Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing
Are you sick of juggling a million things, and pleasing everyone BUT you?
What if I told you that you could achieve more and find your calm by doing LESS?
In this podcast for accomplished working women, discover where you're going wrong with managing your overwhelm and the exact steps to feel more composed and productive.
Tune in to learn unlikely time management hacks, tips to feel less overwhelmed, and surprising ways to do less with your host Michelle Gauthier, who has over 6 years of experience coaching hundreds of overwhelmed working women.
If you want to to start reclaiming your time, setting better boundaries, and nurturing your mental well-being, you're in the right place.
Get started by listening to fan-favorite episode "The Power of a To-Don't List."
Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing
#129| Why Your To-Do List Feels Endless— And How the Sunday Basket® Can Reduce Overwhelm & Save Your Productivity: Overwhelm, Productivity, Time Management & People Pleasing
Have you ever felt like you're drowning in clutter, juggling papers and to-do lists, and struggling to find time for yourself? What if you could reclaim hours every week by simply organizing your home and mindset?
In today's episode, Lisa Woodruff, the creator of The Sunday Basket® , shares how this simple yet powerful system can help you regain control of your time and mental space. If you’ve been battling clutter and distractions, this episode will show you how organizing your environment can transform your life. It's especially relevant if you’re a busy woman looking for more peace and productivity.
In this episode, you will:
- Learn how organizing your Sunday routine can save you 5 hours every week.
- Discover the power of the Sunday Basket and how it can eliminate the mental load of keeping track of tasks.
- Understand why organizing your own space is key to long-term success, even if you’ve struggled with clutter before.
Listen to this episode now and learn how a simple Sunday habit can change the way you live and work!
Featured on the podcast
Organize 365® website
Organize 365® podcast
Connect with Lisa on Instagram
Order The Sunday Basket® on Amazon
Send Me a Message - Have a question, comment, or just want to say hi? Message me here, I'd love to chat!
Work With Me - Interested in working with me 1-on-1, taking a class, or joining one of my coaching groups? Message me here to get the scoop.
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Life can be overwhelming, but on this podcast, you'll discover practical strategies to overcome overwhelm, imposter syndrome, and negative self-talk, manage time effectively, set boundaries, and stay productive in high-stress jobs—all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
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Every single person can learn to be organized. Organization is a learnable skill. I'm a kindergarten teacher. This is Kindergarten Simple. I can teach you.
Michelle Gauthier:You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that former overwhelmed working woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hey friends, thanks for joining today.
Michelle Gauthier:Today I have a really exciting guest. Her name is Lisa Woodruff and she created this system called the Sunday Basket, which you've maybe heard me talk about on the podcast before. It's this idea that you organize your week every Sunday and throughout the week, you take all those papers that end up on your kitchen counter and everywhere else and put them in one basket and you deal with them at one time once a week. Lisa is the founder of Organize 365. She's a best-selling author. She has a podcast with 24 million downloads, hashtag goals. She's helped thousands of women take control of their time, their papers, their mental clutter, and so today, when you listen to this episode, you're going to learn how this Sunday basket system that she came up with can save you hours each week, and why organizing your own space is the key to long term success. So she suggests, for example, that we don't start with the kitchen counter, but that we start with our own closet, and then a couple mindset shifts that help busy women let go of guilt and embrace doing less. So if you've had enough of losing time to clutter and distractions and endless to-do lists, this episode is for you.
Michelle Gauthier:Welcome, Lisa. I am so glad that you are here. It feels like a full circle moment for me because when I, long before I started my life coaching business, was a corporate America working mom trying to manage it all, just Googled I don't even know what and I came across your Sunday basket and I started using the concept and for anybody listening that doesn't know what that is, you're about to find out but I started using that concept, I mean in 2013, 2014 timeframe. I still do, I still plan on Sundays, I still go through my little basket on Sundays and I recommend it to clients all the time, and so last time I talked about it on the podcast, I looked up who invented the Sunday basket, because I've been using it forever. I forgot and then I found your name again and I reached out to you and I asked you if you would be on the podcast, and I'm so thrilled that you're here.
Lisa Woodruff:Michelle, thank you so much for having me. I love meeting and talking with women about getting our time back for uniquely created to do, which is obviously what you did, so I'm so glad it helped you. I'm glad you looked it up again and found me again. I know that was.
