Organizing in 2019 with Lisa Woodruff from Organize365. Ep 75

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercam. 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 seventy five of Best of Both Worlds. Today we're going to be talking with Lisa Woodruff, who is the organizer behind Organized three sixty five. I know a lot of our listeners are very excited about getting organized in the new year, and so she will have some useful tips, and we'll also talk in general about organization, which Sarah is looking at right now because by the time this errors, hopefully her move will be executed done in the books, because that's in early January, right, Sarah. Yeah, as we stand today, I don't actually have a date, which is kind of funny, but I know it's going to be very soon, and so organization wants to be honest, It's always at the top of mind in the new year. But I have an extra reason that I want to be really intentional with where everything goes and kind of the new systems I put in place as I exercise that also powerful strategy of the clean slate in our new home, and I think a big part of that is organization. Yeah, so what does organization mean to you? And we talk about this in the body of the episode with Lisa, But what does it mean to you? I mean, I'm interested in your take as well, because I know we see certain things differently. I feel like there are like two major pieces of organization. There's the more physical piece, which I know that you may be less into, which is more like making sure you have what you need and know where it is and not have excess beyond what you need. And that part that number part three maybe is debatable. But then there's the more mental side of organization in terms of thinking several steps ahead in your schedule, kind of having systems in place that makes sense, not kind of keeping all of your to dos and goals and some nebulous cloud in your mind. But having a you know, a trusted system to keep them. And I feel like those two aren't necessarily like I know some people who are really good at one and not as good as the other. And I probably myself tend to be better at the mental part than the physical, but I find both pretty appealing. What about what do you think? Yeah? No, I mean I think that to me, organization is not about being neat and tidy and you know, label making and other such things that look good on Instagram and all that. I have a particular the bugaboo about people with the core NATed spice well, just because it seems like such a funny an environmental waste, right, like to put everything in matching canisters because they come in their own canisters that also work. That is a great argument, although some people buy them in bulk and then they put them directly into their own refillable canisters, so okay, well that's more environmentally friendly. But I think you know, if you have a perfectly good, good container and then put it in another container just to do so, that seems slightly Yeah, you're right wasteful. And I also think that you know, things don't have to be matching, like there was a quote. I'm not sure if it was Peter Walsher or somebody else like that, so I don't want to assign it to him if it wasn't him. But he's saying like, if you have mismatched mugs, said, every time you open your kitchen cupboard, you will think, on some level, my life is a mess. And I find so much wrong with that statement that like, I don't even know where to begin, Like, yes, I love mismatched mugs because it means you many different mugs that you love. You have different blugs you love, like from different occasions or different and also just like how about my mind is focused on so much more important stuff than whether my mugs match, Like my life is not a mess because I'm focused on my career and my family and not my cupboard with the mugs in it, you know, So I don't know. I think to me, organization is about the stuff that you need being where you can easily find it and make it useful. And so that stuff could be both physical stuff and it can also be temporal dimension like time. So you know, it's knowing where your kid's shoes are, for instance, is the exact same thing as knowing what you need to do at two pm on Thursday, and knowing that all the pieces are in place for it to happen. Those are actually the exact same thing. The systems required together are a little different obviously in terms of managing your calendar versus managing your stuff, so it's in a place where you know to look for it, but broadly it's it's very similar. So I tend to focus on the things like where the shoes are, or that I'm trying to think of some of the recent things we've done. So, for instance, my stamps and envelopes and cards and checkbook are all in one place together because those are things that tend to get used together, so it is very convenient to have them all in one place. The gift wrap and scissors and tape are in one place because those are used together. You know, kid plates are in a certain place because the kid plates are often done together too, you know, separately from from other stuff. But you know, it's just about making sure stuff is where you can get it when you need it, and then making sure that you close the loop on it too. So the closing the loop part is key. I think that you know, I think about when I see a date for something that I know I will need to do something, I put it on my calendar immediately. I don't tell myself, well, I'm going to remember it. I will email myself if I'm not by my calendar, because then I know I will look at the inbox and then I will put it on my calendar. But if you don't have that system for getting stuff where it needs to be, then you will be disorganized. But it's kind of funny because we're like so parallel, except like when you're talking about the gift wrap and stuff, I'm thinking, yes, but it has to like fit in a cupboard, Like I don't want to see it on a desk, where