732 - Why We Feel Like There Are Not Enough Adults to Complete All the Household Tasks - Level 5 - Household CEO

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Today's mailbag comes to us from Laura.

My son is heading into his senior year of high school. A while ago, I started a Slash Pocket with things I thought he should know or know how to do before heading off to college. Every Sunday evening, we meet for 90 minutes to go over a topic. We started last Sunday with how to use a calendar and task list. I'm using a lot of the systems I've learned from using the Sunday basket for two years now. Right now, we're focusing on setting him up for a great senior year. In October, I plan on having him set up his own Sunday basket, digital, because that's how he rolls, but we're covering life skills, career planning, finances, meal planning, and prep, etc.

I work at a college and I see so many students struggle with all of these things and hesitate to ask for help. Here's to doing what I can to set him up to success. I could not do this if my own life were a mess, but the Sunday Basket and the other lessons learned from Organize 365 have made it possible. Not only for me to have the time to do this, but also to have tried and true systems to share with him. Thank you to Lisa and all of the Sunday Basket hosts. I am so grateful for you all.

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 (1:36)

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.

Every once in a while, I come to you with a state of the American household update. And how can I do this? Like, who gives me the authority to do this? Nobody. Nobody. So just take this with a hill of salt if you want to. But I think that we should have more people who are in the household space making these declarations of what it's like to live in an American household. And I'm going to speak more broadly to people who live in other countries' households as well. But really, I'm speaking to American households because that is my perspective as American household family member. So my name is Lisa Woodruff. I'm the founder and creator over at Organize 365 I recently got a PhD in psychology and I am now Doctor of the Home. I have been studying, organizing, writing podcasts, writing books, writing courses about what it means to truly get our homes organized and eventually run them like the economic entity that they are. The American household is responsible for 68 percent of the US GDP, which means that we are responsible for the American economy. And one of the things that I've been thinking about for a while is that we seem to have this shortage of workers and specifically in industry, we have a shortage of leaders. And I've been thinking about this for a couple of years, even before COVID, but in the last five, six years for sure, there just seems to be this missing group of leaders in the world. And I was trying to figure out where they went or why we couldn't find them. And I think I finally figured it out.

So if you look around, it's kind of comical almost.

All of the current and former United States presidents are in their 80s, like early 80s, late 70s, early 80s. They were not all 80 when they were president, although some were, but they're now all like the same ages. It's kind of odd. And probably a decade, maybe 15 years ago, I read the book Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss. And they talk about how there are these cyclical generations. A generation is roughly 20 years of a lifespan, and that there are certain generations that tend to hold power, and certain generations that don't tend to get their chance at leadership, especially at the United States presidency. I am Gen X, and all of these men who are in their late 70s, early 80s are the baby boomer generation.