Julie Morganstern on Organizing and Time to Parent.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one four, airing in late July twenty nineteen. Today we are going to be interviewing one of our favorite organization and time management gurus, Julie Morgan Stern. She's particularly going to be talking about her book Time to Parent, but she has a lot of great other resources out there, so we are really looking forward to that interview. So, Sarah, what kind of organizing projects do you have going on right now? I have a lot of organizing projects i'd like to get going. I don't know that I'm actively pursuing all that many of them, but there's always the perennial kids clothes, right, because we've only got a month before back to school, so it's actually time to go through and figure out what doesn't fit. I actually did just weed out Genevieve's clothes. I got rid of all this stuff that was kind of like less than eighteen month size. And it's one of those tasks that you kind of put off, perhaps because it seems daunting. I think it took five minutes. I mean it really, it really didn't take that long. So I do feel like that particular task, which a lot of parents get annoyed, if you just do one little piece of it each day, you could get a ton of it done over the course of a month. Really, even set a timer for five minutes and you'll realize, oh, I just weeded out all my kids shoes. Like it's not that hard. So that's number one. And then next on my list is the toys, which is going to be harder because everything needs to be sorted and probably a lot of it needs to go in the garage. Actually, we got a great listener question for this episode where they asked if we do the thing where you kind of don't keep all the toys out so that the kids rotate and I'd like to do more of that, not because I have some vision of like three toys being out in a very minimalistic player room and wood and muted tones, but because everything does get jumpled all together, and I don't think they have as much fun with it when it's kind of one big mess. I mean, there's there's definitely a continuum there. I think if they only had three blocks out it would also be problematic. But we're at the messier end of the spectrum right now, and I'm not loving it. Yeah, that's hard because I mean one of the things that's kind of cool with the independent play and creative play is that when they combine stuff right like that that you know, you combine a doll with legos and you put together totally but you never would have otherwise. And then you're using your crans with a cardboard box to make a shelter for all of them. And the problem when you limit too much the materials is they can't do that, right. I totally agree, and I used to think like that. I mean, I don't know, I'm sending Genevieve to that Montessori school where I think they're only allowed to have like one thing out at a time, and there's all I mean. So there are different philosophies about this, And I also enjoy reading a book back in the day called Simplicity Parenting when my kids were toddlers. I do think when they're really young, there might be more to be said for fairly few toys that they can play with creatively. I mean, they do say that kids like in developing countries who might not have fifteen thousand toys, managed to have plenty of fun with like a bunch of popsicle sticks and some markers or something. But yeah, that's why I feel like it is a continuum, because it is fun when they do certain mashups. Yeah, the legos and the magnetiles are often together with the Calico critters mixed in, and they build a house for those, and then Annabel makes something with the art drawer. So I agree, But there is a point when you get past that happy medium, at least in our house. Yeah, with the toddler it's hard to keep everything organized anyway, right, I mean, you talked to you, sent me a note about organizing your bookshelf, and it was unorganized. Very cool. I was so proud of myself so all their books are in this cube organizer, which I spoiler alert maybe mentioned later in the episode. But you know, there's certain cubes that are more like big kids books and certain cubes that are more Genevieve's books. And one day I probably spent two or three hours. I mean it was alongside Genevieve playing, but I really like went through every cube and made sure, okay, this is just Genevieve's. It was the dumbest thing I ever did, because I think it lasted maybe two days. I mean, maybe that's being generous, because of course, as soon as they were all pretty, she's like, well now I want to knock them all down and mix them up and see what happens if I put this book in this cube, and oh my goodness. So I'm not wasting my time doing that again, at least until she's passed. The mashups are fun stage, Yeah, well, I mean toddlers love pulling everything that's eye level down off wherever it is, so I mean, any bookshelf that's approximately two feet in the air, will it will soon be empty because that's what they like to do. So it's funny because this is my third kid, but I've forgotten some I really haven't had a toddler for like four years prior to this toddler, and I forgot. Yeah, it goes away, but then it comes back. Yeah. Yeah. I've done a few organizing projects in the past year or two. I massively cleaned out all my desk drawers because it was just getting very full, and I, you know, organize it. So I have one office supply drawer. I have one sort of you know, directories and other related type things drawer. I have one mailing drawer to all the stamps, the cards, envelopes, things like that go in there, and you know, bill paying stuff as