How organising your home and business can revolutionise your life: a conversation with Lisa Woodruff
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If you’ve ever found yourself drowning in clutter, overwhelmed by to-do lists, or unsure how to manage everything on your plate, you’re not alone. Many of us struggle to balance daily tasks, especially when managing ADHD, multiple roles and family demands.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Woodruff, founder of Organize 365, about her journey organising not just her home, but her mind.
Here’s what we discussed about how creating systems can lead to better self-care, greater clarity, and more energy to do the things that matter most.
Discovering the Sunday Basket: a game changer for ADHD and organisation
Lisa and I connected after I came across her Sunday Basket concept on the ADHD for Smart-Ass Women podcast with Tracy Otsuka. As a late diagnosed (48) woman with ADHD, I was intrigued by Lisa’s idea of chunking tasks into manageable pockets and folders. I’d been using index cards and calendars to organise my thoughts, but this method of batching tasks made so much sense.
After hearing Lisa talk about how this system helps to externalise our brains and reduce the clutter in our heads, I realised I was onto something bigger. Lisa’s approach—breaking down tasks into chunks using folders and pockets—has been life-changing for me.
I created my own DIY version of the Sunday Basket (I call it my Brain in a Box) since I’m based on the west coast of Ireland, where shipping from North America can be tricky. But even without the physical product, the concept alone has revolutionised how I manage my time, energy, and responsibilities.
Lisa’s story: supporting ADHD and externalising thoughts
As it turns out, Lisa has ADHD too. She recently received an ADHD diagnosis and shared her experience of being overwhelmed by ideas and racing thoughts—something many of us can relate to. She explained how the Sunday Basket helps her externalise her thoughts so she doesn’t feel as though she’s constantly spinning in circles.
She spoke about the importance of creating systems that allow for clarity—whether through tangible baskets or mental organisation systems. According to Lisa, by having a structure to manage these thoughts, she has been able to avoid the anxiety and sleepless nights that once plagued her. This concept of externalising your brain, whether by writing things down or sorting through organised folders, was a breakthrough for me, and I’m sure it will be for many others.
The role of organisation in Self care and self-actualisation
For Lisa, organisation is much more than just managing your space—it’s a form of self-care. She believes that when we have systems in place to help us manage the overwhelm, we free up energy for other areas of our lives. It’s not just about keeping things tidy; it’s about creating a life that reflects who we truly are and what we want to accomplish.
In our conversation, she emphasised that organisation is also tied to self-actualisation—the idea that we are capable of achieving our highest potential. Lisa spoke about how the systems she’s created allow her to focus on one idea at a time, something she believes is key to achieving success. This idea resonated deeply with me, especially as someone who naturally juggles (and often drops) multiple ideas at once.
Connecting with Self
As we delved deeper into the conversation, Lisa shared a more spiritual perspective on organisation. She spoke about how our energy is intertwined with everything we do—whether it’s our work, relationships, or personal goals. Drawing from her own Christian beliefs and her ongoing pursuit of a PhD, she emphasised the importance of following your energy. For her, that means listening to her intuition and knowing when to push forward and when to take a step back.
She also explained how we as women often give our energy to others—whether it’s our families, communities, or work—and how essential it is to balance that with self-care. When we focus on what truly excites and energises us, we not only take care of ourselves but also contribute more meaningfully to the world around us. It’s about finding a balance that allows us to show up fully for ourselves and for others.
The importance of taking action
During our conversation, Lisa shared an insight that stuck with me: ideas alone are not enough. Action is what brings those ideas to life. She shared how many people get stuck waiting for permission or perfect conditions before taking action. But Lisa urges us to break free from that mindset. She explained how she often reminds her team, “We can do whatever we want,” emphasising that we don’t need permission from anyone to take action on our dreams.
This idea of stepping into action, no matter how small the step, is a powerful reminder to stop waiting for the perfect moment and start creating now.
Whether it’s organising your home, pursuing a new career, or even starting a personal project, taking action is the key to bringing your ideas to fruition.
Advice for Younger You
When I asked Lisa what advice she would give to her younger self, she shared a poignant reflection. Lisa recalled how, as a child, she was constantly questioning authority and thinking outside the box. However, if she could go back in time, she would tell herself that she didn’t need as much permission as she thought. We often hold ourselves back, waiting for others to approve or validate our ideas, when in reality, we have the power to create and act on our own terms.
