Lisa Woodruff - The Cost of Mental Clutter: Bridging Home Management and Professional Growth

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast for the professional who wants to level up their skill set and focus on continuous improvement.

Today, we're tackling the silent killer professional peak performance, the invisible quicksand.

We spend our lives optimizing our businesses, our processes, and our leadership teams.

But what happens when you are being held back by a disorganized home?

What is the cost of the mental clutter that follows you from the kitchen table to the office?

Our guest today is a powerhouse who transformed from stay at home mom at 40 to the CEO of a million dollar empire.

Lisa Woodruff, the founder of Organize365 and host of a podcast with over 24 million downloads, believes that organization isn't a personality trait.

It's a learnable, high level business skill.

She's here to show us how to bridge the gap between household management and and professional scaling and to give us a sneak peek into her upcoming book, Escaping Quicksand.

If you've ever felt like you're winning at work but sinking at home, this conversation is your lifeline.

Join me now for my conversation with Lisa Woodruff.

Well, hi Lisa.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I'm really excited about this.

We're going to talk about your book.

You got a new upcoming book called Escaping Quicksand.

And.

And we're going to talk about that and why the book.

But I'm really excited about your topic.

We've never had that on the podcast.

We're in season six and we've really never talked about making the invisible work visible or organizing ourselves in your company.

You're the founder of Organize360 and I want to talk about strategies, tactics and frameworks for organizing our lives.

Why we do it, why we don't do it, but really the outcome from when we do.

You're also built a business as an entrepreneur and you have a really interesting story.

So let's kind of start back there.

You're back in high school.

You're living where you decide what do you want to be when you grow up.

Let's go there first.

Okay.

All right.

So back in high school, I was very ambitious, so I went to high school, but I didn't have a lot of peers as my friends.

So the day that I turned 12, I got my Red Cross babysitting course done and I started babysitting at the age of 12.

So by high school, I had a full time job babysitting.

I babysat for three different doctors Families.

And in the summer, I would call up the wives and I was like, okay, which day of the week do you want?

And then the family of five got me twice a week, and then they would rotate which Saturdays and Sundays they got me and I went on their vacation.

So I was running a full, you know, multiple households and all of the children and doing all that.

Loved it.

Went to college, got my degree in early childhood education, and could not wait to be a stay at home mom.

Oh, excellent.

Wow.

And, well, it's a mission, it's a purpose, and you either know it or you don't.

I get that.

My wife had the same trajectory, so it was like, looking forward to that.

All right, so you're a stay at home mom.

Mom, you're working.

How many children did you have?

So we ended up adopting two, which is wonderful.

Weren't able to get pregnant.

So by the end of my 20s, I had two children.

And in my 30s, I mean, I just, I just loved everything about it.

Did direct sales, brought in a little bit of money, ran the kids everywhere.

But by the end of my 30s, life was getting hard.

My parents had gotten divorced, and then my father was sick.

He ultimately passed away, so my sister and I had to settle his estate.

The kids had some extra challenges and needs that were taking a lot of our time and our finances.

We ran out of money.

So I went back to teaching, but my kids needed me home more.

So as I was turning 40, I quit so I could stay home with them.

But we desperately needed me to make an income.

And also I was very depleted.

Like, I no longer had any passions that I was working for.

I wasn't taking care of myself.

We were out of money, I was overweight, I was on antidepressants.

Like, I had thought about getting married and having children and being a stay at home mom.

I hadn't thought beyond that.

And here I was with middle school kids and my father already gone, and I was like, I didn't have a roadmap at that point, and I was about to turn 40.

Wow.

So what was the big turning point?

Okay, you're in 40, you're going through all these issues.

Sorry about your dad.

That always sucks, you know, as our parents.

Yeah, happens.

And you're raising kids and good for you.

But what was a big turning point for you?

So things are going not looking good, you're feeling bummed out, you're feeling depressed.

What was the pivot point for you?

So I would say that's probably the lowest I've ever been in my life.

And I am an optimist.

Like I always say to my husband, like he married Tigger.

Because I'm always bouncing around.

I have all this energy and I'm always positive, but I was not bouncing and I was not positive.

And it was right after the 2008, 2009 recession and I thought the world was coming to an end.

And so I started to really think back on what was my story going to be like.

The women in my family lived until their 90s and 1/ hundreds.

I'm not getting out of this life anytime soon.

So what am I going to do with myself, my time, talent and treasure?

And it was then that I really realized that I watched my mom start a business when I was in second grade grade and sell it in eighth grade.

And I'm a fourth generation female college graduate.

All the women in my family have a college degree and they started and sold their own businesses, which is not normal.

So I thought to myself, I thought, you know what, that's what I'm supposed to do.

I need to start a business, make some money and ultimately I'll have a team and grow a business.

So what is this business going to be?

It's 2012.

I knew that everything I had done up until that point, either I was successful because I was already organized or because I was able to organize someone, including the teaching job that I left.

So knowing a little bit about SEO, I named the company Organize 365 and then just started a blog.

No idea how I was going to monetize it or anything.

Wow, that's amazing.

Well, and what made you pick the topic?

I mean, you were good at it.

So you just started looking at your skill sets and said, okay, I'm going to take this, build a business around it because I see it as a problem.

Yeah.

So specifically the teaching job I left was a Montessori job where you have to teach individually.

So I had 16 students in middle school and I was teaching 16 different math lessons.

And my advisor told me that I was not a very good teacher.

That's why I quit.

I was like, well, if I'm not a good teacher, I can tell you what I'm not a good, I'm not a good wife, I'm not a good mother, not a good house.

There are a lot of things I'm failing at.

