each time. All right, we're going to talk about organization. And I want to let you know that organization has nothing to do with cute containers. I mean, they're fun, I like them, I buy them, but organization is a skill that you learn. It's kind of like learning to ride your bike or learning to tie your shoes. Doesn't have anything to do with the brand of shoes that you're buying or the kind of bike that you have. It's the skill that you're learning. So we're going to talk about the skill of organization, and it's actually a 3-part system. And you, you've heard about decluttering. Everybody's heard about decluttering and minimalism and just have less. And that is part of it. Like, you have to start with decluttering and you have to get rid of the excess of what you have so that you can focus on what is left. And then organizing is actually the skill of looking at what is left and both organizing it so that you can find what you want when you need it, but also sometimes you need to add things in. You need to buy more things when you're organizing. Not containers, but more pairs of underwear or more spoons in your kitchen. Like, you find out you don't actually have enough of things. So decluttering starts your organizational journey. Organizing is where the actual work is done, the learning of how do you organize a drawer, what is the best way to organize a storage room, is there a proper order to going through your house if you're going to organize the whole thing. There is, by the way. And then at the end of that, once you've gotten your closet exactly how you want it to be, Then the third piece, which is what we all want, is increasing productivity. It doesn't matter how beautifully organized your closet is if when you go in there in the morning you still don't know what to put on, or it takes you an extra 20 minutes every day to put things on because you just haven't thought through maybe what your uniform is. So increased productivity takes the organization, the skill, and the end result. And it makes— and it has you save time and create systems and habits so your life can run on autopilot. So Bill Gates has a quote, and he says that most people overestimate what they can do in 1 year in business, and they underestimate what they can do in 10 years. And since I'm about to celebrate my 10th anniversary in January, I could say he's absolutely right. Like, I had no idea this is where I would be 10 years later, and I absolutely thought in year 1 that I'd be a lot further than I was. And so I've modified that quote for us, and what I found to be true in our audience is that you tend to overestimate what you could do in a weekend of decluttering, and you completely underestimate what one solid year of 15 to 30 minutes a day focused on organizing will do to set you up for success in the next decade of your life. One year of focusing 15 to 30 minutes a day In getting organized and putting your systems in place and laying the train tracks will allow you the next 9 years to really get on your train and just take off. You won't even think about the organizing systems anymore. So I told you that 84% of everyone and 86% of women believe organization is a learnable skill, and that is the title of the memoir that I published this summer. It's not like I'm famous and I need a memoir or anything. It's just that I have lived this transformation that I want to coach you through in 2012. And so in 2011, I walked into my job as a teacher, middle school teacher, and I quit my job. I told you I was a stay-at-home mom. I had gone back to work for 18 months and literally my entire house was falling down around me. My kids' needs weren't being met. My husband is a saint. I cannot believe our marriage survived it. I was depressed. I was overweight. We were in more debt than we have ever been in our life. Like, I just didn't see a way out. I was an exceptional teacher. The Thursday before winter break, my administrator told me I wasn't a very good teacher and I was 39. So, in the past, I would have been like, oh my gosh, I am not a good teacher. I need to change. At that moment, I thought, no, she is wrong. I am a good teacher. And I am literally sacrificing everything for my job. And if my administrator does not feel I'm a good teacher, then I should go home and be a good mother and a good homeowner and a good wife, and I will figure out a new job along the way. So that's what I did. I literally quit my job and I came home, which I told you I was in more debt than I'd ever been in before. Like, all I have to say is it's a good thing I'm a Gen Xer because we'd been working a long time. We had a lot of credit and we maxed it all out. And I came home and I said to my husband, I know I have to get a job, but I have got to get a handle on this house. Like, I don't even recognize this house anymore. So I went to the grocery store. I don't know why I didn't even check what we had, and I just like loaded the cart full of stuff. And I came home and I emptied the car and I went to put things away, and I realized that every drawer was a junk drawer. All of our cabinets were already full. I went upstairs and I looked in our linen closets and I didn't even recognize the stuff was in there. It was like I had been transported into somebody else's house. I couldn't even put away the things that I had bought. And I— it was at that moment where I realized that I was so much further gone than I even realized. Like, I had no— I had been running so fast for about 7 years at that point. With my parents' divorce, and then my father getting sick, and then him passing away, and then doing the estate and medical needs with our kids, and just, you know, on and on and on that I just didn't even recognize my life anymore. And it was kind of a contradiction though, because our house was so bulging with stuff, yet we were so in debt. And so I was looking around at all the ways that I had spent money and things that I had prioritized in the past. And so I kept telling myself those negative thoughts, like I told you in the beginning, like, well, how wasteful are you that you bought all this stuff and now you don't have any money and you don't have a job and you can't even organize anything? And I just, I felt hopeless. I felt like I don't even know how you get out of this mess that I created for myself. Like, I, I created this. I was the one that brought all