Michelle Gauthier:it was so fun. So I am super excited to have you and just thank you for all of the hours that you have saved me and, by me passing it on to other people, saved even more. Do you have any idea how many like people you have influenced, or do you have any idea on that?
Lisa Woodruff:Yes, we do Tell me yes. So I estimate that there's a statistic that you spend 55 minutes a day looking for things and once you have the Sunday basket you stop looking for things. So I back that off a little and I say that the Sunday basket saves you five hours per week, which most people will say yeah, it's about once you get it going like, yeah, it feels about right.
Lisa Woodruff:Right, we were in the middle of doing an actual time study on that when COVID started and I was like, well, throw that out the window. Yeah, someday we may actually go back and be a statistically accurate of those five hours. But if you believe that the Sunday basket saves you five hours per week, every week we have used our Sunday basket sales, which officially started in 2018 is when we started selling the physical Sunday basket. So only physical Sunday basket sales, not people who made their own. Only physical Sunday basket sales. Five hours per week, starting six weeks after the person makes their purchase, is 10.5 million hours. So far.
Michelle Gauthier:Oh my gosh, and I love to think about what. What are those 10.5 million hours spent doing instead Like, maybe relaxing or like I don't know, spending time with family? Or so much possibility.
Lisa Woodruff:Yeah, no, they tell us. So, yes, they do that, but also starting foundations. Literally, our workbox was in the lab that invented the COVID vaccine.
Michelle Gauthier:Really.
Lisa Woodruff:Writing books. There was someone who left Florida during COVID, left her teenagers in Florida and went to New York and worked in the hospitals because she didn't want the staff that had young children working in the hospitals before we even know what was going to happen with COVID and she said she couldn't have done that without the Sunday basket. Like, yes, it gives us our time and our mental mind back, but it really, when people have time to do what they're uniquely created to do, they do really big things.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, oh my gosh, that is amazing. Yeah, I guess I could even say that in my case, I quit my corporate job and started coaching. I've been doing that full-time for seven years, helping women, you know, create their own best lives. So what a ripple effect you've created. Will you take us back and tell us a little bit about why you started this? Have you always just been an organized person?
Lisa Woodruff:So I guess there are like three mini stories. So yes, I was totally an organized kid. I'd get sent to my bedroom for timeout and I'd reorganize it, and then I organized my sister, and then I organized my mother. She's an artist, so that was a challenge and that was fun. And then I had two children under the age of two and then I was not organized.
Lisa Woodruff:Anybody can relate yeah, they'll write that, yeah, all my friends were like, hey, lisa's not organized. I was like no, lisa has to become organized. So when the kids were six months and two years old is when I invented the Sunday basket. Like this is 2002.
Lisa Woodruff:So everything is like printed out papers on my kitchen counter and my son would never sleep so I didn't have any time like to get caught up on things, and when he would fall asleep I would get all my papers spread out and then he'd wake up and I'd just stack them back together. And it was like this game I played every day and I was not getting anywhere. I was paying our bills late because I ran out of time, not because we were out of money, we actually had the money, I just couldn't remember to pay the bills. I had no system.
Lisa Woodruff:So one Sunday night I took all those papers and I spread them out on the family room floor and it was 40 distinct piles of things I had to do like invoices, to invoice bills, to pay phone calls, to make you know prescriptions to renew library books, to return all of those things, and I put every pile into a slash pocket and then I just put them in a basket. I had a Longaberger basket and that became the first Sunday basket with the slash pockets in it and I would go through it every Sunday and I did that. I wonder what a slash pocket is, in case they don't know, and everybody what a slash pocket is in case they don't know. Yeah, so a slash pocket is like a binder insert, a plastic binder insert that has a pocket on the front and the back that's colored okay.
Michelle Gauthier:So if you think of that, yeah, so you've got like 40 different color folders not file folders where the stuff falls out all the time, but like it holds it and you could see through them so you could kind of see what's in there you can hold like an index card or a full printed out email.
Lisa Woodruff:So that worked really well and I did that from 2002 all the way until I started this company in 2012. And what you probably got was an e-book version of this in 2013. After I'd been doing this company for five years in home professional organizing and all of that, someone said to me at least it's not your in-home organizing, it's the Sunday basket. I was like, but it's just a basket. They're like, yeah, it's a basket. So I patented and manufactured the Sunday basket and now we manufacture our slash pockets. We have, you know, five pink, five blue, five purple. If you buy them anywhere else, you get a rainbow assortment. So it's more cognitive work to do your Sunday basket and it doesn't have the training and the co-working time.