well, and then one drawer for notebooks, which is one of the ways I discovered that I have about fifty pretty little notebooks that I have either been given or have purchased or something, and never have thoughts that are special enough to actually break open these special notebooks to write in. So use those notebooks because you don't want to get yourself in the situation where you're like, I actually am not going to live long enough to fill these pages. Oh, I already know I'm not going to live long enough to fill all these pages that you know, I should try. I give some to Jasper because he likes writing in them, and so that fills some of the space. But yeah, I was like, wow, I have had vast ambitious ambitions for my big thoughts that are not actually being born out. I also cleaned out the big boys room recently, because so the two of them share a room, and when Sam got a new bed, we changed the configuration. I realized there's just stuff everywhere. I mean, you're going to have happened with two boys. And the books especially had gotten a little bit out of control because we all love books, and I sort of never question buying books, whereas I would probably question if they asked me for a toy. And so you know, it adds up and birthdays and Christmas and all that stuff. And so we had to get some more shelf space and move some of them to Alex's room because they're more appropriate for his age. But you know, it looks a lot better. So there's at least with four kids, I feel like building a giant library is not the worst thing in the world. It's kind of like you have this big, I don't know, repository. So depending on what their interests are, especially for your younger two. It's like they have everything. Yeah, well, we turn out to have a lot of Magic Tree books, so I have to figure out who's going to inherit that collection at some point maybe, But we're going to learn all sorts of great organizing tips from Julie, so we're excited to bring her to you now. Well, Sarah and I are very excited to welcome Julie Morgenstern to the program. So Julie, could you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Sure, I'm very happy to be here, and my name is Julie Morgenstern. I'm a professional organizer and productivity expert, and I've been in business for over thirty years, an author of six books on organizing and productivity. We're so excited to have you on. I actually only discovered you in the last few years or so, but I have been personally loving your podcast. Julie. Oh great, I'm delighted. I thought it was a great topic that you were tackling, and I hope for more episodes. Yes, I'm so glad you like it. Yeah, Time to Parent and Live coach parents through the time management, organizing challenges of trying to try to manage these very tough years. Yeah, your career, you've looked at both organizing space and organizing time. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between those two. Yeah. I think I started out organizing space and my clients. You know, you'd organize space and you would free up an enormous amount of time and energy that was formerly lost to looking for things or procrastinating because you couldn't find things, And there really is an interplay and then time time management. I've always taken a particular view of time management and treated it as organizing organizing time like a space that you know, it's time. Space is much more tangible, you can see it, and time feels ethereal. But if you really think about it, organize time is just like organized space. It's like a closet because you know, we have talked about many times that we have one hundred and sixty eight hours two hour week that we have to work with, and everything that we want to do has to fit inside that container sleep and work and self and social lives and family. And the better you think about it as a container and are thoughtful about the way you arrange those different buckets of time inside the closet of your week, the more you get out of it. In the same way as if you're thoughtful about how you batch and group things in your closet, it gets more out of that space. So there are a lot of parallels, and I've built my career pulling on those parallels. That's so cool. I don't think I ever heard that analogy before organizing your week like you would organize your closet. Yeah, and Julie, you you've written about how you became much more interested in these topics after becoming a parent and then becoming a single parent a couple of years into that journey. You know, how does being a parent change how we interact with time and organizing our time? And I guess our space too. Yeah. I mean, first of all, when you're just trying to organize yourself is not particularly easy, right, like trying to organize your own space and your own time as a single parent, as a single person, or even as a married person. It can be hard enough, but once you start having kids, it just gets so complicated and that you can no longer do you know, think of organizing as a single user system. Every system you design once you have a family, has to be conceptualized as a multi user system. And when you do that, what you can then create is something that is as easy for a five year old to follow as a grown adult who's very focused on these things, as a grown adult who tends to not notice piles on tops of dining room tables as a fifteen year old. It's you have to create these user friendly systems and multi user systems. It's very complicated, but it's a big leap that I think we failed to make as parents, and very often as women in particular. The moms tend to just absorb the whole job and kind