The Productive Home CEO theoretical framework is built on the premise that our households are businesses.
American households drive about 68% of U.S. GDP through their spending, so it’s reasonable to say that, yes, our households are businesses. Businesses run on systems. Businesses come in many shapes and sizes. The foundational principles of running a productive, profitable business hold true across industries and organizational sizes.
The same is true in your household. The Productive Home CEO Pyramid shows you the foundational systems that all households run on, whether they know it or not. The pyramid encapsulates a role you (or someone else in your house) play and the job description for that role. These job descriptions and roles have always existed in how we run our households. The difference is that the structure and theoretical framework have been invisible until now.
If it feels like you are running in a million directions and doing so many jobs while running your household, you’re correct! Your exhaustion and overwhelm are justified!
I’ve spent more than a decade inside the homes of women, and I’ve never once met one who was lazy. I’ve met thousands who are drowning in work that has no title, no job description, and no one else who can see it well enough to help carry it.
You don’t have a lack of effort. You’re running an entire company nobody told you you were hired to run. The problem is that the work you’re doing is invisible to you and everyone around you, so it’s hard to build systems to make it easier and faster when you don’t see the overall framework.
Dr. Lisa Woodruff
Founder & CEO, Organize 365®
I have been informally and now formally studying this exact problem my entire life. It started when I was the oldest grandchild on both sides of my family and watched how my family of origin’s houses functioned differently. Then I studied the households of the families I babysat for, created new efficiencies, and organized their houses while taking care of their children. Next, I got a degree in early childhood education from Miami University and organized classrooms and children’s learning. Finally, in my late 20s, we were blessed with the adoption of two children, and I spent a decade organizing my own home and other people’s homes while I was primarily a stay-at-home parent.
Home organization and creating systems have always come easily to me, and I have enjoyed sharing that gift with everyone around me.
When I started my company, Organize 365, at 40, I realized that the skill I was sharing and doing for others was also something I could teach. Over the last 15 years, I have moved from completing in-home organizing for people to teaching you how to do it online.
And most recently, at the age of 50, I went back to college and got my PhD in applied psychology, both to study how we organize and increase productivity at home and to now do academic-level research to expand the body of literature around home organization beyond married couples with children at home (to include all people of all family compositions in the United States).
Level 3: The Household Management System powered by the Sunday Basket
The Productive Home CEO theoretical framework is the culmination of all my years of lived experience. The first level of the pyramid that I used to make visible the invisible work I was doing at home and gained some traction when I was a stay-at-home parent was Level 3: The Household Management System Powered by The Sunday Basket.
This is the level that I usually suggest people start working on: their Productive Home CEO journey. The Sunday Basket System makes visible and safely holds all the ideas, projects, tasks, and to-dos that are cluttering your mind and your kitchen countertops. Once you externalize those items and hold them safely in the box you review weekly, you free up mental capacity to look at the pyramid and decide where you want to put your efforts next.
The order you build the levels isn’t the order they stack. The Sunday Basket takes the most weight off your daily life the fastest. It clears your counter in a single weekend and quiets that 11:52 p.m. list within a few Sundays. Once the daily paper has somewhere to go, you’ll have the breathing room to work through your spaces and build your binders without feeling like you’re drowning while you do it.
Our Mission
The mission of Organize 365 is to help you get functionally organized in all levels of the pyramid so that you have more time to live in Level 5 self-actualization as the CEO and visionary of your own home and your own life.
There’s no way around it. This is real work. Running a household takes real work, real time, and real money, but the benefit of building structured systems and organization in your household is more time and capacity for what you are uniquely gifted and created to do.
You are already putting in the work. You are already doing the efforting! The Organize 365 essential systems can take the work you’re doing and the effort you’re putting in and organize it so you can finally achieve an organized, productive life.
Imagine...
Imagine waking up a year from now and knowing exactly what you have going on for the week. Your calendar is planned. You already have the materials you need purchased or ready in your household. Your spaces are organized and functioning for the phase of life you’re in now. You have more time and capacity to help your family and friends when they need it, or to read a book, work out, or do anything else that lights you up.
Most people will wish and dream that someday they will have more time and capacity, and a select few will put in the time and effort in an organized, focused way to live that life a few years from now. Time will pass either way, but if you’re ready to put in the effort, I’ve created systems that will give you the result you’re looking for.
