Lisa Woodruff: Especially if you have kids, how many times do we organize their rooms constantly? How long does it stay organized? Sometimes, not even before we can get through the threshold and back into the hallway, and they’re already throwing down like, oh, my gosh, what am I doing? But if you will give yourself the gift of the next couple of weeks, whenever you find a spare 5, 10, 15 minutes Thursday night where you want to just turn on some music and go and clean out under your bathroom sink, and clean out your nightstand, you will feel so much better. And when you get those three spaces organized, it will minister to you, and you will go to bed, and you will wake up and organize spaces.

Heather Nelson: Welcome to Her Story Unscripted. I’m your host, Heather Nelson, a connector, business strategist, and someone who truly believes that the most powerful conversations happen when we stop performing and start being real. This podcast is a space for women to share honest, unscripted conversations about life, growth, and the experiences that have shaped who we are. No perfectly polished narratives, no pressure to have it all figured out, just real, authentic stories told exactly as they are. 

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s Her Story Unscripted. I am so excited to have Lisa on today. We just virtually met, but I already know this conversation to be so juicy. Because so many of us are sitting in this crazy time of life, and you’re going to help us get out of it, so welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Woodruff: Thank you so much for having me on. 

Heather Nelson: I’m super excited to have this conversation. So you own a business called Organize 365, and we’re going to talk about how you got there and the things that you’re teaching women today. But I would love to hear a little bit more about who you are. You have children, and there’s a reason why you’re sitting where you are today. So tell us a little bit about your journey. 

Lisa Woodruff: My life story in a nutshell is, I was born and raised in Ohio. I’ve always lived in Ohio. And when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was babysit, and someday, be a wife and mother. Stay at home mom was my ultimate goal. I went to college and got a teaching degree, but I literally was shopping for a husband. So back in the day, they would call that getting your MRS, like your missus degree, and I did, baby. I snagged a college boy. We got married. We weren’t able to get pregnant. But about five years later, we adopted our two kiddos, and I did spend a decade as a stay-at-home mom, which I loved. It wasn’t all roses. Raising kids is hard, and the kids had challenges and everything. But it was what I was uniquely gifted and created to do was to be a stay-at-home mom. I loved every minute of it. However, during those 30s while I was raising those kids and they had challenges, we went through a worldwide recession. Ran out of money. My parents got divorced. My dad got sick, and he ended up passing away. My sister and I had to settle the estate. Not fun things happen. I just kept feeling like I was in this pressure cooker, and it was just getting more, and more, and more pressure, and there was no release valve. 

And as I was turning 40, I was like, okay, my kids are in middle school now. We definitely need me to earn more income than I can earn. Just on a little side hustle, my dad’s gone. My parents are divorced. The holidays are all different. Hashtag adulting is a little bit less fun than I thought it would be. I still held on to that MRS degree. I still have it. 30 years and running, but I didn’t know what was next. I didn’t know what was next for me. I didn’t know what was next for the economy. I was just really in a dark place, and that’s when I started Organized 365. I had gone back to teaching. I quit my teaching job because even though my kids weren’t home, they were at school. They needed a stay at home mom’s hours and flexibility for all their medical conditions and things like that. And running a household takes a lot of time, so I needed a lot of time to run that household. I started Organized 365 because I love organizing. I’d either been hired or been successful wherever I was hired because I was organized, or I could help organize other people so I thought I’d just help organizing people. So for a couple of years, I did in-home organizing, and then I realized the people I was organizing were learning how to organize themselves. They canceled my services because they were able to get themselves organized. Well, I’m a teacher. I was like, okay, well, if this is learnable, which I didn’t know it was. But now, I saw it was. 

How do you teach organizing online? Because I always wanted an online business. This is like 2015 now. How do you teach it online? How do I know what piece of paper you’re holding up? How do I know what bedroom you’re in? How do I know what you’re looking at that you want to organize? And so that’s why I started my podcast 12 years ago. I’ve been teaching online organizing. It’s been a long time. Then I realized that we didn’t have some supplies. You have school supplies, you have work supplies, but we have nothing to rent in our home. So I created the supplies that we need to do our weekly planning and have a better system than a file cabinet. Really create a curriculum for organizing your entire house. And then when I was turning 50, I was like, okay, this is all well and good. I’m helping a lot of people get organized, become students and learn how to be organized. However, if I don’t get a PhD and start doing academic level research, this learning, understanding and the growth of Organized 365 will end with me. My kids won’t inherit my company. Maybe it’ll get it sold. Who knows? But it won’t live on beyond my lifetime and my generation. So if I go into academia and start doing academic research, studies and things like that, then I can move this into science. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Heather Nelson: And that’s what you’re doing now. I just love that everyone finds their career niche or their passion through something hard, crazy and chaotic. It’s so funny because this is like the ongoing conversation that we all are finding in our 50s or our 40s, like so much later in life. What I think is so cool and one of the things that you said to me that was, I always just assumed everyone was organized. I’m a Virgo. I’m super uber uber organized. And before we hit record, everyone asked me, you run two businesses, you have a podcast, you have kids, you have all of these things. How do you manage it? And I always tell them, it’s the systems I have in place. It’s being organized, because then all of that doesn’t feel so chaotic to me as just spending the time doing the things that you love once everything’s in place. So to that point, let me ask you a question, and we maybe volley back and forth on this. 