But I didn't think I was failing.

At teaching for sure.

Yeah.

And I thought, well, what she really hired me to do is organize that school and that co teacher, which I did do well.

And I was like, oh, she hired me to organize, not to teach.

So there must be something with this organizing thing.

And after a couple of months in business doing the blog, I joined another direct sales company.

I realized I was a professional organizer.

Started doing in home professional organizing for a series of years, making that money as a service professional, and then took those learnings and turned them into books and products and a podcast.

Well, it's amazing.

Well, it's.

We all need those turning points.

And you know what?

There's a correlation, I think, between educators, teachers, entrepreneurs, those who I see successful entrepreneurs all the time.

And they all have a teaching background and a psychology background.

So they.

Or they come from.

Because you're learning to communicate.

You're communicating with people.

Well, let's talk about organizing, why we do it, why we don't, why we do it.

And just with my experience with organizing, I've got a disclaimer here.

Years ago, when the Marie Kondo started to hit the airwaves and my wife bought into that concept, really hook, line and sinker and I called it condoized our entire lives and our home.

So everything has its purpose.

We tossed out a ton of stuff and contagious.

So we started over probably a dozen years ago and started getting rid of things.

One thing after.

They're just getting rid of it, getting rid of it.

And each time we did was amazing.

It was very liberating and I felt very.

Just light.

Things were just getting lighter all the time.

And it was about.

And organizing.

Everything has its special purpose in its special place.

So that was her system was, hey, if it doesn't bring us joy, it's tossed.

And I have to say, I'm.

You probably don't know many men who would do this, but I'm happy to show you my underwear and sock drawer because if you open up my drawer and sock drawer, it looks like it always bought from a boutique.

If anything has shabby or it's gone and.

But it's all folded in a certain way that looks like it comes from the fifth Avenue boutique.

And you look at it and it's.

I don't like taking something out of it because I feel like I'm ruining the display.

So just the way T shirt shirts, everything, drawers, everything has its place.

And so I'm a fan of organizing.

That's why I'm excited about this and.

And just why we do it, why we don't do it, and what are the potential outcomes when we do or we don't.

So let's kind of dive into that.

What's the psychology behind that?

Because I know you're working.

I think you're just finishing up your Ph.D. here in the next eight weeks or so.

I am, yeah.

So my, my Ph.D. is on the invisible load and the cognitive load of organizing, which is a little bit different than what you're talking about.

Let me talk about what you're talking about.

So, couple of things.

One, you're talking about the design aesthetic of organizing, how it looks when you're done organizing, which a lot of people like the way organization look books.

I'm not able to maintain that level of organizing.

I'm not your Pinterest organizer.

My drawers look good, but you're not going to put them in a magazine or anything.

And also you mentioned you have seven kids.

I know you have grandchildren.

So I'm thinking about the time that Marie Kondo intersected you and your wife's life.

The kids were probably on their way, if not already out of the house.

Perfect time to be doing a lot of purging and decluttering and really reclaiming your household as husband and wife again, getting ready for those grandkids.

When I experienced Marie Kondo, my kids were much younger and I was in the accumulation years.

And so I couldn't get rid of their things, so I ended up getting rid of a lot of mine.

Now, I love how Marie Kondos can organize your closet.

Game on.

Go all in.

But one of the things that she said was to get rid of your books.

And I had a bookshelf in every single room, including the storage room in our house.

And I got rid of all my books.

And I regret it to this day because every single book I own, I have read.

And so I think there are seasons also where decluttering is a great solution.

Solution.

Especially as you're transitioning from one life phase to the other.

To your point, I know you're always talking about what makes you different and what's your unique selling proposition.

Marie Kondo can be great for some people in some seasons and in some spaces.

I could be great for some people in some seasons, in some spaces.

But to take one organizer and then just apply it to your whole life without really any other checks and balances, while it'll be amazingly fantastic for one person, may not be for the other.

So I'm an educator.

And so I'm going to give you a lot of options, like how you look at things based on the generation you are.

If you're a millennial, a Gen X, a baby boomer, is Completely different how you utilize your house, if you have children, don't have children, which part of the country you're in, what your socioeconomic status is.

That's more of how I look at organizing.

And my goal of organizing is that you know where your stuff is.

You have the stuff that you want and then you don't have a lot of time to maintain your stuff so that you have more time to do what you're uniquely gifted and created to do.

And for most women, that's going to take one to three years to really process through the whole entire house and reset it to the phase of life that you're in now.

And then you kind of run on autopilot until you hit another big life change.

It's a little different perspective.

It's kind of like from what I'm hearing you say, there's the why and the how.

MARIE KONDO here's yeah, organize and do this.

And you're.

We always start with why.

Thanks.

Yeah.

SIMON SINEK so you're giving us the why, the motivation.

Here's why we should do it.

And you're right.

I think the stages of life now, when we had our seven children around the house, you never saw toy people came to our home and they would always like, were surprised that we had that many because you never saw toys hanging out.

You never saw we had certain rules.

So the rules were community property.

Wherever it's community, you got to keep clean your private space.

Love it.

But it really does affect us in a psychological way that actually surprises me and not everyone like you talk about changes of life.

I also find personality type, style.

So for instance, like a director, C level executive or whatever is going to have a neat and tidy desk.

You go into the IT department or the let's call it the company nerd, and it's packed full of things they stacked miles high but don't touch a darn thing because they know exactly where it is.

So what goes into that?

Where does the whole theory why are some people neat and organized when they're little people?

And then where do we develop the bad habits?

And why did we.

What happens along the way?

So I can't speak authoritatively to clutter, like the psychology behind clutter.

