731 - Housework: What We Love and What We Loathe - Level 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Today's mailbag comes to us from Marcy.

Hi there Lisa, I am loving this summer, and you have become my best friend virtually. I am listening to podcasts, I am watching seminars, and I am jumping in to the Productive Home Solution at the end of the 52 week cycle with The Binders. I have created my Sunday basket and my calendar box, and I feel like someone finally gets my brain in how I want to be organized. Thank you so much. I can't tell you how much this whole group of systems is right up my alley and beginning to be put to place in my home.

Do you have an Organize 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customer service at Organize 365, and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize 365

Lisa Woodruff (0:57)

Welcome to the Organize 365 Podcast, where we research, analyze, and make visible all the work related to running a modern household. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Woodruff.

In this podcast, I draw on my expertise in education and applied psychology to surface rich, meaningful discussions around the visible and invisible loads we carry. This podcast will help you embrace your current season of life and create lasting functional organizing systems that will increase your productivity at home. I have so much to share with you, so let's get started.

Last week on the podcast, I talked to you about how to time block the tasks that we do in our household, and I kind of divided those into different categories. And those categories are based on the Productive Home CEO theoretical framework. We talked about housework, we talked a little bit about home organization, and we talked about household management. Those are levels one, two, and three. In this podcast, I'm going to be talking about only level one, which is housework. This is the work I did in getting my PhD. One of the research projects I did was, how do we operationally define housework? Like, what does the American population say housework is? What is and isn't housework? And it came down to only three tasks. One is laundry, like anything related to clothes, cleaning clothes, putting clothes away, dry cleaning clothes. The next one is cleaning. Anything related to cleaning your house, cleaning the counters, cleaning the floors, cleaning the bathrooms. And the last one was food. Buying food, preparing food, cleaning up from food, everything food related. As I've been thinking about housework, here at Organize 365, we have products that support levels two, three, four, and five in the productive home CEO theoretical framework. And I often just skip over housework, mostly because it's housework.

And there are so many great resources already on the Internet for cleaning checklists and cleaning routines and like everything related to cleaning. You can find like oodles of Pinterest and everything about how to get your laundry done. And the most content is around food. And based on the fact that I'm holding up protein bars, you should know where I am on my food knowledge and expertise. Very, very low.

But these are the work of humans, of humanity, like from birth until death. We need to clean our spaces. We need to be fed and we need to have our laundry done. So it's not like this work is going anywhere. It is mandatory work. And there are lots of resources that can help match it to your aesthetic and your time frame and all of that that you could find on the Internet. What I want to talk to you about here today is the fact that this work must be done. It's it's not optional, unfortunately.

And as I was reflecting that, and I was thinking about like, okay, this is like the foundational level one of the Productive Home CEO theoretical framework because it has to be done because all humans need it.

What can I say to you about this level that would be new, novel, interesting?

I don't know. So I was thinking about it. I was like, okay, I was thinking about my thoughts on laundry. I was thinking about my thoughts on cleaning. And I was thinking about my thoughts on food. Because it's for myself personally, like when I do it, how I do it, how much time it takes, how I feel about it.

And I was like, well, I love to do laundry. And I mean, I'm indifferent about cleaning, cleaning, not cleaning, whatever. I mean, if it has to be done, I'll just do it. And I loathe everything related to food. I'm just like, if you could just deliver it and say you have to eat this, I would just eat it and move on. Like if I didn't have to think about food, oh my gosh, it would be so freeing. So I asked a couple of my friends, and I said, okay, here are the housework things. Is there something you love? Is there something that you're like whatever, and something you loathe? And they were like, yes. So now I'm going to send it out to you guys. And on the YouTube channel, you guys can comment below or in the podcast, you can go on over to the app or go to the Instagram channel and comment.