Lisa Woodruff: I have always been organized too. And what I have observed is in households, we all either organically create our own organizational systems, or we copy a parent’s or a friend’s system. There is no universal system. But as I grew in business, and you said you’re running two businesses. As I started to systematize, hire team members and grow in profitability in my business, I was like, huh, I should do that at home. And so I started reverse. A lot of Organized 365 is me going, oh, I was never a business owner. I was a school teacher. And school teachers just work from sun up until sundown for 10 months straight, and then they take two months off, and then they do it all over again. So there is no delegating. There is no operationalizing in schools, and school teachers don’t get supplies. We buy our own supplies, so we’re used to buying our own supplies. But once I started being an entrepreneur, growing a business, hiring business coaches, putting business systems in place, getting a bookkeeper and getting executive assistant, I was like, oh, my gosh! There’s repetitive things that you do in business that you operationalize, or just delete entirely because they aren’t profitable. But yet at home, we’ll just optimize them and do them faster. So we get through the things that aren’t really very important, so we can get to the important things. I’m like, oh, what if we just stop doing it? What if we just apply these basic entrepreneurial principles to the house? That is where all of this came from.

Heather Nelson: So interesting. I feel like I am pretty organized. But one of the things that I picked up on, especially if anyone’s watching on YouTube, you have this cute little basket of a file thing, and I think that is one part of my life that feels very chaotic is the papers, the endless amounts of papers. My husband’s going through a workers’ comp thing right now, and so I literally have a bucket of papers that I just throw everything into. And I feel papers, and you probably can speak to this, is the most overwhelming part. I just throw it in a drawer, literally next to me is my two file drawer, which I will probably never ever file. But I think I’m going to after talking to you today. 

Lisa Woodruff: Okay, can I ask you questions on your podcast? 

Heather Nelson: Yes. Oh yeah, sure can. 

Lisa Woodruff: Because I can tell you, here’s what I found is the answer. But why is the paper stressful? Why don’t you just get rid of it? 

Heather Nelson: I know because I feel like we have to keep everything, and you were alerted to it earlier. I think it’s how we were grown up. I still look at my grandma, and when I go to her house, all her bills, she has so much paper. And it was one of those things growing up, like you had to keep it. But now, everything’s so digitalized that I’m like, why do I need to keep it? 

Lisa Woodruff: No, you do actually need to keep it. Because, okay, there is analog paper, like physical paper that piles up on your counters, and then there is digital paper, which is like all information, really, whether it’s paper or digital information. The purpose of information is that you can get the information you need when you need, so that you can make a decision and act on it. And so once you realize that is this paper or information that I need you already mentioned there’s a workers’ comp case. Okay, this is a classic example. Fill in IEP, estate, medical condition, school project, whatever. Fill in whatever you are working on for. We are now talking about this workers’ comp claim. If you have a workers’ comp claim, okay, now you have to figure out, when did it start? What services did you have? How much did you spend for those? Any ancillary costs. When did you talk to this person about it? Did they follow up here? And then there’s a clock ticking as to when that’s going to get filed or not. And then you have to have correspondence that goes back by email. Okay, I’m right, aren’t I? 

Heather Nelson: Now we’re all overwhelmed. Yes. 

Lisa Woodruff: Okay, but this is modern life, and I could do the same exact scenario. I’ve never done a workers’ comp claim and see how accurate I am. Any project that we’re doing, fun or not fun, has information related to it. And that information is found in many different places. There’s you talking to the lawyer. There’s the email communication. There’s the my chart or whatever the medical chart is. There’s the police report. If there’s a police report, the incident report at the office. If there was an incident, so that’s five different digital systems with which this information could be in. They do not connect. You have it digitally, but it’s a pain to get it. When you print it all and have it in front of you, and you go to your lawyer and they say, well, where’s the incident report? And you hand it to them. Where’s the police report? And you hand it to them. Where’s the medical? And you hand it to them. Man, you are really using that $350 an hour well. Because you’re not like, oh, I have it here. I’ll email it to you. Oh, it should be in that file, the email that I sent you last Thursday. Not Friday, last Thursday. You’re wasting so much time just trying to get information. 

Also, when you verbally say something like, oh, I’ll send you the information, but this is what it says. Nobody believes you. Even though you’re right, nobody believes you. But if you can hand people a piece of paper, I will be in meeting after meeting, after meeting, be like, here’s the stat. And they’ll be like, no, it’s not. They don’t hand them the paper. They go, oh, it is. I’m like, that’s what I just said. No one believes you, but paper is powerful. Paper is meaningful. It came from Children’s Hospital, or came from wherever, and so there’s letterhead on it. Now it means something even though you had the information. You’re not the authority. The other thing I really like about printing out all of this stuff is number one, digital systems go down, and they lose things. Now, you’ve lost that piece of information or that piece of the puzzle, and now it’s your word versus theirs because you can’t substantiate it. 