of become the default organizer for the family, and it's a job that can be so burdensome and impossible, truly impossible to ever succeed at doing it all for everybody, plus being present, plus being pleasant. Present and pleasant are really hard when you're the organizer of an entire tribe. So got to learn how to share it. And this is definitely a very on the moment topic right now. I just finished R. C. Lachman's All the Rage, which I thought was actually an excellent delve into this issue. We had Gemma Hartley on the podcast about six months ago or so. She was fascinating. So that's great that you're also, you know, looking at it with that perspective of having done this yourself, but thinking about how things might work in different situations as well. I may be that person who doesn't notice the piles on the dining room table. I'll put that out there, right. We need you, Laura. It's good balance person. But what's sort of interesting how you approach this and the idea of the sort of overwhelming job of organizing time and space as a parent, is you actually break parenting down into four distinct jobs in your new book Time to Parent, which is, as you point out, a very different thing than most people approach it. They're sort of like, oh, you know, you're the expert in your kid or other parenting books are like you're doing everything wrong and you're terrible. But four distinct jobs. The acronym pa RT first of all, why I think of parenting this way as distinct jobs, and then tell us about what those that acronym stands for sure, So I as a time management coach, one thing I've learned over the years is that job ambiguity in any position in any industry is a recipe for overwork and inefficiency and insecurity. When you don't know what your job is, how do you know when your day is done? It's never done. How do you know where your strengths lie and where you need to build skills? And that happens very often in the workplace more and more these days. Right, job ambiguity, and it's terrible. People just work forever. Well. Parenting has always been totally ambiguous. The job description has never existed. And when my daughter was born, I was shocked that there were not time management brochure is handed out in the maternity ward with every baby that was born, Like, how am I supposed to now do this and balance raising this human and being a human right giving her everything she needs, and also maintain my job and myself and so on. So when you have job ambiguity, and that's it feels like a job that's infinite. Right, As a parent, don't you feel like it's endless? It is infinite, you're just juggling one thousand and one balls. But that is not really true. So I thought, if I can create job clarity, it will eliminate a lot of the inefficiency and worry and then parents can actually approach it in an organized way. So it broke the job into two parts actually, at first raising a human and being a human, because while you're raising your kids, you're in the prime of your own adult development years. No one ever talks about that. And then each of those two have four components. So Laura, what you're asking about is the is the raising a human. So we have to balance our time as parents, our time between four activities in order to raise happy, healthy kids. And it spells the acronym part as in doing your part for another person. So the piece stands for we have to spend time to provide. We have to provide for our kids, right, I have to work and make and manage money to pay for all the stuff kids need. A stands for arrange. We have to arrange the logistics of our kids and families' lives. It's a huge job. We just talked about a lot of traps there. We also have to spend time on the R is for relate. We have to spend time relating to each of our kids to get to know each one for the unique individual they are. That's that elusive quality time. People are always craving and barely have time for. And the fourth thing we have to spend time on as parents is teaching our kids. That's the t paart teach. We have to spend time teaching our kids values and life skills so that they can be successful as adults. Part And if you stop and think about it, that's it. Those are the four activities. It's not one thousand and four, it's not to it's four and we have to do all of them. You can't skip any our kids really don't get what they need. I love it and I can't wait to delve into it. In a second. We're just going to take a quick break for our sponsors. Hey, listeners, we know a lot of you are in management, you're leading teams, or you're running small businesses. And if you're doing those things, you know that hiring isn't as simple as putting an ad in the paper or posting to a job board. 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Yeah, and another really cool thing about Emma and Luflur clothes is it is made for working women. So I have a pair of black pants that are machine washable. Total game changer. Right, put on the black pants, You're done with them, put them in the wash, take them out, no trip to the dry cleaner required. That is amazing that it's every working woman's dream. I think that you guys would love trying them and will flour. They have a ton of great stuff on offer, from dresses, blouses, black pants, pencil skirts, basically everything you need for work. Right now, new customers can enjoy twenty five dollars toward their first purchase or bento box with the code best of, So visit mmlafleur dot com slash best of for more details. That's m m l a f l e u r dot com slash best of for more details and to get your twenty five dollars off. Okay, we're back. We were just