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Speaker 1:
[00:05] Welcome to the Organize 365 Coffee Chat. These Coffee Chats pop up when I have something fun or important to share with you about what is going on at the Organize 365 company. Coffee Chats share time-sensitive information, so when the coffee has gone cold and the information is no longer relevant, these episodes will disappear from your Podcast queue, keeping the Organize 365 Podcast feed current and relevant. I think our coffee is ready. All right, you guys, grab a coffee, and this one is gonna be a long one. I am so over ready to plan my summer, it is not even funny. I think that there are a couple of reasons why. Number one, I have submitted my final dissertation, so we are graduating on June 29th. I have booked the hotel, I am registered for graduation, the PhD is going to be officially over. Also, I am moving back in to being full-time CEO, wife, mother, and out of the semi-significantly part-time grandma role I've been playing for the last four months. And the world is my oyster. Here's what I found. When I was a stay-at-home mom, obviously, my life revolved around my children, their needs, and the changing of the seasons would a lot be, what was the next thing the kids were doing, what life skills were I going to teach them this summer, what were the economics of our family, how are we going to take our annual trip to the beach. As my kids launched into adulthood, and I've grown in my role as the CEO and Organize 365, I have a lot of time, like so much time that I spent 25 hours per week getting a PhD for the last three years and three months. And now all that time is coming back to me. Now, I parlayed some of that into a gym membership and working out. But even with driving time, that's like 12 hours a week. It's not 25 hours a week. I have a lot of time and I have a lot of capacity. And now I'm wrestling with, what do I want to do next? What do I want to do with my time? And because in my 40s, I got my house completely organized. And when Abby had her first child, we renovated the basement, so her space is completely organized. Yeah, I'll take a couple of weeks and spend, you know, maybe a total of 20, 30 hours resetting the house for the summer. But I don't have any big meaty projects to do at home anymore. This was like such a, for me, that you can get to the point where your house is organized. Like just flat out, if you're not there yet, I just want to let you know, you actually can get to the point where your house is actually organized and you don't spend every waking minute trying to figure out how to better optimize your house. So I'm at the point where the house is organized, now I've gotten the PhD, company's doing well, like, what do I want to use my time for? And so I'm going to walk you through planning day and how I have used these planning days. I think we started them in 2018. I do three per year. And every four months, I go through this entire process with myself and a whole bunch of you, where we plan the next four months. It's really like bringing all of the business principles I have in my business, or how can the business be profitable and save time and not too many meetings, and everybody working in their uniqueness and feeling fulfilled and providing transformation to our customers, to me and my household. How did I take all those things I do in business and bring them into the household? And it is through this planning day. This is the workbook that we use for planning day. So I'm going to walk through it. Like I said, grab a coffee. I'm going to be talking for a while. So a couple of years ago, I think, maybe two, two and a half years ago, I realized that, oh, Lisa, okay, this four-hour planning day that you do with people, yes, this is how you make your big decisions, but also you do a lot of prep. So I do a lot of prep. So I'm in my planning to plan kind of like when you clean for the cleaning lady to come. Greg hates that part. I'm like, I don't understand why you hate that part. I don't understand why you hate anything related to somebody else cleaning our house. Like, I love it. I'm like, you have to tidy. Cleaning is completely different. Two different works. So prepping to plan is a different work than actually doing the planning. Let me just put, insert a little footnote here. In my PhD, I studied even more the executive functions that I already was studying before I got a PhD. And I understand our executive function better. Executive function is the prefrontal cortex of our brain. It's the part that helps us set and achieve goals. And there are a bunch of different things that happen inside of your executive function. No joke, organizing and planning are labeled as part of your executive function, like in science. So Organize 365 has always been science. So the organizing is the organizing your physical spaces and your materials. And the planning is setting the goals that you want to achieve. Here's what I have come to realize and totally internalize now. The reason why I have been successful with planning is because I set aside time to plan. You can not do your checklist and plan at the same time. It is not a thing. Stop it. If you're like, I made a whole list of things to do. Planning has to be done like, oh my gosh, I'm going on an airplane next week. And I'm like, I cannot wait to