Number two, if you have all five of those pieces in front of you, and I print out all the email correspondence and all the different medical thing, okay, then I sit there, I’m the lawyer with no computer on. I’m like, okay, well, how did this relate to this? And then I sit there and write like a book report the incident happened on this time, see Exhibit A. Then this happened, see Exhibit B. And I’m like a lawyer, even though I’m not a lawyer. And so when I go to meet with anybody, I’m like, here’s the two pager, and behind here’s all the substantiation. And I have been in a couple of court cases, and so I know how you have to have all these different appendices. Or when I do my scientific work, you always have all these different appendices. So if you have all of your information there and they ask you questions, you can answer the questions and hand them the piece of paper. Now, some people listening may be like, I’m not in a court case, so I don’t need this level.

Heather Nelson: Totally. That’s extreme.

Lisa Woodruff: I don’t need this level of Lisa. Here’s the thing, you never know when you’re going to need this level of information. Couple examples I could think about in my own life. Medical is the top one. None of us have any of our medical records. We just don’t have it. It’s not even in the file cabinet. We just don’t have it. We go the doctor, it’s in my chart somewhere. It’s all digital, right? Legally, you have to keep 7 years of medical records. All medical institutions need to keep 7 years of medical records. My doctor doesn’t. I was like, what do you mean you don’t? They’re like, we just pay the fine. I was like, oh my gosh, you just don’t even do it. They just don’t even do it. Number one. Also, a lot of times when you have something going on, you would like the records from before 7 years ago, especially with your kids. So if you’re dealing with a 9-year-old, but you want something from when they were two, you might not. And then those systems go down.

Heather Nelson: So you’re basically saying we do need to keep our paperwork, but we got to organize it so we can find it easier.

Lisa Woodruff: We need to know why we’re keeping this information and where we should keep it. So the two ways, you keep it. You’re talking about the box, that’s the Sunday Basket. This is the ongoing project. Your spouse’s paperwork is going to be in there because you’re every week moving this project forward. But anything like medical records, we just had a test done with one of our family members. It was an MRI. I always ask for the DVD. You probably don’t know you can get that for free. I always ask for the DVD, and I put it in the medical binder. One, I don’t want to repeat an MRI. This is a sedated two-hour MRI. I don’t want to have to repeat that test. It costs a freaking fortune. Second, if you want a second opinion, they can’t just look at your chart. They’re going to need the DVD anyway. So now, I have the DVD, and turns out this is something we’re going to have to keep doing the MRI for. So now, we could compare year over year. If it’s four years from now, we will go to a different specialist. I have all the DVDs, and I could just hand them to them. I don’t have to do my chart requisition and all of those kinds of things. So yes, you need to keep the information if it is actionable or could be actionable in the future. Bills, no. 

Heather Nelson: But that was my question. All our bill statements and utility, like no. Okay.

Lisa Woodruff: If you write them off on your taxes, technically you should have them printed out. But these things that are really hard to replicate that could have a significant impact on your future, like a major medical test, print it out. 

Heather Nelson: What are some of the other things that you think paper-wise we should keep? So obviously, medical or anything legal. What other? 

Lisa Woodruff: The paper that overwhelms me is insurance paperwork. Holy cow! We have 11 policies for the love. We have four different cars. We have our son’s condo, our house. The older you get, the more insurance policies you get.

Heather Nelson: I was just saying this the other day. I’m like, I have so many insurance. We put so much money in insurance. 

Lisa Woodruff: It was like a year ago when I realized that I hadn’t renewed the tags on my car, that I started looking into this because we just moved too fast. I hadn’t renewed the tags on my car or my daughter’s car for multiple years. Also, our daughter who was 22 at the time never added to our insurance. She’d been driving with no insurance because I assumed the guy added her, and I’m paying a lot of money. Yeah, she wasn’t even there. All these things straightened out. So with insurance, I always keep the initial policy, and then the most latest payment with all the 18 million pages they give you. And then when the new 18 million pages comes, I throw the old 18 million pages out. Shred it or whatever. I just have those two things, but the original policy is important. Your original life insurance policy is important. And then I always keep the most recent time I paid for a life insurance policy to show that it is updated. Because if you don’t pay for a life insurance policy, they can cancel it. 

Heather Nelson: What about organizing or keeping? What do you do for passwords? Username and password scenario. I have stickies everywhere. Then I went to a class, and they’re like, you can’t have it on a spreadsheet because what if someone gets it? 

Lisa Woodruff: I totally have it on a spreadsheet. As a matter of fact, this is how unsecure I am. It’s a Google Doc. 

Heather Nelson: Sorry to all the security people out there. 