But what I have observed and what I teach is that there is a difference between analog and digital.

And I primarily am an analog organizer in that I specialize in executive function, like how do we organize and think and start and get things done in our brain.

And for me personally, the IT guy that has papers everywhere and don't touch it, has externalized everything that is in their brain and possibly on the computer so that they can see it in physical form, so they can move it around and manipulate it, create something new and then upload it for me, if you have a lot of things that are digital and analog, I have to cognitively remember where to go look for that.

And I'm probably not going to remember.

So, like, for example, we obviously have a Google Drive.

We're a digital company.

My chief of staff came in and she's like, and I also uploaded that to my Google Drive.

Do you want me to put it in your Google Drive?

I was like, stephanie, if you think I know where my Google Drive is, that's funny, that's what you are for.

But I have all these bookmarks and I have all these slash pockets and I have everything physical and what I'm finding and what the research I'm going to do is, is there statistical support for this cognitive offloading from your brain to the environment in physical form, does that reduce anxiety?

Does that reduce the executive load in order to be able to make decisions and do planning?

It's interesting.

Different than what you're.

Anecdotally, I would say yes, just based on my.

Right.

No one's ever studied it.

So we'll.

And I think that's a great topic because when I come in and I look and everything's tidy and I clean up, by the end of the day I have to straighten out maybe ocd.

It's just, it's got to be neat and tidy.

I have to clear the inbox, otherwise it nags at me.

And half the time when I have a chore or something I have to do and I'm procrastinating it, that piles on.

And so I'm organizing my day or my week.

Yes, yes.

Then all of a sudden that I was to the start.

And then when I actually attacked the choreograph, it only takes a few minutes.

I think, why the hell did I not just attack that and get it done?

Because it took 10 minutes to actually get it done.

So every week I, for instance, I'll organize my week and then I on Sunday nights I'll review and go, how do I create the perfect week next week?

How do.

So I keep referring.

Yes.

What's.

Oh, I love it.

Perfect week.

What's it look like if I.

My last week on the planet, what's it going to look like?

Right.

And I find that that really, really helps.

Well, let's start this way.

You Say often that organizations, it's a learnable skill, yet most people treat it like a personality trait that you're either born with or you're not.

So for the entrepreneur who feels, say, naturally messy, where does the shift from chaos to system actually begin?

Yeah.

So organizations, learnable skills.

So I was talking about the executive function.

You know, if you have deficits in executive function, that's where ADHD comes from.

So the first thing we use our executive function for is working memory.

That's the primary role of your executive function.

Like we're having this conversation.

So we're thinking about this conversation we're having what the next question might be.

We're not thinking about other things.

Well, your executive function also does a bunch of other things.

And the last thing it does is planning.

So planning and doing something can't happen at the same time.

So every week when you're refining your week and you're coming up like, what is the best week going to be?

You're making a more and more refined plan in your planning part of executive function.

And then your working memory runs with that plan the next week because you can't do the two things at the same time.

So organization is a learnable skill.

We're talking about the organizing of your week and the tasks that need to be done.

Well, how do you organize your house?

First of all, I would have loved to have come to your house when you had seven kids.

I'm like, I still can't even believe you don't have toys out.

I remember I only had two kids and my mother in law came over and they were like, I don't know, 5 and 7.

It looks like a bomb went off in our house and I was folding laundry in the middle of the family room.

And she's a perfectionist.

She's sitting on the edge of a chair, like just barely sitting on the chair because my house is trashed.

And I said, well, I'm sure this is what your house looked like when your kids were little.

And she goes, no.

And I was like, oh gosh, okay, fine.

So it's not how it looked like, but this learnable skill.

We can learn how to plan our week because there are gajillion people who talk about it.

We can learn how to refine our closets because there are gajillion organizers that talk about it.

But how do we teach kids how to organize their bedroom?

Not a lot of people talk about that.

So I have a program as a teacher that I create where I talk directly to your kids.

About organizing their room.

So when you said the kids rooms are their own and they could be trashed, that's where I came in.

And I was like, okay, how do we teach kids to organize their bedrooms?

Because in my opinion, your child's bedroom is their mini apartment.

And eventually it will become their apartment, dorm room, or condo.

And from the time that they leave home until they're running that household the way your wife is, which is amazing, they either learned it through osmosis, through her, or they didn't.

Once they're on their own, they're on their own.

But there are learnable skills.

So a child's bedroom is a mini apartment because it has so many functions.

You sleep there, you play there, some eat there, you do your schoolwork there, you have your clothes there, you have your passion projects there.

Like their whole worlds are in their bedrooms.

And that is where you start to learn the skill of organizing.

When you can maintain your bedroom, then you can maintain your dorm room, your apartment, your condo, and future house.

And as you get into bigger and bigger houses, they're just more and more of those microcosms of places to organize.

Yeah, I wonder if it's not osmosis but neurosis that does the learning and the training, because they're.

Yeah, you see it.

But you're right.

You know, we set up their bedrooms when they were young.

We had, you know, the girls had to team up because seven kids we didn't have.

That's a lot of kids.

But, yeah, it is.

And that kind of worked.

And we showed them, this has to be picked up once a week.

I told them, I want to see the floor.

I want to know, right, there's still carpeting in here.

Right.

And honestly, they were just messy.

And as long as they.

We let them get away with it, they had to clean it once a week, be organized for the next week, but then it would be trashed.

What was interesting to your point is when they left home and when they got roommates, their first complaints were, my roommates are pigs.

And, oh, they're messy.

Oh, they're.

Yeah.