get my head in the clouds and start dreaming and thinking and ideating on what is possible. That is the first part of planning is like thinking about what do you want your future life to even look like? What are the possibilities? Like I played around with the idea of getting a PhD for seven years before I said, yeah, I think I'm going to get a PhD. And every time I played around with it before I decided to do it, I was like, that's crazy. I'm not that smart. I've never gotten straight A's. I'm not qualified to get a PhD. That's why I still never got straight A's. I don't have that kind of time. I am not a good academic writer. I still think I'm a very poor academic writer, but I will collaborate on my research going forward on anything that is being published after the PhD. So I know that I will do as I always do and crowdsource everyone else's uniqueness. My uniqueness, I want to study things people are not studying in academia, and I'm willing to fund the research. And I understand the literature in which I'm grounding that research. Now, being a great academic writer, no. Do I know how to do stats? Yes. Am I good at it? No. No, I'm not. Yes. I will have a team to help me do that. Maybe you're going to be one of those teams, let me know. And we're going to do collaborative research in the Organize 365 way. I'm super excited about it. So as you are thinking about your summer, and I'm going to tell you how I'm thinking about my summer. Step one, I'm starting to dream about what is possible because I do have time this summer that I've never had before. You may not, when you first start planning, when you first start planning, you're really learning time management principles and you're taking the same exact hours you're going to have in your summer and you're going to get more out of it. You're going to get more done. You're going to squeeze out more to-do's. You're going to finish some projects that have been on your list forever because they're really weighing you down. And that's the first, I don't know, three, four, five planning days that you do. And you're like, oh my gosh, I want it to be fixed tomorrow. I'm sorry. I mean, I am not a magician. This is not Disneyland. Your wish is not just granted. You have two choices. You can keep doing what you've been doing forever and be drowning in the detritus of your life. That's the stuff, by the way, that's a big word. I had to learn that word because my editor put it in my book, The Paper Solution, and as I was reading the audio book, I was like, I don't even know how to pronounce this word, detritus. We are drowning in the detritus of our lives, you guys, aka laundry and junk. For those of us lay people like me. We're drowning in this. You can't go from reactive to proactive like that. I mean, you can bring out a lead magnet about how you literally switch your mindset and you could go from reacting to proactive overnight, but then you got to set up all of the systems so that you can live a proactive life. There's not a single person you know that is productive, that did not establish the system that they are using. Let that sink in. There's not a single person you know that is productive, that did not take time to establish the system that they're using to be productive. Anybody can respond. But proactive people set up systems. The first thing is, where the heck are you setting up the system for? What do you want the system for? What are you planning for? What do you want the outcome to be? I'll just take this annual trip to the beach. I was very reactive when Greg and I were first married and we were going to the beach, because we couldn't afford to go to the beach. Thank goodness, his dad helped us get there every year. The finances were part of it. Then there was the logistics. Had to load up the minivan and stop at a hotel on the way up and down because we couldn't afford airline tickets. I had to do the logistics of that. Every time we did this trip over and over and over and over again, I got better at it and I would plan more. It was the goal originally just to get Greg to see his dad in Florida each year. But over time, it became this was our only trip. A lot of people don't even take a trip, so I felt very grateful we even had a trip to take. Many, many years, our only vacation every year was this annual trip to the beach. Then I started thinking, well, what would make it fun for the kids? I started to plan really fun things that we would do in the car, different car things that we would do. Then that was the week where I was like, okay, I'm really going to be the 1950s housewife, and I do the grocery shopping more at the beach. Even though if you know me, you know I don't do the grocery shopping now. I do all the laundry, I make sure everything is taken care of, I do all the packing to get there, all the packing to get home so that my husband can have every single second we're there with his family and not even worry about it because he hates leaving. Then all of a sudden, everything's packed. He's like, how do you even do that? I'm like, well, you were fishing. So whatever, with the fishing. Then over time, as the kids got older, I was like, what would make this very meaningful for them? The beach is actually boring to all of us except my husband because he loves to fish and do all these things. We would like to go to Disneyland. So last year, I took my grandson to Disney World because that would make it fun for me and my daughter and my grandson. So we did that. What would make it fun for my son? I took him to the Daytona Speedway because he's into cars. So we did that for him. How would I make that fun for him? So even when you're doing things, you've always, always, always done. Planning allows you to set a goal and make it more intentional. Get more marrow out of life. Just really enjoy how you're spending all of your time. It never happens accidentally. You can every once in a blue moon accidentally have an amazing day. