The Leadership Growth Podcast
Timely, relevant leadership topics to help you grow your ability to lead effectively.
New episodes every other Tuesday since January 30, 2024.
The Leadership Growth Podcast
Productivity Starts in Your Home
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68% of U.S. GDP is household spending–and today’s guest has ideas about how to make those individual economic engines more efficient.
Lisa Woodruff is a productivity specialist, author, and founder and CEO of Organize 365. She hosts the top-rated Organize 365 podcast, where she shares strategies for reducing the overwhelm, clearing the mental clutter, and living a productive and organized life.
In today’s conversation with Daniel and Peter, Lisa shares her suggestions for how household managers can make the most of their time, talent, and treasure.
Tune in to learn:
- The problem with “to do” lists
- What constitutes visible work–and how many hours it really consumes each week
- How applying systems thinking and strategic planning can help professionals set the right foundation for productivity at home
“Households are economic business entities,” Lisa says, “but we don't give them the business tools to help people who run households be productive and get back their time for leisure, for whatever they want to use it for.”
Questions, or comments? E-mail us at podcast@stewartleadership.com
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Resources and Links
Lisa Woodruff Amazon Author Page
Organize 365 Podcast (Apple Podcasts)
Stewart Leadership Insights and Resources:
10 Tenets of Calendar Management
The Difference Between Important and Urgent
5 Ways “Cloud Watching” Improves Your Leadership
How Do You Prioritize Your Workload? 7 Questions to Decide What Deserves Your Time
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
10 Tips for Managing Your Workload
8 Steps to Take Back Your Time
How to Zoom Out and Manage Your Inner Chatter
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Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Stewart, along with my brother, Peter Stewart. And we have a fantastic guest here with us. Lisa Woodruff, welcome to the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Thank you so much for having me.-This is fantastic, especially the topic. I don't know about all of you listeners, but the feeling of overwhelmed is so dominant these days, not only at work, but with home and the blurring of lines. The idea of being personally productive is perpetually a challenge, and we are trying to balance so much. Lisa is here with us to be able to provide some tools, ideas, approaches on managing so much of that. As we get into that, let me just share some of Lisa's background here with everybody. Lisa Woodruff, a productivity specialist, home organization expert, and founder and CEO of Organize 365. Her top rated Organize 365 podcast has over twenty five million downloads, and that is where she shares strategies for reducing the overwhelm, clearing the mental clutter and living a productive and organized life. So if you haven't checked that out, make sure you make a note.(laughing) Check it out there. She has authored several Amazon best-selling books, including the recently released Escaping Quicksand. So Lisa, thanks again for joining us.
And so let's start off with an initial question to you:What led you to dive into this personal productivity space? Give us a sense of that story, if you could.-Well, I think little girls are all bred to be productive because we have to help with housework and do our schoolwork, and then we establish our own households, and some of us have children, and some of us also go back to work. And the work of running a household is a lifetime's work and has historically been done by women. It's obviously shared by men, and men who are living on their own do housework as well. But historically, it's been women who run households, and it's a real full-time job. It's at least a part-time job, but for many, it is a full-time job. And so, the thing that really has me continuing to dive now even to the academic level of the productivity and the systems and the operations of running a household and the economic impact. You know, 68% of U.S. GDP is household spending. Like households are economic business entities, but we don't give them the business tools to help people who run households be productive and get back their time for leisure, for whatever they want to use it for. Most people are just trying to figure out how to be more productive and efficient so they can get their paid work done and their unpaid work done, and there's no extra time left over.-That's a lot you're describing. And it is... We all live in households. We know all the different components to it. We have kids at various ages, some still at home, some have flown the nest. And there is always so much to be done. So it sounds like as we talk here, we'll be able to not only help the reality of the stressors of managing a household, but how do we get out beyond that so that we feel productive?(laughing) Because there is something important about that. Why do we feel like there is this need to be productive? What itch is that scratching in each of us?-I don't know if everybody has the same desire for level of productivity. My level for productivity is really high because there are a lot of things I want to do, be and have. Like I want to run a company. I want to be an active grandmother. I want to be a good wife. I want to do jigsaw puzzles and watch Ted Lasso at night on TV. Like, I want to do all of these things. So, the more systems I could put in place and the more productive I could be, the more of the things I want to do, I can do, you know, in a day, the capacity I have, I could do them in a day. And for me, I found that running the household because it didn't have good systems was the limiter on the amount of things that I could do in my thirties and forties because it just took so much time. And I kept trying to do it faster or making better checklists. And hoping that I would just be done with it so I could go do other things. And eventually I realized that no, this is actually the work of humanity. This is the work of living. Like, this work is never going to go away. And I need to be more streamlined and purposeful in how I approach that work so that it kind of fits in with my life instead of something I'm trying to do very quickly and then just get rid of it.