Where to find Lisa Woodruff
If you’re looking for more guidance on organising your life and mind, Lisa’s resources are wonderful. You can find her on the Organize 365 podcast, or visit her website at organize365.com. She also shares insights on Instagram under the handle @organize365.
In conclusion, I walked away from this conversation feeling empowered to take control of my organising systems, not just for a cleaner home, but for a clearer mind and a more focused life. Lisa’s approach to organisation, self-care, and energy has reinforced my commitment of the last couple of years in terms of creating and refining systems and structures that support me in achieving greater peace and success. Whether you’re managing ADHD, juggling multiple responsibilities, or simply seeking more clarity in your life, I hope you find this as helpful as I have.
le grá (with love),
TRANSCRIPT
I’m so excited to be here.
It’s funny to say how we met because we’ve literally just met this morning, but I feel like I know you because I’ve been listening to so many of your Organize 365 podcast episodes.
I came across you through the ADHD for Smart-Ass Women podcast with Tracy Otsuka. Your Sunday Basket idea was so compelling that I was waking up at night thinking about plastic pockets and how to externalise and organise my brain. I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD this year, but I’d been putting organisational systems in place from very early childhood without realising how much harder it was for me.
I’ve been using index cards for years, with my desk diary and phone calendar for appointments. But listening to you talk about the Sunday Basket and managing two small children made me realise why my previous method of going through hundreds of individual index cards wasn’t working. Your approach of chunking things into folders and pockets—where you can just grab one and batch tasks—has revolutionised my life.
I’ve done a DIY version since I’m on the west coast of Ireland, whereas you sell a version in North America. Would you like to share how long you’ve been doing this and what you’re working on currently?
Lisa Woodruff: Oh yes, sure. But first, I want to comment on what you’re saying. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD too, and I think that with all women do, it’s a wonder any of us aren’t diagnosed with ADHD. I tried the index card thing too, writing everything on them, but as you said, chunking up is crucial. There are so many things we’re doing, want to do, or plan to do in the future, either in our brains or written down somewhere. If it’s written down, good luck finding it, which is why I like the pockets.
We just finished redoing everything in our house, and we’ve just been signed off on the last thing. My husband mentioned the garage floor, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, we’re not doing anything else for a while. We have no more money, and I have no more capacity for projects.”
So, about me: I’m Lisa Woodruff, and I’m actually part Irish. I have family that still lives in Ireland, though I’m not sure exactly where. My great-grandparents came to the United States in the late 1940s, so it wasn’t that long ago, and I knew them. They grew up in Ireland.
I live in Ohio. I started Organize 365 the year I turned 40, in 2012, but I started the Sunday Basket in 2002 when I had a six-month-old and a two-year-old. I didn’t turn it into a physical product until 2018. We do sell it internationally, but you have to use a parcel forwarder to get it, which is cumbersome and expensive. I’m working on international shipping options, but it’s not easy.
Basically, the Sunday Basket is an externalisation of your brain. It has colours that organise all the roles we play as household managers. For instance, if you don’t have children, you might not have the blue colour, but you probably have pets and family members, which would be your blue. We chunk how you organise a household as if it were a business.
The reason I wanted you on The Feel Better Every Day Podcast is that all my work is about self-care, and it feels like organisation, being grounded, and getting better sleep are crucial. I’m waiting to start ADHD medication, but the psychiatrist described what it would be like when I don’t have seven thoughts at any given moment, just one. She says sleep improves because you’ve got so much more done; you don’t have those worrying thoughts.
In a way, I’ve been self-medicating with what I’m calling my Brain in a Box—just the externalisation and knowing it’s handled, that I don’t have to do everything now or never. It feels like a crucial part of self-care. I used to have notebooks where I’d index them at the beginning to know what page notes from such-and-such an event were, but I’d still never look back. Now I do it on a Friday because we’re only moving forward, right? I wrote it down, so it must have happened, moving on. But I was forgetting huge things.
For me, organisation is hugely about self-care. I wonder if that’s the case for you, and also, what other things do you do daily in an ideal world? If you were to think about having all the time, capacity, bandwidth, energy, and money, what would you love to do daily, and what do you actually do?