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I think it's maybe a decade ago now, a hurricane came through Ohio. When the hurricane came through Ohio, it just knocked the power out for like a week. It was the third night, I think, of the power being out. My good friend Margie said, come on down with your kids. They had an outdoor pool and they fired up the grill, and we were bringing over the last of our frozen food that we couldn't keep good anymore. We just grilled everything up. We sat outside for hours talking and laughing, and the kids are playing. That was unplanned. That was a memory that is still embedded in my head. That is few and far between. If you want to have more of those kind of experiences, you need to plan them. Okay, Lisa, get to the point. I told you it's going to be long. You can log off. You don't have to watch. This is basically, I want to talk to you, and this is like a live podcast that isn't going to be a podcast. Okay. First thing is you have to know what you want. That's my problem right now. I don't know what I want out of my summer because it's not a household project and it's not a PhD, and I'm dreaming about what is next. I was talking to my husband this morning. I belong to a gym where I have my grandson as a member with me. He goes all the time, and they have this parents' night out thing where they'll watch your kid and give them pizza for three hours. And so I said to Abby, this is great. You can do whatever you want. I'll take Grace to the gym. This will give you the night off. And she is all in. She's like, yes, please. I would like you to do that every Saturday. It would be fabulous. I said, okay. So then I said to Greg this morning, I said, apparently we're going out to dinner every Saturday. He goes, we are? Why? I said, well, if I have to take Grace into the gym, come with me, drop him off at five, tell me where you want to go. We're going out to dinner. Like that's one of the things that I planned for the summer. Now, that kind of happened by happenstance. Now we're going to plan for it financially. I'm going to make a really big fun list of places we'd like to go. Greg loves steak. There are a lot of great steak houses. I have in my Sunday Basket a list from a magazine I saw once of all the great steak houses in Cincinnati. So that might be something that we're going to do this summer, is go through and pick a different steak house every weekend and go and do that. Is that expensive? Yes. But we're only taking my husband and I, not the whole entire family, and date night is good for us. Will we do it every Saturday? Probably not, but I would like to do something intentional with my husband every week. So that is one of the things I'm thinking about I might be doing this summer. Now, let's start going through the workbook, and let me share with you how I guide you now into doing the same thing. I can't guide you into figuring out what you want to use your time for or what your goals are. So I want to get you thinking about that. For prep, prep happens the day before planning day. So on Thursday for two hours, we're going to be live and we're going to go through our Sunday baskets. The Sunday basket is where I keep everything that I do for my family that is active. When we go through our Sunday baskets, we pull out anything that we have finished, projects that we have finished that are going to go through our binders, so we move actionable things into our binders. Then we go back through our Sunday baskets and we check everything to see what projects could we actually finish in this next trimester? What are things that we could say are going to be done and we're going to put our effort towards that? What other unexpected things are going to come up that we need to plan for? And we're going to pull our calendar boxes into this too. So if you're in the Sunday basket and you did not do your calendar box or even just watch the video about making calendar box, watch that video. And then we pre-label some of the pages in here during prep. And we do a bunch of our tear sheets that are on our Sunday basket. I'm not going to show you all that. I'm going to hop into planning day then. Then the next day we are live for four hours. And this is very much like a interactive, well, it's very much like a lecture in college. I do it on Zoom. There is no chat. We used to have chat years ago, but you guys are too chatty. So we have no chat because this is a time for you and me to work basically one-on-one in real time with the deadline. So I want you to listen to what I have to say, and then I'm going to set a timer for five, seven, ten minutes, and you're actually going to do what I just said. Now, some people, the first time they do this, they use post-it notes or they'll take