Lisa Woodruff: Multiple people in my company have access to it. There’s no bank passwords on there, but everything else is literally on there, which is great because I’m a business owner. We have a ridiculous amount of logins. But a lot of my personal stuff is there too. Like all my travels, because my executive assistant will support me in that. Really, any program I have on my computer, it all goes there because I just check there. Also, passwords updated on my iPhone. There’s a whole bunch of passwords in there. The other places I keep passwords, I have a little tiny password book at home. That’s where I used to keep them. So the older passwords are in there, and then I have my notes app on the phone. The reminders app, I just have one that says passwords. Just passwords thrown in there. It’s all the random ones. I’m not very good at this. But here’s the one thing I will say about this, and I’m going to be doing something I’ve just learned about this. We really have to know our spouses, our sisters, our parents, anyone you might be the executor of, the passcode to their phone. If you know the passcode to people’s phone, who cares? Just reset it, and it’s going to send you email on their phone if they’re in capacity or whatever, and you’re going to be able to get into any account because you could just reset the password. If you don’t have access to that person’s phone, you’re screwed. Because even if you have the password and it sends an authentication or a code, you still can’t get in. Passwords aren’t good enough anymore. You have to know the password first. But 50% of the time, that’s still not going to get you in.

Heather Nelson: You just need the phone.

Lisa Woodruff: You need the phone in order to get in. And then if you are going to be acting as power of attorney or executor, and you don’t have the phone to get the email password thing, then you have to send your power of attorney or your executor papers to the organization. Wait for them to give them, and then they will give you access to the account. And that is a time suck.

Heather Nelson: We’ve talked a lot about papers, but that’s the one that’s in my life that feels unorganized. Everything else in my life feels pretty organized. But you help someone, I’m assuming specifically women, organize their whole home their whole life, not just papers. Talk about what your programs and what other areas in our lives that we need organization from?

Lisa Woodruff: I’m coming up with my own theory now that I’ve gotten my PhD. Yes, you are fancy, and it’s really fun. So I’ve been doing the work in Organized 365 for 15 years, plus the stay-at-home mom 10 years on top of that, plus babysitting for 10 years before that. I have been studying homes my entire life. And what I realize is we are doing a lot of different work at home, and we will tend to isolate. So the work we just talked about is information management. You’re the CIO, CFO of your organization. That’s what I call level four work. So I’ll quickly go through the levels, if that’s okay with you. 

Heather Nelson: Yeah, please do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Lisa Woodruff: Okay. So the first two levels are the visible work everybody can see. First is housework. It takes the most amount of time. It’s everything, food, cleaning and laundry related. Anywhere from 10 to 25 hours a week. It’s obnoxious. Oh, my gosh! Don’t even. It really sucks. Anyway, we really can’t get rid of. We can optimize it, whatever. But that’s just our permanent part time job that we don’t know we have. So that’s annoying. Sorry if you didn’t know. Then the other level of physical where we could see house work or household activity is organization. Now, organization, and I have a whole program to organize every single space in your house, organization is investment time. So if you invest an hour now, you’re going to save 5 hours later. You invest two hours now, you’re saved 10 hours later. It’s kind of like a 401k for your time in your house, and you know that’s true. Not organizing the toy room. If you’re organizing the toy room, that’s actually negative time because you didn’t get something else done. But if you organize the storage room, your closet, or any of that, you’re going to get back more time because those spaces will stay organized for months. Sometimes, years. So that’s all visible work. 

What most women are talking about right now is invisible work. And this does work for men too. But mostly, my studies are with women. So the invisible work is the household management. That is the Sunday Basket. That is the claim that you and your husband are working on. That’s taking a lot of time. It’s cognitive load. It’s stressful. It’s not really visible. There’s some papers here and there, but it’s a lot like, did I do this thing? How long is it going to be? You’re just thinking about it. So that is paying bills, calendaring, reminding people of things, planning the holidays, planning the vacations, everything school related, all of that mental load, all that managerial planning, bill pay, all of that. That is household management level three. Level four is information management. Realizing that, yes, as the household manager, you can manage all these tasks. 

But you are also your family’s Siri or Google, and they’re asking you all the questions because they don’t have a repository to go to get this information. So information management is going ahead, printing it off and putting it in binders like it’s the 1980s. And then when people ask you a question, you go check your binder, especially once the kids are over 16. Start to separate out their paperwork from your paperwork, and then they can go find their own birth certificate, their own records, and you’re starting to launch them into adulthood. And then the 5th level, which is new. I think it’s unique to Organize 365, is this concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ends in self actualization. And I believe, as someone in a household, we should be able to be our best selves at home. We should be able to self-actualize at home like we do at work, and that means setting and attaining your goals, prioritizing your self-care as well as the other people that you care for. Really leading your home as a strategic CEO of the economic enterprise that you’re running as opposed to a household manager or even lower, the maid that is just doing the housework in the home. 

Heather Nelson: This is why we are so stressed out all the time. Everything you just said, 90% comes into the woman’s world. 

Lisa Woodruff: It does. And the American household produces 68% of the U.S. GDP. We are an economic entity. We are a small business. But often, we look at just pieces of it like, I’m going to do organization, or I’m going to do housework, or I’m going to tackle my paper. We’re like, I’m going to do this one thing, and it’s so overwhelming. It’s so much work that you just either ignore the other things, or you just do a little bit of the other things. I want us to really look at the holistic running of the household from a CEO perspective. Because once you adopt a CEO, you know this as a business owner. Once you realize, oh, this isn’t a side hustle. I’m not trying to earn a little bit of extra money. I employ people. I have customers that are depending on me. I am a business that’s been around for 15 years, so my customers who have lifetime value want us to keep in business. I have to make decisions that are for the best of the company and the best of the CEO. Because if I am not healthy, my whole organization is not healthy. If I am not learning and growing, my whole organization is not learning and growing. Same at home. 