-And I like the way you're kind of framing this up. Because so often these types of conversations, we often think of the workplace first, and we think of productivity in the workplace. What you're doing is turning that on its head and saying, hold on, we can talk about workplace and all these other places, but the central kind of foundational piece is often that household, that home. And whether that's one person, whether that's two, three, five, ten, however many people are in that household, as an adult, you often have responsibility of running that house. You're a significant part of that, and it bleeds over into so many other aspects. And so it makes a lot of sense to use that as this central place. I'm curious. Especially with the COVID factor and so much more virtual, how has that influenced our ability to look at these two things, that almost in some ways, the personal private versus the public And they intersect, and we need to pay attention to the intersection a little bit more.-Yeah, you know, that is interesting. I haven't thought about that as much. What I'm thinking more about, you know, now that I'm 54 and my husband's almost 60, and our, you know, our parents are in their late 70s and 80s. I'm starting to really see how households and the work of households shift as we get older, also. And I'll address the COVID thing as well. I think all of it just comes to the same conclusion in that we live in our households throughout a lifetime, and our only perspective of what it's like to run and manage a household is our age and younger. And it's really hard for us to think about our age and older as far as the amount of work and how long it takes to do work in a household. So when I see a COVID, I have a very traditional marriage. My husband has had the same job since the day he graduated from college. For the first decade when we had children, I was a stay-at-home mom. And now I have a company that I run. When COVID happened, obviously everyone went to work at home. And my husband has never worked at home. He doesn't have a work phone. He doesn't even have a laptop.
So for him, work is, you know, 7:30 to 4:30, and that's it. Like, nobody can contact him after work hours.(laughing) Which is probably foreign for many, many people. Now that he's back to the office, same thing still doesn't have a laptop. Well, I was working from home at that time And after we'd been home for about a year, he'd gone back to work and he went on a trip to Florida. That's where his family's from. And so his company made him quarantine when he came home. And I remember I was sitting at my home office, and now he's back in our household again, you know, on the card table in the bedroom. And I was like, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. I was like, I have a warehouse that I lease with an office. Like the office I'm in now, I had this office. But my mindset was, I was a stay-at-home mom and I was a work-from-home mom, even though I had employees and I was paying for an office somewhere else. So I left the house and I went to the office and I worked there that week. And the next week, when he went back to work, I kept coming to this office and working. So, in 2021, was when I started working from the office I was paying for
that was not in my house because my mindset had been:I was the one that was at home to let the dog out for anybody who came to the house. At that point, I was like, okay, we are both, you know, working away from home. Our kids are grown. Like, we're both not working from home. So I think in that way, COVID really changed male and females' mindsets of who does what, where they do, and how much time it takes to run a household. Because when you're home, you realize, oh, you know, you've got to let the dog out, you have to wait for this person. The other time that I think recently that my husband and I have really thought a lot about this is when his mom has fallen a couple of times. And so she'll fall, and then when she had a cat at one point, we had to go take care of the cat and go get the mail. And then she'd be in a rehab facility. And so we have to do her laundry while she's in the rehab facility, take care of her house. And then every time she has recovered to where she's living independently again, thank goodness. But we keep looking with each fall of like, okay, it's taking her longer to live independently again. At one point, we had to have some help come into the house for multiple months, for a long time, and then it got whittled down to less and less time until she's completely independent again. But you are then running two households. So you're bringing the housework into your household and then going and running that whole household. And so I think ll of these life experiences, as we get older and older, we think, oh, it's supposed to get easier, or there's going to be less work. Actually, that's not what I'm finding to be true.-It does seem to expand exponentially as we age and just more layers of influence and complexity come on. So you've used this term a few times, which is not often applied outside of the professional world to the home life, and that's systems.-Hm.-And talk about getting systems in place and systems in order to help with that productivity. Give our listeners examples. When you're talking about systems in a household, what are you referring to to help broaden our mindsets?-Okay, so there are visible and invisible work that we do inside of a household. And usually, when you think of running a household, you think about the most basic housework visible level, which, fun fact, has never been operationally defined, even though there are thousands of studies that have studied it. So I did a study to operationally defined housework.