this stuff in the house. Nobody else was ordering it or bringing it in. So I sat down, I made a huge list of every single space that needed to be organized, and I realized that I didn't have a lot of time. And this is how I created this 100-Day Home Organization program. I needed to go through my entire house, and in that book, Organization Is a Learnable Skill, I show you how I go through my house actually 3 times in that year and end up productive. So I've done it. That's why I know. that it's doable. I did not start when I had the time or I had the money to do this project. I started when the cost of not getting organized was greater than the cost of getting organized. And I just realized at that point that somebody else could teach those kids, but no one else could be my kids' mom. No one could replace that. And these years were passing me by. My kids were in middle school at the time, and I was going to wake up one day And they were going to be grown and I wouldn't have been there. And so I came home to organize my house and get a new job and take back the responsibilities that only I could do of my house and my mothering. I'm not going to say it was easy. It definitely was not easy. I definitely have a supportive spouse, and I know everyone doesn't. And I also want to address the fact that I am a wife and mother. I'm about to turn 50. You may be single. My sister, who's going to join us here in a minute, Emily Kelly, she is single, 45, single her whole life. She found the same exact thing happened to her when she was 39 turning 40. All of a sudden, like, you go into this next phase of life, or it may be because you got a new job or you're moving or a significant family member has passed away. You find yourself at these times in life where you're just ready for the next season, and there is a process of moving from one season to the other. So I want to stop right now and I want to start by Helping us recognize what we do and do not have control over. You control your attitude. The one thing I did have going into 2012, I was depressed and I was negative, but I made a decision at that kitchen counter that I was going to proactively take back my life, whatever it took. I had no idea how long it was going to take. And so I changed my attitude. And I also only focused on myself. I was out of control. My spaces were out of control. I had been buying a lot of things. I wasn't putting things back in the right place. I didn't worry about the organizational habits of my spouse or my kids at the time. I just focused this entire year on my actions, knowing that my family would come along and they would They would follow my lead, which they did, and that's usually what happens. You also have control over 80% of your house. Now, you may, may be in a unique situation where you don't, but for most of us, when you decide to take over and organize your home, we really do have control over almost all of the spaces in our house. And so if you just keep focusing on yourself and the areas of the house that you have control over, you will keep making forward progress. So go ahead and type in the chat, are you ready to focus on you and your personal organizing journey? Because whenever you focus on others, it's harder. But when you focus on you, there's always one more thing you can do, a little bit more that you can try. All right, so now I want to help you find more time, right? We could all use more time. So I tend to talk fast, move fast, have lots of ideas, lots of projects going on, and it turns out that doggone turtle is— makes more progress than the hare. The hare looks really, really busy. She's running all around doing lots and lots of things. But the consistency of the turtle, the little bit every day, actually is what ends up winning the race. So I am going to talk to you about the steps that we could take and the consistent actions we could put in place that will start to give us more and more and more time as we go along the way. You remember the picture at the beginning of the spinning plates, all the different plates that you are spinning? Our days are filled to overflowing. Like, I am just amazed you are on this live call. I would be watching the replay. So for those of you watching the replay, you are just like me and I would also be speeding it up. So, we are just We just overcommit. We are overpassionate. We have so many opportunities. We are so blessed that our lives are filled to overflowing, and sometimes we don't know what to say no to because everything is so good. So, step 1 is to actually stop the flood that is overflowing your life. The way I have you do that is I have you start a Sunday basket. It is pictured behind me on this side. This is where we can put all of our tasks Our mail, our to-dos, the ideas that we have for the holidays and next year and our jobs and our kids and our personal attainment. And to stop the flood, you have to have a place to put all of those ideas that your brain knows that you will go back to. That is what we call the Sunday Basket. And if you haven't heard about the Sunday Basket before, there's a one-episode podcast you can download in your podcast player. There's a Sunday Basket page at the Organized 365 website. You can go to sundaybasket.com. It'll tell you all about the Sunday Basket, and there is a free masterclass you can play there to learn more about the Sunday Basket. So I'm not going to go all into the details of the Sunday Basket, but the Sunday Basket is the first thing that you need in order to save you more time. So I told you I wrote a couple of books. And one of the books I wrote was in 2017. I wrote How ADHD Affects Home Organization. I'm not saying you have ADHD, but we all have executive functioning in our brain. There are 8 things that the executive function does: planning, organizing, helps you get started, helps you stay on task. 6 of those 8 are related to organizing. And so I wrote a book about the 6 of those 8 and how you can work with your executive function and maximize your executive function for more focus and actually complete things, like to get things done. And what we found over time is that that's what the Sunday basket does. I didn't realize it until we started talking to psychologists and psychiatrists this summer that said, oh, you're externalizing people's executive function into this Sunday basket. And that is why it works, is