Heather Nelson: How do we get paid for it? 

Lisa Woodruff: Well, you know how you get paid? You get to self actualize because it isn’t always about money. You get to live the life you want to live. You get to design the life you want to live. 

Heather Nelson: Yeah, so true. You’ve mentioned the Sunday Basket. And before we even recorded, when I was looking at all of your stuff, what the heck is the Sunday Basket? 

Lisa Woodruff: So the Sunday Basket is where you put all of the invisible tasks that you’re doing. I’m gonna give you a little scenario, and let’s see if you pass the test. You’re gonna be podcaster number 5. Oh, my gosh! I’m coming home from work, and I’ve got to grab something to eat. I need to change the laundry, change into my Pilates clothes. I pull into the driveway. I grab my laundry or grab my mail. As I’m coming in the door, these things run through my head that I learned in the 1980s, which are, you should only touch paper once. So I start flipping through the mail because I shouldn’t bring in recycling paper. I’m walking right by the recycler. I could just recycle it right now. I shouldn’t have to touch this paper twice. Do you have this in your head too?

Heather Nelson: I don’t even get the mail to the car yet, and I’m already ripping. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna just toss this as soon as I get home.

Lisa Woodruff: Good girl, Heather, you’re being so productive. So you come in, and then you drop the mail, you go upstairs, you get the Pilates clothes on, you grab something to eat. You’re in the car. You’re on your way to Pilates. What did you forget to do? 

Heather Nelson: Eat. 

Lisa Woodruff: Nope. You grabbed the food.

Heather Nelson: I grabbed the food. I don’t remember.

Lisa Woodruff: I know. See? And I do this purposely because you forgot to change the laundry. The kids’ uniform. Now you’re going to get home at 9:00 o’clock, and you have to change it out, and you have to start the next one. Now you got to stay up till 11:00. Now, see what you’ve done. But boy, A plus for you. You didn’t touch that paper twice, girl. This is what I’m saying. The Sunday Basket is for. So the Sunday Basket is for, we have in our days a to do list that we are running, a plan we are running. It’s not like you’re just walking around and going. I have no idea what to do with myself, so I will just go through my mail right now. No, we are like, yeah, done it. We’re 5 minutes late for everything. And let’s go, hurry up! Why do there have to be red lights? Only green lights for me. We’re gonna run into it. We’re lucky we’re doing Pilates. So then you go, great. So you thought I could do Pilates? Why did I think I could do anything for myself? Now I don’t have the laundry done. Now I’m not going to get sleep, and we start doing all this negative talk to ourselves. 

The Sunday Basket is your overflow. It is your external brain. It is the thing that is going to hold any future tasks that are not urgent and will derail your productivity for later. So I get all the mail. I do not sort it, and I drop it in the Sunday Basket all week long. I don’t even look at it because it doesn’t matter if it came in snail mail, it can wait a couple more days. And I obviously had a plan, and I’d rather not process the mail every single day and move my laundry so that I have the laundry. But more than that, it’s these note cards. I’m always jotting down little notes, like here are three things I have to do this weekend that I wrote down. I’m at work. I’m writing all these things down. When I get home, I will look at that sheet of paper and I’ll say, can all this wait till Sunday? And I will just drop it in the Sunday Basket. Now, there’s a reckoning, obviously, on Sunday or whatever day you choose. You have to deal with the Sunday Basket. It takes about 90 minutes to 2 hours to do all these administrative tasks, and you’re like, I didn’t want it. Fine, that’s fine. But you’re doing 30 minutes to an hour, to 90 minutes worth every single day. And every time you do these random things that come in through text, or DM, or emails, or whatever it is that could have waited till Sunday, you make worse decisions with your time and your money because you’re making them in the moment, not when you’re looking at the whole of everything you need to do, and you’re distracting yourself from what you were doing. 

And science shows that it takes 23 minutes to get back on task. Is it really worth doing a five minute task here and there? No, it’s not. All of those should wait till Sunday, and then you batch them. These are all financial decisions I have to make. These are all calendaring decisions I have to make. These are all school-related decisions I have to make. And then as you’re making those in your planning mind, you’re going, oh yeah, that reminds me that this birthday party is this week. But there’s that birthday party that week, so I’ll just buy both kids the same gift on Amazon. Whereas if you’re just doing it at the moment, you’re like, what do you think that kid wants? And you’re trying to order it on Amazon at a stoplight or something. Don’t think you haven’t done it. We’ve all done it. 

Heather Nelson: Or you’re on the way to the party, and you’re like, oh my god. I gotta get a gift. We had to spend more money because we had to get a bag and tissue because we didn’t think ahead. And we had that at home. But now, here we are. We’re at Target. We have to get the things because we’re on the way to the birthday party.

Lisa Woodruff: And while you’re there, the kid also wants something for themselves, and you’re going to get a coffee, and you know how it goes. We should get a treat if we have to go do all this.