notes over on a regular piece of paper. And I counsel everyone your first three times for sure that you at least re-listen to Planning Day, if not re-watch it. So if it's your first or second time, I tell you just like pop the popcorn, get a coffee, and get a notebook, and just watch it as if you're in college and it's a lecture. And then when you re-watch the replay, then stop and actually do the activities because the way I plan is so different than the way most people plan. Okay, so step one. When you get your workbook, you're going to have some QR codes here that'll tell you about that stuff that I just told you about prep day and homework videos. So I do have some homework videos, like I'll tell you as I get to some of these pages. There's just so much I want to tell you about planning, and I can't keep you like for a whole entire week. Although maybe you would come to a 40-hour a week planning day. Some of you would. So I recorded some of the videos, so you can watch them and do those things ahead. So first thing I do is I talk about how we are the CEO of our households and we are going to be strategic. And then this is probably people's favorite thing of planning day. So this is when I talk about in this next four months, what should you focus on? So we do it separately each planning day. There are three planning days a year. We do the beginning of May, end of August, end of December. And I talk about the next four months. So I'm going to be talking about May, June, July, and August. And this is when I'll say things like, are you doing an annual trip? Do you have a pool membership? Stuff like that. What is seasonal that we should really be thinking about now versus like everything you possibly could be planning for your household. And this is when I will often talk about things that are specifically timely and relevant right now. So this time, there is a lot, I think, that is very timely and relevant with what's going on with oil prices, food prices, things like that. So I'm actually doing a separate seminar. Next Friday, the 24th, it's going to drop at 8 o'clock. I'm going to pre-record it because I'll be on an airplane. And really talking to you kind of like this, about what I know about industry, what I know about supply chains, what I know about household budgets, and how food and oil prices this summer are really going to impact you as a household manager, and things I want you to be thinking about. No fear here, nothing to stockpile. Don't worry about it. But just some tips that I've learned, being old, running my household for so long, that could save you some money and some time, and just give you some calculating into how this is going to impact your budget this summer. So I'm going to give you that a week before planning day, so you can be thinking about that as well. So that's understanding Lisa's three years. Then we talk about Golden Windows. So Golden Windows is a concept that I came up with, about how we all have these unique pockets of time, that we are able to supercharge. I have the game sheets and ladders over there. The game sheets and ladders where you're going along all the boards, and then you might end up at the end of a ladder, and you're able to jump up to a higher level just because you ended on the ladder. So the ladders. Golden Windows are ladders of energy. Where we have more energy, we have more focus. Maybe we have more time. And these golden windows are like milestone birthdays. You're moving, you're having a baby, you're getting remarried. Like they're just, there's some golden windows. I go through all the different golden windows that we might be having. So you could kind of stack like, yeah, I do have these golden windows and kind of pull that energy to get your plan going. Next we have our brain dump train and you do this on your own. This is where from now until planning day and even after you'd be like, oh yeah, that's right. We do have a family trip. I'm going to put that in blue or, you know what? I really want to redo my gardens this summer and that's going to be personal. So what are your hopes and dreams and desires and things that aren't on your to-do list, but might be on your to-do list. You kind of like dump those into the train. Then these, we have videos for. So this is your year at a glance of your big family events. And this is all 12 months and you write down when everybody's birthdays are that you celebrate or you buy gifts for holidays that you celebrate. Vacations you might be taking, big milestone birthdays you want to plan. This is when you think like, oh shoot, I've got a kid that's graduating a year from now, or, oh, my parents big anniversary is going to be this fall. Things like that, that you don't want to forget, that might need a little bit more planning. Then we spend quite a bit of time going through what I call the time pies. A lot of people really love this. One of the things I do in planning day, or maybe the best thing I do in planning day in hindsight is I have you manipulate your time three or four different ways. And this is so helpful for me because when you just think, okay, I have Monday, you know, one hundred and sixty-eight hours, that just when you look at your time this way in 24-hour pies, you realize that there is a lot of time. For me, most of my time ends up being in the evenings that I don't utilize