A completely different way of thinking about your household. It’s a more professional, strategic lens for looking at the housework you’re doing and the impact you have on your family, your community, and yourself. I encourage you to join my many free webinars, which will dive into the overall pyramid and each level you want to tackle individually.
You can find the full webinar schedule here. Sign up for our newsletter so you are alerted when new webinars are added.
Let’s take a look at each level of the Productive Home CEO framework one at a time. You’ll notice that the work at the bottom is loud and visible, and the work in the middle is the heaviest because no one can see it. The goal… What we all want to achieve is Level 5… the capacity to spend our time how we want.
Level 1: Housework
The base of all work in the house is housework. Defined as cleaning, laundry, and everything food-related, this work is pervasive and never-ending. We will need food, clothing, and someone to clean where we live for the rest of our lives. The goal at this level is to do your housework efficiently and quickly, and stop trying to get an A+ because we need that time and effort to move on to the other levels.
The Escaping Quicksand book is a great primer on how to lower your expectations for housework and free up your time.
Level 2: Home Organization
Level 2 is the work we often think of when we think of household management. It is the organization of the physical spaces in your home. This work can be completed, but it usually takes a few years. The key in Level 2 is to organize your home so it matches the people who live in your household and the phase of life you are in.
Many home organization examples focus on families with small children or on repeated areas in the home, like kitchens and closets. I used to think some people were just organized and others weren’t, but now I know everyone can learn the skill of organization. The problem is no one else is teaching it because the only way to monetize an organized house in a capitalist society is to sell you more bins and containers or a design aesthetic. That’s what we think organization is, but that’s not what organization is. Organization is having a place for everything and knowing where that place is. Full stop.
After a few years of doing in-home professional organization, I decided to put my teaching degree to use and figure out how I could create an online system so other people could learn what I was doing in their homes (creating organization).
This was no small task. I have re-recorded and refined The Productive Home Solution four times in the last 10 years as my understanding of the different variables of how households function and who lives in households has evolved over time. From a program initially designed for stay-at-home moms with young children to a universally applicable system for any household, any family dynamic, and any age group, The Productive Home Solution is truly the foundational organizational system.
The Productive Home Solution is a comprehensive 52-week curriculum that covers every single area I would organize in your house as a professional organizer, from your bedroom to your storage room, to guest bedrooms, family rooms, laundry rooms, and everything in between. The Productive Home Solution walks you through your entire home one task, one area, and one week at a time, in an order that actually works. It’s the room-by-room roadmap I spent two decades figuring out the hard way, so you don’t have to discover the sequencing problem the way I did.
While it may take 1 to 3 years to organize every nook and cranny of your home, it will not take that long to feel the relief of living in organized spaces.
The Productive Home Solution is set up almost like Lego bricks. Each daily task you do, each weekly space you finish, starts building the organized structure you crave.
In The Productive Home Solution, you’ll learn why systems fail and how to build ones that rebuild themselves so you stop paying for the same things and your spaces stop getting disorganized.
The Productive Home Solution course opens three times a year: in December, April, and August.
Join the waitlist here so that you don’t miss the next time the course opens.
Level 3: Household Management
Here we are back at Level 3 again. Level 3 is when the work inside of your home goes from visible to invisible. We can see piles of laundry. We can see disorganized closets, but it’s very hard to see the mental load that is weighing the household manager down:
- remembering birthdays
- organizing holidays
- managing bill payment
- Add more
This mental load is the focus of so many media stories right now and academic research. The load is real. It is felt deeply, causing stress, anxiety, and depression. I am sorry, but the load is not going to go away, so we must find a way to manage it.
The idea is simple. Every piece of paper and every open to-do that needs your decision goes into one basket. You leave it alone until Sunday. Then you sit down, on purpose, and decide what each item needs from you and when. Slash pockets sort what’s left by the action it requires (To Call, To Read, To File, each child’s school, each active project), so you never decide the same thing twice.
A pile is undecided. A system is decided, just not yet finished.
Managers have unique skill sets they use to drive projects forward and recruit, motivate, and hold people and processes accountable for completing their work. The Organize 365 household management system powered by the Sunday Basket is the system you’ve been looking for to reduce your mental load. Members tell us it saves them an average of five hours a week once they get the system up and running… usually in 6 weeks.