reviewing part and that was how it related to the parenting part. But then did you say there was a second acronym that related to taking care of yourself? Yes, so, as parents, we're not just responsible for our children's wellbeing, we're also responsible for our own and we tend to eclipse that. When we become parents, we just sacrifice everything for our kids, but then we implode. We're not very good at the part. So to be a happy, healthy human all raising children, we also have to divide our time between four things, and those spell the acronym self, as in fueling yourself. So what are those four activities that enable you to do your part and be happy and healthy yourself. We have to spend time on sleep. Right, The first thing to go, usually and very challenging, is a parent. But if we do not sleep, we do not have the energy, the patience, the brain power to do our part in that other section, right, you're just operating on fumes. We have to spend time to ease, for exercise and fitness and things related to our health so that we have the energy and confidence to keep up with our kids. L is for love. To be a happy, healthy adult, you have to invest time in and nurture the adult relationships in your life. It's different than a relationship to kids. And when we're nurtured, it's easier to nurture others. So that's the love and f on This self stands for fun, which important, so important, and it's so underrated. And I can't tell you how many in my career as a time management coach and an organizer, how many parents really put their own hobbies and that really define them completely on a shelf until their last kid goes off to college. That could be thirty years or thirty five years. And the thing about your own hobbies and passions, they make you feel like you. And when you lose track of you while you're trying to do all those things in part and have other relationships with other adults, you have no rudder. But when you do feel like you, and it's small doses, you keep feeding that you're kind of grounded for handling the whole big job. It's the most in some ways, it's one of the most important things, and it's really overlooked all the time. So that's it self, sleep, exercise, love, fun. I love it, and I feel like, oh, sorry, Laura, I'll let you go, But I was just going to say that I feel like I don't know. Our listeners are always seem to be seeking permission to make sure to address their self acronym. So I think that seeing it in writing from someone who has been through it all and who has really thought through it is going to be helpful for those who kind of know that we need those things but don't necessarily always purposefully put them into our lives because we don't know that we're quote unquote allowed. You're not allowed. You feel guilty. You feel like anytime on yourself, you're stealing from your kids, or your job or your community, and that's not true. It really is like if you think of yourself as a cell phone battery, you have a battery life and you have to refuel, and if you don't, you just can't give. And one of the things that really keeps us, I think is the guilt, and there's this whole societal kind of judgment or in our veins kind of pass from generation to generation. And today's generation of parents, by the way, are really known and have been studied to be spending more time with their kids than any generation in history. They really take it seriously. They really want to be there for their kids, but it is often at the expense of self care and cultivating their marriages and themselves. So one is the guilt, but the other. And I think, you know, as people are listening, they're like, all that sounds great, but like, where the hell am I supposed to find a time for all of that? Like there's not enough time. And the solution lies in doing these things in short bursts, like microdoses of self care, Like think about other than sleep, sleep beneath your seven or eight hours. You've got to become a ninja about that and master and overcome everything that gets in the way, because it's amazing how efficient you are when you have seven or eight hours of sleep as opposed to when you don't. Everything else you think you're saving time, you're not. You're moving like a snail through the day when you are not rested. But the other elements of self. Look for twenty minute doses or less that you can fold into the routine of your day and the fabric of your week, as like constant, regular shots of fuel that just keep you going and energize you for everything else you're doing. It's a different approach. And one of the you know other things that you write in the book takes less time than you might think is one of those first acronym parts, the relating to kids. So that's when you're kind of entering their world, doing the stuff that they like to do, fully focused on them. But you know, for those who especially have young kids, it's like, oh, you know, how can you do that for hours on end? But you write that you really don't need to for hours on end, So tell you ajit about that. So that was the one piece that I actually did research on that because I'm organizing a time management expert. But I couldn't tell parents how to divide their time unless I knew what the experts, the scientists, the human development experts say children need to feel loved and secure. How much time do kids need to feel loved and secure? And I spent eight years diving into the research and it was fascinating in every realm psychology, sociology, education, medicine, economics, And here's the buried answer, And here it is. Everybody, sit down and listen. It's shockingly doable. What