well, because I'm a morning person and so I don't have a lot of energy for the evening things. But you realize where you do and don't have time. And most people find, as I do, the first couple of times I did this, is that this is your work week time and this is your Saturday, Sunday time. You spend Saturday time completely different than you spend Sunday time. And the majority of the time that you have to work on projects are on Saturday and Sunday, not during the work week. So that's kind of the revelations that come from this. But we really walk through that. And then we talk about the hidden pockets of our time that we lose, the invisible things that we do, that we lose time for, but take real time. And we start with our morning, afternoon, and evening routines. I'm sure you've heard of morning routines. You've probably heard of evening routines. Afternoon routines is something that I created. I haven't heard anybody else talk about it. But afternoon routines saved my hiney when I was a stay-at-home mom. Because once I realized, oh my gosh, there are like all these things that I do, that I need to do with my kids, that I need to have energy for, I just started tucking all those in right after school. So three to five thirty, I just had this big list of things that I did. Because when I get to six thirty, I should be in a bathtub somewhere. I'm like, I'm done, mom's closed. You didn't do your homework well, I guess it's just not going to get done because I am closed for business. Would you like to get up at six thirty with me to my house? No? Okay. Guess we're not doing that. Of course, I did my homework with my children, don't worry about it. But I wasn't happy about it and it wasn't a pleasant experience. So as much as I can front load into an afternoon routine, I'm going to. Now, because I'm working full time, I mostly do a morning and evening routine. I don't do an afternoon routine. I find an afternoon routine really, really serves you when you work from home, when you have young children, and when you're like me, you want to get everything done before the evenings. We also in a couple cycles ago, we now set what our morning routines, morning, afternoon, and evening routines are Monday through Friday, and then what are they on the weekend? So because again, they change on the weekend. These are things like time manipulation, things that I've learned over time that impact us as household managers, but wouldn't even be applicable in work. I mean, like, you're not working, so we don't care what you do on the weekend, right? But as a household manager, where we work and live in place, sometimes it's all the same place. And so thinking about that time in each of these settings is really important. Then this is what I'm really thinking about right now. Half an hour into the video, I finally get to the point. This is what I'm thinking about right now. In addition to our Saturday time and Sunday time being completely different time at home, and how I have my morning, afternoon, evening routines being different, work week versus weekend, I also realized along the way that how I do my housework as a household manager, like as the maid, also changes not only yearly, but really it doesn't change that much yearly, it changes seasonally. How I cook and clean and do laundry in May through August is completely different than how I do it September to December is different than how I do it January to April. And you might be like, no, no, that's not true. You just do laundry, you do cleaning, and you do food prep. I challenge you on that, I challenge you on that, because the grill has started. We started grilling last weekend. I love grilling season. Dinner is just so much easier. Everything is so much easier when we have grilling season. Grilling season is on, I have things ready for grilling season. So I will get onions and tomatoes, so we can have burgers all the time. I don't have onions and tomatoes the rest of the year. I just, you know, I don't cook. But we always have them for burgers. And you know, a slice of lettuce, you know, an iceberg lettuce. I haven't had an iceberg lettuce in the house in months. But you need to have a head of iceberg lettuce for, you know, the hamburgers that I love to have on the grill. Also laundry. You would think in summer, there's less laundry. Oh my gosh, there is so much more laundry in the summer. So much more laundry. We change our clothes constantly because we're sweating because we're hot because it was cold. Now it's whatever. And then also, we play in sprinklers or you sit out on the back patio and you've got towels and like we have a four year old. So there's just like so much more laundry in the summer. You actually need to be running your washing machine a lot more. Also, in the winter, like I'd get home, you start laundry on Friday night, you just do it on Saturday. Well, in the summer, you want to be outside. You don't be inside folding laundry. Anyway, laundry is on the podcast tomorrow. We'll talk about laundry on the podcast. But that's what I go through here. So we talk about laundry. Like how is your laundry going to change? Cleaning. Is the day you clean, how much you clean, where you clean, is that going to change? Then we talk about food. What is your food planner? All just this section takes an hour to get through. Like what is the food? Who's going to