I think you don't care. If it's in a neat pile on a desk, it doesn't bother you, whereas it would bother me. Similarly, like the inbox, you don't care if you have three thousand emails, and I like to empty it. So it's really weird because we'd sort of get to the same place, but like I tend to really feel the need to go one step further of getting rid of the stuff. Yeah, so as long as I know that I've answered everything I intend to answer. It doesn't matter to me if there's a thousand other emails in my inbox, Like I'm not, I don't care about them. They don't exist, right Like I don't actually have to deal with them, whereas I think, yes, like you said that bothers youah to have that. Yeah. So yeah, we're interested in what you guys think about this episode and organizing in general, and if any of you have discovered some exciting new secrets as you've attacked your new year. Yeah, and we know people have different organizational gurus they follow and sech. We're also looking for recommendations of podcasts, books, anything else that we need to check out. And in fact, that's why we have our guest on is because you guys recommended her. So we hope you exactly, so please keep sending those in. All right, well let's dive into the interview. Lisa. We're very excited to welcome you to Best of Both Worlds. How about you introduce yourself to our listeners. Oh my goodness, I am so excited to be on your podcast. I listen to you guys all the time. This is so much fun. So I'm Lisa Woodruff I have a podcast called Organized three sixty five, and for the last seven years, I've been helping women in Cincinnati get organized. And then I took what I learned helping people in person and created online products and programs to help women get organize their home and their paper. Yeah. And have you been in the organizing business for you said seven years in Cincinnati. What were you doing before that? So I turned forty seven years ago, and before that, I was a teacher, I was in direct sales, I was a mom. In two thousand and nine, I had eleven schedule sees on my tax return, so I was an entrepreneur that hadn't found her home yet. Eleven is quite quite a lot. Actually, yes, yes, well let's see, I pay all my taxes. That's what I have to tell you. That's good. We were going on all eleven businesses. That's wonderful. But you finally decided this was the one that was for you. Yeah. I again, I was turning forty. I had been at a really low point in our family, both with you know, our kids' health and financially. And it was twenty twelve, so it was four years after the recession, but it was like a seven year downturn in our personal family, and I quit my teaching job in December of twenty eleven. Not something you're supposed to do, by the way, And I was like, what, like eleven schedule sees a couple of years ago, Like, Lisa, come on, what is the one thing that you could do for the rest of your life and then build something? Like build something that's going to last. I was like, well, I don't know what it is going to be, but I know it's going to be organization related because everything I had done up until that point, I either was successful or I was hired because I had an ability to get organized or to organize other people. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm very curious how you discovered that, because you know, it's not the sort of thing that kids don't necessarily grow up saying I want to be an organizer, right, I guess unless you're a Marie Condo who apparently did as a child. But for everyone else, it seems to be something you come into. So you had just been paying attention to the threads of your other businesses that had worked. Yeah, well, I'm pretty analytical, and when you're literally like I was, so, I mean twenty twelve. When I think about it, was such a low time in my life, like financially, spiritually, emotionally, Like I looked around, my whole house was a disaster, and I listed out all the businesses I had done in the last twenty years and everything I had done, and specifically the teaching job I had just quit. I literally was hired not because I was a teacher I was, but because my co teacher was disorganized and they wanted me to organize the classroom closet, which was huge in a Montessori classroom, and I ended up organizing all the closets in the whole entire school, and I was like, hmm, organizing. Well. So I look back over everything that I had done, and I just realized that the skill of being organized or in my classroom, even like helping the ADHD Middle School students get organized, was the thing that I was best at, not necessarily teaching or selling a product for direct sales, but the actual skill of organizing that that could be taught. And I really had a heart for other women like me that got overwhelmed at home. Nobody's there to help them. Like once you get overwhelmed at home and you get disorganized. In school, you can get an aid, you can get a teacher. At work, you can get an assistant. But if you're at home, like your spouse looks at you and they're like, well, get it together, my mom could do it, you know, like, there's no there's just guilt and shame, but there's no help. Yeah, and so let's let's back up just a little bit of this about what does it actually mean to be organized? Yeah, because I think there's a lot of misperception about this, possibly fueled by you know, photos on Instagram of everything like and you know, color order or whatever, your books and color order or your spices all in the same shape canister. What does it actually mean to be organized? Well, I think that's just such a good place to start because listening to your podcast, you know, you and Sarah are very organized, and so people aspire to be like you, and you're very productive, and you most of your conversations on your podcast result revolve around productivity. And what I found is people desire productivity, but productivity comes from