Lisa Woodruff:So, in 2018, we started the course and the co-working time and the physical product that really supports you getting organized on the weekend.
Michelle Gauthier:That is amazing, oh my gosh. And then how was that like, as you were, for example, manufacturing a physical product or buying a physical product or having it manufactured? I can't imagine what a stretch that must have been on, like your brain and your business and your mind and all those things.
Lisa Woodruff:So luckily, I had been in business six years at the time when we actually started manufacturing, but when you've never manufactured before and luckily I was a service-based business still. So all the money in the company was from doing in-home professional organizing, which is like almost a hundred percent profit. So I had built the online blog. I had been podcasting for a few years. At this point, I had some online courses I was selling, so I used that revenue in order to buy the product. Well, you have to buy a lot of slash market.
Michelle Gauthier:I bet have to buy it. I think it was like 10,000. Yeah, I can't just buy like 100, I bet.
Lisa Woodruff:No, like 10,000. So I placed the order, which takes a long time to get here, and, as the order is going to be delivered and my broker is going to bring it in the back of his van, I started thinking about, like, how many boxes is this going to be? Because I'd never placed, and that was just for the 1.0s, the red, orange, yellow, green, blue. I'd already placed the order for the pink, purple, blue, green and you had to buy 10,000 of each color. So I was about to get an order that was four times the size and I was like there aren't enough shelving units in the world for all of this to fit in my garage. I was like, yes, I'm renting a office and so, yes, doing the intellectual property, placing the order, funding the order and then storing the order. And then all of a sudden, I mean, you know, when you start a business, you don't know what you don't know. Plus, I have a kindergarten teaching degree, so I have a business degree. So I'm like, okay, now I've got to buy an office to store slash buckets. I also have to hire somebody to ship these out, because I don't I'm a stay-at-home mom Like I don't have time to ship them out. I don't know how to ship them out. Also, they're coming in all these different packages.
Lisa Woodruff:We put them together with the Sunday baskets were coming from a different manufacturer. That was another. So so now I'm having pallets of stuff delivered and I rented an office space. Like I didn't rent a warehouse, I rented, like, an office inside of an office building. So I'm having two pallets now of Sunday baskets delivered and they had to deliver them on a truck with where the lift gate would go down, cause I don't have a door. Yeah, so we're delivering them in the parking lot, Like, cause there's no door, it's an office, there's no delivery area. So they're pulling up to the front of the office building at 11 30, which is lunchtime, gosh, and they're delivering pallets onto the park in the middle of the parking lot. So I'm blocking people from going to lunch oh my god.
Lisa Woodruff:Luckily I have like one little like two by four cart and I could put like six boxes on a cart at a time, but they were, like I don't know, 180 boxes, oh my god. And it's July, oh my god. So probably I'm like running in and out of the locked door like yeah, yeah, and I was like I think I'm in over my head, I think I don't know what I'm doing.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, and then I don't know what I'm doing. I hope someone's going to buy these. I hope someone's going to buy all these If I spent all this money.
Lisa Woodruff:Oh my gosh. I have always used cash to buy everything, sometimes a small line of credit, but for a long time I didn't take any money out of the company and I said to my husband I'm profitable on paper. Look, I'm making so much money on paper. He's like where's the money? I was like, come on over, come on over. I'll show you and I'm like yeah, look around, imagine all of this is dollar bills.
Michelle Gauthier:Exactly. It's all in folders, oh my gosh. That's such a great story, though, and that's a lot of the women who I work with do end up leaving their career and starting a business or doing something different, and it's such a good example of you really don't know what you're doing. You're never going to feel a hundred% comfortable, but you just give it a try and you live and you learn and like look at this impact that you've had by taking that risk. That's just amazing. Okay, so since then, just at a high level, how many Amazon bestseller books do you have?
Lisa Woodruff:Like four right, I do have one traditionally published book and three Amazon bestseller books and hopefully soon, we're in the process of selling my my next traditionally published book.
Michelle Gauthier:OK, that is amazing. And do you even know how many podcast episodes you've put out there? There's like thousands, it appears. I've listened to lots, but not all of them, you know.