And the American public defined it as three tasks:anything related to food, anything related to cleaning, and anything related to laundry. And in most families, that's going to be about 15 to 20 hours worth of work a week. And you think there's no way, and then you'll do a time study, you'll be very sad, and you'll realize that's how long it takes.(laughing) So, that is cleaning. So, having a, you know, a... a repeatable meal plan that you're using would be a system. Having certain days of the week that you do the laundry would be a system. Having a system for cleaning your house top to bottom, or better yet, get somebody else to do it.(laughing) That would be a system. So, that would be a simple system. Most people over a lifetime create those systems. And there's usually one of the three, which you really like is not your gifting. For me, it's meal planning. For other people, it might be cleaning, whatever. And that's your like Achilles heel. Like, I have to do this one because you have to do all three. Like, they sustain life, you have to do them. The next level of visible work would be organizing. And organizing, in my opinion, is a current investment of time for a future exponential routine return on time. So, like if you clean out the refrigerator and you've got everything in there nice and neat, it's so much easier to make the next meal and not have food go bad, or think about your pantry. Any of those times when you'll take some time to clean something out to make it go. But the systems that we don't have for households, that we do have in business, are information systems and managerial systems and CEO leadership systems. And those are the systems that are the invisible work, the cognitive load, the mental load, the burnout. That's where all of the extra work comes from in running a household that we have not well operationalized and systematized for household managers.-Let's keep this conversation going related to the systems. And I'm wondering what are some of the traps that we might fall into, either because we haven't identified systems or we're trying to work with systems and not quite getting there. Walk us through some of the pitfalls that we might stumble into along the way.-All right, great. One's going to be to-do lists, and the other one's going to be digitizing your productivity and systems. So the first one is to-do lists. Like sometimes you can get a really, really good checklist going. Like when my kids were school age, I got really good at having a great weekly we need these, you know, certain amount of things from the grocery store. And I would just have to check a couple adding things onto that. And I did really great at going to the grocery store and having the right things in the house at the right time. And then all of a sudden, their food preferences changed, and their schools changed, and like that whole thing fell apart. So that checklist worked for a while, and then all of a sudden the checklist stopped working. So checklists are great for a period of time, but they have to be maintained. And the worst kind of a checklist is a regular, never-ending to-do list. And the problem with the to-do list, the great thing about it is you have it written down. The problem with it is every time you get 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, instead of taking time for yourself, you're like, ugh, I know there's stuff to do, so I'll go check the list. So then you go check the list and you're like, well, I only have 10 minutes, so I can do a 10-minute task or two tasks that are going to take five minutes, but I can't do a 15-minute task. So you're always doing the lowest-level tasks on that list, just to try to keep that checklist going.