Regarding medication, I’m recently diagnosed with ADHD and non-medicated. My children have both been diagnosed with ADHD, and we’ve tried medication with varying success. They’re adults now, so they’re choosing their own path. I’m pro-everything that helps everyone, including alternative medicine and regular medicine.
One of my colleagues, Monique, said about eight years ago when we finally made the actual Sunday Basket, “Lisa, wouldn’t it be cool if we found out that you actually had ADHD and these products are like a non-pharmaceutical intervention for ADHD?” I’m currently getting my PhD, and ultimately, our goal is to see if we can show support through science that cognitive overwhelm and anxiety are reduced through systems inside the home. We want to show a significant improvement, not compared to medicine, but as a complement to medical intervention.
I don’t have racing thoughts anymore, and I don’t wake up at 3am anymore. I think it’s because my brain is allowed to have all the thoughts it wants, and I record them somewhere. I regularly go through these different boxes and things to see them again, to see if now is the time when it should manifest.
I believe that ADHD people see things that are not yet seen, see invisible things as visible, and see the future. I think it’s a superpower, personally, but it can be distracting and detrimental if you’re just spinning in your ideas. I’ve been able to grow a company by having all the ideas I want but externalising them and then going through them regularly.
When you say self-care, I agree. Someone identified a year or two ago that organisation is self-care, these systems are self-care. I also want to take it a step further: it’s self-actualisation. I love self-actualisation; I’ve always thought I could be, do, and have anything I wanted. But every day it was a new thing I wanted to be, do, and have. You’ve got to stay a little bit focused to actually get any of those things you want.
I find that the systems I’ve created allow me to be me and then allow me to choose what I want to put my effort into until I’m no longer interested in doing that, and then choose the next thing. I have a lot more success because I’m not limiting my ideas, but I’m focusing on fewer ideas at one time.
I was going to ask about the uppercase Self, like that highest, wisest, truest, most you’re talking about—that self-actualisation, being all you can be. What else helps you connect with that energy every day?
Being raised in a Christian household, you didn’t really talk about anything other than God. I feel the more I’ve broadened my understanding of humanity, especially now getting the PhD and understanding a lot more at a deeper level, it’s all energy. I have a very personal relationship with God and Jesus specifically, and I can feel that energy. I think it’s all energy, and when you understand energy and your own energy from an energy perspective, I tell people to follow their energy.
My programmes are kindergarten simple. It takes 18 months to three years to get through all of them, but it doesn’t matter. You can do this block this day and this block that day. I’m a kindergarten teacher; you’re going to end up with an organised home because you can’t not, because I break it down so simply and nothing is dependent on anything else. So you can follow your energy.
I often say, if you want to go clean out your closet but you’re supposed to do your kitchen, go to your closet because you’ll get three times further if you follow your energy. Along with that, I think that especially if you have ADHD and you have a lot of ideas, when you can learn to get out of that frantic energy of “I have a great idea and if I don’t act on it right now, the idea is going to go away and I’m going to forget it and then I won’t have that success,” to “I have a lot of ideas all the time, I am where ideas come from, which thing do I want to put the next week, month, year into to see how big I can make that one idea?” and put all your effort back into that and follow your energy that way. Then you start to get some traction.
Along the lines of that energy, if you’re a woman, we are caretakers whether you have children or not. We care about our family, our community, the earth—we just care. So we will give our energy to other people as opposed to keeping it to ourselves because that’s selfish. As you start to really understand what your unique gifting and calling in the world is, your ideas that are different from other people’s ideas, that are easier for you than for other people, then you’ll start to pull more of that energy for your life’s work. That is not selfish; it is actually for the betterment of everyone when you do that.
In order to do that and have the energy to do that, you also need to take care of your personal body. I think that happens as you get older and you realise that an extra energy drink or coffee, or burning the midnight oil, is actually depleting your energy overall. I need to prioritise myself, which I think usually happens around your mid-30s, early 40s. Then you start to really say, “Okay, if I’m going to live to be 100, I can’t keep doing this for the next 70 years.” So then you slowly start to say, “Okay, a little bit for me, a little bit for them, a little bit for me, a little bit for them.”