Lisa Woodruff:I, I don't know, because well, we've had a Friday podcast for 10 years, so when is that 500 something? But we started the Wednesday podcast six years ago. But then I do coffee chats and then there was a year where I just did Mondays because I wanted to do Mondays. I feel like I have no idea, but it's 24 million downloads.
Michelle Gauthier:Oh my gosh, that is amazing. What a great number. Even if you think of one person downloading one episode, that that helped them in some way, like that is an amazing number of touches. So thank you for taking that risk.
Michelle Gauthier:For all of us who have benefited from what you have created, I'm hoping now that if, if, no, if someone hasn't heard of the Sunday basket, we talk a lot on this podcast. I would say, you know, once every couple of months we talk about clutter being the source of overwhelm and, of course, disorganization. Since I'm talking to overwhelmed working women, who are often moms, it feels like the kitchen counter is sort of like the main area of pain. I mean the whole house too, but the kitchen counter feels like the main area of pain. And my kids are older now. They're 14 and 17. So they don't come home with papers anymore. They don't even have papers. But when they were little, like all the little preschool drawings and all that stuff, it just feels so overwhelming sometimes. So for someone who has never heard of the Sunday basket, can you give us just a high level, what it is?
Lisa Woodruff:Yes, so it is like your administrative assistant for your house, for your household management role. So it's not going to do cleaning, it's not going to do organizing, but you, as a household manager, like. Think about this 68% of the US GDP is American household spending, and usually the woman is responsible for that. So we are literally the CEO of the largest small business in the world, and we do that through a Sunday basket.
Lisa Woodruff:So the things that are in the Sunday basket would be like you'll have a slash pocket for bill pay, like everybody has to have their bills, even if you pay them online. You know you have to have some kind of a cadence of paying bills. You have a slash pocket for menus and meal planning, even if you order them from a service like you got to remember to order them from a service and cancel it when you're vacationing and things like that. So there are some standard things that everybody has the same slash pockets for. That's the red, orange, yellow, blue, green. So it'd be what you have to do this week, what you are doing on your calendar or your meal planning errands or anything you're going to do outside of the house, your bill pay and things you're waiting for.
Lisa Woodruff:So, like you sent in your tax return. You're waiting for it to come back. You sent out for a rebate. You're waiting for it to come back. You emailed the family about when they're coming for the holidays. You're waiting for them to respond. So that way, every week you could just touch base. Like that's right. You know, susie didn't tell me if we're going to this party or not.
Lisa Woodruff:So those are like everybody does those. And then you have pink, purple, blue, green colors and they're each a role that you play as a household manager. So the pink is the color for you. I'll get back to that in a minute. Blue is the color for people, and pets count as people, so you might have a slash pocket for each individual person in your family. So if they're school age, you might have like their school stuff, their soccer schedule For you. I'm thinking you might have like getting your temporary license, finding out information about colleges. You know any of the 1099s or W-2s they have for filing their taxes, because now they're working, you know that kind of stuff. Purple is the color for the house, so any remodeling, any repairs that need to be done, selling the house, decluttering any household related things. And then green is your financial and administration color, so taxes, charitable things that you do, all of that.
Lisa Woodruff:When I manufactured this and I received all these slush pockets and I set up my own finally, my own official Sunday basket I realized I didn't know how to label the pink. I've been talking about it for years about how we needed to have pink for ourselves and I literally didn't have any projects that were just for me. Everything I did was for my family, for my house, for our finances, for making it all run, and so I started making slash buckets for me, like things to read, I like to do puzzles, makeup, clothing, and now pink is travel for me. So like I will go and travel with my family, I'll go and travel with my husband. I'm even taking myself on my own trips, just like day long homeschooling myself for things that I want to go do.
Michelle Gauthier:I love that. That's awesome. Yes, I feel like most moms would just be like I don't need that pink one, but we still need that pink one. That's amazing. Okay, so then you've got all that stuff. There's a place for everything.
Lisa Woodruff:And then on Sundays, what do you have people do? So the thing about this box is it has a divider in it, so it's an offset divider. So your slash pockets are in the back third and the front third is like an open box, and so that's by design. We want you to write down every single thought you have on an index card and throw it in the box so we can wait till Sunday. Also, like if your kids bring you a toy, it needs a new battery, it goes in the box. If you run out of a prescription but you have it in your pill container can wait till Sunday, goes in the box. You're cooking, you run out of a spice, throw it in the box. Like every single thing that would stop you from being productive in your life. Throw in the box.