And then for me, I finally got to the point where I was like, okay, at 7:30 at night, I no longer am allowed to check the to-do list
because all I would do is keep checking the to-do list until 9:30 at night until I couldn't possibly do any more tasks, thinking that maybe someday I would get that to-do list done. And you're never going to get it done. So there has to be a time when you're allowed to go play and you don't have to do your work anymore. Same thing happens with digital systems. For a long time, people would be like, okay, my checklist is in a digital app or my to do list is in a digital app. And that works really, really great again when you set it up, kind of like when I set up the one for the grocery store. But what happens is a new app comes along that's shinier and sexier than your old app. So you're like maybe I'm going to try the new app or I'm going to color code it or I'm going to do a shared app with my spouse or I'm going to do I'm going to move it over here. For me, when I move to a new app, I literally forget the old one exists. So, if it's at least the to-do list, I would see. I'd run across it and be like, oh, darn, I haven't seen this for two weeks, but now I remember all these things I'm supposed to do. For the apps, they just like, I don't know, disappear, and I never see them again. I find that digital systems are great for personal productivity. And as long as you're using them, they work well. But as soon as you stop using them, it's like sometimes really important things just disappear entirely.-Appreciate your elaboration because I think as you're sharing these examples, I think so many of our listeners, and I know for me, as I'm, oh, I can relate to that. I can relate to that happening and so forth. So what do you recommend we do to compensate for these struggles of the never ending to do list, whatever? What are your big tips, recommendations?-Yeah, so the system that I have is the Sunday basket. I started using it when my kids were six months and two years old. It does involve writing down every single thing you need to do, not on a to-do list. But every single task is on an individual card. That way, when it's done, you can just recycle it. And if it can wait till next Sunday, it just waits until next Sunday, and that's step one. It's really like a business inbox, not your email inbox, but remember the old fashioned days when you literally would have an inbox on your desk? And you would put things in the inbox that needed to be done. Well, this one lives on your kitchen counter, and you literally put your ideas, your mail, your checklists, printed out emails, like, any tasks or projects that you're running as a project manager go in this box, and then you spend 90 minutes a week actually planning out your work for the week. So you look at everything that's come into your inbox, either physically or just from your brain, or from text messages or threads or apps, or all the things you have to check. You check all the things. And you get together all the data, all the requests on your time, talent, and treasure, and then you do any of the quick tasks that you can do there instead of putting them off. And then you have to plan, like you would in business. Like you would plan how many projects you can get done this week. And once you have those calendar blocked on your calendar, you keep the workout for those, and everything else lives in the inbox.
And what you learn very quickly in doing the Sunday basket is number one:you're never going to get all of this done.
And number two:you may not be very good at estimating how much time you have in a week. Either you think that things are going to happen a lot faster than they do, which is pretty much the norm, or you don't even pull out enough projects because you thought things would take a lot longer than you thought they would. So once you are better at estimating how long it will take you to do projects and how much capacity you have during the week, you pull out one, two, three projects, you get those done in the week, and then your inbox holds all that information. Just like in business, you would hold all of your projects there. And the ones that are most urgent and important are the ones that get on your calendar, not the ones that can be done the quickest and the easiest.-What was that? Time, talent, and treasure? You rattled that off so quickly. That's a really important distinction here. What does that mean to you? Why do you categorize it like that?-So, I think a lot of times we make decisions based on how much things cost, your treasure. But, as, well, I'll just speak for myself. As a female household manager or stay-at-home mom, I didn't value my time financially because I mean, I was a stay-at-home mom. All my time was free. But all your time is not free. And so you have to think about how much time you have, how much talent you have, and how much treasure you have. So, what are you uniquely gifted and created to do? So, for me, it's podcasting, coming up with these ideas, getting my PhD so I can do academic level research around executive function and household managers. Like that's a very unique thing that I'm doing. Because I want to be doing that, I'm not also going to be cleaning my house. The very first thing I did when I started a business was hired somebody to clean my house. Because I knew that if someone else didn't clean my house, I would clean my house. And while, yes, it costs money for that house to be cleaned, it takes me six hours a week to clean my house. It takes the person that I hire three hours every other week. I don't know why that math works, but that is how the math works. And I used to clean houses, so I know I would clean other people's houses for three hours, but I can't do mine. Because when I do mine, I also organize and I also do laundry and then I redo the kids' rooms. I don't know, it's a whole thing. So I knew that by hiring someone to clean my house for six hours for however much that was going to cost, I would actually get back twenty four hours and every one of those hours I poured into my business. So I knew what my time was going to be worth or how much it would cost for me to hire somebody to work at my company for twenty four hours. It would be a lot more than somebody to clean my house for six. And then I captured that time for my uniqueness and poured it into my business. So I'm always calculating how much money, physical money, does this cost? Is this truly in my uniqueness? And then, how much actual money do we have? Like, how much time do we have, and how much money do we have in our household in order for everyone in our household to be able to self-actualize to their uniqueness?