decluttering first, organizing, second, increasing productivity. Third, you can't jump to productivity if you have too much stuff in front of you and the things you have are not in an order, So a lot of people will declutter, they'll get rid of everything they possibly can, and then they will jump to productivity and they skip the step of organizing. And the step of organizing is when you look at what you have and then you figure out like, okay, we have a lot of office supplies in our house and school supplies, and then finding one place in your house that's like the store that everyone goes to when they need new school or office supplies. Ours is in our dining room. So when you run out of paper, you go to the dining room to see if you have more, and if you have access, you put it back in the dining room. So that's like the store for everyone in the house. And starting to look at your whole house is like really an apartment complex. I call our kids bedrooms mini apartments, and a warehouse for like all these resources that your family needs that changes as your family grows. And that's the organization piece. It's not just about living with less or optimizing all of your minutes. It's about how the space in your house actually functions, where you store things, how much you keep, how often you buy it. Those are all organizational tasks. I was going to chime in because I, as everyone knows, I was going to lead to this conversation. My apologies, but I wanted to ask Lisa a question, which is that I feel like your work focuses both on the kind of physical side of organizing, like that's the decluttering and like putting everything in the same space, but you also address the kind of more mental or cerebral side as well, oh for sure, Like I'm a huge analyzer and my kids have ADHD, so I've really dived deep into how the executive function of the brain works and how it impacts our organization at home. And I really feel for women who women who are disorganized at home end up getting depressed also, and they feel very alone. And so I have It's not about pinterest, like Laura said, it's not about these teal matching containers. I don't even like the color teal like has nothing to do with containers. It's all about your mindset and also the phases of life. Like we've lived in our house twenty two years. We didn't have children. Now our children are going off to college. Your house functions very differently when you have kids my age, when you have little kids, like Sarah has, like you have to constantly be looking at how you use your house. And normally when we look at how we use our house, we think emotionally like the dream we have of the wife and mother and homeowner that we should be or could be, versus the reality of what's around us and helping everything flow more easily. Like everybody else's children do laundry when they're like three years old. Mine learned when they were sixteen and seventeen. It's okay, like nobody's coming to check. Do what works for you. I would love if my three year old would do laundry right, heavy work for him. Yeah, no, I was. I would say there's a parallel here with sort of organizing one schedule too that you know we talked about. You talked about the decluttering, I mean, getting rid of the stuff that is useless to you everyone else. That's a that's a great first step. You know, you may want to be productive, but there's also the step of figuring out where things can go and how it works, and you know how you'd like the space that is your schedule to function. It's it's just a different sort of dimension there in terms of physical space versus temporal space. And I was gonna say, like the organizing piece, it speaks to a sort of intentionality there, right, because you could do clutter about everything is just where it is, but the organizing pieces, you know what this is going to be the reading book, or this day is going to be the day that I work on my project that I you know, my side project. I think that we often stop, like you just said at the like okay, well I've paired down my stuff, but you never stop to actually logically think through weight. Is everything in where the best place where it needs to be? And I think that your work it takes it that step further. And you're right, it does definitely parallel with with a lot of Laura talks about with time. Yeah. And I think also when you start thinking about your house, like if you think if you're just call calling your kids' bedrooms their mini apartments, totally changes your mindset. Oh yeah. Often I follow a lot of people that their kids do all these chores. My kids never did chores. I just I it didn't work. I beat myself up for years. Finally I just gave in. I was like, fine, they don't do chores. But However, they do clean their own rooms. And it took me eighteen months to teach my daughter to do it, but it was a learnable skill. And let me just tell you, she could clean your whole house now and organize it because she knows how because I took the time to teach her. But I only require that she organizes and cleans her bedroom because that's her apartment, because that's how old she is. But then also with that apartment mentality, we change the paint colors in those rooms, and they can get different furniture or they can earn things that go in their rooms, depending on what your you know, what your rules are. But my kids have refrigerators in their bedrooms, TVs in their bedrooms. I mean, they're going off to college soon, and I'm teaching them a lot of what their first condo or house will be like based on this apartment in our house, and with teenage kids, we do kind of function more like an apartment complex. Now, you know, the kitchen is very much a restaurant and has multiple different foods in there. I'm not feeding the same thing to everyone every night. We all have our own taste. By the way, your master bedroom is your condo, just in case you're wondering