And this is just, you know, for parents, whatever you teach them when they're young, even if they don't do it when they're under stress, I've learned they do it, taught them to look both ways for the cross the road.

They look both ways when you're not around.

So teach them and understand that one day it probably will sink in, and then they'll be repeating what you said to their chagrin, you know, years later and go, oh my goodness, I just sound like my mother, right?

Or my dad.

Either way.

So I get that.

That's funny.

You started organized365 at 40, transitioning from stay at home mom to CEO of your own successful brand.

What was the biggest operational hurdle you faced in treating your household like the foundation of your business?

So the biggest problem for me is because I was working from home, I would always prioritize the household related tasks.

So I remember I was a couple years into the business, I was finally replacing my teaching salary.

So I was blogging, I was trying to grow this online brand we were doing in home professional organizing.

I was doing all the stay at home mom things of driving the kids to school as if I didn't work.

And I came home and I would pick up the house and do everything I normally do and I'd start blogging.

Then I go do all the driving in the afternoon and then in the evening I would go upstairs to work on my business and my husband and the kids would complain because I was always working.

And I was like, oh, Lisa, you idiot, you're the one that is not working when they're at work at school.

So the next day I dropped the kids off at school, walked in, filled up my water, walked over the laundry and everything went straight upstairs.

Worked for the solid six hours left, came home, picked them up, and then that night I was doing dishes and laundry and prep and they're like, you're always busy, you're never sitting down.

But they weren't saying I was always working because now I was doing my housework during the family time and my work work during the work time.

This was huge to me because this added like 10 hours of work to my work during the week and it was uninterrupted.

And honestly, I hadn't been doing it that way because I also got tired because I had to push through the mental of being able to work six hours cognitively on marketing pages and sales pages, stuff I didn't know how to do or write three blog posts instead of one.

Like I had to grow those muscles of being a business owner and doing the work of the business.

It was much easier to be like, oh, I'll just do one thing and then go straigh house.

Well, you know, the one thing I've learned, I meant there's a lot of men who work really hard.

But when we compare it to what you ladies do, and I don't mean to just prepare, I have five daughters, so I see it, you're Expected, you got the 9 to 5, then you got the, you know, 7am to 9pm mom.

Then maybe we have the nana roll or grandmother role.

And then your husband and wife.

It's like you're wearing so many hats.

So I see it and we recognize it.

And so you help out where you can help out.

Don't.

Let's talk about your upcoming book, Escaping Quicksand.

Great name.

It focuses on prioritizing adult care needs alongside family and business.

So.

And a lot of us are baby boomers are coming into that or we have parents that are aging.

So for the type A professional, why is self care often the wrong word and care systems the right one?

Okay, so thank you so much for asking this question.

And this is something that came to me while I was getting my PhD.

I was in a developmental class, like learning the development of Humans.

And I was asking what we knew about adult development and we don't know very much.

There's only two psychologists that have ever studied adult development.

They were both 50 year old white men when they studied it.

And I said, well, you know, so menopause must be a phase of life because puberty is a phase of life.

And they were like, no, not in the literature.

I was like, well, let's update it then, because I mean, everybody knows that's true.

And so I was like, well, I'm not gonna get anywhere because this professor is much younger than me and hasn't been through menopause, so she doesn't know what I'm talking about.

So I got this picture in my head of the St. Louis Arch and I was thinking about, like, what we think of as adults that hasn't been studied at all in psychology or science.

And I was like, we talk about this idea of self care.

And I, in my 50s now, am doing a lot of things my family thinks are selfish, like getting a PhD and traveling for work and going to an office to work instead of working from home and laying the dog out at noon.

Like, they see all these things as selfish.

And I'm like, no, I'm just being a worker.

Like this is.

Lots of workers are working like this.

But I feel as a woman I have to justify every minute that I spend that is a benefit of myself and my work that is not directly related to care or the household.

And maybe I don't, but that's just how I feel.

And so when we say self care, we think, oh, you can get a bubble bath or you can get your nails done and then that should shore you up for six to nine months.

Right.

So I got this picture of the St. Louis Arch and I was thinking about childcare and I was thinking about elder care.

So childcare is when you take care of a child and elder care is when an adult can no longer care for themselves.

And so in both of these cases, obviously we're going to feed them, bathe them, clothe them, shelter them, we're going to provide for their essential care needs.

But it's more than that.

We're also going to provide education and recreation and we're going to give them spiritual outlets and we're going to go have relations with them and we're going to converse and we're going to go out to dinner, we're going to celebrate their birthdays and we're going to do things that are unique for them and explore what talents they want to do.

That is self care from 18 to 88.

Self care is for yourself.

You will do all of those things just like your parents did for you when you were a child or you will do for your parents and grandparents when they are older.

Now women, for whatever reason.

Well, I think the reason, especially if you have children, you can't do that for yourself.

When you have a newborn, like, you must prioritize the newborn.

And by the time the youngest one is in school full time, you forgot what it looked like before you had kids.

And so then you're just like, now you're just like the mom and you're just doing all of the things.

But it also happens when like I have a couple of cousins that had children later and they were in accounting and they literally worked like 80 hour weeks.

Like they didn't feed themselves well because they were literally staying at hotels because they didn't have enough bandwidth to drive home.

They were worked so hard at those top four agencies.

And so I think we get through our 20s and 30s really trying to be the best we can at our job, whether it's parenting, homemaking, whatever it is.

And we wake up in our late 30s and 40s and we're like, I don't even know how to feed myself anymore.

None of my clothes fit.

Like, and then you think, well, it's selfish to go buy new clothes.

Like you'll buy a new wardrobe for a kid every six months.