because it is a consistent place for people to put their ideas, which frees their brain to do the fabulous thinking and synthesizing it needs to do instead of being a to-do list maker. So once you have a Sunday basket in place and you put all of your ideas and your to-dos and your actionables in that Sunday basket, then all of a sudden you can breathe because we're holding back the flood of information and possibilities. And weekly you're going in and you're pulling out just a few that you're going to take and make progress on, or you're going to take and you're going to complete, and the rest will just sit there and wait until you're done. This was what I learned how to do when my kids were 6 months and 2 years old, and then again I did it in 2012. I had to restart my Sunday basket system because I had so many projects and ideas that I wanted to do. And I wanted to do them all at the same time, and I needed to record all of those ideas and put them somewhere safe and then pick one or two projects at a time to get started on. So the Sunday basket holds all of those balls that you're juggling, any of the plates that don't need to be spinning right now, you could safely put them in the Sunday basket and they're there when you are ready. So this is what the Sunday basket looks like, you can find it at sundaybasket.com. But another question for you over in the chat: how many of you already have a Sunday basket going? So how many of you already have a Sunday basket going? We have now shown that if you do the Sunday basket, after about 6 weeks, once you get it set up, you will save 1 to 2 hours a day, Monday through Friday, from doing that Sunday basket on the week. So if you do your Sunday basket on Sunday and you spend 90 minutes doing your Sunday basket, You can look to gain about 5 hours Monday through Friday just with mental capacity and not forgetting things and not redoing things or getting somewhere and not having what you need. So do you have a Sunday basket up and running? All right, another thing that I have learned is that we have 168 hours in the week, and I want to talk to you again. I want to give you another time constraint. If you have a paid job, or for me, I was a stay-at-home mom for a while, we define work here at Organized 365 as whatever you spend the majority of your Monday through Friday doing— homeschooling, being a stay-at-home parent, working in a corporate job, working a flex shift, being a student. There is something that you are putting the majority of your time and effort into, which is usually at least 40 hours a week. Plus usually a commute, even if it's in your house commuting and making your mental shifts. So that's a minimum of 40 hours a week. The Pew Research Institute has said that housework accounts for 28 to 36 hours a week, not counting childcare. Not counting childcare. We're spending 28 hours a week on housework. You remember the housework that I mentioned in the beginning? It's a lot of hours. You have at least a minimum of a part-time job running your house or your apartment or your condo. You would be amazed how many hours it takes to just be a human. And then if you're sleeping 8 hours a night— we're not, but if you were— that would be 56 hours of sleep. If you add all that up, that's 124 hours. I told you we have 168 hours, so that still leaves 44 hours. Now, I'm not saying you need to take all of your hours and account for them on a spreadsheet or anything. But we do have more time than we think, even accounting for housework, sleep, and paid work. This time just tends to slip away, and we don't necessarily know where it goes. Time and money are intertwined, and this is a concept I really played with a lot last year. We tend to really look at one or the other. If our money is scarce, then we'll spend our time because we don't have a lot of financial resources. If we have more financial resources, we tend to watch our time because we are able to purchase or outsource or buy more prepared things in order to save our time. And there is this constant yin and yang between saving time and saving money, saving time and saving money, or spending money and spending time. And as you go through your days, I just want to bring that to your awareness that everything is costing time, Or money. Some things cost both, and we tend to undervalue our time and overvalue the amount of dollars that we have, whereas you can get more money. There, there are places to get more money. Money comes in and money goes out, but you can't really get more time. You could get more time through organizing, but you can't buy it anywhere. So let's talk about how Organize 365 can help you Take 1 year of focusing 15 to 30 minutes a day and ending up with a more productive life that'll let you run the next 9 years. And here's the thing, you know how when you're ready to lose weight and you're like, oh, does it really come down to exercise and eating? Yeah, like there's no magic to it. Living a purposeful, productive life and getting organized comes down to a consistent effort of putting time into taking back your home and getting organized. It's the consistency. It's the 15 to 30 minutes a day. That's why if you have a weekend and you like work Friday night all the way until Monday morning, and, and you declutter and declutter and declutter, and you start to get organized, you feel great for like a month or two, and then you're like, how did I get back here again? 