These past few weeks have been steeped in family for me. Steep is definitely the right word. It's like I’ve soaked myself in my extended family, which, because we live so far away from one another, it’s something I only get to do once a year at most. 
We traveled a few times to their cities and their houses, and they all came for a full week to our house. Now during those weeks, we wanted to eat together, chat, laugh, share stories, play with the kids, and just generally enjoy each others' company for the short time that we had together. I didn't want for us to be distracted by the unimportant stuff. The things that a houseful of guests can feel when they're all living in the same space for a while, like being frustrated by not having clean laundry when they need it, or that the food isn't ready quickly enough for the hungry kids, and so being able to find stuff that you need quickly and easily in the house you're staying in is really important, because there's not a front desk to for you to call when you need fresh towels, right?
So yeah, I was thinking a lot about what an organized home means right now in the summer, but also what that organized home allows me to do and feel. 
I don't know if I've said this enough to you, but an organized home isn't the goal. It's not even really about comfort. That’s not even really the goal. The goal is the confidence that an organized home gives you so you take risks somewhere else in your life. Not just when people are staying in your house, but when you're out at work or out in your community.
But having that confidence means that you need to trust in how your home is running.
So today I want to walk you through why that's true, and then give you one simple way to check whether your home is actually working the way you think it is, or whether it's just you holdingeverything up.
By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear way to tell the difference between a home that runs and a home that's just you running it. And you'll have a real test you can use this week to find out which type of home you've got.
Welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living. I'm Zee Siman, The Choosy Organizer.
This podcast is for the women who are done organizing everything and they’re ready to be choosy about what matters, what's enough, and what can wait. Because beautiful living starts with a little less stress and a whole lot more intention.
This is episode 118. And the question we're getting into today is exactly the one I just asked myself with a house full of family last week. Is my home actually running, or is it just me, holding everything together?
But first, there's another question you need to consider. And that is why do you actually want your home to be organized?
Now most of us would say something like, so it feels calm, so it looks nice, so I'm not stressed. And yeah, that's true. But I don't think that's the real reason or the only reason it matters to you that your home is organized.
Do you remember when your mom or dad took you to the playground, and there were other kids playing there? Now, what happened when your mom or dad told you, "OK, go play." 
Did you run off, and go climb the tall thing, talk to kids you'd never met before, and you tried the scary slide? Did you keep turning back to see if mom or dad was still there, either watching you or chatting with other parents or reading, but still there in case anything happened and you needed them? That was a feeling of safety that you had, right? Mom or dad would be there when you looked back. But the safety wasn't the fun part. The safety was what let you go and be brave somewhere else in the playground.
Well your home works the same way for you. When you trust it's going to run the way that it's supposed to, you stop spending energy watching it, checking it, managing it in the back of your mind. And that energy that you would have spent on it goes somewhere else. It can go toward the hard conversation you've been putting off. The trip that you want to book. Or the job change that you've been sitting on.
So the organizing and the organized home isn't the reward. But the organizing is what frees you up to go be brave somewhere else. That's likely at work, or in your community, right?
But that only works if you can actually trust your home to run smoothly without you managing it every single minute. And for a lot of us, we're not quite there yet.
A lot of home systems that you think you've set up well will break down because you're mixing up three different things that all feel like the sort of the same problem, but they're not.
I want to help you think about these three problems by thinking about a car. When you buy a car, you're thinking about driving it, sure. But there are more layers to consider than that right? You're also thinking about what it takes to keep that car running well over time, right?
There's the engine maintenance, the oil changes, the stuff that if you ignore it too many times, your car is going to stall, probably while you’re out on the highway. So that's the first thing we tend to mix up. The maintenance. In your house, that shows up as changing the air filters regularly, it’s the cleaning, making sure the doors and windows are well sealed. Nobody notices this maintenance stuff when it's handled. But everybody notices it the moment that it’s not right? 
All of a sudden, you’ve got huge drafts in the winter, your air conditioning bill is super high in the summer, and you’ve got mold growing in the shower. Not fun. OK so maintenance is the first thing that can break down because we could think it’s a different problem.
What problem? Well we might think it’s the gas. That we’ve run out of gas. A car needs fuel every single week, no matter how well you've kept up with the oil changes. That demand never goes away, and it's not supposed to. 
But maintenance is different than fuel, right? That's the second problem. Your home’s fuel. The things you have to keep giving to your home so it keeps running. 
Doing the dishes and the laundry. Checking and processing the mail. If it frustrates you that this stuff keeps needing attention, well that's just what the fuel is that’s required. The fact that it’s frustrating to do might simply mean that you’re ready to delegate it, or change the schedule around it, or the conditions you’re doing these things in so you find ways to reduce the friction and frustrations around doing them, ok?

And then there's the third problem, and it's comfort. It's whether the other kids on your son's soccer team are totally fine piling into the back seat, whether your own child feels relaxed riding in it, snacks and all, without worrying about what happens if something spills.
Your home has the same thing. It's the feeling someone gets when they can make a mess in the kitchen while making pancakes for the whole group, without setting off a reaction, or they can admit they forgot something without already bracing for what happens next, what the reaction might be.
So what's actually at stake if you don't separate these three problems? Well you end up applying the wrong fix. If your home actually has a maintenance problem, buying more bins won't touch that. If it's a fuel problem, well no system will ever make it "done," because it's not supposed to be done. It’s fuel. And if it's a comfort problem, no amount of organizing is going to fix that, because it's not about stuff at all.
Actually, that third one is the problem that's hardest to see, because it's not about a system specifically. It's about who's really running things behind the scenes. And here's why that problem is often invisible to everyone except for you.