Lisa Woodruff:Then on Sunday you go through the mail. You go through everything you put in there. You go through all of your ideas on index cards. You sort them into the right slash pockets If they can wait. You look at all of your slash pockets and you just ask yourself one question. There's only one question you ask in the Sunday basket and it is this can this wait until next Sunday? If it can, it must. So everything that can has to go back in the box. It goes in the slouch pocket, but it goes back in the box. Then what you have left are the things that cannot wait until next Sunday. So you have two choices. You either say I'm not doing this, you don't do it, or you say I'm going to do it now, which you get about 80% done during your Sunday basket time, or I have to do it on Monday because I have to wait to make a call or do whatever.
Lisa Woodruff:So it's going to get on my calendar and what this does is it eliminates a to-do list.
Lisa Woodruff:You don't have a to-do list, you have a box and every idea and actionable goes in the box. And as you have ideas throughout the week, if you need to do them before Sunday, you do them right away, but if they can wait, they must wait. And because they must wait, you continue living your life as you had already pre-planned, instead of chasing actionable to-dos or whatever your brain thought or the latest text that came in. Like you stay on your plan Monday through Friday. Saturday is always a wash and then Sunday you reset yourself. So at the end of the Sunday basket time we plan our week on paper like we're in kindergarten because I'm a kindergarten teacher and even though you might not use that paper, outline during the week the physical act of thinking through your week, looking at your Google calendar, thinking through oh look, there's not enough time to get from the doctor's appointment to the soccer game, okay, well, I need to make a modification now on Sunday instead of Wednesday after school.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, I absolutely love that, and I too believe strongly in the writing it down on a piece of paper, and I literally don't even have to look back at it if I've done that, but there's just something about it that makes it real and I, too, have mine, all you know, in an online calendar. But there's just something powerful about writing down all those appointments and putting the to-dos in a place on the calendar, and then you're just all set for the week and there's science behind this.
Lisa Woodruff:So I'm in the process of getting my PhD because I want to do a lot of research and there is science behind writing this down. There was a scientific study where they took people and they had them take tasks from a list and put them either on a like a Google calendar, or use a stylus on an iPad and put them on a calendar or put them on an actual physical calendar, and obviously they weren't their tasks, they were just random tasks. Then they took these people and they took them somewhere else and they had them do something else, like to make it go off of their mind, and then they brought them back and they had them. Do you know, recall the tasks that they had put on those calendars? And the person who hand wrote it on an actual calendar was far and away remembered, more than even the person who used their hand on an iPad.
Michelle Gauthier:That's interesting yeah.
Lisa Woodruff:That is very interesting.
Michelle Gauthier:Yeah, yes, oh, that is interesting. It's kind of doesn't surprise me. I'm glad to hear that science is backing it up, because that's what it feels like. It feels like it to me anyway, which is tough because I'm such an efficiency person. So I feel like, oh, this isn't as efficient as putting it on my computer, but I think it is actually.
Lisa Woodruff:Well, you put it on your computer, because of course, we're not going to put all that details, we're not carrying around the planners that we used to but I think the act of manually having to see it on paper, write it down, think through, see where you're you could be more productive during the week and then yes, I don't look at mine throughout the week either it's just the act of taking it from a digital source to a physical source, which encodes it in your brain, and then you move on. Yes, yes.
Michelle Gauthier:So for everybody out there who's listening, I just know right now somebody is saying that's too much for me. I don't even know how to get started. My whole house is a mess. So what is your thoughts? As far as just if you mentioned you were an organized person, what if someone's not an organized person?
Lisa Woodruff:Yeah, and I wanted to mention you know we're talking about like saving 10 million hours. I've got 24 million downloads and as I'm saying those, the numbers don't even seem real to me. I'm like, oh, it sounds a little bit bigger than I actually am, it's not, but I've been doing this for 13 years. I've been doing this business for 13 years and before this business I was successful in the direct sales business. So I brought a lot of those organizational skills and so I started this business a little bit faster than I did that business. But I mean, it took forever to get the first million downloads. I think years and years, and years. And so what I would say to that is in anything that you're doing, learning the habit takes time, but as you continue to do the habit, you become more and more and more proficient and it just becomes second nature and you don't even think about it anymore and you start to get an exponential result, like in the Sunday basket hours, like in the podcast downloads. So every single person can learn to be organized. Organization is a learnable skill. I'm a kindergarten teacher. This is kindergarten, simple. I can teach you. It may take you 12 weeks to get your Sunday basket going instead of six, but it's not not going to work.