Heather Nelson: Then we just spend all this money. 

Lisa Woodruff: We’re like, I don’t know why I’m always broke. 

Heather Nelson: I kind of do that. I do dump a lot of things. Again, I take the things out of the envelope to get rid of the envelope that I don’t need. But I’m like pointing over here because I have a stack of stuff. And then I technically do. I just don’t have a proper basket. But I love that because then it’s like, okay, it can wait. Nothing is that urgent. And I love that you can jot down a note, just put it there and forget about it because I know that’s how I operate, especially driving. I think of like 5,000 things that I need to do, and I just write it down on a notepad, or in my reminders to come back and revisit it another time, or move it to a different date. But I like that there’s a physical basket of stuff that you can just, especially when the school stuff comes in and they’re like, oh, here’s a notice for this. And you got to fill out this, and then this, and this. I like that you just spend a little bit of time just to focus on that stuff.

Lisa Woodruff: Yeah. And it has 25 of these colored plastics. They’re binder inserts, but we put them in the box. And so they’re color coded. So blue things are family related things, purple things are household related, green is financial related, red is normally in there. But you could add the red in for your husband’s disability claim. So then it would stand out, and then everything’s just in that one slash pocket. So whenever you need to do it, you just grab that out, do whatever you need to do, add the new documentation in it, and it’s right there on the kitchen counter. You could just grab it.

Heather Nelson: Interesting. You had mentioned earlier, but you do binders. You had talked about binders, and do you do binders instead of file folders? Why?

Lisa Woodruff: Yes. Because a file cabinet has no constraint. You could just add another file cabinet. But the most important reason, there’s two reasons. Number one, a file cabinet is not portable. And usually, you need the information at a doctor’s office, at the lawyer, at whoever. You need to take the paper somewhere. But a lot of people live in areas where they need to evacuate for hurricanes, fires, whatever, and you can’t evacuate a file cabinet. You can easily evacuate binders. And then our binders are unique because they come with workbooks in there. So for example, the financial binder is great with organizing all of your things related to cars, important retirement insurance, all that financial being the CFO of your household, but it’s set up and it’s been checked by estate attorneys and tax attorneys. So everything in there is actually what you would need if you were the power of healthcare, power of attorney, or settling someone’s estate. So if it’s one of those binders that you set up, and it’s everything that you need while you’re living, but it’s also everything that someone would need to be able to advocate on your behalf if something happens to you. So it does double duty. And because I settled my dad’s estate, I know all these random questions they ask you that you’ve never even thought of. I didn’t know my father was in the military. He wasn’t drafted because he had asthma, but he was in the National Guard. I didn’t know that. I was two. Just that kind of stuff. Like passwords, that kind of stuff. 

Heather Nelson: It’s so interesting that you say that because I always say that my husband doesn’t know any of my systems. He doesn’t know where everything is. God forbid something ever happened. I told my really good friend, I was like, if something ever happens, here’s my password. Just have her go into my stuff. She can figure it out because I know that’s how she operates. But I’m like, just go in there and you’ll find everything. But the more I think about it, I’m like, I do need to be a little bit more strategic. I don’t have a big filing cabinet, but I have tubs. But there’s like six tubs because each kid has a tub. My husband has a tub. I have a tub. But then you’re right. It’s just paper that’s accumulating that probably doesn’t even need to be there. 

Lisa Woodruff: So each of the binders, there’s a financial binder, a medical binder, a reference binder, an operations binder. Like for the medical binder, for example, none of it is in a file cabinet. Some of it is on your computer. Most of it is in your head. So that’s the other thing. If you don’t ever write it down, there isn’t even a digital place to go find it.

Heather Nelson: Now you’re making me, I’m like, oh, I need to go to this project.

Lisa Woodruff: Yeah, you need to get your homework done, Heather. 

Heather Nelson: It is one of those things, I opened my drawer the other day and I’m like, I do need to get to that. I think the one thing that I took away is you don’t need the statements. And if you pay a bill and move on, and not have to keep all those things. So you have coaching, I’m assuming, and I want you to talk a little bit about that. You also have a product, also have a podcast, and you also have a book. Talk about each little pillar of how someone can get into your ecosystem and utilize it.

Lisa Woodruff: You’re so sweet. Okay, so remember, I was a teacher, and I realized that what I have created is a school. I’ve created a school that I, as an adult student, would want to go to. I know as a woman that when I buy a product or a course, I want to have access to the information I just purchased for a lifetime. I don’t want it to expire in 30 days. That is annoying because as soon as I buy something that’s going to expire in 30 days, if the kids are sick for 28 of those days, then I lose my money. So the way I Organize 365 is set up if you decide, I want to organize this thing. Let’s take the Sunday Basket for example. Most of our products have a physical component, an online component, and a co-working component. So the Sunday Basket is $179. You’re going to get that mailed to you. It’s a box, a basket, the little folders, and also the workbook. Then you’re going to get in our private app where there are videos that go through how you set up your basket, and that go along with your workbook. And then there’s co-working time at 5:00 o’clock Eastern on Sunday. About 40 out of the 52 weeks, someone will come on. And for 90 minutes, they will walk you through how to do your Sunday Basket every week. We’ve been doing this for 6 years. That’s a one-time purchase, and you’re in the Sunday Basket Club. You are a Sunday Basket person. 