children thrive on is short bursts of like five to fifteen minutes twenty minutes tops. Short bursts of truly undivided attention delivered consistently, not big blocks of time delivered erratically or occasionally. Short bursts folded into the fabric of their day. And many experts say, listen, kids have short attention spans, and many many experts say to calculate about a minute for each age of life. So just stop and think about that for a minute. A one year old has about a one minute attention span before their eyes drift to the next shiny object. It makes sense, right, And at five year old five minutes, a fifteen year old fifteen minutes. If you're lucky, you know they'll talk to you for fifteen minutes. So short bursts build it into the time you're already spending with your kid. Don't add time, don't worry about it. You can be a working parent and not feel guilty. Just make sure that at each reconnection point you have in your kid's day, when they first wake up, when you when you first get home, at the end of the day, dinner, bedtime. At each one of those junctures, spend the first few minutes relating to them, not the first few minutes on a range like hey, did you do your homework? Hurry up and get dressed, and then maybe we'll have time for a game. No connect first, and then get to the business of life. And it's remarkably powerful and very liberating. Everybody can do it. I love that liberating idea because you know, I really just like playing board games with the children, but it can stretch out for like hours, this negotiation of whether we're going to play it or not. You realize, like you play it, they're gonna be bored in ten minutes and you're done, like you're exactly, So sometimes it's better just do the ten minutes and then you know, take your pain, and then you're free. So I think got it that way. It's true. And I mean, I remember when I was raising my daughter, I was like that. I worked from home for a long time, and I was like, I'm a hyper focuser, Like whatever I'm doing I'm giving it my undivided attention. And if she asked me I want to ask you a question or tell you a story or play a game, I'd be like, wait a minute, and that minute could go on for hours either way, Like I want to finish this before I have to get stuck. And the truth is, if you learn to just pivot and when you are spending time with your kids, you have to don't do anything that's like so flow that you can't be interrupted from. Just turn your phone over, close your laptop, turn get eyeball to eyeball at whatever hype they are, play the game. They will be done in ten or fifteen minutes. It's shocking, so really cool. It's very liberating, and kids are really satisfied. Yeah, the idea that you don't have to sit there for three hours on the floor, that you're a failure if you don't. Yeah, that is actually a lot thinking about that. I'm going to watch the clock a little more carefully the next time I get on the floor with my toddler. Yeah, yeah, and just sort of see And it's like short bursts and when your toddler's bored and wants to do something else, you set them up with that, and then you can go do some together but a part thing. You can do some whatever you need to do, and then reunite when they're ready and you're ready. So, Julie, you talk about some specific skills that people can learn that will help them manage their time as parents. One of my favorite, of course, is to anticipate derailments. Because obviously stuff goes wrong, stuff comes up, things happen, life happens. How do we learn to anticipate derailments and what does that look like practically as we think about our schedules. Yeah, I think that listen, especially as a working parent. I know you have working parents who are listening. You have work can be unpredictable, and life with kids can be on kids can be unpredictable. So I think if you build in to every single day toward the end of the day, toward the end of your work day, or toward the end of your day day, you look at your schedule for I always talk about tomorrow plus two days beyond that at least a three day forecast, because you need to kind of have that context of what's coming down the pike. See what's on the schedule, see what you're trying to get done, what are your deliverables at work tomorrow, what are you doing with the g kids tomorrow? Et cetera. Make your plan and then ask yourself what could go wrong? What could go wrong at work that's going to keep me from getting out the door at four or five or six or whatever time. You anticipate your boss who always comes at the last minute, your own perfectionism, a colleague who always like asks you for help while you're doing something else that you don't know how to say no. So anticipate what could go wrong at work and think through what will I do and how will I handle that? Come up with a sort of preemptive plan so that it doesn't catch you by surprise. And if you have a colleague who always comes to your boss always comes at the end of the day. Start at noon saying hey, I have a really hard out today at six. You know, I like to be flexible, but I really have to be out at noon. Do you have anything that you need done by today? At three? Just reminding you I'm out in three hours. At five, I got thirty minutes left and I'm walking out the door. And so you just manage those derailments proactively and to be surprised. How you can usually anticipate eighty percent of the shocks in your day you could have predicted. And the same thing with your kids. You have a presentation, and like, the kids are supposed to be in school, but what could go wrong? Somebody could get sick, somebody could and what are