Today, I am bringing back the Organize 365 lead researcher, Sarah Dyson. We are sharing about our soon to be published literature review scheduled to be in the The Journal of the Arkansas Psychological Association. 

We share how we needed to define a shared language in order to collect data and discuss solutions. The submitted article is titled The Role Women play in the 21st Century Home and Gender Equality- A State of the Art Literature Review. As soon as it is available, we will share a copy of the publication on our research page at organize365.com/research.

My initial hypothesis was that women were doing more work at home than men. Interestingly, those are not the results of our research! Members of younger generations share housework far more equitably than we expected. Gender roles have changed and we need solutions for all genders, all age groups, and all types of households. Organize 365® is adjusting based on this information. 

The literature review covers four major topics in the home: cueing and goal attainment, gender roles, female entrepreneurship, and future research. Listen in for a sneak preview of all these topics.

In this podcast series, we've been talking about essential organizing. You can catch up on this series by listening to these episodes:

1. Organizing Personal Spaces
2. Organizing Family & Communal Spaces
3. Organizing Storage Spaces

This week, we are moving to organizing your paper management in our quest for functional organization in your home. You know how much I love to talk about paper organization! People are FINALLY coming around to the fact that paper is not going away, and it needs to be organized. You could organize your paper first or last, and you could also choose to only organize portions of your paper. 

We found in our research study that 54% of people have piles of paper everywhere. Only 18% of people have a system in place for organizing that paper. In addition, 70% of Millenials perceive a reduction in stress when their paper is organized. You see, we all have paper. You could have less paper, but you're never going to be paperless. 

Paper is different than other areas of your home. It's different because 85% of what you store in your filing cabinet you will NEVER need again. The remaining 15% is paper that you do need and you need to be able to find it when you go looking for it. You only go looking for these important papers when there's a problem. Binders are the solution! Trust me, your future self in crisis will thank you when you have your paper organized and can find what you need.

But here's the other problem you will run into with paper: Only about 20% of what I suggest that you put into your binders is actually in your filing cabinet or it is actually paper at all. The other 80% of what needs to be in your binders is either on the computer where only you know how to find it or it is stored in your brain. If something happens to you, how does anyone else take care of anything in your home or for your family?

In this episode, you'll find encouragement for why and how to get your paper organized.

Are your papers organized? What is keeping you from organizing your paper?

Mentioned in this episode:

Podcast #420 - The Weight of Paper

Paper Organizing Retreats

The Paper Solution® Binders

This week we are moving from personal organization to the next area of organization: family and communal spaces.

These are the areas that you will want to organize first because people see them when they come into your home, but they are the hardest areas to organize and maintain. I know, there can be judgment anxiety over these spaces. There is also a tension between wanting these spaces to look good but also being able to live in them comfortably.

In our research study, we found that only 14% of people say that they have their family and communal spaces organized. Why is this? Well... 

How often have you spent so much time cleaning and organizing just to turn around and find that space trashed again? I'm sure you've been through these seasons or you might be living in one of those seasons right now! Sometimes, it's like shoveling snow in a snow storm!

As you can see, family and communal spaces are hard and that's why I recommend that you start with organizing your personal spaces. Build your organizational muscles and habits there first. When you do get to the family and communal spaces, start with your kitchen. You'll feel a difference when you know where everything is in your kitchen and when you know that everything in there is purposeful. After the kitchen, move on to your other shared spaces: the family room, communal bathrooms, dining room, front hall closet, and cleaning supplies. 

Listen to this episode for more encouragement and inspiration for tackling the organization of these hard-to-organize family and communal spaces.

What makes these family and communal spaces so hard for you to organize and maintain? Do you have toddlers? Teens? Lack of time? Too much stuff? 

Ready to get these family and communal spaces organized? Learn more about The Productive Home Solution™ and how the program can help you reach that goal. 

How do you know when you’re done organizing?

No one has ever officially defined "organized." I decided I would define it. We started by conducting academic-level research using our surveys. You can read more about Organize 365® Research and the finding on our Research page.

For most Americans, organization happens as Swiss cheese organizing.

You’re a little organized here and a little organized there. You can’t confidently say, “I AM organized,” because you think that being organized means perfection while not being organized is hoarding. You don’t have language for what happens in the middle of these two!

We need to consider the idea of done rather than perfect.

In this episode, I share many statistics and findings from our research, which is all leading us to change the way we present and teach the material in The Productive Home Solution™. 

If you just get through the first 42 days of the 100 Day Home Organization Program, you will have 80% of the spaces you use on a daily basis organized. You CAN call yourself organized. But many of you don’t FEEL organized. It doesn’t fully check off any single category of organizing as complete for you. It just marks a couple more spaces in your Swiss cheese organizing. I want to see you get to the point where you can say that you are personally organized or storage organized or paper organized, etc. You get to pick and choose which areas you want to tackle and master and declare organized in your life.

Coming in the fall in The Productive Home Solution™, you will be able to pick an area, focus on it for 5 or 6 weeks, and then declare that area of your life organized. You’ll work in baby steps to mark a full area as done so you can move on to the next area you want to organize. 

But what does it mean to be organized? Both men and women declare their home organized when… You’ll have to listen in to find out the answer!

Learn more about and join The Productive Home Solution™ here.