exactly, So, Lisa, I mean when I was trying to sort of tie the two space and time together, how exactly does organizations save time? Because I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of people are drawn to this idea that being more organized will help them save time. So how does that work? I think if you start thinking about your house more like you would a classroom or a school or a business, then you start to see the same things that you would see in a school or a business, where you would batch tasks or you would layer on things that happen every single morning into a better morning routine and look at all those productivity things that you guys mention all the time that then will shave off time in your house. So organization of a space, you're going to stop looking for things is the biggest thing. Like if you know that all office supplies go in this one container in the dining room, then you're going to stop looking for school supplies all over the house or wondering how much you have of them. So it really saves you the looking for things time, and then everyone in the family eventually can learn to return things to their proper place, so that you're not looking for things. Is the number one time you're going to get when you start organizing to begin with. Yeah, I think hunting for lost objects is the most frustrating and pointless waste of time ever, So I would definitely put a shout out in for organization on that. In my house, like we said, it's not about the teal canisters, things are often not neat and tidy. I would say that they are organized though. So the children always take off their shoes in our mudroom. They always leave their backpacks in the mudroom, their coats in the mudroom. They never go anywhere else. Comes out of the backpack for homework, for instance, it goes right back in the backpack after the homework has been completed, like it cannot say anywhere else in the house. And that's how we get to school on time in the morning. That's how we don't miss the bus because if we're hunting around for shoes like game over, you know, for children looking for shoes just not going to happen. So yeah, that's that's definitely a time saver. So a lot of our listeners, you know, we're airing this new in January be a big New Year's or you know resolution every year people want to get more organized. What are some small and doable steps our listeners can take to get more organized for the new year, Like, what are some particularly like in those families with young children, Because I know that you speak on your podcast a lot about when you turn forty, you like suddenly had this bandwidth and you could go through everything. But a lot of our listeners, well many of them may be over forty, but many of them or not, and many of them have toddlers still running around. So I'd love you to speak to some tips for us who are still, like very much in the trenches. So first all, address how Laura just mentioned that with the shoes and the backpack and the coat, and your audience members are going, oh my gosh, how did she get them to do that? Did she get them to take them all off in the coat room? And I'll tell you how she did it is that was the rule. And then I'm sure for years, Laura you had to say, Nope, shoes stay in there, Nope, backpack stay in there. Okay, put that right back in your backpack, and now your kids do it automatically. No, child. You can't make a rule and a child is going to do it automatically. Think about a preschool classroom. So let's stick with kids under five. First of all, if you have children under five, what I tell you to do as an organizer is to take more naps. That's my number one rule. You need more sleep. I don't worry about. Yeah, they all say, can you say it again, Lisa, Yeah, you need more naps. You need more naps. Awesome. Number two. If your kids are under five, they are not in full time school yet everything about them changes every three months, the kind of food they eat, the size clothing they wear, the toys they're interested, their naptime routine. Like every three months, you're changing out their closet. You are shoveling snow in a snowstorm, So don't try to get rid of all of the snow or put out. No, you are just surviving until your kids get into full time school. And the more you can make the spaces that they're in look like a daycare or a preschool, the better you'll be because if they go to daycare or preschool, they will bring those skills back to your house. If if there's a cleanup song at school. You have a cleanup song at home. Now it could be Michael Jackson if you want. It does not have to be a preschool song, but you have you know, you like eighties, you like Michael Jackson. You play a Michael Jackson song and we clean up the stuff before we have dinner. Any kind of routine or queue that you can have kids do in order to get them into that routine will really help you. And then you just need to really resign yourself to the fact that you are going to be every three months pretty much going through everything your kids have. So that would be for people with kids under five. The other thing I tell people when they're starting to organize is to always start with yourself, not your kids or your spouse, because the organization that you start with yourself will stick. Kids it's going to take. It took me eighteen months to teach my daughter to clean her room, and I started when she was eleven, Like, it was a skill that was really really difficult for her to learn with ADHD and learning disabilities. She could learn it, but it just took more time than maybe it would have taken with someone else. It's worth the investment of time, but it's a significant investment of time, whereas if you focus on yourself, I always say, start in the launder room. No one's ever going to go in there, so keep making that productive. Refine your laundry system, save time there, save organization there. Then go to your closet. Refine