Lisa Woodruff:I have learned a lot about ADHD and we are actually going to be doing a lot of research on executive function when I get my PhD. We already have the test, we already have people to give it and this product externalizes your executive function. I believe that's what I figured out how to do, so you don't have to remember things. The Sunday basket remembers them. You don't have to prioritize it because it gets prioritized on Sunday. There's a lot of cognitive load that we naturally are doing right now by trying to do to-do lists and remembering everything that gets externalized into this box. Yeah, when it gets externalized into this box, you have your brain back.
Lisa Woodruff:So a lot of times people will say I don't have five extra hours during the week where I could say I have five hours because I'm using the Sunday basket. But they will agree that they have five more hours of thinking capacity. They're able to think, they're able to have bigger thoughts, they're able to be strategic because they're not just trying to do all the reactive tasks of the day. So what I would say is the reason why there is a physical box is because you need a physical representation of your brain. You need these specific colors because everybody doing the Sunday basket is doing the same colors.
Lisa Woodruff:We have a 90-minute co-working almost every Sunday so you could do it and be held accountable with a group. We have courses which I've got videos upon videos upon videos about how to do this. Like this is not easy, but it is kindergarten simple, and once you really invest the time into watching the courses and doing the co-working time, then you will be able to establish a system. Anybody can learn this. It just might take a little bit longer. And not learning it means you're going to live disorganized, the rest of your life Learning.
Lisa Woodruff:It means that you are going to live more organized the rest of your life. It's kind of like I thought about this PhD. I started when I was 49. I thought am I really going to go back to school for three years? And I thought to myself well, the time is going to pass anyway and, yes, it's going to be hard. But when I'm 53, I'm going to have a PhD and I won't take that, I won't be lost.
Lisa Woodruff:And now that I'm getting to the end, I'm like I'm so glad that I did that and so yes, it's hard and it's challenging, but I'm a completely different person than I was before I started the PhD. I think differently, I have a whole new vocabulary, I understand things at a different level. And it's the same with organization and you always start with the Sunday basket and we have other products and services. But I say to start with the Sunday basket because, as household managers, if you don't have a system for your household management and you start to organize your closet or something else and then a kid gets sick or you have to go help your parents or whatever, now you've got a mess there and your household management isn't organized. The capacity comes from the household management being organized. That's when you'll be able to tuck in the other organization.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, yes. So you definitely recommend this as the start. This is like the heart of it, and then you can continue on from there. I love the thought that everybody has the capability to become an organized person, and the the idea that it might be harder for some people, based on how your brain is wired, also feels like okay, that's good, it's, anybody can do it. It's kindergarten, simple. I love that. Yes, great. Another question that I have for you, just in general, about organizing when people say like I've tried before, I've started and stopped, or even I've done my kitchen, and then it just goes back to being a mess, what do you say to that?
Lisa Woodruff:Yep, two things I say to that. First of all, sometimes when something is organized in one season of life, it's not organized in the next season of life because you're organizing it the old way. So if you have children, your household functions differently. Every you know 18 months to three years, you have to have different kinds of systems. The second thing is you do Swiss cheese organizing, which means you're just like looking at what you can organize, that you see like, okay, I'll do the laundry, I'll do this, I'll do this.
Lisa Woodruff:And while it visually looks better in the short term, it's not actually getting long-term organized, because the order in which you get organized is as important as how much time you put into it. If you reorder what you're doing with the same amount of time, you'll actually get organized. So, for example, if you wanted to organize this weekend, you're probably going to start with the kitchen and the laundry room and maybe the family room or your closet. Your closet is a good choice, all the other ones bad choice. And the reason why they're a bad choice is because your family is in those spaces and they're going to undo whatever you do within a week or so. It's pointless, it's like treading water. What you should do instead is number one organize yourself, your closet, your car, your bedroom, your portion of the bathroom. Then move on to the storage areas. What, yes, storage? Nobody goes there. Nobody wants to go there. Go down, organize that. Make it a prepaid store. Put in shelving, make it look like a store. When you go down there it should be all shelving and bins and you know what you have and it will stay organized forever. When you organize the storage room the way we organize it, you can literally move houses and it'll be the first thing organized in your new house and people have. It is a prepaid store.