But for yourself, like, I'm sure that this, these clothes will get me a little bit farther.

A little bit farther.

Well, moms are always the one who eat the burnt toast, right?

Like you just do.

And they're, and I don't know if it's in our I hate stereotyping, but I've seen the women I know and the professional women I know or those who are bringing their professional skills to the home just do so much more and more capable than their male counterparts.

I'm just male counter.

It's almost like that the male wants to go out and hunt and kill the thing, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And then he wants to bring it home and say, okay, now you clean it, get it ready for and take care of it.

So there's so many departments that you have to manage where maybe we're a little more singular focus and maybe that's a older perspective, but just from what I've witnessed in my world too, the women are great multitaskers.

And I don't believe in multitasking as a rule.

I don't think I do.

I witness it.

It's like you have sections of your brain.

How else are we supposed to get done work differently?

Yeah, well, it's, you know, I, I.

The story that comes to mind is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers where they're being interviewed and said, what's it like you're dancing with Fred Astaire, like one of the best dancers in the world.

That guy's amazing.

And she says, well, I do it backwards and in heels.

It really is that kind of perspective.

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Clients.

And now back to my conversation with Lisa Woodruff.

You built a million dollar revenue company around household project management.

Why should a business professional view Their home as a department that requires its own sop, standard operating procedures.

Oh, yeah, it's better than that.

It's not a department.

It's a whole separate business.

The household is the economic entity.

It is the economic entity of, like, ever.

68 Of US GDP is household spending.

So if you want to know what's going to sell in the United States, you should ask somebody who runs a household, because we are where all the money comes from.

All the rest goes to the government and the military.

So how a household manager runs the household, how she redistributes that money into society, is the future of the society.

Also, you know, there is not just one department, There are departments.

So in psychology, we've studied house work, but really we've conflated housework with also parenting and household management.

So now that's three departments.

Well, if you own the house, then there's also maintenance of the house, which is a current investment for a future investment.

Well, if you want to get organized, you have more time.

That's a current investment of time for a future return on time.

I've only named five departments.

Like, as a household manager, I'm a cfo, CEO, CEO.

I'm like, I'm all of those things.

And we.

That's right.

And we have mostly the robots, which don't do a good job because the humans, they're all volunteer.

So my robot vacuum, a big thing.

It won't.

It won't vacuum for me.

But often I, as a household manager, will default to, okay, are the dishes done?

Is the laundry done?

When's the next time we have to change the smoke detector barriers?

Da, da, da, da, da.

When really my higher and best use is being strategic and being the CEO and cfo.

Like, when I sit down, which I'm doing this week, actually, and go through all the recurring expenses and cut a bunch of those.

I'm going to save thousands of dollars this year.

I'm going to look at our AAA membership, which we've had for six years.

What are all the things that I could be getting discounts on?

We're going to Legoland this summer.

You get 55% off of Legoland.

Like, I'm going to save us as much money as I can in my CFO hat.

Then my CEO hat three times a year, I look at the next four months and I'm like, okay, strategically thinking how old the children are, the grandchildren are, what season we're in, how to best deploy our money.

Is now the time we get a gym membership, or is now the time that we take a vacation, or is now the time that we invest in schooling or some additional therapies?

Like, how are we going to meet all the needs of the family at that time?

And those things happen at planning.

Like we talked at weekly.

Your weekly plan.

You cannot be doing the housework and also planning strategically.

So you need to set aside some time to be the strategic CEO and CFO of the household and then get the task done.

But here's how I want you to find the time.

Do less housework.

Like, I love that you love your underwear and sock drawer.

But what I tell a lot of people is if your kids are under the age of five, like, just have a clean laundry basket and a dirty one, because by the time you're done washing the clothes, they're all going to be dirty again.

Because the kids through clothes so fast.

It's not until their school age that you need more of that structure.

And even then, it doesn't have to be super structured because nobody's looking at your underwear drawer.

No, I want to show.

Much to your chagrin.

Maybe I'll post pictures.

You should, just so you can get the.

Attaboy.

I'll give it to you.

It's just impressive.

I show friends that.

Come on, say you got to show you something, and it just looks like it's a store.

Love it.

And I hate to.

Yeah, I'm always like, oh, and I don't want to ruin this.

Or if I take something out.

Well, they all fall.

And she folds them all in unique ways.

Right.

But that's her way.

Well, let's talk about the sop.

Now, we're using technology to stay organized.

AI has been amazing.

The last three, four years, we've been using AI to structure our TO dos, record our sop, look at things, set calendars, optimize our time.

Is this the best schedule?

What's a better schedule?

And it can get it 80, 85% there.

But then that last personalization touches ours.

How does AI fit in?

What have you experimented in that?

Have you gone down that road?

Or you're looking at, hey, here's how the CEO of the home use some AI tools to maybe help them look at the bills faster.

Look at, for instance, your expenses.

I, for instance, took all of my bank statements from Wells Fargo, dumped them into an AI tool I used Claude, and I said, I want you to analyze all these expenses, put them in categories, and 15 minutes later, I had what you were about to go and attack.

So I could see what was going on.

So that saves hours of looking at.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like a lawnmower versus or a snowblower versus shoveling snow is using a lawnmower instead of hand cutting it.

What tools are available or new technologies?

Are you exploring any that maybe help with this a little bit?

So I did dump all of my stuff into origin, so I'm going to go look at that this weekend.

So I'm not a Neanderthal.

However, I stink at this.

I mean, this is my biggest weakness because as an organizer and as a teacher, I want to teach you an analog.

So the way that I taught algebra in Montessori was through manipulative, which was so great.