your closet, find out what you want your work uniform to be at work and your work uniform to be at home, and get rid of the clothes and things that don't serve you. You will start to build your confidence and self esteem. And nine times out of ten, your spouse and your children will start to get organized right behind you because they watch what you're doing, not what you're saying. So like tackle the tackle the areas you have control over, have these small winds, and then kind of hope to build from the toy room is last. So my husband was helping me organize the house once and the kids were I don't know, they were school age, and he said, okay, I will help you clean the house to stay. I can't remember why. It's like the only time this ever happened. I said, great, we do the family room last. He's like, no, no no, no, I'm going to start in the family room. I go, fine, but we do the family room last. So I did like the bathrooms and the kitchens, and he did the family room, and of course, you know, eight hours later or whatever, he's like, this room is a mess. I'm like, yes, this is why we do it last, because the children are in this room and they're moving stuff around. But see, the dishes are done, the kitchen is, the laundry is done, the kitchen done. Now we do the family room last, and then the whole house is clean. So the kids are actually last, They're not first. Yeah, they are little sources of disorganization off and I'm trying to think back, you know what it was. I think it is so you say that this was just one role that we were incredibly consistent on, and there's many other things that have not been consistent. Like I find I've told them not to eat anywhere but the kitchen, and I still find like wrappers all over the house, as if they're like little rats everywhere. I don't know, but they I think it's more of because the downside of the shoes being somewhere else is so you're late, big, yeah, that that you have to They would just be like if it did find it anywhere else? Like, no, immediately go back find the coatnywhere else? No, No, that is not where it goes. It immediately goes back, as opposed to leaving it and being like, uh, well, I'll get to that later. The homework has been a bit more of yeah, well the homework is a bit more of a work in progress. But again it's just, you know, it feels bad when the kid doesn't have it at school, and it's not my problem that they don't have it at school, So they've they've sort of learned on that one too, that you know, you put it right back in and then it's there. I know. So you can't do it all like, you can't be like, my whole entire house is going to be organized and then I'm going to create these eighteen rules and we are going to follow these and that's how it's going to be, and I'm going to do it in twenty one days. Sorry, No, it's going to take a year to organize your house, and it's goo take longer for everybody to maintain it. It's a learnable skill, but it's not an instantaneous skill on that year estimated. So I've listened, I love your podcast. Actually, I think it's really fun to listen to U, especially while I'm cleaning. Somehow just goes really well with that task. So motivation. I was wondering, like, you know, a lot of your listeners do stay at home with children or more sort of home focused, but our audience is definitely many women with different types of careers. Do you feel like your programs are still doable if you are, you know, very busy with something else as well? Is there a way to chuck things up or spend us you know, like maybe a slice of time in the morning so that someone who is also, say an attorney or a physician, could also kind of get a handle on things. So that's so interesting because I thought so too. I thought it was people who are listening to my podcast we're at home, and it's not true. They are very much entrepreneurs, corporate attorneys, doctors, all of that. Actually, that doesn't surprise we have it because we're the ones with so many wealth. Everyone has a lot of balls in the air. But I can see again your podcast appeals to me, and clearly I have that more structured lifestyle. So okay, keep going. But that's that's very interesting. And it appeals to literally seven to eighty seven year old people like their children that write in their questions, and people are in their twenties and thirties with young kids, and then a lot of people that are baby boomers and are downsizing and looking at second homes or multiple homes. So the range of the podcast is literally seven year olds to eighty seven, like we have all of them, and it's pretty evenly distributed, like we have forty percent that are forty to fifty five, but then we're even with millennials and baby boomers twenty five percent and twenty five percent, and then we have kids on top of that. Now I forget what the question was. Oh yeah, so it's more except for people who have a lot of other things going on. So the way that I've divided you're not in your house all that much. Yeah. So the way that I've divided up the year is everybody does want a quick solution, And as a teacher, I was like, Okay, that's what you want, but here's what you need, and I have a one hundred day program where you have fifteen minutes a day where you go through each of the sections. But some people do all of the sections just on Saturday, and other people do it every day of the week. And that also depends on you know which kind you are based on how you do laundry, Like, if you do a load a day, you'll want to do fifteen minutes a day. If you're like me and you do all the laundering one day, you're going to do all the tasks in one day. But it's a lifetime membership, and I encourage people to go through it three times a year. We launch it three times a year, and the same group of people plus a few new ones go through every single time we go through, and you look at the spaces in your house differently each time you go through. And