3 months later. It's because you didn't get all the way through all the spaces in your house, and you decluttered and you started to organize, but you didn't finish organizing and reach the increased productivity portion of the cycle. So it's the consistent effort over a whole year that helps you get organized. And you're going to start one room at a time. So I'm going to take you through the first 42 days of the 100-day program to show you how the way I think about organizing can be done in 15 to 30 minutes a day, which it was hard to create that, so just letting you know, and also how you could see how it's going to kind of stack on itself. So I always start you off in the kitchen, and the reason why I start you off in the kitchen is because it's where you spend the majority of your time. It is a space that you've probably already tried to organize. Let me know in the chat, have you already tried to organize your kitchen, or is your kitchen already organized? Probably because I mean you stand there so much, you're in there so much. But what I have found to be true and why we do it for 21 days, 21 days, it's a lot. Like what are you doing in your kitchen for 21 days? Hey, remember I said we're going to do this in 15 to 30 minutes a day, and that wasn't my idea, that was your idea, by the way, because I tried to create a program that was done in 2 hours a day and you said, no, I don't have enough time. I said, all right, an hour a day. No, I don't have time. No time. All right, half an hour a day. No, I don't have enough time. So get 15 minutes a day was all I could get you guys to commit to doing. So I say 15 to 30. I'm pushing it because most of you will only give me 15 minutes a day. I'm like, well, I could teach you how to organize your kitchen, but if you're only going to give me 15 minutes a day, I'm going to have to break this into 21 lesson plans. Because I want to teach you the skill of getting organized. I don't want you to just one and done your kitchen and then 3 months from now Do it again, do it again, do it again. So teaching you how to organize each space is going to take time, because how you organize a drawer is different than how you organize a cabinet is different. And I'm teaching you these skills along the way. So when you organize a kitchen cabinet, I call these mini rooms. I want— every time you open a cabinet, it has doors on it. When you open it, I want you to think, oh, I'm going in the dishes room. I'm going in the spice room, and I, I really changed the languaging in how you're organizing these different spaces. Because let's be honest, you moved into whatever dwelling you're in, you unpacked those boxes into whatever cabinet you did in the kitchen, and they're probably in the same cabinets. How'd you learn to do that? Who taught you how to do that? Who taught you where things were going to go? Did anybody teach you? Did you put any thought in it? Did somebody else unpack your boxes and your things are still in the spaces where they put them 15 years ago, 30 years ago? You've never really even thought about, well, that's where they go. That's where they were. That's where I'm gonna put 'em back. I want you to really think about how do you use your kitchen? What phase of life are you in? Do you even like the stuff you have? Do you have too much? Do you not have enough? Who else lives with you? How do they use this space? Is there a better way we could organize this? Because organization is about asking a lot of questions, determining the organization that will work best for you. And then when you put all that thought into it and you organize that space, it will stay organized. I know, mind-blowing. And it has nothing to do with containers. Like, you could buy containers, but you don't have to. It's more about where the things go and how they're organized and where they live than what they look like when they're there. I'm not your Pinterest organizer. I mean, it's good, it's going to be functional. It's not all going to be teal baskets when you're organizing with me, but it is going to stick. The other thing about spending 21 days in the kitchen, and I do it on the weekends, you guys, I take all 7 days and I do it on a Saturday in about 3 hours. You don't have to actually do 15 minutes a day. You can bulk these things together, but you're going to spend 3 Saturdays in your kitchen at a minimum. And the reason why is because the first Saturday you're gung-ho and you're decluttering and you're, yeah, I'm going to take this back. Oh, I didn't know that these drawers are mini rooms. I love this idea. Lisa's brilliant. And then week 2, you're going to be like, all right, well, I got most of it done, so I'm gonna skip those 2 days. And all right, I guess I'll move this cabinet over there, although I don't think that's going to work. Why are we rearranging cabinets? This doesn't make any sense to me. And then you're going to get to week 3 and you're gonna say, I think it's good enough. I really don't think I need to do a 3rd week in the kitchen. I mean, how long do we have to spend in here anyway, Lisa? And I'm going to say, push through that resistance, because that is where you've always gotten your kitchen on your own. Like, on your own, you could get it at least 50% organized and decluttered. It's that bottom cabinet that you don't want to get down on your hands and knees and Put your head all the way in there so you can reach back in and pull the stuff out, or is that top cabinet that you have to get the, the chair and you're going to pull it down and you have 27 vases and you don't even have cut flowers. And you don't want to deal with the fact that you have vases because you don't know where to donate them, and you know, your mom was really good at flowers, but you're not good at flowers. Like, it's those things. That's what you get to in week 3, all those decisions you still don't want to make that are at the top or at the bottom. That are still clutter, and I want you to get it all the way organized. I want this to be the space to be totally organized, not perfect. The goal is not to be perfect because we're going to come back to the kitchen 2 more times in this year. We're going to go through all these spaces 3 times, but the goal is to get your kitchen functioning for the people that live in your household today so that it will work for this season of life, however long that is. It might be a year. Might be 10 years, but we're going to get it set to work for you. So I already asked you if your kitchen is organized. If you haven't typed in, type it in now. Next, I move into the second 3 weeks— is 3 weeks we spend in your primary getting ready area. We spend a week in the bedroom, a week in your bathroom, and a week in your closet. So the closet is first, and you have probably organized your closet before. And there are a lot of great decluttering and organizing closet systems out there. I teach you how to do this in a manageable way. This is where we're not going to spend a Saturday and take everything out of the closet all at once. That feels great when you do it, kind of, as long as you don't lose energy halfway through, and I always lose energy halfway through. I want you to do it in chunks. I want you to take all your shoes and put them on the bed and try them all on and walk around your bedroom and then