Like, you really understand things when you can manipulate it with your hands.

So I love to get organized by going through all the physical stuff in your house, going through all the paper, actually printing out the emails, printing out all the things you have in bags.

And I know, stick with me for just one second because there are so many different AI tools, different phone systems, different whatever, that if I were to pick one and you're an iPhone user and I pick the whatever, not an iPhone is because I have an iPhone, you're gonna be like, oh, I can't do it because I'm an Apple person.

So organization happens in analog.

Productivity happens in digital.

So if you.

So, like, for food, you could go through and clean out your.

Clean out your kitchen, clean out your pantry, then you could upload that into whatever AI you want.

Say, these are the ingredients I have.

Make lists for me.

Or these are my food restrictions.

These are my macros.

Make lists for me.

Great use of AI.

I am.

I'm not your nutrition consultant.

I'm like, like, how do you create a breakfast and lunch station so that all your breakfast and lunch stuff is in one cabinet, not all over the kitchen?

That's how I'm organizing you.

I'm not organizing the productivity parts which are going to happen in digital.

But one other reason why I'm analog and not digital is because productivity and digital is personal.

Analog is universal.

So if you have a binder of information and you go to a tax lawyer, you have it all in front of you.

You're not like trying to look it up on your phone and send it to them.

If you are with your siblings, taking care of your parents, and you've printed everything out and it's in a little tabletop filing system, you all have access to the same documents.

Now, could you digitize and put those in Dropbox?

Yes, you probably could, but it is just so much easier to grab the death certificate and take it somewhere.

And death certificates are physical.

Birth certificates are physical.

Passports are physical.

Like there is physical.

And physical is just so much faster and easier when you need to take it somewhere and when you need to communicate to a professional or another family member.

So I find that productivity and digital is great, personally, but as far as doing the active organizing and then sharing it with others, it's easier to do an analog.

That's interesting.

No, I can see it's using the right tool for the right job.

It's.

You know, my wife makes sourdough.

She's.

Man, your wife is amazing.

She's totally amazing.

And.

And she works.

So she runs our company, actually, so her organizational skills.

But I do the cooking.

My job is grocery shopping and cooking.

Cooking and my husband's as well because I abdicated.

So.

Yeah, she did, years ago.

And, you know, we just made the decide, here's our roles, and we both love those roles.

So for me, it's a wood chop.

I get done at the end of the day.

I like to take my time, go to the market.

It's a decompressed time.

So it's never really a chore.

If it is, we're going out for dinner.

So if it feels like a chore tonight, I'm buying.

You know, we're gone.

And she's.

She's good with that.

But it's interesting because the.

The analog versus digital, there's things you can do.

Like, for instance, you talked about books.

I was a book guy.

Boxes of them.

But when we downsized, they couldn't all come with me.

I had no room for them.

So I put a list, took pictures of them all, and then I just ordered on digital.

And so my iPad is completely organized with all my favorite books that I revisit again and again.

And now everything's online.

It's kind of like music libraries.

I used to have all the albums.

Now I wish I kept all the albums, but just because they've gone up in value.

But I got rid of all the albums and we use Spotify and I can listen to the songs and just a click and I'm there.

So it's finding what tool works best for that job.

Yeah, heard you loud and clear on that.

Let's talk about the 87% versus 18 gap.

Most Americans are Canadians or people anywhere listening to this podcast.

They believe that organization is learnable, but very few feel that they've mastered it.

What's the number one organizational lie that keeps people and entrepreneurs stuck in that gap.

Well, if I was listening to this podcast episode, I would thinking, man, Michael is organized.

Like, I mean, you believe organization is learnable skill, and you've given lots of data as to how you are organized.

And over time, you've really refined your organization to really match your phase of life and all of that.

And you may be listening to me and go, well, Lisa's okay, Lisa.

And I do fold my underwear in the six little spots.

But.

But I just.

We've got a newborn living at the house.

Like, I know that life's not perfect.

I'm a woman of excellence, and so I will often.

Just the other day on Instagram, I came down on Sunday.

I showed everybody what a cluster my house looks like, because there are little kids that live in my house, and I just would rather play with them than worry about what it looks like.

Organization.

When people say they are done organized, it is different for every person.

I would say, Michael, you're probably done being organized, and in your face of life, that wouldn't make sense.

But when you're in a younger phase of life and you have more people living in your household, you feel that there's so many things that are on your to do list that are yet to be organized.

So you can't say that you're done.

Like, okay, I got the bedroom and the playrooms organized, but I haven't done the storage room room.

I did the storage room, but I haven't gotten the paper organized.

And so I find a lot of times for women, it's decades before they finally get done.

Now, people who are in my programs do get all the way done.

It takes one to three years, and then I love it because then they're all ticked at me and they go, oh, darn you, Lisa.

Now I have nothing left to organize.

So I have to wrestle with what I'm uniquely gifted and created to do because there's no more hobby work to do around this house.

That makes sense.

I've always kind of viewed it as an operating system system.

So the organization, just like by DOS and Windows, and each stage, there's an evolution to it.

And you're right, we had three grandbabies born this last year and our daughters, they're exhausted.

And yes, they have their own companies.

They work, they're employees.

They have responsibilities.

We've taken off Fridays, which required a massive organizational change.

So on Fridays, we have one set in the morning and another set in the afternoon so that they have a free day to go and get caught up.

And it's nice having that on.

Pop around to do that.

But I had to give up my Fridays, which was very challenging.

So I had to organize my week different.

And what I found was just by simply adding that extra hour throughout the week, it was not a big deal.

Just reorganizing and moving things around a little bit, I was able to free up.