you going to do about it? If you think about backup plans in both lanes of your life, and I think as a parent, you must. It's just too tenuous when you're trying to balance these two worlds, right, Like, you want to be a good worker, so if something happens, you need to be flexible. You want to be a great parent. If something happens, you want to be there. So you need plan, be in plans, c down two highways every day and don't be so surprised with and they're ready. You're ready for the surprises exactly. One other tip I love from the book was in the section on sleep, and you mentioned that you like to think of sleep as the start of the next day as opposed to the end of the previous day, so that the day does not start when we wake up. The day starts when you go to bed, and I actually really like that. How is that a game changer for people? And why should we think of it that way? Yeah? I mean I observed as a coach over the years that people who tend to put off sleep and go to sleep late, you know, really late, and ended up sleep deprived, think of sleep as the end of the day, and so they don't want the day to end. They're trying to shove in more. They want to get more done. And people who go to sleep on time and who love sleep think of sleep is the beginning of the next day. It's like getting into your charge, putting yourself in your charger, and you're like, it's exciting to go to sleep because that's charging up your batteries and your juices and you're ready for the next day. And it just shifts. It's a mindset shift that leads to behavior shift so rapidly. And once you do that, then you sort of plan. You have to sort of build your bedtime routine. I talk about that in the book too, that you have to kind of give yourself forty five minutes. This was something else I found in the research. I did not know this forty five minutes takes the average adult forty five minutes from the time they start whatever bedtime ritual that they you know, which is like, it's time to go to bed, I'm getting up, I'm doing my stretches and washing my face, putting my pgs, whatever your routine is. It takes the average adult forty five minutes from the start of that routine to being sound asleep. It definitely takes my kids even longer than it does. Yes, the start of the bedtime routine is like seven forty five and they're in bed at nine fifteen. You're like, what what happened? I don't know. That sounds like a lot of money goes along. Negotiation going on. We're working on it. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and you can do that too. I bet you, Sarah that if you try this technique of first moments, first moments, connecting bed time routines are going to get a lot easier. I could see that. M Yeah, awesome. Yeah, Well, we love that sleep tip, so I'm going to try that as well. And we also wanted to ask you a couple of quick questions from our listeners. We put out a poll to Instagram. We didn't say it was you specifically. We just said, an awesome organizing guru will be on the show and we'd love to know what you'd like to ask them. So I don't know. I kind of like the kids and chores, how to get the kids started with helping out? Sure, So I think there's a couple of things to keep in mind. I'm glad you're asking that. Whoever wrote that in there is don't feel bad making your kids do chores. That's number one. And even if you're a working parent, kids who do chores, studies say are way more successful as adults in as roommates and marriages. You're teaching them life skills. So I think that, and in the book, I actually have an age by age guide to what you can expect an infant to do, a toddler to do, a school age kid, a tween, and a team. So you want to think of I think there's also a mindset shift that is so critical, which is to think of sharing the household chores as a way of taking care of each other. It's not a burden, it is a way of taking care of each other. And the sooner that you get your kids started, there's things that they have to do for themselves, which is they have to start learning how to get dressed or you know, get dressed, prussure teeth, grim themselves. That's self care. Those are some sets of things that they can be responsible for, and then there's contributions to family chores like setting the table or helping cook dinner or clearing the table. Even toddler's absolutely can be responsible for putting their toys and their games back where they belong, as long as you have a place where they belong. It requires organizing the space and putting labels and all that, but you one hundred percent can do it, and just make sure that you leave the time for everybody to do it, because to do every to do takes time. So if you want your kids to clean up before dinner, set your cell phone alarm for ten minutes before dinner. When it goes off, you just go in and announce it's time to put everything away. Dinner in ten minutes. So you have to kind of stay aware of the time and not just be like, it's dinner time, clean up. What's wrong with you people? Right? Yes, absolutely, I feel like before dinner my kids always claim that they're angry, so it becomes a challenge. But I get it. Yeah, Okay, how about we had a good question about how to deal with disappointment when you don't get your daily to do list completed? Ah or maybe there's a proactive answer to that. Center Now that's a great question. Well, first of all, make sure that your daily to do list is realistic. I think you can set yourself up for disappointment every day if you're very unrealistic with what you put on your to do list. And that I would say start putting time as real time estimates next to