119 - Twenty 5-Minute Tasks

Organize 365 Podcast

Lisa Woodruff

Lisawoodruff, Education, Self-improvement, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2016

⏱️ 146 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Once you have streamlined and moved most of your household tasks to large chunks of time in your calendar, you can now start to use 5 minute snippets of time to knock off some of the repetitive routine tasks on your list. This opens up more valuable chunks of time to get done bigger - and more valuable - projects.

I know it sounds kind of counterintuitive, but if you are always doing little tasks here and there, you never feel done. If you have a 4-hour time block set aside to do those tasks and can knock 30 minutes off during the week through six 5-minute chunks, you feel accomplished and organized!

Here are twenty tasks I do in 5-minute pockets of time to get you started thinking about what your twenty tasks will be:

Start a load of laundry
Empty the dishwasher
Fold a load of laundry
Clean off the kitchen counter
Do the dishes
Clean out a shelf in the pantry
Empty all the trash cans
Pick up toys in the family room
Collect all the towels and start the laundry
Vacuum a room
Delete email and voicemail from your phone
Change your furnace filter
Take items up or downstairs
Go through your mail and open it all
Write a thank you note
Book a doctor appointment
Refill soap dispensers
Clean out 1 drawer
Shred paper
Put 10 things away

Use those minutes you spend talking on the phone or waiting for people knocking off your repetitive tasks!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. My name is Lisa Woodruff and I'm a professional
0:07.1	organizer and blogger in Cincinnati, Ohio. I want to help you get your home
0:11.8	organized and help you organize life stages and unexpected events.
0:17.0	So sit back, relax, and let's get organized.
0:23.0	This week on the podcast, I want to talk to you about 20 different tasks that you can do in five minutes.
0:31.0	I know very often I'm telling you to set aside 15 minutes an hour, half a day,
0:37.3	a whole day to get something organized. Or I'm a really big proponent of setting aside my whole Sunday so that my household runs smoothly for the week
0:48.0	or doing all of your mail on Sunday in the Sunday basket.
0:52.0	But today I want to talk to you about 20 tasks that I do that
0:56.2	take five minutes or less. And while your tasks may be different than mine. Having this list and knowing what you can get done in
1:06.1	five minutes or less will really help you be more productive and get done some of these routine everyday type tasks in those little nuggets of time that you have throughout the day and throughout the week, which will allow you to have 15 minutes an hour, half a day to do some bigger project maybe on the weekend.
1:26.7	So let these are none of these things are going to be things you haven't thought of and I really
1:31.6	would encourage you at the end to sit down and make your
1:33.9	own list of 20 or more things that you do on a regular basis that you could just do in
1:39.6	five minutes or less. When you have a list like this and you're waiting for your kids and you have five or ten
1:44.8	minutes you can glance at your list and then knock a couple of things out which will free up your
1:49.7	weekend. So number one is to start a load of laundry. I love to start a load of laundry in the
1:57.4	morning so after I'm done getting the kids to school it's ready to go in the
2:00.7	dryer. Anytime I could get any of my machines working for me, the
2:05.5	washing machine, the dryer, any of those type of machines, doing what they need to be doing,
2:10.6	then that saves me time.
2:12.0	The second one is emptying the dishwasher.
	...

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