So Friday, Saturday and Sundays were available for family.

Yes.

And in that role, I'm not going to be.

Be a workaholic until it stops.

And I find that works pretty good.

But, but watching them organize their tools and some people have better means than others.

Some can hire someone to come clean the house, some can't.

And it's tough.

So we understand what that looks like.

My friends who have two kids who complain about, you know, they're busy, they'll complain and I'll say just times that by three and add one more.

And I said, then come back and talk to me.

But it's all relative to that individual.

And like I said, I married somebody who's phenomenal at organizing, who loves it, breathes it, studies it, and just like yourself and could, you know, I'd read her book as well.

So you'll have to have a good conversation.

I should have had her do this podcast interview.

I think it would have been a little better.

Let's talk about the power of adult care in the 40s and 50s, because that's coming into a little.

You do touch on this and it's part of your motivation as well.

So you mentioned that in your 50s you can finally see the path you took to pull yourself out of the quicksand.

So what is one thing a 30 or 40 year old entrepreneur business professional can do today to prevent that mid career sink?

Yeah, I don't know if you can prevent it.

The literature is clear.

In all, all academia, all the studies, there is this dip in happiness that happens in your mid-40s, into your 50s and then after that you just kind of move back up into happiness, which is, I mean it just is, it's just something that happens.

We do tend to get overwhelmed.

The book Escaping Quicksand really is not how to get organized.

It's the mental mindset shifts I made in my 40s in order to get and stay organized.

And I would say if there's just one that I was going to share with you, it would be this idea of moving from a perfectionist to a woman of excellence.

I tried to be perfect, I tried to be great in my motherhood.

And as soon as I thought I had all the ducks in a row.

Someone would point out one little flaw or one little flaw.

And I took that as a personal character assault, that I'm not good enough, that I need to be better, I need to be perfect, and I would try harder.

And then I finally realized that I wasn't going to be able to meet that mark.

There's always going to be something I was missing.

So for a while I was like, well, I'm not a perfectionist.

I just kind of be sarcastic.

Like, well, I just, you know, I'm not good enough.

I'm not as good as you are.

But that didn't really sit well with me either because I was trying really hard.

It wasn't like I didn't care.

And it was coming off as if I didn't care.

And I almost was telling myself I didn't care.

But I did.

I really did care.

I really wanted to be good.

And in my 40s, I realized that I'm an excellent person, I bring excellent effort, all the resources I have to bear for every problem that I solve.

But it's not going to be perfect.

There are always going to be things that I could do differently.

And the biggest difference I realized in hindsight once I firmly went into excellence versus perfectionism, is not accepting others, judgment of myself, or judging others, and instead giving myself grace and accepting grace from others when I wasn't perfect and just living a human experience without expecting that.

Robot perfectionism, I think that's a common problem.

We've got imposter syndrome.

We've got issues.

And it seems, yeah, prevalent.

It seems more prevalent with females than it does with males.

I think males suffer from it as well.

I do, but I see it a lot.

And probably because I'm surrounded by amazing women and I hear their conversations and they're talking about it.

There's so much that's expected of them.

And I'll say it again, and I don't mind saying it, we're physically strong, generally speaking, but boy, it stops there.

And you know, it's interesting.

When I started my speaking career, I started speaking and I'd open for another speaker by the name of, of Tom Peters.

And Tom Peters wrote In Search of Excellence.

So it's a school book of the younger generations, wouldn't even unless they learned it in school.

And his first statement, this is 25, 30 years ago, he would come out to an audience with mixed audience and he'd say, Mr. President, CEO.

He goes, here's my best advice I could possibly give you.

He goes, fire all the men.

And he saw.

And he goes, just fire all the men and you'll, you'll be on the truck.

And then of course, all the men are gasping, the women are applauding, going, that's what we've been saying.

And.

But the point he was making was funny.

We have to be more like women.

And it's not about being feminine.

It's not about that.

It's right, right, right.

The organization.

It's about looking at the priorities, getting those things done, because we just don't see it.

And I think it's.

Is it environmental?

Are we right?

Because when we grow up in school, we weren't really taught.

We were taught the three Rs.

My parents were British, so they put us in private school.

So I had eight kids in the class, so I got a great education.

Yeah, why don't we teach this stuff, though?

We don't teach financial acumen, we don't teach organizational skills.

We just teach memorization, rote memorization.

Learn two plus two.

Learn how to operate a number two pencil and write, you know, and then go be a factory worker somewhere.

Like, why is it as an educator and what are you saying?

And, and do you see that changing or evolving?

Well, it's going to have to change.

I mean.

And yes, that's exactly how it was set up.

So I mean, if you go all the way back to the 1800s and early 1900s, like, yes, children went to school, but also they learned a lot in their environment, in their community, in their village, because it was a village.

And like, you wouldn't learn from your neighbors and you would live with your grandmother and you would have many more generations together and you would live closer together.

So we were much more communal in how we taught.

And absolutely, with the industrial revolution came public schooling.

And the goal was to create factory workers.

Like that is, that's not a secret.

That is exactly what public school was for.

And yes, we need to move into critical thinking.

Now.

What's interesting is schools have been trying to move into critical thinking in these things that you're talking about.

And I think they were starting to make some progress before COVID but then with COVID there definitely was a break that happened not in the system, but just in humanity.

And even before COVID colleges were having a hard time with students coming in with critical thinking.

Now it's just like non existent.

And so this idea of being able to think and ask questions, things that entrepreneurs naturally do, ask questions, look people in the eye, shake their hand, think about where things come from.

Follow your uniqueness, follow your passions.