put all of your shoes back. And then the next day I want you to do your pants, and then the next day I want— and I want you to learn that you can do organizing in bite-sized chunks. You don't have to spend a whole day and get all hot and sweaty and get a babysitter and schedule in pizza. Like, you literally can do this in your everyday life, and I'm going to teach you how to do that. In your bathroom and your closet and your bedroom. Now, when you get down to that 42 days, 80% of your time is spent in your bedroom and your kitchen. And so at the end of 42 days, just gonna be honest with you, most people stop doing the 100-day program until the next round. And I'm all for it. You've made so much progress. You're going to have such an amazing 3 months of living in an organized kitchen. And bedroom area, and then you'll go deeper each time. Part of the reason why your organization has not worked in the past may be the order in which you did your home. So you've probably done it right, you've done your kitchen, you've done your closet. Have you gotten to your bedroom? Have you gotten to your bathroom? And then after that, it gets progressively harder because we usually— if you're going to do this just in one big weekend, a long weekend or over winter break, that's a lot to do. I mean, if you got through all of those spaces, like, who has time to do the family areas and the VHS tapes that you still have and the storage room? And then if you have kids, the kids' spaces, or I mean the garage. Hello, the garage. We just, we lose steam. And then we're like, you know what, it's good enough until the next cycle comes around. And then we're like, all right, I'm gonna start again with the kitchen. So this system that we have progressively keeps moving you further and further into the house, teaching you more and more skills in every single room, and getting your whole house organized like your kitchen will be on day 21. And productivity does not come from the act of organizing or having everything in cute bins. Productivity comes from the habits and the tasks stacking you can do once you're no longer looking for things or constantly organizing. You have to be organized in order to move on to productivity. So I want to stop right here and I want to make a really realistic expectation for you in your organizing in your most productive year. Remember, we have these tiny years inside of this 365 days. So the first one, from January to May, if you have not started with Organize 365 at all, Would be get your Sunday basket started pronto, and then to do just the kitchen and the primary bedroom suite inside of the 100 Days program. And then we go from there, because organization is like math. You have to learn how to add before you can learn how to subtract. And then multiplication is just repeated addition, and each skill builds on the other. So once you learn how to declutter, you learn how to organize the drawers in the kitchen. I teach you how to organize your silverware drawer, then I teach you how to organize another drawer, and then on the next day I tell you how those 2 skills work for any drawer in your entire house. You can then go to your junk drawer, you could do your nightstand drawer, you could do a drawer in your laundry room or your garage. You get— you then will be like, oh, I know how to organize drawers now. When we do cabinets, you'll be like, oh, they're little rooms. What is the purpose of this room? I know how to organize cabinets now, and I keep building on those skills as you go through so that when we get to the storage room or the garage, you've built your organizing muscles strong enough that when I say, okay, this is like a drawer, this is like a cabinet, this is like a whatever, even though you don't have a drawer or a cabinet there, you're like, okay, I have a framework. I can now start to organize a more hot mess of a space. So productivity in one area leads to productivity in, in the next. When your kitchen and your primary bedroom is organized, you are going to have more time and be more productive through May. And when you get to June, you'll be like, bring it, I am, I'm ready to get my organizing muscles stronger because I'm ready for more productivity in the living spaces and in some of my paper organization. And as you grow your habits and your organizing muscles, We here at Organized 365, you will see more and more that is already layered into things that you've already gone through before. Montessori education says that you teach the same skill 3 different times. So Montessori classrooms are multi-age and usually have like 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders together, or 3, 4, and 5-year-olds in the same room. And the teacher actually gives the same lesson every year on dinosaurs or whatever it is. But the 1st grader picks up different things than the 2nd grader and the 3rd grader that are in the classroom. And also they have different assignments related to whatever it is they are learning. That is how this system is created. You will learn when you go through the Program the first time, and there are people who have gone through the 100-Day Program 16 times. And they are always getting more and more and more out of it because you, your muscles are stronger. You are learning at a different level, even though the content that you are going through is the same. It's just how we learn as learners. So the roadmap to a completely organized life starts with a Sunday basket, moves through this 100-day program and everything else I'm about to show you in All Access, and then ends in getting your work organized the same way that you organize your home. So I want to take you through how we do this. I'm going to show you behind the scenes of the lesson plans of your year to get organized, the classroom support that you will have, and the supply list that we will supply you with. So first, let's start with the lesson plans. So I told you about the 100-Day Home Organization Program. That's just a teeny bit of the All Access Complete Home Organization Program. It includes a private podcast, which is starting on December 5th. We're launching a brand new private podcast for this All Access membership level, which is lifetime, by the way. Once you sign up, like, you're in it for life, and I will literally guide you in this 52-week podcast as to what you're supposed to be doing