-I'm glad you dug into that a little more, Daniel, because I was wondering the same. I loved those three perspectives as we think about what individuals are bringing, you know, the time, talent, treasure. So thanks for elaborating on that. Let's go a little bit more macro on this of why are people so much more overwhelmed these days? And like... How can some people manage, and why do some people manage them better than others? Like, what can people do? Like, what's your take on that?-So many reasons. I have grandchildren now, a five-year-old and an eight-month-old. And I'm talking to some of my cousins who have school-age kids that are a little bit older than my grandkids. And we're talking about, you know, like, all the things that we're doing and what we have to manage. And when my kids were in school, there were a lot of papers sent home, and you had to have a system for managing all the papers and all the calendars that would come home in physical format. And my friends have told me it's so much worse today because now every single thing your kid does has a different app. So, if they're in soccer, you have to go in the soccer app. And not only is there a soccer app where you have to find all the information, but also there's like a community in there. So if one kid can't come to practice, it's like Bobby can't come to practice. Oh, I hope Bobby's okay. Oh, yeah, he just fell. And like, you're you know everything about why Bobby can't come to practice because it's like 50 different text messages on your phone. And you're trying to scroll through text messages for that, figuring out where soccer is supposed to be. Now you're going to look at Taekwondo. That's a different app. There's a school app. Now you've got— so everything is disjointed. And it's all in all these different portals that you have to open and close all the time. And you have to cognitively remember which ones you've surfaced. Like, just even for my gym, I can register for my Pilates classes for two months in advance. But I can only register to take kids' camp, and this one class I take seven days in advance. So while I'm finishing up the class, I go back in to register for next week because I'm terrified that I'm going to forget to sign up the grandkid for camp. And we're going to show up, and he's not going to have to be registered for a class. So it's all that, you know, you think the digital is going to make it easier. It's not making it easier. I think it's making it harder.-Lisa, clearly you have thought so much about all of this. And you have such expertise.
So I guess my question is:what else should we be talking about here that maybe we're not even thinking about? What's a different mindset? What's a different approach? What's a different tool that we need to kind of break out of in some way? What else are we missing here?-Such a great question, because what I've shared so much is the visible work that we see, and the invisible management that we do. And for over a decade, even in my own company, that's all I was focusing on until I finished the PhD. And then I was like, oh, that's it. So in my 40s, I started this company because it was politically correct for me to take time away from my family if I was going to earn money. And so I started a company and I really used it as, you know, they say entrepreneurship is the best professional development program you'll ever be in, which is true. Which is all I want to do is I want to grow and learn, but because I was earning money and returning it back to my family, it was okay that I kept taking all this time away from my family. And then in my 50s, I decided to go back and get my PhD because I wanted to. And my husband's like, you're not going to get paid anymore? I'm like, no. He's like, you're not going to get paid to research? I said, no. As a matter of fact, I'm going to pay for my own research. He's like, why are you doing this? I said, because I want to. Because I want to. And here's what I realized. As we become adults, it's much harder for us to do things just because we want to. Like our kids, we'll sign them up for anything and anything that they remotely show that they have interest in just to see if maybe that's their thing. And then you turn 22 and it's like, that's done. Like, there's no more of that. I'm like, what the heck? Now's when we finally have earned all this money. Why don't we spend it on what we want to do? And so I got my PhD because I wanted to get my PhD. And that's when I realized, oh. Self-actualization happens in workplaces because they're created for self-actualization. Households are not. They're created for self-actualization for children, but not for adults. So, what I mean by that is, when you are in business and you get a college degree or whatever you get, your trade, and you go into business, you continue to work and hone whatever you uniquely are gifted and created to do. And earn more and more money in order to bring back to your family. And so, along the way, you become self-actualized in whatever it is your uniqueness is. At home, when you graduate from your childhood home and you come into your own home, there are no systems and supports. You have to create everything from scratch. And then you're raising children, caregiving, or you are working, and any leisure time you have might be for leisure, but it's not usually, there aren't a lot of people just getting a PhD because they want to. Like, that's $100,000. Or just, you know, going and taking all these classes because they want to.