then often people who are working away from home, they listen to the podcast or think about the area that they're going to organize on their commute, and then when they get home, they spend less time at home physically in the space organizing because they've done the mental in the car. But people are at home do the mental and the physical at home, So that's the biggest difference. Cool. Yeah, I could totally see myself wanting to try your programs. Actually, as we start in a new space, that's very very tempting, so very cool to know to balance it with you finds. So, Lisa, what have you've seen that's just not worth the time if people are trying to get organized, what do people put way more time into than it's probably worth it. Hmm, that's a good question. So I'm a functional organizer, so I don't spend a lot of time labeling things, although if your kids are under five, I would encourage you to label things because it'll look like a preschool. So I don't spend a lot of time labeling, and I definitely don't spend a lot of time in decorating or making it pretty, like I don't know, my home is my home, but I don't spend a lot of time in the decorating part. That makes sense. You can spend a really lot of time labeling things if you are, at least according to Instagram and some of the organizers that are popular. When we were professionally organizing, like if somebody said and I want it all labeled, I literally would double the amount of time it took us to organize. So if it's going to take us an hour to organize that space, I'd be like, Okay, the space now takes two hours hours because the labeling takes so much time. Plus it maybe a loss of flexibility because it's kind of harder to move things around once you've now designated, Like these are the size three to six month clothes, Well, guess what, your kid's not going to be in those for more than about three months so or six weeks exactly. I know, I'm just gonna say if that, I think we always went through that one in about two weeks for whatever is, and they plumped up quickly at some particular time in there. So, Lisa, organization is you know, a hot topic in the media, especially you know around New Year's you get a lot of like programs and specials and magazine stories and all that. Are there any particular you know, books or shows or magazines or blogs that you follow that you'd like to recommend? Of course all of yours, like all of your books, Laura. I just had someone in yours. Well, I just had somebody in my Facebook group. They're like, you can follow Okay, we just got Laura's books. We can't read them over winter break. So I love the way that you look because your questioner look and think about time and all of that I would say that book by Gretchen Rubin about what you are, the Four Tendencies if you're a questioner, that kind of just any really personality test that helps you with how you think and look at the world, and then also your family. Like when I did the Four Tendencies of Gretchen Rubin, then I also figured out what my husband and my kids are. So anything that helps you with how your family processes information or space will also help you. So knowing what their Strengths Finder is or knowing what their Meyers Briggs is or any of those are really going to help you. Because organization is about how you see the world and how you organize things, and you want your family to be able to use that system as well. Very cool, all right, So, lest the one thing we always like to know is what a day in the life looks like for you now? And I know you're not physically organizing your clients spaces anymore, that you've transitioned into more of the program that people subscribe to. So what does a day look like? That is a good question. I have a couple of different days for the most part. My kids are seventeen and eighteen. I've won off at college, and then our junior in high school, we decided to homeschool last minute, so I homeschool her. And she just got her driver's license. So I used to spend twenty five hours a week driving and now I spend like two. So I'm home almost all the time. I get up around My husband goes off to work at seven fifteen, and I'm usually up by seven fifteen, and I'm usually at my computer at eight, and I get started with email, I make a coffee, I make my daughter's protein smoothie, and then at nine we get her started with schoolwork. And I usually have Zoom meetings with my team members in the morning. I have ten people on my team that help me with organize three sixty five now, and then I go into whatever the task of the day is. I am very focused, and I sit at my computer usually until four thirty. Like I'll break to do homeschooling, or I'll break to get a salad and bring it back to my computer. But I'm one of those people that can literally just sit and work with no breaks, as is evidenced by my fitbit that tracks no steps. And then around four thirty, I say I'm going to get off the computer, and I don't until like my husband literally pulls in the driveway, and then usually fifteen minutes after and then around five thirty I go downstairs and we I'm terrible at cooking, we don't do great at dinner, but we have something to eat and we talk usually until around seven, and I usually sneak back on the computer from like seven to nine thirty, but lately I haven't been. I've actually been turning the computer off and then I'll binge some TV show and do a jigsaw puzzle until I go to bed. Say, there's nothing wrong with doing work if it's what you enjoy doing. And I mean, the package you're managing to homeschool at the same time as working full time is pretty impressive. So there's an organization for you people, all right, So, Lisa, I like it the fitbit as a as a measure of focus rather than a measure of a focused other than fifth, we don't even get up to go to the bathroom, Lisa. We also like to do as you you're a podcast listener, you know, a love of the week, so we can