Then the next thing is that productive home solution. You could buy it as a one-time purchase, or you could buy it for 10 payments, and you get in the course. And it’s a 52-week curriculum. I have a ridiculous amount of videos. And then Tanya on Thursdays, I think it’s like at 11:00 Eastern or 12:00. She comes on, and she has twins that are 12 now, I think. So a different phase of life than I’m in. And she’s like, okay, here’s how this works in my household because I’m showing you how it works in my household, or how it did work when my kids were younger. And in different phases of life, you’ll see different things. I have grandchildren now, they’re 4 and 5 months old. So I’ll also add in videos of my daughter and the grandkids, and with younger kids as well. So that’s organizing your whole house again. Once you’re in and you’ve made all the payments, if you’re on the payment plan, it’s a lifetime purchase. 

The paper situation, you could buy individual binders if you want. But if you buy all four, then you’re in the paper solution online platform. You get the idea. And then we do planning days for you as a CEO. Those do expire because you’re just planning for a four-month season of time. So you get a six-week replay, and then that does expire before the next one because that is timely. I have five books, and those are all valuable. Because I’m a teacher. Here’s the thing, when everybody’s like, how can you have so many books? How have you been podcasting for 12 years? How can you have so many courses? Because I’m a teacher. Creating content is like a Tuesday. We never teach the same thing twice. That’s boring for us. We reteached it, and we redo it. So I’ve been studying this and refining it. People who’ve been in The Productive Home Solution to organize your house, that’s been going on since 2016. 

So we’ve gone through some iterations. Some of the modules have gone away, and new ones have been added. That’s another thing that annoys me. If you buy something and the new people get something better, that’s not in our company. Whenever you buy it, as I add new things, you get it. We’re going to come out with something in August, and everybody who has a financial binder is going to get it. They won’t have to pay for it. They’ll just get it. So it’s a school. You decide what you want to organize. Which of these five levels you want to tackle next, and you buy something. There’s usually in The Productive Home Solution. There’s not a physical component, but there’s usually something we ship you. Then there’s an online dashboard that has a lot of content, and then there’s a co-working group, and then there’s a Facebook feed. But it’s in a private app where people talk back and forth about their transformation as they have it. 

Heather Nelson: Oh, my god, I love that! How big is your team? And do you have a prediction planner to send all this out? That’s like a whole nother level of product and shipping. 

Lisa Woodruff: We have an 8,000 square foot office and warehouse with a forklift, and I have a full color printer thing. And yeah, we’ve got a full team.

Heather Nelson: I love that. This is a super random question, and you might laugh. When you’re talking about printing things, is there a really good printer that prints really well so that you don’t have to spend a ton of money on ink? Because I feel like I buy ink every week. Do you have one that you love? 

Lisa Woodruff: My favorite home, and what I have in my home and any of my employees’ homes is the Brother HL, whatever the numbers are after that. Sometimes it changes. But it’s a black and white laser printer, and I think it will do two sides. But I always have it do one sided. The color printers are always going to suck through the ink. And usually, I can print it out in black and white, whatever I need. I also have a color printer at home and at work. But that brother HL for decades was all I ever had. And it prints fast.

Heather Nelson: And then you also have a podcast. What do you talk about on your podcast? 

Lisa Woodruff: So the podcast is a solo podcast where it’s just me talking for 12 years. I talk about all kinds of things. Observations that I have, and then people in the app and on Instagram will be like me too. So I say out loud the things that you are thinking. Like, are you thinking about it? I am like, interesting. And then I just say it out loud, and they’re like, oh, my gosh! I was thinking that too. I was like, that’s what I thought. And then I’ll just follow that little rabbit trail and follow it up on something else. 

Heather Nelson: I love that. Everything that you’ve talked about will be in the show notes. So if anyone’s listening and wants to get in your ecosystem, or buy any of your products, they can find you or listen to your podcast. That’s the one thing with podcasting for me. I didn’t love the solos because I was like, what more content can I actually talk about? But you’re a teacher and you are a content creator constantly.

Lisa Woodruff: Apparently, a lot. I’m like, am I going to run out? No, I’ve got a whole slash pocket over there of so many ideas of things I could talk about. 

Heather Nelson: I love that. Okay, for the person listening to this and feels like their house is chaotic, everything needs to be organized. Are there three areas of a woman’s life that they should focus on first-that will make them feel better? 

Lisa Woodruff: Yes, girl. I am putting you in timeout, and I am sending you to your bedroom. I don’t want you to come out until your bedroom, bathroom, and closet are organized. Because here’s why. Especially if you have kids, how many times do we organize their rooms constantly? How long does it stay organized? Sometimes, not even before we can get through the threshold and back into the hallway, and they’re already throwing down. Like oh, my gosh, what am I doing? But if you will give yourself the gift of the next couple of weeks, whenever you find a spare 5, 10, 15 minutes Thursday night where you want to just turn on some music, and go and clean out under your bathroom sink, and clean out your nightstand, you will feel so much better. And when you get those three spaces organized, it will minister to you, and you will go to bed and you will wake up and organize spaces. And you are in control of these spaces most of the time, unless you have a teenage daughter, or I don’t know, a spouse that really doesn’t have boundaries. Pretty much, whatever you organize on your side of the bathroom, and bed, and closet will stay organized, and so you’ll start to do work, and then see the fruit of that work for days, and days, and days, and days, and that’ll give you the strength. 