People usually, in their later lives, start to realize:hey, I can grow and develop in whatever I want to do. But in the younger years, a lot of that time is taken into caregiving and running the household. And there just aren't any hours left to do whatever you want to do because you're taking care of people and you're taking care of other things. So, if you can learn to plan, like the Sunday basket is planning for your weekly tasks. But if you can really step back, and I have these planning days three times a year where we do strategic planning for your household like you would in business quarterly. And we look at the next 120 days. What are the needs of all the constituents in our household? What are our household needs? What are the needs of ourselves? What capacity do we have for our time, talent, and treasure? And then what are we going to pick out as our big goals for the next one hundred and twenty days, you wouldn't believe how much more you can get done because you're working on bigger goals and bigger time than just one week. We don't tend to think this way in households, but we should, because I think a lot of dissatisfaction from middle-aged women is that they don't have an outlet for self-actualization in the household. They don't necessarily want to escape the household or their marriage. But sometimes that's what they have to do in order to get the time for them to be able to really pour into whatever they want to explore in this next season of life.-So many fascinating thoughts you're sharing as you're describing this. And I'm having flashbacks to a conversation I had with a professor back as I was a TA for him as an undergrad many years ago. And this was for a child development class. And the Franklin planners were just coming out a little bit more. I remember walking the uh we were walking from his office to the lecture hall, and he said, “Peter, I'm concerned about a shift that I'm observing.” As I had a planner and I was writing everything down, and he's like, “You see what you're doing?”“Is it feels like families are trying to be run more like a business.”-Mm.-And he said, “The problem is, is business, their fundamental organization for why they exist is for productivity.”-Yes.-But the reason why a family exists is to promote relationships.-Mmmmm.-How do you feel this comes together? How can some of the productivity focus that you're highlighting actually, help or hinder the development of relationships?-That is, I'm so glad you brought that up. That's so interesting. And I have thoughts and opinions. I don't have research to back it up. But my original degree is in early childhood education. And when I got my PhD and I was in a development class and we were talking about development of a lifespan,
there are only two psychologists who have ever studied lifespan development:Eric Erickson and Levinson. They were both 50-year-old white men when they came up with their theories, and they mostly focused on children. And Levinson specifically only looked at middle-aged white guys at Harvard, was his population for coming up with adult life cycles. And so they went back to him and they said, What about women? And he studied it and he said, 'Oh, yeah, it happens for women just later.' That's literally what he said. I'm like, okay, that's not actually good.(laughing) And I said in that class, I said, “So is menopause a phase of life?” And they go, ”No”. I'm like, it's literally the inverse of puberty. How can it not be a phase of life? So, anyway, we've got a little bit of room to study here in academia about what the phases of life are.