As you were talking about with your new book coming out, like, how do we remain human?

For so long in schools, we've been trying to produce an outcome, a worker in society.

Now we need to figure out how do we have people understand their uniqueness, this, but be able to communicate that and then work in collaboration to make something new and bigger.

I don't have answers for it, but that is what we need to figure out how to do.

It's interesting, societally wise that we're focused on, they're, you know, closing down.

Critical thinking, we always call it.

Oh, it's a liberal education or.

But no, it's called learning to ask questions.

Right.

Ask questions that you might not have the answer to or that answer doesn't work or it's not valid because people have their perspectives and their perceptions of what that is.

So I think that's part of it.

I have to ask you to future proof the household if we're looking forward to, as we move into an increasingly automated age, robots.

You know, Elon is talking about coming out with a twenty thousand dollar robot that can do simple chores and help with things.

So I get it.

We have.

Sign me up vacuum cleaners.

Yeah, I think so.

What?

But in the automated age, what human organizational skills do you think will remain.

The human skills will remain the most competitive advantages for professionals over the next decade.

So what can we do professionally and where, hey, automation might look after this?

You know, the robots, AIs.

But if we're going to focus on our skills from an organizational point of view, what should we be focused on to enhance those skills?

And most importantly, what's the payoff if we do employ those and apply those strategies?

Yeah.

So my mind went to the house.

I'm trying to translate to business and I can't, so I'm gonna stick in the house.

One of the things I've been saying to my audience all the way back to when Covid started is that you have so much more control than you think you do at home.

And that when the political things are railing all over the place, you can turn that off at home.

Yeah.

And what I found recently is, you know, I have a lot of cognitive load on remembering to do this app with the robot.

And then my, my washing machine is telling me this and that and the other thing.

And I asked my audience, I was like, what are you guys doing?

And they're like, we don't install the apps.

I'm like, what?

And they go, yeah, you don't have to install the app.

And I was like, they're like, just put, push the button and the robot will just start going.

I was like, oh my gosh, I'm such a rule follower.

I have like 18 apps to run my household.

So I think that's what I would leave you with.

This is your household, you can run it how you want.

I don't care if Your neighbor has 19 apps and they do all these things.

Every app is actually adding to your cognitive load load, and that's what a problem is for women is this invisible load, the cognitive load, the mental load.

It is much easier to go over and push the button on top of the robot than to open up the phone, go to the app.

You forgot what you were doing.

Now you're on Instagram.

Oh, dang it.

That's right.

I was supposed to start the robot.

You go in, the robot's not connected to the WI fi.

Okay, I need to connect the robot to the WI fi.

Do you need the automation?

Do you need the twenty thousand dollar robot?

Probably not, right?

Wait till it comes down to like $4,000, $2,000, you probably don't need it.

And just really think through is the improvement really the improvement you want?

So a lot of the machines we have in our households have saved us time.

Washing machines, all of these things.

A better question I think is what are you going to use your time for?

Because we're obviously where we're going, we're not going to need to work as many hours for pay and maybe not to do as many hours for labor in the household.

Okay, if you got an extra 5, 10, 15, 20 hours a week, what do you want to do?

How do you want to spend that with your family?

What do you give, want to give back to your community?

What do you want to learn?

How do you want to grow?

And I think that's the better question.

Yeah, no, that's a great question.

Find that motivation and what to do with that time when you do sit down and go, I don't know what to do with myself.

My wife will sit down, she'll do some of the domestic things, she'll do laundry and cleaning.

And she actually likes doing laundry and cleaning.

So it's not.

We couldn't get somebody to do it.

She actually prefers.

I've suggested it.

Right, right.

She goes, no, no, no.

I like this part of her exercise routine.

Routine when it came to doing it is exercise.

It is exercise.

And when it is the steps and she counts it as exercise when it comes to planning meals I found I don't leave it to the last minute in order to plan.

I always plan my meals a day in advance or that morning of and that way I don't binge, I don't snack.

If you wait till dinner time that Mac and cheese is going in the oven.

I can't wait to get that.

Oh yeah, it is with some brownies.

I eat better workout and I again it's scheduling that perfect week.

Just a little tidbit when we had the all the kids at home so there's nine of us on Friday nights.

They all everybody's gone to bed and do whatever.

She would put a list of 14 chores out on a piece of paper and the first one up you have to pick two and first or first one up you can sleep in if you want to sleep in on a Saturday morning.

But next one up first you'll be.

Picking up dog poop and taking out trash.

Exactly.

You just had to have it.

So it can be tough and it is tough for parents or if you're a single mom or a single parent and you're having to deal with it, you have to again you have to dance backwards and wear heels and I get that.

The book is called Escaping Quicksand.

You can get to your website and order anywhere you get books you can pre order is now available website is organize365.com great name.

We'll have all of that in the show notes.

You've also got a podcast and lots of good resources and to your products so we'll encourage our listeners go visit your website.

But if you're looking for more organization in your life life and if you're going to sum it up into a 30 second summary of if you get it all right, get your life organized.

Get your work and all those things and it's always going to be evolving.

We get that, right?

What's the payoff?

You get time.

Get organized so you get your time back.

Yeah, get your time back.

Do the things that you love to do when you want to do them.

Lisa, this was insightful.

Thank you so much for being our guest today and we're looking forward to seeing your book.

Michael, thank you so much.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you and who is one person who you can share that with either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is organization is a learnable functional skill that acts as an essential foundation for reducing mental clutter and scaling your professional life.

Or when your home is in order, your mental RAM is free to focus entirely on making you more present and productive.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Until next time.

This podcast is created and associated with Summit Media.

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Goodbye.