next, because there are some weeks that we're not in the 100-day program. What do you do in those weeks? And you're about to see some of the school supplies that we have. When do you do those binders? How do those fit in? And the podcast will be something that will be inside of our app. I'm gonna show you in a minute. That will really guide you and motivate you. I've already started recording them. They're anywhere from like 7 or 8 minutes to 18 minutes long, and they'll drop every Sunday. So let me pause the sharing. I have been sharing my screen. Yeah, I have. Okay, I'm going to stop the sharing and I'm going to take you over— whoops— into our dashboard. Now, can I find you again? And share the screen again. Okay, so here we are over at the Organize 365 website, and at the top here on the right it says dashboard. Normally it'll say login, and once you remember, you'll log in, and here's your dashboard. So here's your Sunday basket information. You could try a free week of the 100-day program. That information is in here, but inside of the all-access home organization program, here's your 100-day home organization coursework. Which is all available immediately upon purchase, and everything else we're going to talk about that are additional things that are inside of All Access that are not the 100-day program. So let me show you what this looks like if we're in the kitchen, which is days 1 to 21. Each week is going to have a, um, um, a header. So this is week 1, we're going to do kitchen zones. You have all of your lessons here, so let me open up a couple of these lessons. And then there's always bonus stuff in here and older stuff. There's content. I told you I'm a teacher, lots of content. So here's lesson 1. All these videos are literally like 1 to 3 minutes. Remember, you're only giving me 15 minutes a day. I can't talk to you for an hour. So I give you a really short video, I give you a little bit of words, and then you go do it. And then day 2, we're going to talk about clearing off your kitchen counters. Day 3, I didn't open. And then there's bonus stuff in here. So I've been doing this for 10 years, so I don't have the blog anymore on the website. So the blog, the old blog posts are actually in here if you want those. Also, I have done over, I don't know, 400 podcasts. They're not all in the podcast player anymore. So the original podcasts from 2015 Are inside of the 100-day program. So, so look at all these extra podcasts you can listen to if you want to. If you're like, oh, like, how do I organize kitchen cabinets from Lisa in 2015? You can, you can listen to them right here in the course. Let's go back to the dashboard as you complete each of these. So let's say you're going to complete this, you mark it complete. And you go back to your dashboard, then see how that got marked. So you can keep track of what you've done and what you haven't done. Every single day is independent. You do not have to go in order. You could start on day 89 if you want. It does not matter, and you could keep track by checking off your lessons. We go into food prep. So this is all the 21 days. Let's look at another one. In the 100-day program, here are those closet days, bathroom days, and Bedroom days. So when you go into— I think it's makeup. So here's a video I did. This is how I organized my makeup. And then I also have a video— it must be over in the app— of my getting ready in the morning. It's just like you get ready with me in the morning and I show you everything that I've done. So a lot of bonuses are in here in addition to the lessons. Okay, let me go back. So you can see, this is your coursework. This is where you're going to find all of your courses here inside of our 100-day program. We want— we don't want you to do any extra work. So the blitzes are all in here. You don't even have to find them online. You can go get the blitz videos right here. We're going to take you right to where they are. Everything you need to get organized is inside of the course. Like I said, I'm a teacher. It's a bazillion years of content. Lots and lots and lots of stuff. So let's go back to our slides. Okay. Huh. Yay. All right, so that's inside of the dashboard. Uh, oh yeah, we took a look inside. Sorry, I sidetracked myself. So in addition to on-demand Work that you can do. We also have a lot of classroom support, and the classroom support— this is Tanya. She doesn't know she's in the slide. Hi, Tanya! Tanya is inside of our new community app that is launching in 2 weeks, and I think we just got app approval today, and she is in there to motivate you and inspire you. So I want to have you get a sneak peek inside of our new app, which we only have beta testers in, so it's a really big deal. So this is what our app is going to look like. You could do it on desktop or you can do it on your phone. It'll be on iPhone or Android. It'll be in the Google Play Store. And the reason that we have moved into a community app is because I want everyone who is getting organized in their year of organizing to be able to, one, participate in the community regardless of your affiliation with different social media channels, and two, more importantly, to focus you. Like It's good, but there's not a ton here. You can easily get in and out of our app in 5 to 10 minutes a day. So I'm going to go ahead and open up my feed. So I am— I have a Sunday basket, so I'm part of the Sunday Basket Club, and I am an all-access member. So I have my 100-day program, and I have my all-access membership, and I also have the Friday Workbox. I have all the things. I also made all the things. But anyways. This is my feed, and so I'm seeing all of these groups all together, but if I want to just see one, I can go up here at the top. So I'm going to click on the 100-day group. I'll show you what Tanya is going to do. So as you scroll down here, you could see that today we're on day 61 and we're working on our cleaning schedule. So that's the first thing you're going to see that just published, uh, 3 hours ago. And then yesterday we did the laundry room. And then here, Tanya was asking us what our favorite organizing product was, just getting us a little interacting with each other. We just launched this app, you guys, 4 days ago for beta testers only. So we are doing the cleaning week, and then here I popped in here live and I showed you how I am organizing Grayson, my