make food? How are we thinking about it? All of this planning and thinking in advance allows you to be like, oh yeah, I'm just going to change my regular grocery order. I'm going to be like, that's right. We're going to have, we're going to change what our menu is going to be. And then we have a page all about the Sunday Basket, all the things we do in the Sunday Basket and errands. So thinking through those household manager responsibilities and how they change. If you don't think through how they change, here's what happens. You set a new goal for the summer. You're like, I'm pretty sure I have the time to do this, not that you've done all the time pies and everything. We're like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure we can fit this in the summer. And you're like, why do we never have clean towels for the pool? Why is the laundry never done? How come we never have? Because your invisible work has shifted, but you haven't made it visible and made your systems match. So that's what we do in that section. Now, this is homework again. There's a video to how to do this. This is your maintenance calendar. And we figure out what are the things that we do every month of the year that are not every month. So like every month, I change my furnace filter. But only a couple of times a year, I change the batteries and the smoke detectors, right? So things that don't happen every single month, but are maintenance related. Then we get into the real planning. You're like, finally? Like at what hour are we? I'm like, the last hour, don't worry about it. Here's another thing you need to realize. There's a lot of preparation that goes into planning. If you think I'm just gonna sit down and plan in an hour, okay, well, all right. So if every minute of planning saves you five to nine in execution, depending on who you're looking at, if you spend an hour planning, you're gonna save five hours. I mean, that's what we do in the Sunday Basket. So that's great. That's really great. Weekly planning, planning for 90 minutes to three hours in your Sunday Basket, is definitely going to save you like five to 15 hours during the week. Yeah, I'll take that trade every week. That's why I do my Sunday Basket every week. We're planning for the next four months. Think you could do that in an hour? No, you cannot do that in an hour. I'm already thinking about it, dreaming about it. We're going to do two hours of prep together. We're going to do the four-hour live together. You're probably going to re-watch the live. That's another four hours. That's just 10 hours with me, but you're probably going to spend another 10, maybe 20 hours planning. Now, that's the right amount of planning. When I think about how long do I plan in my business, I take two full days with my leadership team. That's 16 work hours that we take to plan just the next 90 days. I personally plan at least 20 hours before I get to those meetings. So I'm putting 40 hours in plus my employees' time, so 80 hours into planning 90 days of work. So yeah, as a household manager, I'm probably going to take 40 hours to plan my next four months in my household. That is why I save so much time. I don't run into a lot of potholes. I don't have a lot of unexpected events because I've really thought it through. So when we get to this page, this is one of my favorite pages, we are going to plan the next four months, but we're going to think about the fall and we're going to think about the new year at the same time. So like I said, back remember when I was on that calendar page and you realized that your parents' big anniversary is going to be in the fall. Well, you're going to go to the family section of when we plan in the fall, you're going to put down mom and dad's 25th anniversary or whatever it is. And you're going to remember, because you might be doing some things here for this. So this is what are your financial goals, your personal goals, your household goals, your family goals, and your financial goals for this one hundred and twenty days and then the next and then the next. And then we break that down into months. So now we take from here, we take from this line what you wrote here, what are your big goals and then we break it down over the months and over the weeks. So this is going to be May, June, July, and August. You can have just like, here's what I want to do in May, June, July, August. You could just put one thing in each box or you can get really, really detailed. And I give you really detailed lists for, let's see, this is, okay, this is if you're doing the Productive Home Solution and you're starting in January, this is your plan. And it literally just becomes a checklist to do the Productive Home Solution in January. Okay. Oh, great. Here they all are. Here are my brains. Look at my brains. So this is the plan if you're in January doing the Productive Home Solution. This is the plan if you are in the fall and you're just going to do storage. This is the plan if you're going to double down on the Sunday Basket and set it up, and only do the Sunday Basket. This is the plan if you're going to do paper, you're going to focus on the paper and you're going to focus on binders. This is the summer plan for the Productive Home Solution. This is the plan if you want to focus on your personal spaces. This is the plan if you want to focus on planning, and