your to dos. I always advocate for that is how asked forevery to do? How long will it take? And get really good at answering that question, and you may find before you even start your day like, whoa, I just planned fourteen hours of to do's for a three hour block of time. That's not going to work. And then no matter what you get done, you're going to be disappointed at the end. So becoming a time realist rather than a time optimist, I think is a key to never being disappointed because you're looking ahead, you're calculating, and then you're really planning what's possible. And one other thing I'll say is whether it's your to do life, or you didn't really relate to your kid nicely, or whatever happens in your day. I say you as a parent, one habit is to forgive yourself every single night and start tomorrow fresh, like go before you go to sleep. That should be the last thing you do. Forgive yourself for whatever mistakes you made, because you will make thousands of mistakes to parrot. And if you just keep trying to hit reset the next day, it's a lot easier than feeling guilty and disappointed and always looking behind you rather than being in the present. Those are all great ideas well, Sarah, did you want to run thro any more? Or I think we are almost at thirty minutes. We should probably keep our Yeah, keep ourselves fantastic. Yes, this has been fantastic. So we always end with a love of the week where we talk about something that's really going great for us this week, and Sarah and I can go first, so that you can Julie, you can think about this for a minute. Sarah, what do you have for us this week? Well? I figured I might as well have an organizing themed one, so I did we have these cubes that we have all the toys in and We have actually three of them that each have twelve cubes, so that's thirty six cubes, which sounds like a lot. But there's like one very long wall and that's sort of the only real room that we keep toys. And it's awesome because the kids kind of know which bin has what. I guess we could do better with labels, but it seems to work okay without it, because they kind of they're color coded and to some extent, and yeah, they just you know, you can throw everything in there and it looks cleaned up, even when you didn't have to, you know, meticulously do that much sorting. So I love my cubes. We have the target ones. There's even better ones for my Kia. Maybe someday we'll upgrade on I upgrade your plastic cubes. Not sure what huge amount. That's great. Being organized enough is the goal organized enough. I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, I've used this one before, but we we've actually turned our dining room table into the puzzle table. And I talk about just accepting the fact that we're in total kid mode now and we don't have formal dinner parties and we do use a lot of puzzles, so I have now decided to just in my mind completely rethink the dining room as being the game and puzzle room, so that that mindset shift has made me feel like, you know, we're using this room in our house now in a way that we just weren't before. So that's my love of the week, that I now have a puzzle room. I love it. That's awesome, all right, Jullie, how about you, yany So for me, I'm going to say that my thing that I am really loving this week, and I have been loving lately a lot, is I have this sleep app on my cell phone and what it does is you just set the time. You set the time you want to wake up, and it will then monitor you and wake you up in the right spot in your rem cycle so that no matter what, you wake up refreshed. And it has truly transformed my wake ups. And I now wake up naturally at you know, the right moment, even before the alarm goes off, and it's completely reset my sleep. I get great sleep and I always wake up refreshed no matter honestly how long I sleep. But I typically sleep seven and a half hours or eight and a half hours a night, but I just it's it's great. It makes going to sleep really fun and waking up delightful. That is so cool. Waking up can be delightful, like you're winning. Yeah, you are winning. It's a big deal. I was never a morning person, so it's changed me. Yeah. Well this is wonderful. Well, Julie, thank you so much for joining us, for taking the time to do this a reminder for our listeners. Julie's new book is Time to Parent, in which she talks about all the different ways that you can organize your time in order to be a calmer, more present, and you know, having more fun parent. She also has a lot of other titles out there, such as Time Management from the Inside Out and Julie, can you quick tell us about your website and your podcast. Yeah, so my website is Julie Morgenstern dot com. Please come and visit, and there's lots of stuff there and you can sign up for if you have a balanced parent newsletter and an Organizing you newsletter, so you can sign up for that. And I have a podcast called Time to Parent and in it I follow the structure of the book and coach parents on all of the eight different quadrants of balancing your life, raising and being, as well as some of the time management skills that it takes to be able to juggle these eight balls, because even though it's not eight thousand, it's not too it is eight and learning how to switch between them take skills, and I coach people on how to really apply them, and so it's really fun, good stories. Lots of experts I know listeners to this podcast would enjoy that as well. Thank you so much, Julie, It's been truly an honor to talk to you, great to speak with you guys. Thank you and listeners. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.