Lisa Woodruff:Next thing you do. Then you get into the family spaces. We tend to organize our children first. I don't even know why it's undone the next day. Then we do our family spaces after that. That'll make it maybe a week, a month if you're lucky, and then we never get to storage and we put ourselves last. Forget it. Just go organize yourself for a month. You'll be so much happier and when you organize your bedroom, bathroom and closet, you will be living a 50 percent, an organized life. 50 percent of the time You'll go to bed organized and you'll wake up organized and then you go from there. So it's the order in which you're getting organized and you have to match your phase of life. So there's a little bit of strategic. Got to be strategic.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, I absolutely love that. I've never heard that suggestion before. I think that's so wonderful, and I also noticed that when I'm really organized, my children notice and they follow suit, and whatever room is clean and organized is the ones that we just naturally end up hanging out in, and I think it's amazing how it just has an effect on the overall feel of the household. I just heard a guest on your podcast say the other day she was talking about how her kids know, when they want her to do something, that they go put it in the Sunday basket. Like, don't tell me right now, unless it has to be done this moment, if it's something I have to sign or something I need to look at, just go put it in there. And I love that.
Michelle Gauthier:I think that's such a great. You know a great way to lead your family, because really we do, we just do. We set the tone and we lead the family as the mom. Okay, great, thank you. I will ask you at the end where they can buy that stuff and all those things. But the last thing I want to ask you are the two questions that I ask everybody who is a guest on the podcast, and the first one is what is something that you can do immediately if you feel overwhelmed, to help yourself feel better? 8,000 things come to my mind, don't? We all are like, okay, which of?
Lisa Woodruff:the 8,000 things come to my mind, don't we all? We're like, okay, which of the 8,000 things?
Michelle Gauthier:did they do? I was thinking you were going to say I never get overwhelmed, I'm so organized I'm never overwhelmed.
Lisa Woodruff:No, I was like clean out your purse, Like there's so many you know. You know what I would say Whatever just came to your mind Because I thought, well, clean out your purse, because I want to clean out my purse, or go take a bath, or go take a walk or, you know, order something on Amazon or get takeout tonight, like I think you should do. Whatever just came to your mind is what you should do.
Michelle Gauthier:Yeah, that's the thing that will work for you. Yes, and what is something that you do to consistently do less? Like, for example, I would never go to the grocery store. I always order my groceries. Like, what is something that you do regularly to do less? So many things.
Lisa Woodruff:We could talk for hours about this, but I would say something that I continually do to do less is dishes. So I'm only doing 50% of the housework. If that in our house, like my husband, does everything food-related. I do laundry, he does dog. We have it very well divided, mostly because I abdicated my role. If you are waiting for your spouse to be like, how could I tell you, help you, and I will do that from here. It's not happening. You just have to walk in and abdicate your responsibility. That's how I got out of food, but I don't mind doing the dishes and I still do the dishes. Here's the thing I do dishes three times a week because that's what works for me.
Lisa Woodruff:Okay. Now we eat a lot of takeout. We're in our 50s, so we usually don't eat dinner and my daughter makes her own food. So I will do the dishes on Wednesday night, because our house gets cleaned on Thursday, so it has to be cleaned. Wednesday. I start the dishwasher. Then sometime on Friday night or Saturday I will run the dishwasher again, so we have enough food dishes and the house is clean. Because on Sunday my mother-in-law comes over for dinner, okay, and then after we're done eating on Sunday, I do the dishes and I run the dishwasher one more time.
Lisa Woodruff:Now, initially, when I started this, sometimes my husband or others in my family would say, hey, there are a lot of dishes, and I'd be like, yes, there are, as in. Like, you know how to wash a dish, feel free, because I'm going to do it at these three times. So I know when I'm doing it and I see that it's a mess and I just walk on by because I don't have the time, working 60 hours a week and getting a PhD to be doing dishes three times a day. Nor do I care. I don't care, I just walk by and I go upstairs and I take a hot bath or I go in and I read a book in another room, like I just don't care, and so that's what I would say. Like you can change your expectations and over the years we've lived in the same house for 30 years Like there have been times where I did the dishes three times a day. Right now I'm doing it three times a week. You know, I'll probably go back to doing it daily when I love that.