then the routines reset blitz, and then the Sunday Basket. So you just want to get your time focused. Now, just showing you that should show you that, obviously, you can't just do planning day once. Once you become a person who plans, first of all, it's addictive, and second of all, you will not accept the status quo of being reactive anymore because you realize how much time you're wasting, not on Netflix and playing games, I do that, but on just not being in charge of your life, not being the one in the driver's seat, not being the one that gets to say how the money is being spent, and all of a sudden you're like, crap, I didn't realize oil prices were going to impact this thing, and now I have to pay for this thing, so now I can't do this other thing that I wanted to do, because I just didn't think about it. I just didn't know the causation effects, or I didn't understand how supply chain was going to impact July from February, or I've lived in my house for 10 years, but I guess I didn't really realize there was a grilling season. I didn't really realize that these were the things I was doing on a regular basis. So once you realize what you're doing, once you see the game you're playing, once you understand the role that you have as a household manager, yeah, we're not in control of oil prices, but we're in control of so much in our house, so much. And when you focus on what you're in control of, then you're able to utilize those things. So I'm going to really give you this plan. I'm going to give you a lot of options, and I'm going to really help you with what is your house, because my house is organized now. I don't have a lot of household plans, but you and Organize 365, this is the thing. This is the thing. Focus on getting your house organized. Get your homework done, because once your homework is done, all of this is open to you. All of this is open to you. But if your homework isn't done, that is the thing that's going to keep boomeranging you back into reactive mode because like, dang it, I forgot about this, I forgot about that. And you have to take care of your house because you live there. Who else is going to do it? It's going to have to be you. Now, I get to play a lot in the pink. Like, who do I want to be? What do I want to do? How do I want to spend my time? Because my homework is done, and I get to spend more time with my family members purposefully, and thinking about how to make everything more meaningful for them, and focusing on our finances. Always have to focus on the finances. Then we're going to look at our time differently. Two more ways, two more ways. I know, I'm kind of obsessive. Then we're going to take those time pies, and we're going to give you a regular calendar for how to time block your week. And I'm going to have you take the time pies, and I'm going to have you put them on here, and you're like, oh, okay. So that extra time I have, you're right, it is on Saturdays and Sundays between like three and seven. Like that's where our time is, you're like, okay, well, how am I going to use that? And then the last thing I do is we look at the next 120 days altogether in a two-page spread. This is all four months, all at once. And then we go back through here and we're like, okay, so let's put in the travel, let's put in, let me just grab one that's already done. It's way easier to do it on one that's already done. Not that one. Don't worry, I have a lot of planners here, so I'll find one that I could show you. Okay, this one is kind of boring because it's not in color. Okay, this one's in color. Okay, this is last year, May to July. It looks like a kindergartner did it. I was a kindergarten teacher, don't worry about it. Okay, so I planned May, June, July. I can't explain this not in planning day, I guess. Yeah, we can't explain it not in planning day. Anyway, we look at our whole one hundred and twenty days, then I have you go through with crayons and mark out like, okay, well, if it's a work day, and you already know that Monday through Friday, you use all your time, you don't have any time to do your projects, because what we just made here are the projects that we want to do. Our goals are new. We aren't already doing these. These are new ways we want to spend time. We need to find pockets of time to do these things. This isn't like, we've already talked about laundry and dishes and food, we're obviously going to do that. This is the new things that we want to find time for. Well, where are we going to find time for those? That's what we're doing in the one hundred and twenty days. So as we're going through and I will say like, okay, well, block out when you're going to be on vacation. You obviously can't do plans there. Block out when you're working. You obviously can't do things there. Block out all of those things. Now, go back and look and see when do you have time when you are actually going to be at home and you actually could do a project. And then we denote those. Then we add them up. And what we find out is you usually have about forty to one hundred and twenty hours each trimester to do something. You don't have four months. You don't have five hours a week. You actually have like two or three weekends where you have twenty hours and you have a couple other weeks where you have five hours, and that's what you have. Now, once you could see your time