Built on over 24 years of real-life use and tens of thousands of people running their households on a similar system, the Sunday Basket is a tested system that you can trust. Within 6 weeks, the Sunday Basket system reduces the mental load you have been carrying sometimes for decades and creates a basic operating system where you will triage requests for your time, talent, and treasure, and ideas that you have for future improvements in your household and other areas in a weekly structured Sunday planning session.
When your system is up and running, every paper and open to-do lands in your Sunday basket and gets decided on Sunday.
Your countertop stops holding your anxiety, and you can finally breathe a sigh of relief, not wondering what you’re going to forget next, knowing confidently that all of the things that need to be done in the future have a safe place and a time to be decided and done.
The Sunday Basket system is available for purchase year-round. When you purchase the Sunday Basket, you will be put into the next implementation session, which happens in xxx
Level 4: Information Management
Created in 2018, The Paper Solution is the answer you’ve been looking for for what to do with the papers you know you need to keep but aren’t sure how to organize.
After organizing hundreds of homes in Cincinnati, Ohio, I realized that file cabinets no longer work for household managers. File cabinets are not portable when you need the information at a lawyer’s office or a doctor’s office, or if you need to evacuate your home in case of a hurricane or a forest fire.
Where the Sunday Basket holds active paper, The Paper Solution holds reference information: everything that’s true about your home, your money, and your family’s health, whether you look at it today or not until the worst day of some future year.
That funny meme where the young adult child is calling home to their mother to ask where their birth certificate is or if they have car insurance. It’s funny because it’s true. Until you have a designated place for your family to go find information, you’re the default brain they go to. The Paper Solution is your family’s Single Source of Truth, and it ends the game of Go Fish for good.
The Paper Solution includes the four essential binders households need to manage important household papers. Financial, medical, household, and operations papers are organized in physical binders with Mad Libs-style workbooks.
Level 5: Strategic Planning
Finally, Level 5! This is the level I have been trying to reach as a household manager for over 50 years. It’s harder than it should be for an adult to self-actualize in their household.
The first four levels of this pyramid build your capacity.
The fifth level is where you spend it.
So often people succeed at work because systems are set up for them to succeed. Their uniqueness is rewarded both in pay and in accolades and the communities they work in, but in our households we are independent, and often we are alone. Yet we have unique desires to learn that are just for us, and we never seem to have time to chase the daydreams we had as children.
Here’s the truth productive people know but don’t know how to use to help you achieve it. It is this: once you have established systems in your household that support your housework, home organization, invisible managerial load, and information management, you have more time and capacity than you know what to do with.
It sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s actually my lived experience. The interesting thing is, when you get this magical extra time and finally get to do that one project, that one course, or that one new job you’ve been longing to do (for sometimes decades), you will complete the project and then you’ll have more time.
When I started Organize 365 at 40, I had to put these systems in place at home so I could have more time to do what I was uniquely created to do: start this company. However, along the way, I found more time and capacity, and I was able to do more things, like get my PhD, spend 20 hours a week with my grandchildren, become a person who goes to the gym and exercises, start traveling the world with my husband, and start doing academic research as part of Organize 365.
No, I didn’t do all of those things at once, but I have done all of them in the last decade and continue to do more. The sky is the limit with what you can do with your time and capacity once it is freed up for your uniqueness and your self-actualization. But until we get those systems in place in your household, that freedom is fleeting, and one unexpected event can rob you of the freedom you have finally achieved with your time.
At Level 5, you are the CEO of your household. Yes, you probably are also the maid and the professional organizer and the chief information officer, but from the lens of a CEO, all of the work hits differently. CEOs are able to plan and prioritize their work, recognize what is important and urgent and what is unnecessary and just busywork.
In Organize 365, we do this through trimester planning days in August, December, and late April or early May. These 2-day planning events help us step back from the roles we play in our household, look ahead to the next 120 days, figure out what we want to do, set our intentions, and then hit the ground running.
Many Organize 365 community members also participate in the CEO Mastermind. This membership meets monthly as a collection of household CEOs thinking about the project of the month that most of us have on our plate.
The Productive Home CEO
Theoretical Framework
There you have it. This is the complete Productive Home CEO operational framework. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it is also the foundation, the structure, and the systems you need to unlock your capacity and experience freedom of time and freedom of choice.
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