go first, just so you have a little bit of time to think about it. Sarah what's your love of the week This week, I'm gonna go real random, and we have discovered pretzel buns. Yes, so instead of a burger bun, if you're doing like a veggie burger, any kind of a burger, you can get these little pretzel buns and whole foods and they make it like fifty times better and the kids are obsessed with them and I might be too. That's my level of the week. Yeah. Well, since we're recording, we're actually recording this in December, even though it's airing in January, so I've been in the thick of present wrapping and I, as listeners to our money episode, know, I'm kind of have this dread of Costco. But the one thing that is cool about Costco is the bulk sized wrapping paper, like you actually get through a ton of presents on one role, as opposed to those skimpy little roles you get elsewhere that you can wrap like four things before you're out. So I think I wrap like thirty gifts on the same role and it's nowhere near done, so I would uh, that is my love of the week is only having to which, by the way, I have a wrapping station We have a box in a closet that has we need pick paper, gift bags which are reused for the most part, by the way, tissue paper, and we keep you know, a pair of scissors and tape there as well, so you know, because you need it all the time, it's not like it's a rare occurrence. And if you get something like silver and wrapping paper, you can actually use it year round, so it's not like a Christmas name. All right. Okay, So the love of the week is service professionals. So today I have a plumber out because we had a link a leak under our kitchen sink for I'm not even going to tell you how long, and finally I was like, fine, they're going to come out and fix it. However, he also fixed a basement faucet and replaced that, took out our laundry tub because I don't want that, and fixed our master bathroom sink that was draining too slow. So when you have a service professional out, like I know, it's expensive, all right, it's already expensive. You don't want to spend the money. But once they're there, tell them all all of the things that aren't working and then just go through the whole list, like, just get rip the band aid off. When we had an electrician out, I had fourteen light fixtures changed at one time. It's going to be expensive no matter when you do it, so just get it all done at once. Yes, that's amazing, very organized. A yeah, all right, well, Lisa, thank you so much for being on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, this was a pleasure, and remind our listeners where they can find you real quick. So my website is organized three sixty five dot com, the podcast is organized three sixty five, and I'm organized three sixty five on all social media. Awesome, thank you so much, Thank you. Well, that was fascinating. We're glad that Lisa could come on and share her organizing tips and hopefully people will go check out organize three sixty five. Lots of information there as well. So today's question comes from somebody who wants to know about reading lists. So Sarah got this question on Instagram, So please do post questions on Instagram. We're happy to pick those out there too. This listener says, I'd really like to hear about favorite or top recommended parenting books from you, both both Infant early child development and general how to parent books would be helpful. Just found out I'm pregnant with my first woh, congratulations. Your podcast has been inspiring me to confidently balance my profession and being a great mom. All right, Sarah, I love that. I love that comment, and I'm excited for that listener as she embarks on a super fun journey. And I'm excited that she's already listening to us to prepare. And since she's listening to us, that's probably all she needs to do. Now, I'm just kidding exactly. I actually i'd be cool with that. That's sort of my answer, but anyway, you give your more thoughtful answer first. Now, I will also preface this like I was just when I started to want to have children, and when I had children, I was already a board sortied pediatrician, so I didn't have as many as maybe the concrete questions like you know about which vaccines or about you know, what is a normal breathing rate for a newborn? But I just sort of more for fun and just to get myself into that world. My sister in law had handed me a pile of books. I didn't buy any of them, and one of them was one of those what to expect type of books. It wasn't the actual what to Expect. I believe it was the MAO Clinic Guide, and it talked about pregnancy and just sort of the nuts and bolts of you know, the things that you might talk about your friends but you might miss, like you know, what happens afterwards, Like do you have a month long period? Yes, you might, and you know, all those sort of basics are in that book, and things about like how often do you need to breastfeed a baby when they're first born. Like just seeing it written down made me not that I was taking it as an instruction manual, but it just put me a little bit into that world, and I was excited to read about that world. So for me, it was more for fun than as an instruction manual. I do feel like I got a little bit more out of the baby focused books. I really like Mark white Spooth's sleep book, which is still popular today called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Other people swear by other sleep systems, but this one has a number of different philosophies kind of built into one book, with a lot of recommendations on you know, ranges of numbers of hours of sleep, and I think I think it's a reasonably balanced guide and reference and things like happiest baby on the block to talk about like how to soothe your baby Now. Your baby may not follow the instruction manual, but it's nice to at least your baby may not have read these books, by the way, but sometimes