that way, you go, oh, OK, well, then I better not screw around that weekend that I have forty hours because that's like a third of the time that I have this next whole one hundred and twenty days. This is what I love about planning days. It's not just the plan. The plan, the goals are made in alignment with your entire life. Like what is everything that you're already responsible for? You can't just be like, OK, I'm just not going to cook for one hundred and twenty days. We're not going to have laundry done for one hundred and twenty days. I'm not going to do my Sunday basket for one hundred and twenty days. None of that is going to work. If you don't have a Sunday basket, you're already eating up all your time and reactive works. You don't even have time for this. You see what I'm saying? Like you have to find new pockets of time. And once you have those pockets of time, you need to know what you're going to do in those pockets of time and use them so that when we get to the next planning day, you're like, OK, I got this project done. This is the whole point. When I did my research in 2021, is organization a learnable skill? Eighty-seven percent of Americans? Yes, it is. Are you organized? No, I am not. And I was like, this sucks. Like if you realize organization is a learnable skill, but you're not organized, then you think it's a problem on you. It's not. It's a problem on me, the teacher. It's learnable. I'm teaching you. I have to teach it to you. So I had to figure out how did I become productive? How did I actually get out of the mess? How did I actually unlock how much time I could get a PhD? And now I don't even know what I want to do with all this time. How did I, how do people do that? This is how they do it. It's a lot. I'm a lot. I know it's a, it's okay. I'm okay. Don't worry. Every productive person you know, they think like this. Do you think like this? I remember I was, I had figured out something in business and I figured out how much I had to make per day or whatever. It was like this math thing I figured out. And then I heard a business owner saying exactly what I had just figured out. I was like, that's a thing. Like, but I figured it out because I like worked through it on my own and I did it. That is what organization is. That's what running a household is. It's like every time you run into another household manager, every time you have a talk with your girlfriend, you're like, oh my gosh, I finally got on top of my laundry. Here's what I did. You're like, I could do that. But we're doing our work not in an office, not at a school, not in a corporation. We're doing our work by ourselves in our household. So how do you know how anybody else is doing this? You don't. Unless you ask, and they're able to know what they're doing and articulate it back to you. Right? So that's what I do on planning day. This is how I get so planned. I would love, love, love you to join me in planning day because I know, I know that, I know that, I know. The thing we are missing in the world is women being in control of their time, having more capacity to do what they are uniquely gifted and created to do. Organize 365 is an organization company, but that is not our mission. Our mission is to get you functionally organized so that you can use your time for what you are uniquely gifted and created to do. When you do Planning Day, people will tell me that's why they stay in Planning Day forever. They're like, whoa. Once you start thinking about your time this way, setting your goals this way, you can't unsee it. Also, you can enjoy watching Netflix and playing that game on your phone at night because you know that this is 45 minutes where you don't have energy anyway. You've already identified there are these two or three weekends that you have this season, and that's where the majority of your goals are going to get done. But if you don't know that, then you get to those weekends, you're like, oh my gosh, I've got this weekend, I've got nothing planned, this is so great. I'm going to go for a walk, I'm going to get a massage, I'm going to play my game, and that's fine too, but you don't get your goals accomplished. Then you're like, I don't know why I don't ever have enough time to get my goals accomplished. I can't find 30 minutes a day. Yeah, you're never going to find 30 minutes a day. You're probably not going to find five to 10 hours a week. That's very rare. But you are going to find these pockets of time where you've got, take an extra day off. You've got 40 hours in four days where you could just plow through a whole huge project. But that's the only opportunity you have in the next 120 days to really make progress on a household related goal. Okay. I actually have to go do my job. I have a meeting soon, so I'm going to have to go. Otherwise, I would just talk to you all day, which is I do like to talk to you all day. That's why I record so many podcast episodes. We're going to send this out as an email as well. Join us for Planning Day. I promise you, you cannot have a better gift for yourself than to invest in you. The only thing you're going to have 120 days from now is still you, still wherever you're living. Every change, every improvement that you make in how you plan and spend your time is a gift to yourself and it will reduce your stress and cortisol as well. Join us in Planning Day.