For me, I’m post-menopause at 49, and it’s like I really need a lot of acupuncture, a lot of herbal medicine and learning. It’s still a learning curve to not try and do all the things and then those mini burnouts. My work’s all about self-care, I know, but I’m also thinking with what you’re saying about your religious beliefs, there’s an element of self-care with that in knowing you don’t have to do it all yourself. I just wondered if you want to say anything about that?
You know, that reminds me of something I heard years ago. I don’t remember where I heard it, but it goes along with that idea that you can’t patent an idea. If you have an idea, you can’t trademark it. People say, “I have a great idea, and when I share it with you, you know it’s my idea.” You have to actually have it in use in order to do a trademark or a patent.
I wish I remembered where I heard this, but someone said—maybe it was The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell—that there are these ideas that are generally in the energy at certain times. So it’s not an accident that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the same time created these computer companies. There was an energy at that time for personal computers to be created, and these multiple—and then Michael Dell, you know—they all created their own version of that.
These ideas are out there, and these energies are out there, and when you tune into the frequencies, then you hear more of these ideas. It is the action taken on those ideas that actually leads to success because many people probably were like, “Oh, I wonder if this big computer could become a personal computer,” but they didn’t do anything about it. These three men did, and it created these three industries, these three companies.
So I think about that a lot, and I think, okay, lots of people have had organisation TV shows, and I don’t think it’s the right time for me to do it. The way I want to do it is a little different; it’d be more like a talk show actually, which I don’t know is the—you know, there was Oprah, there was a huge talk show, there was like a season for talk shows, and that season for talk shows has kind of passed. So will there be a new season for talk shows? Is it actually a YouTube channel? Is it actually just the podcast I already have? You know, I’m always thinking about how things are changing and growing over time.
I think it is the energy—like the energy of the idea plus the energy of the community that’s there to receive the idea. All these energies come together.
I’m thinking of Liz Gilbert in Big Magic where she looks at creativity. I think she was talking about Mary Oliver, who would be out walking, doing farm duties or whatever chores as a child, and she’d have what you’re talking about. She’d get that connection, and she’d be racing back to the house to write it before it—but it is about that action rather than just, “Oh yeah, it was…”
So, if you could go back in time and give younger you some advice, what would it be, and what age would you be going back to?
I was a pretty precocious child. I was good—I never got in trouble. I was a very goody-two-shoes kid, but I was always pushing the envelope. I was questioning the bishop in the Catholic church in my Catholic school, and my professor was like, “Oh my goodness, what is she doing? She is 14, and she’s questioning the bishop.”
I really understood at a young age that my thoughts were different from other people’s thoughts, and to respectfully challenge authority in that way. However, if I had to go back and tell my younger self something, I would tell myself that I don’t need as much permission as I think I need.
I’ll say to our company—we have a small company—and people ask, “Can we do that?” I’m like, “We can do whatever we want. We have our own company; we can do whatever we want.” And I just keep saying it because they’re all women, and they’re like, “Are we allowed to?” I’m like, “Just place orders and then put it on the internet, and then people buy.” Nobody’s telling us what to do.
We think we need permission. I just met with a consultant the other day about a military initiative we’re hoping to do. My colleague was on the phone with me, and she asked the consultant, “Okay, so what do we need to do to be ready to sell to the military?” The consultant replied, “You guys were ready years ago. You should have been already doing it. What you have is needed; you’re already ready. You should already have a contract by now.” She said, “The men I deal with don’t even have their idea fully done, and they’re selling it to the military.” She’s like, “You’re over-ready.” And we’re like, “Okay, well, how do we work with you so that you can help us?” And she’s like, “Just do it.”
We’re always waiting for permission, like somebody is going to say no. We’re waiting until we have all our housework done until we have permission. We’re always waiting for permission. You don’t need permission.
That’s something else I massively got from your podcasts. Again, self-care has been my work for decades, but it was the way you were saying that it will never be done. The to-do list will never be done, so it’s like actually scheduling in much more rest, scheduling in and enjoying it, knowing no one’s ever done because we’re alive and we’re constantly having and like that.
So, where can people find you? I’ll include it in the show notes, but where would you like people to go first?
Everything’s Organize 365. So, Organize 365 podcast, organized365.com website. I’m Organize 365 on Instagram. It’s pretty much the only social media I’m on other than LinkedIn, and there I’m just my name, Lisa Woodruff.
Well, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and yeah, thanks so much.