grandson's stuff, up in my bedroom. So you can see that video, and this is a little organizer I'm using as my grandma bag, so I gave you the Amazon link for that. And then I asked you what you wanted to see. Did you want to see my bookshelves or did you want to see Grayson's areas? So you picked Grayson's areas. Tanya asked you another question. So anyway, we have a lot of engagement going on in here, but it's not too much engagement. So let me show you inside of the All Access group. So then inside of All Access, we're going to be talking more about the paper, and I'll show you that when we get to our school supplies. So I hopped in here and I shared with you— what's this? What's this that we shared? I don't know. I don't know what we shared. We're in beta right now. Okay, so that is the app. That's where you'll see your friends. You get different badges, things like that. Okay, next. Yes, we get to do the school supplies. Okay. So let's take a look inside the school supplies. Let me stop sharing. No, stop sharing. Hi, how are you doing? All right, so you now know what is inside of the All Access dashboard and the new app, which you guys, I didn't realize that I was going to show you the app until today, so most people have not even seen that. So you need school supplies in order to get organized, so I'm going to take you through our box. And I'm not going to keep going through everything that's in All Access, but inside of here we also ship you everything that you're going to need as you get deeper and deeper and deeper inside of the program. So do you remember when I said that I used to buy my planners? I would go and I would buy new 12-month planners 3 times a year. Well, we here at Organize 365 just send you a planner that only goes for 4 months. So every 4 months there's a new planner and the first one is included. And I take you through really thinking through— sorry, the camera is not picking this up— thinking through and planning your year. We do a lot, a lot of planning, and I do a planning day with you when you get started. There's a planning day included. If you just did the Holiday Blitz with us, we include the Blitz printables in the planner. Again, we don't want you to have to search anywhere. Or do anything extra. We just want you to have the supplies that you need so you can follow the actions of the day. No downloading, no signing up, just what you need to do. I think I mentioned before that our Sunday basket— all, all of the Organized 365 purchases are lifetime membership, which means that once you join this group, you are in this group like as long as you want to be in there. I told you that there are people who have been in there for 16 rounds of the 100-day program. So also included are the 4 binders that you see behind me on this side. They organize your filing cabinet. They do your financial binders, your medical binders, your, your reference, and your household operations. So I am going to pull those from right here. Each one comes with slash pockets inside of it and the workbooks that you need in order to Really create a full picture of what your financial picture is. So we want you to ditch your filing cabinet so that your papers are portable and you could take them with you when you need to advocate for yourself or for others, but also so that you can take them with you in the event that you are in a situation where you need to evacuate from a fire or hurricane or something like that. What we found as we are organizing our paper Is that we think that all the information we need is either digitized on our computer or it's in our filing cabinet. And the truth is, it's about a third in your filing cabinet, it's about a third on your computer, and it's about 40% in your brain. So when you get these binders, we actually have workbooks in here. And the workbooks teach you what you need to get off of the computer or out of the filing cabinet or out of your brain. So that you can advocate for whoever you need to advocate for. All right, let me go back to our slides. Share screen. Okay, so one thing I just want to mention. Is that our binders are made in the United States, our paper is printed in the United States. I found out 8 weeks ago that our binder rings— all binder rings basically— are not made in the United States, no matter who you're manufacturing with. And there are no more binder rings in the whole United States for the deluxe binders that we custom make. So our rings are sitting on one of those ships outside of the LA port, and they have been for the last 8 weeks. So I just want to let you know right now what our plan is, because we're almost out of binders, is that when you sign up for your year of organization in 2022, we will send you the planner and we will send you the contents of the binders because we have all of those things. And then we will send you the shells of the binders that you need early in January, so you can get started, you can get the dashboard, you could be ready to go on January 1st, but the outside is going to come in a second package in January. I mentioned that planning day that I will walk you through planning when you get started your first time. And you also get to add either the kids program or the photo program to all access when you purchase. So just like I showed you all of those little slash pockets on the dashboard to organize your home in the 100-day program, we have little slash pockets that are for your kids. We consider kids 0 to age 25. And we have individual videos and lessons and printables for them to organize their bedrooms, which I call their mini apartment. And I literally guide them to setting up and organizing their bedroom when they're in grade school, when they're in middle school, and when they move out and they are on their own in their first dorm or their first apartment. The photos— the photo organizing program is for your physical photos. So I just want to let you know, you are not alone. You have what it takes. You were made for this, and you are ready to get organized. I would be honored to be your teacher to help you get organized. And now we are going to take questions, so I'm going to stop sharing, and let me find Emily Kelly. Okay, so I am going to share my screen again. A couple people are having questions about the kids program and the photo program, so I want to show that to you as well. So if we go to the photo