A few podcasts ago, I shared that Organize 365 is pursuing research about organization. One of the first challenges we faced is that we do not have a common vocabulary around work inside the house like we have for work in the workplace. As part of our research, we needed to define the words we were using in the survey questions. That meant, we needed to define housework. This is the final episode of a four part series that defines and explains the different kinds of work we all do inside of our homes. 

Today, I am sharing some details about the fourth kind of housework - maintenance. Home maintenance tasks are the tasks that the owner of the property is responsible for in order to increase the value of the home. This includes things like painting, updating flooring, replacing HVAC units, and purchasing a new roof. It is technically optional, but it is in the best interest of the property owner to keep the maintenance up to date. It is an investment the owner makes to protect the value of the property. Maintenance can be done directly by the owner, or it can be done indirectly by hired help. Renters have very little, if any, maintenance expenses and responsibilities. 

In the most recent research, Organize 365® discovered two important things. Home maintenance is the kind of housework where external help is most often hired by the homeowner. Home maintenance is also the only category of housework that is most often completed by men. 

When Greg and I first purchased our home, my dad taught me a very important lesson. His advice was to make any desired improvements to our home as soon as possible, so we would get the most enjoyment from our purchase. He was so right!

I also remember my aunt recommending an annual home maintenance budget of 5% of the value of the home. That is alot of money. You may not spend the whole amount every year, but larger expenses can use up several years worth of the budget. 

If you own your home, I want you to think about being the landlord of your home. This will help you determine what maintenance tasks are most important. The Organize 365® Household Reference Binder is helpful in keeping track of your maintenance needs and documentation that the necessary tasks have been completed. Having an organized system for my documents and information has helped me to make decisions about when to replace and when to fix certain appliances. I can also better predict my maintenance expenses because all of my papers are easily accessible and organized. 

I hope that you find these descriptions of housework helpful and I want you to think about how you can become more efficient with your housework to do the work you are uniquely created to do!

In November of 2020, I did a two part podcast on the four kinds of work in business (361 & 362). It turns out, there are also four kinds of housework, and I introduced these in Podcast 418. There are many of these business concepts that also equate to our homes, we just don’t think of running our household like it is a business. We hear a lot about work/life balance as though these are two separate ways of getting things done. There are so many parallels between your day job and your home job. 

A few podcasts ago, I shared that Organize 365 is pursuing research about organization. One of the first challenges we faced is that we do not have a common vocabulary around work inside the house like we have for work in the workplace. As part of our research, we needed to define the words we were using in the survey questions. That meant, we needed to define housework. This is the third of a four part series that defines and explains the different kinds of work we all do inside of our homes. 

Today, I am sharing some details about the third kind of housework - organization. Organizing is a completely optional kind of work you do inside of your home. However, organization really impacts our overall sense of well-being. UsingStephen Covey’s matrix, organizing is important, but not urgent. 

As I share in Organization is a Learnable Skill, I first started getting organized with my Sunday Basket®. This weekly review of all of my commitments helped me to move from reactive to proactive by considering what was truly urgent and important in my life. The Sunday Basket® also helps to clarify thinking about what to-do items have significance. Significance, as Rory Vaden explains it, is about the future impact of decisions. You can hear more in podcast episode 386and on my YouTube book review. 

Organization tasks keep the home decluttered, organized, and productive. An organized home is one where each item has a place to be, gets put away in that place, and can be found in its designated place. Organization is an investment of time today for exponentially more time in the future. 

In this podcast, I also share a ton of findings from the recent Organize 365® research. Learn how many Americans feel organized at home and what keeps them from achieving their organizational goals. I also share the different ways men and women feel when a home is finally organized - listen in to hear which group is relaxed and which is relieved!

A few podcasts ago, I shared that Organize 365 is pursuing research about organization. One of the first challenges we faced is that we do not have a common vocabulary around work inside the house like we have for work in the workplace. As part of our research, we needed to define the words we were using in the survey questions. That meant, we needed to define housework. This is the second of a four part series that defines and explains the different kinds of work we all have to do inside of our homes. 

Today, I am sharing some details about a second kind of housework, tasks of daily living. This type of housework is a set of skills we all need to do or have done for us for our survival. Tasks of daily living are related to the Social Security Disability definition of disability and include things like grooming, grocery shopping and meal preparation, transportation, and paying bills. Some transitional high schools offer training in these skills through Project search and other programs. 

Tasks of daily living follow the individual. In college, as a new parent, and as a grandparent, you will always have to feed yourself and do laundry. Conversely, the amount of cleaning likely went up and down depending on your stage of life. However, once you share a home with another person, you begin to negotiate to divide and conquer the tasks for convenience and productivity. Generally, these tasks become consolidated as the responsibility for the person who is home more often. 

Tasks of daily living are the hardest and most expensive to delegate. Some small portions of them can be outsourced, but it is not convenient to have help with these items. Most of those surveyed reported they did their own tasks of daily living. In the study, we also asked what the major barriers to doing these tasks were, and most of the general population reported a lack of motivation or being too tired. See more about the research at organize365.com/research.

The major solution to keeping your tasks of daily living organized and getting them completed proactively is the Sunday Basket®. You need to create better systems, better habits, and reduce your expectations!