Allison Daminger is a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and she found that running a home breaks down into four separate jobs. Noticing that something needs attention, figuring out the options, deciding what to do, and circling back later to check if it worked. In most homes, one person is carrying out all four of those jobs, and nobody else in the house realizes that it's happening.
So here's the real test for figuring out which one you've got, a home that's running pretty darn well, or a home that's just you running it. If you want to know whether you've actually built a system, or whether you've become the system yourself, try stepping away for a little while. 
You could go on a work trip, maybe have a weekend away, or honestly just handing everything off to someone else in the house for a couple of days. You give yourself a home vacation. I know that’s so hard for a lot of women, to be at home and not do the home stuff, but this is the real test, isn’t it?
If everything falls apart while you're gone, or you get asked 50 million questions while you’re on your home vacation, that doesn't necessarily mean you're indispensable. It means the noticing and the checking back have  never been handled by anyone else. They were always just you, in the background or in the foreground. You were the only one doing it.
Let me give you an example. There's a mom, we'll call her Renee, she has two kids and a husband, and she's built what looks like a really solid system. They have labeled bins, a chore chart on the fridge, and everyone seems to know where things go. Well Renee had to go to a work conference at the last minute for four days, and her husband said, “Go, don’t worry, we’ve got it handled. We know where everything is. We see the bins.” 
So she came home to find out that the lunch stuff in the fridge had run out, no one knew if there was more, so her husband had to scramble to Costco late after dinner one night to get more for the next day. And the chore chart wasn’t touched for those four days, so one daughter had to pull her basketball uniform out of the dirty laundry to rewear it.
And now here's the thing. The bins and the chart were never actually the system. Renee was the system. She was the one noticing when the lunch bins were low, deciding what needed to be restocked, checking whether the chore chart got followed. None of that had ever really been handed to anyone else. It just looked handed off because the labels were there and the chart was on the wall.
So if that's you, that's not a failure on your part. That's just useful information. It tells you exactly what needs to move from your head into somewhere your family can actually see and use it.
Now, there are two specific ways that people get stuck here and I don’t want you to get stuck here. 
The first is watching a brand new system so closely that it never gets a real chance to prove itself. 
Renee setting up a system where she was the only one who noticed what things were getting low, and the only one who would check back to see if they got filled with the right things and if the chore chart got completed, meant that the system never got a chance to run on its own with others taking care of all four steps.
The second is giving up on a system after just one failure, before it's had time to earn trust. For Renee that might mean that going on this work trip was the first chance she had to test the system without her. And yes, it sort of failed, but now she knows how to tweak things, what things to change in order for it to have time to work.
A system earns trust the same way a person does. You test it a few times, and if it holds up, eventually you can relax around it. 
So give a new system at least a few honest tries before deciding that it's not working. That means that it can’t be you doing the all noticing and the checking back. It means allowing the system to run with everyone involved taking ownership of every step. 
There’s something that I realized after a while when my kids were really young. I was getting tired of preparing the meals and cooking and packing the lunches. So I thought, well let me delegate to the babysitter and my husband when he wasn’t traveling, right? We’d take turns. 
What actually happened though is that the babysitter had to ask me “So where are the little refillable ketchup containers for the lunch boxes? And what does this kid like as his snack” and I had to tell her ok on Wednesday you need to pack the snack up in a separate bag because from the lunch they’re going to a different building.” 
And my husband would come home and I’d feel so relieved to hand off dinner prep to him, only he had to ask me “So what should I make for dinner?”
So yes, they could certainly do the tasks to keep the system going, but I was still the one noticing and checking back. Noticing what the weekly school schedule was, and checking back to see what was in the fridge or freezer for dinner that week.
That’s not a failure of mine or theirs, right? It’s simply that I was holding all the parts of the system. And so if I wasn’t there, the systems couldn’t run.
So here's what I want you to walk away with today. An organized home isn't the goal. The goal isn’t even the comfort of your home. 
No, the goal is the safety you feel when you’re confident that your home can run without you holding the reins on every single thing. It’s that safety that lets you go be brave somewhere else, take risks at work, in your community, wherever you need that courage most.
But that safety only holds up if your home is actually running the way you think it is. 
And the way to find out is to separate the three things that get mixed up as the same problem. There's maintenance, the stuff that's invisible until it breaks. There's your daily fuel, the stuff that never stops needing attention and it’s not supposed to. And there's comfort, whether the people in your home can make a mess or forget something without bracing for your reaction.
And if you really want to know if your home is running itself, or whether you're the one holding it all up, take that home vacation. Step back for a few days and see what happens. If it sort of starts to fall apart, that's not proof you're indispensable necessarily. It's proof the noticing and the checking back were never handed off. Now you know exactly what to work on.
And then just make sure you give a new system a few tries before deciding it's not working. And don't hover over it so closely, either. Don’t be a helicopter parent over your house. Give a new system a real chance to run without you there the whole entire time.
Your home was never supposed to be the only reward for getting organized. It's the trusted base that you leave from feeling steady enough to go do the harder things because you know you'll come back to a home that's still running, fairly in order, without you needing to fix everything the second you walk in.
All right so if this got you thinking about who's actually doing the noticing in your house, send this episode to one friend. You probably already know who you want to send it to already. The person who keeps telling you she thinks she just needs a better system, when really, she's the whole system, and nobody's told her that's not the same thing as failing to build one, right?
So thank you for spending your time with me here today. Have a beautifully organized week. I’m Zee and I’ll see you on the next episode.