4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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I really love Lillian Gilbreth's focus on efficiency for the American home. I'd like to think I'm picking up where she left off. After the war, "men took back their jobs." But did it ever occur to you that women worked at these factories and there were dual income homes before the war? It had not occurred to me. I wanted to be home but some women wanted to be at work, working in their uniqueness making a paycheck. Now that the soldiers had returned to work, more women were home, the big packaged food companies marketed to her about how to make her life easier.
Past Mistakes
In the past science has just determined the definition of housework and completed their studies based on it. And human nature is to do the household tasks of your gender, as you saw displayed growing up. But there's a new sheriff in town and I asked the public how they defined housework and I am so excited to publish my findings. In conducting studies in the past they also used a convenience sample group for their studies; like all college students. This gave skewed results.
In one study, they used married couples with children. This also resulted in what I call "He said, She said" about who is doing what housework. And who is doing more. That convenience sample was ok in the 80's because that was roughly 60% of the population; married with children. But now? Married with children only represents roughly 25% of the population. My sample groups will be large and mimic the US Census to accurately reflect the general public. I want to be able to focus on teaching efficiency for all genders, all ethnicities, and all family compositions. Because I want a single mom, a multigenerational home, or a nuclear family to learn how to get organized, leading to productivity, that reduces household work.
1 Problem 1 Product
It's easy to want to solve one product for one problem but there's an underlying problem. This is how people try to start to organize often. I used a child getting ear infections as an example. The first infection, one product for one problem. But then too many infections and now we need to look at the underlying problem. When you look for one product for problem, you get in this cycle of decluttering to organization and back to decluttering but you never get to move on to productivity because the skill of organization has not yet been learned.
But just like getting a celiac diagnosis, you must modify your environment to achieve your desired goal. The Productive Home Solution teaches you to declutter, organize, and modify your home. The Paper Solution® teaches best information management practices. The Sunday Baskset® provides a system to optimize all your household manager responsibilities. The first time around decluttering and organizing can take some time but then it's just maintenance. New milestone, then you modify your environment again but you don't have to learn the skill all over. You just apply it to the new phase of life you are in like a new baby, home, job, or milestone birthday.
The Mission
By now you may have heard Organize 365® is decluttering all work related products and services as of December 31, 2025. This will allow more time to focus on universal application of the systems Organize 365® offers. I want to answer what is essential housework? How can housework be most efficiently optimized and operationalized? How can we all do less housework? And I plan to focus on testing and disseminating results from studies about systems and methods in the marketplace and in academia. Here's to the next chapter of Organize 365®.
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| 0:00.0 | This week's mailbag comes to us from Anna Lois. I have a Sunday basket win. I have a place to keep notes for a |
| 0:07.8 | presentation that I'm giving next month so that I don't forget where they are a month from now. |
| 0:14.2 | They are in my project slash pocket. Do you have an organized 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an |
| 0:24.9 | email at Customer Service at Organized 365 and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, |
| 0:32.6 | and your life with Organized 365. Welcome to the Organized 365. |
| 0:42.1 | Welcome to the Organized 365 podcast. |
| 0:49.2 | I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker, Lisa Woodruff. |
| 0:56.5 | This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. |
| 0:57.6 | I have so much to share with you, so let's get started. |
| 1:03.7 | How we utilize our households for ultimate efficiency. |
| 1:09.0 | After Lillian Gilbert's work came more to a close, she was active still in the |
| 1:14.8 | 50s, 60s, and 70s, but really at the end of World War II, at the end of the 1940s, a lot of |
| 1:21.9 | things changed in, you know, in society. Mainly, the war was over. |
| 1:29.0 | The soldiers were coming home. |
| 1:37.2 | The women who held positions in economic industry were sent home so that the men could have jobs. |
| 1:37.7 | Now, I'm going to tell you a couple of things about how I thought about this. |
| 1:42.3 | As a child in school, I remember just thinking like, |
| 1:45.9 | yay, the soldiers are home, the men are home, they're going to take their jobs back in the factories, |
| 1:52.3 | and the women are going to go home and raise the children. I don't know. That's why that's how I thought |
| 1:56.1 | about it. Maybe that's how it was sold to me. I don't know, but that is the, the vision I have in my head about |
| 2:01.5 | what happened during that time. Now, having studied women that had jobs in the 1900s, early 1900s, |
| 2:09.1 | et cetera, I now realize that not every single person before 1950s worked in a factory and not every |
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