And so, what I would say to that is:your professor was a man. And this was not yesterday. I mean, this would have been decades ago, right? Okay. Because when I was around when Franklin Covey came out, too, it's like my crack.-Yeah.-And what I would say is, traditionally, if we're looking like before the 1980s, yes, for men, households were family. For women, they've always been production For millennia, women have run households. That's where home economics came from. That's where child development came from. That's where cooking and, like, we won World War I and World War II because of home economics, because the women figured out how to preserve food so that our soldiers didn't starve. That's literally part of the reason why we won World War I and World War II was because we were able to have better supply lines for our soldiers because of home economics. Women have always been productive at home. They've always been producing. So productive means producing. And historically, men have produced in the workplace and women have produced at home. Now, making a man productive at home maybe was countercultural, but for a woman to be able to run the calendars and the children and all the things they had to do, of course, they're going to need productivity and they're going to need systems. Like, can you imagine running a business without those things? It would be impossible. And the household, the American household is responsible for 68% of U.S. GDP. So 68% of our gross domestic product comes from spending in the household. We produce. And we spend. Like we are the economic entity.-This is fantastic, Lisa. Okay, so as we're wrapping up, let's talk about actions.
As we're all in households:we're all trying to manage and lead, managing the relationship, yes, but man, is there a lot of production we need to pay attention to. What are the couple of things we need to keep in mind? What do we take away from this?-Yeah, I think the first one is if you're feeling really overloaded in the at all, I just would get like a stack of index cards. They're like fifty cents. And just sit there on one index card each. Just write down all the things you need to do or the projects are in process in your house and get them out of your head and on paper. This is going to reduce your anxiety and help you really see what you have in front of you. And then, you know, look at those. Maybe some of those things are not good ideas. Just get rid of them. And then some you want to get working on now and put the rest over to the side. If you're in a coupled relationship or there are more people that live in your household, have a conversation, like, how much work are we doing? Do we even want to do this much work? What if we use paper plates during the week and we only use regular plates on the weekend? What if we go to paper napkins? How about if we have somebody clean the house instead of all of us cleaning the house? But that means that we're going to eat from home two extra nights per week, or something like that, or dividing up the work based on who likes to do that kind of work in the household. And then also, I would really be thinking about what do you want, to your point, what do you want your home environment to look like and feel like? And does it really involve the amount of effort that we're currently doing? So, for example, growing up every single day at five o'clock, we had to vacuum our house because my dad wanted the house to be vacuumed. So, when I got married, I did that every single day. I'd come home from teaching, I'd vacuum the house, and my husband would walk in the house. Then, when the baby was two, I literally lost my mind because my husband just walked in and picked up the baby on the freshly vacuumed carpet. And he was like, “What is the matter with you, you crazy woman?” And I was like (chattering sounds). And he's like, “You vacuum the house every day?” I had been doing that for like seven years.(laughing) He didn't even notice. Guess what I stopped doing? Vacuuming. Now, today we've got robots that can vacuum. You could just buy a robot for $350 and program it, and nobody ever has to vacuum again. Like, really stop and think, like, why are we doing what we're doing? Observe your life from the outside. Like, hopefully, I've given you some really good ways to come out of the fishbowl that we're in and look in and be like, oh my gosh, I didn't even realize I was doing those things. And when you do need to support your adult children or your parents or grandparents, how are they running their households? What can you support them in? And do you need to do it to the level that they are doing it? Like, just really, it's all variables, it's all data. And you get to create the system yourself.-Lisa, so helpful. As we're finishing up here, you have a new book that was just released. Tell us a moment about the book and where we can get it.-Sure, the book is called Escaping Quicksand. This is the book I wrote about how I created systems to support my self-care. So talking about how, specifically as a middle-aged woman, how I was able to start thinking about the needs I had, just like I think about my kids and my husband's needs. How do I think about my own needs and really meet those needs in the same way?-Love it.-All of our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. And Lisa in particular, thank you so much for being a guest on the Leadership Growth Podcast-Thank you.-So, all of our listeners, thank you again. And we certainly hope you're able to take away some tips and tools to help you be a more effective leader. Yes, in the workplace, but yes, absolutely, as you lead your own household as well. Please like and subscribe, and join us in the future. And all the best to everybody. Take care. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. Or better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com