organizing program and you open that up— I was a Creative Memories consultant for 12 years, a leader in Creative Memories. I've helped people make thousands of scrapbooks. I personally have made over 500 scrapbooks. So inside of this, you don't have to make scrapbooks, but you will learn how. I teach you how to collect all your photos and memorabilia. How do you identify photos? Like, when you have photos that are going back hundreds of years or 100 years, how do you identify those? I actually teach you some tricks and how to identify those. I teach you how to sort them the first time through and just make them in buckets of organizing. And I teach you how to sort and eliminate duplicates. As you go through. So this is not for digital photos. I am a— I'm a paper girl. I'm a paper photo girl. And then I walk you through how to make an album. It is easier than you think when you know the process. And so I walk you through all the parts of assembling an album, even if you only make one album. I walk you through why I use Creative Memories. You can use whatever you want, but this is why I use Creative Memories. And then I also teach you about how to organize your physical memorabilia, like in binders or Letters or deeds or any of those things that you find as you're organizing your paper. And then if we go back to the dashboard, the kids program is so much— there's so much in the kids program. It's essentially the 100-day home organization program for kids. I am a— my college degree is in early childhood and elementary education, and I love kids, so it's, it's all in here, people. This is for the parents, teaches you how to set up a house for kids that are 5 and under, how to teach your kids how to be organized. So this is all just for the parents. And then, um, oh, that's just the parents in general. This is how to set up a house for kids 5 and under, sleeping zones, feeding zones, clothing, storing extra clothes. Play stuffed animals, finding more space, organizing the kids' papers. And then hold on, let me open these up so I can show you quicker. And then we do learning. So learning the skill of organizing. This starts about the age of 7, but we've had kids start even younger. I teach them about their mini apartment, which gives them ownership of their space. And so I talk to kids like they're adults— not adults, but like they're humans. So I show them how to organize their space. I give it to them in typing if they also want it in typing. I talk to them about how to plan out their zones on paper. I do that on graph paper like I did as a kid. I literally teach them how to do the graph paper. And then I talked about clothing. Look at how many I do about clothing. What do they like and how to respectfully tell you what they like and how to declutter their clothes and how to store their clothes and how much clothes— clothing should they have and where does that go and give them little labels. So here's your how many clothes you should have and little labels that you can put on top of your different areas so you remember what you put where. And then— oops, sorry. And then we talk about schoolwork, organizing their schoolwork, adding a desk, uh, creating a Lisa binder, how to use activity bags for all the different activities they have, how to organize all their passion projects and their toys, how to declutter any category. We start with stuffed animals, how to make their school memory binders, how to organize their school papers. And then after they do learning, they do launch. And launch is designed for 16 to 25-year-olds. So it's taking that idea of a mini apartment and applying it to a real apartment. And there we talk about setting up our launch system, setting up a basic Sunday basket, and going through a basic Sunday basket. And we give them a lot of printables to get them started in their medical and their planning and their errands. So this is how they set up their binder, and you could buy the binder or they could set up their own. Some of the printables are included. How to set up their Sunday basket just with the 1.0s. And then we have the Saturday and Sunday days. So Saturday is the day that you clean and organize your room, and you have a checklist. And then I literally— you guys, it's, it's a teacher in their room. So they literally take the iPad or whatever in there, and I teach them how to pick up their trash and put their food and dishes away and put their laundry in the hamper. And then I literally teach them how to make their bed, do everything, how to clean up their floor, how to dust and Windex. I tell them put shoes on if they're allowed to vacuum, like you must wear shoes. So everything you're telling them, I tell them, then you don't have to tell them. And then for Sunday, I teach them how to plan their week starting very young. Like there are things you need to do. You need to clean out your backpack and go through your homework and check your school binder. I walk them through that, like, have you checked your school binder? Have you packed your activity bags for the week? Have you put your paper in your parents' Sunday basket? Have you put your papers on top of the refrigerator? It's very thorough. It's extremely thorough. Everything you would possibly ever want to know about how to organize kids and kids' stuff. Okay, so we answered all the questions of the people who are on here live. If you have any questions, please just email customerservice@organize365.com. We're happy to answer any questions that you have. If you have a lot of questions, Emily Kelly will give you a call and personally answer your questions for you. We want you to really know what you're doing and be excited about starting your year of getting organized. We will be doing more of these masterclasses in December and in the future. You can also watch the replay of this one or share it with anyone that you want to by forwarding the email if you are on the registration and you got this by email, or going to our YouTube channel, or going to our free Facebook group, we would love to have you join us in the All Access Home Organization program and get your home organized and get ready for your most productive year ever, putting in place all of the railroad tracks that you need in order to just smoothly glide along those for the next 9 years after you invest this year in getting organized. Thank you so much, everyone.