this is nice to have a few tools that you can at least start with. Now. Of course, in the day the age of the Internet, you can pretty much google everything and find like ninety zany and varying opinions on any baby related topic. In fact, a fun game is if you google like some random symptom and the word pregnancy, you will find a message board with some woman that had like my pinky tingled for ten weeks during all of my pregnancies and actually only with the boys. So it means that it's a you know what I mean, like anything is out there, so you know, be careful there. But if you just want to, you know, see someone else write the same thing that you think you can, you can find it. I will finally add that there have been some more kind of narrative just fun reads that I found later on, and I do have a parenting book Club, So clearly there's something about that genre that I think is interesting. But some of my favorites were Bringing Up Babe by Pamela Druckerman. I read that while I was pregnant, and it was just kind of fun. I'll Join No Fun by Jennifer Senior, Battle Him with the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, Small Animals by Kim Brooks, And one of the sort of more memorable quote unquote how to parent books was something called Simplicity Parent by Kim John Payne. I actually like that. Any of the kind of discipline guide books sound really good when I'm reading them, and they always have these vignettes where like the kids they do the magical thing and the kid all of a sudden is better and I tried at home and it doesn't work. So maybe my kids are just broken or I'm broken whatever, But those I tend to have. No Unfortunately, that's not what it is. It's just that there's very, very little in parenting books that is researched right, that is based on assigning people to different techniques and seeing what works like over a population. So basically you're always just reading somebody's idea of what might work right, and so it works with some kids, and it doesn't work with others. And maybe it works with your friend's kids or your sister's kids or whatever, and your kids don't. I mean, it's just like, you know, something like a sticker chart like that can work for a kid who is very excited about getting the sticker and pleasing the people who seem pleased that she cans stuck better. Yeah, whereas your kid may not give a crap about pleasing you, in which case you have a very different personality kid. But that doesn't mean they're broken. That just means that they're not going to be the kind of person who likes to put the sticker on things in the future. And there's upsides and downsides to that. But you know, that doesn't mean that you're a bad parent. It doesn't mean that they're a broken kid. It just means they are who they are. And I think that's that's always my beef with a lot of these books. But I got to say, I'm not a big fan of either the pregnancy or parenting book genre. My husband bought What to Expect when we were expecting, and I refuse to read it. I feel like, I mean, the function of most pregnancy books is either to scare you or to like have some sort of goddess type myth that like, you know, it's just the magic because you're pregnant. You're magic because you're pregnant, but then the magic is apparently worn off if you get an epidural or something, because that's the kind of mindset these things are in. I don't know. There's and then then the parenting front, there's just the reality that you know, anything that's sort of based on like how you're going to get your kids to turn out right or turn out a certain way is also just ridiculous, I mean, because so much goes into how children turn out and there's no acceptable endpoint variable of what means you turned out well and turned out didn't turn out well, And so I mean you could take heart that by the time you are reading a parenting book, like so many things have gone right, like your kid has a parent who cares about it, your kid has a parent who wants to do a good job. Like your kid is therefore among the luckiest people on the planet, and your kid is going to be fine, Like the parenting blank book could pretty much be blank. So yeah, that's great. That was my little soapbox there. So I would sort of on the prack of front I would I would second sarah suggestion this you didn't mention this, but that you hang out with friends with the little kids. You're going to learn so much more through doing that than you will through reading about It's it's you know, what they call an education. I forget the phrase or the constructivism or what, but just that you learn things when we need to know them experiential and we learned them when we need to know them. And so reading a textbook about how to build something does very little for you is actually trying to build it and seeing what works and what doesn't. That does work. So hang out with the little kids. You know, if they'll let you babysit them for a while, that's great. Hopefully you are around friends and family who have had kids. You've seen little kid maybe you did a lot of babysitting. I know. That was my position, is that I had already babysat for umpteen million children, so I was I was cool with the idea of how to change the diaper, you know, by the time I just had a baby. Seriously, that's like a gold mine, because number one, they're probably bored and they want adult company, like if they're home on attorney leave. And number two, yeah, you can just like ask about everything as you see it and practice kind of on that baby while giving them all a break, so that I think would be the best best thing to do if you can missing, Yeah, exactly, and you can listen to this podcast yeah for our helpful tips and tricks. Anyway, So this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking organization and we will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box 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.