Do not use that to go into any kid spaces. That will give you the strength to go to maybe the kitchen, the storeroom, some of these other spaces. That if you were to organize those, your whole house is going to be more organized because they’re not going to get unorganized fast. You don’t have an effort problem in getting your house organized. You have an order of operations problem. You’re trying to organize the spaces that people will see if they come over. Do they even come over so that you can get a gold star from people? Do we even care if they give us a gold star? And you’re sacrificing, enjoying other spaces of your house organized longer that will really benefit your mental wellness and reduce your anxiety. It will reduce your anxiety to have a lot of these spaces that you have in the back of your head. Walk right over the toys, and toy room, and go do the linen closet. Leave all the dishes on the kitchen counter and go to the linen closet. If your family is like that, all the dishes aren’t done. You’re like, I know. Thank you so much for offering to help. I really got to get this linen closet done. They’ll be like, wait, what? Well, you noticed it. 

Heather Nelson: Take one space, and you probably teach this one space at a time once a week. Like once a week, pick one space, a drawer, a room, a file cabinet, and just do that. And then the next week, do one other, and just like work down that list. I do agree on the closet. We’ve moved a lot in the last couple of years, but it’s kind of fun when you go through your closet because you actually find clothes. You’re like, oh my god, I forgot about that shirt. Oh, my god, what about those shoes? And then if you actually purge the stuff that doesn’t serve you well, it’s almost like you feel like you have a whole new wardrobe. You do. 

Lisa Woodruff: I literally was just thinking, I do not have enough clothes to get through the summer. I am going to have to go to the store again. So I was cleaning out my closet, and I got to the end. I was like, Lisa, you have 20 options here. How do you think you don’t have enough clothes? Once I thought, oh, instead of wearing jeans, I could wear black pants in the summer. Of course, duh. But I just don’t usually. Usually, I just wear jeans in the summer. I was like, but if you wear black pants, you have these 12 tops to go. So this week, I’ve worn black pants every week, and I’ve been wearing clothes I haven’t worn in a long time. Just looking at it differently.

Heather Nelson: Is there any last thing? I mean, we talked about so much. And now I’m super freaking, pumped, and inspired to go organize again. Most of my house is organized, but the papers are a nightmare that you want to leave us with today.

Lisa Woodruff: Yes. Okay. So it’s not really a last minute tie a bow on it. I want to go back to something you said that I wanted to follow up on. You said I have to go through these papers and deal with these papers. And yes. And if you just deal with the papers that you see right there, you’re going to get rid of that pile because you’re probably going to do it or put it wherever it goes. But actually, when we run our households and are just getting done the things that we see and are on our to-do list, or that we can think about. In business, you would plan, what are you going to do for sales, for marketing, for finance, for operations? And you would think about quarterly how to optimize each of those departments, how they need to be supported? What you need to add to them, and all of that. When you just deal with what you can see or what you can conjure up in your head, you will be productive. But if you adopt the whole paper solution or the whole Sunday Basket system, there are things you don’t even realize you’re doing, or don’t have good systems for that you haven’t thought of. That if it was just brought to your attention, you’d be like, oh yeah, I don’t have a system for this stuff. Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I have that in my head too. 

So a lot of these systems that we haven’t at Organized 365 don’t only just operationalize what you can see. It identifies things that you’re doing in the background on autopilot that you don’t even realize, pulls them up and out of your head too. And all of this expands your capacity for what you are uniquely gifted and created to do. That is the mission of Organized 365. It has always been to help you get organized so that you have time to do what you’re uniquely gifted and created to do. You can be done with Organized 365. We don’t have you label anything. There are no rainbow orders. There is no container that you’re going to buy when you’re done with your room. It’s all about how your household functionally, operationally organizes for the phase of life that you’re in to increase your capacity for whatever you need to do, parenting, working, traveling, whatever it is that you want to do-that is the goal of Organizing 365. 

Heather Nelson: I love all of that. Again, you have completely inspired me to not just this pile of paperwork, but holistically as a whole, everything that I need to do. Lisa, I’m so glad that you came on the podcast. I have so many things that I’m gonna take away from this conversation, and I know the listeners will too, so thank you again for being here. 

Lisa Woodruff: Thank you so much for having me. 

Heather Nelson: That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Her Story Unscripted. Is something you heard today made you feel a little more seen, a little less alone, or just got you thinking that’s exactly why we’re here? If this episode resonated with you, I’d love for you to share it with another woman in your life who needs to hear it. And if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen, or catch us on YouTube so you never miss a conversation. I’m Heather Nelson. Thank you for being here, for listening, and for showing up for real stories. I’ll see you next week.