Episode Details

There are four types of work that we all do at home. In this episode, I go through these four types of work in detail and discuss how to reduce the amount of time spent on the first three so you can do more unique purpose work.

We've talked a lot over the last couple of years about housework. As a part of our Organize 365® Research, I have honed in on and defined this type of work. There are three main types of housework: cleaning, tasks of daily living, and organization. You must clean your home to some standard you set, do all the tasks that make you a human, like showering and brushing your teeth, plus the things in your house must have a home. Housework is like a part-time job of 18-25 hours each week for the average household without children!

Listen to these episodes for more about how I define housework:

• #422 - Defining Housework Part 1 - Cleaning
• #424 - Defining Housework Part 2 - Tasks of Daily Living
• #426 - Defining Housework Part 3 - Organization
• #428 - Defining Housework Part 4 - Maintenance
• #495 - The Process of Equitably Dividing Housework
• #497 - Housework: The Hot Mess Theory Part 1 with Jacqui Ioli
• #498 - Housework: The Hot Mess Theory Part 2 with Jacqui Ioli
• #499 - Effort: The 80/20 of Housework - Not All Housework is Equal

This is the work that happens in your Sunday Basket®. I talked about this with Eve Rodsky. Invisible work is the mental load and related tasks to running a household. These are things like paying the bills and planning for holidays. This type of work doesn't fit into the housework category and we have a hard time labeling and quantifying it.

The Sunday Basket® System helps with invisible work. The first six weeks of setup and habit-building can take a lot of time because you're setting up systems and processes. You have a set time to handle all these little one-off or recurring tasks. It might take you 90 minutes to 3 hours in the beginning, but then something magical happens. The time savings (and lightened mental load) that you experience during the week is exponential. The average Sunday Basket® user saves 5 hours each week!

There is a second type of invisible work: emergency invisible work. Illnesses, scheduled changes, and childcare/adult care fall into this category. When you or someone else gets sick in your family, the world around you doesn't stop and wait for you. The regular work doesn't go away and the emergency itself often creates more work. There are also schedule changes that are really just a part of life and we have to just roll with them. Not everyone has the final category, but childcare and caregiving for adults is a full-time 24/7 job all on its own.

Angela Watson and I talked a lot about hobby work earlier this summer in relation to teachers. We naturally fill our time