Michelle Gauthier:Tell us your thoughts that enable you to go in the other room and read a book. When there are dishes Like, what do you think? Okay, first of all you guys.
Lisa Woodruff:50 is fabulous.
Michelle Gauthier:First of all, when you turn 40,. When you turn 40, are you?
Lisa Woodruff:Yes, no way, yes, oh my gosh. So 40, you're like okay, I'm going to stop defending my thoughts to my friends, but you're still like, but I hope they still like agree with what I think. 50, you're like I don't care, I don't care what you do, this is what I'm doing, so I'm moving on.
Lisa Woodruff:So part of it is just age and I don't think we talk about that Part of it is just like the older you get and you don't care what your family thinks, only for the woman, because we as women, we like. If our kids or our spouse came home and said, I want to do X Y Z, we'd be like all right, where do we get the money? How do we figure it out? We come home and say we want to do X Y Z and they're like oh, you're going to leave again. How much is that going to cost? Why do you have to? Can't you just do that from home? Is it unavailable virtually? And I'm like no, I can't do a book tour virtually, I'm going to be gone for it. I mean, my husband is still complaining about the book tour from five years ago. Wait till he finds out there's going to be another one. Let's just not worry about it.
Lisa Woodruff:And it doesn't matter how much money you make. It doesn't matter accolades or how many how'd you prepare? They do not want you to not do what you used to do in a previous phase of life. And women go through a lot of phases of life, men not so much. Anyway, women do like. We continually reinvent ourselves, at least every decade, if not more often and you have to just start saying to yourself that's great, do the dishes if you want.
Lisa Woodruff:I'm not doing them right now yeah, that's great do whatever I'm not doing, and I will even verbally say it, like my husband will say whatever. Like the other day I came home from work at nine o'clock at night because I had my PhD. I was like, and he's like why are you so happy? I was like what do you want me to come home as a Grinch?
Michelle Gauthier:no-transcript as our default, and I think the gentle undoing of that, so that we are allowed to not care what other people think, is so powerful for us to have an impact in the world. We have to let go of what other people are thinking, even if what we think they're thinking is about the dishes or you know, small things like that or what what the neighbors would think if they stopped by and there were two days worth of dirty dishes sitting there. If you decide that you don't care about that, then great, you've just freed up even more of your brain for your PhD or whatever, wherever else you want that brain to go. That's awesome. I love it. Thank you so much. Okay, so if everybody's ready to get their own Sunday basket situation going, where should they go to find this?
Lisa Woodruff:So our store, our podcast, my Instagram is all organized365, organized365.com. But if you specifically just want the Sunday basket, we do have that on Amazon. It's a little bit less if you buy it on Amazon and you'll get free shipping over there if you want to do that, and if you do, please leave me a review.
Michelle Gauthier:Okay, okay, Will do, will do. I love that it's on Amazon. Does that mean the warehouse is not in your office when it's being sold on Amazon? Is it elsewhere? So we're now.
Lisa Woodruff:We're now at 8,000 square feet, so 4,000 square feet of office and an event space and then 4,000 square feet of warehouse. Who's in here for five years and we fulfill our own Amazon orders, so it'll still come through our warehouse. Okay, okay, but you just have space for it now. Yeah, we have more shelving and a forklift.
Michelle Gauthier:My husband's getting bigger and bigger Piles of dollars built of dollars bills he does in that yes, oh my gosh, is there anything that I haven't asked you, that you want to say, or plug, or anything else? I could ask you another question.
Lisa Woodruff:All I would say is you're doing great. Like you are doing great, you're in the right place. You're doing what you need to be doing. This is a great podcast to listen to. You are, you know, filling your mind with possibilities and proactive and positive things. You are, you know, filling your mind with possibilities and proactive and positive things. You are a woman of excellence. Perfection does not exist. Just take the next step. You're uniquely gifted and called and created to do something. Just keep following that vision. You can do it and we're here to help. I love that.
Michelle Gauthier:I love that. Yes, I second everything you just said. I love it. I feel like women always think that we're lacking, not doing enough, et cetera. Actually, you're doing really freaking great. We just don't stop to think about it enough and we should, yeah Well, thank you so much for being on and thank you for the impact you've had on my individual life, plus all the millions of other people who you've impacted by having the nerve to go after and share your unique gifts. So thank you, thank you. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegothiercom. See you next week.
