86 | Home is the Most Important Organization with Eve Rodsky

Welcome to Episode 86, where we sit down with Eve Rodsky. 

Eve turned a "blueberries breakdown" into a catalyst for social change by applying her Harvard-trained background in organizational management to the home. Her New York Times bestselling book, Fair Play, a gamified life management system, has elevated the conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her follow-up book, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Eve explores the intersection of creativity, productivity, and resilience, offering an antidote to physical, mental, and emotional burnout.

In this episode, Eve shares her journey from a chaotic childhood to becoming a thought leader in domestic equity. She discusses the importance of treating the home as an organization, the mental load women carry, and the significance of time choice. Eve also shares a peek into the groundbreaking research from the Fair Play Policy Institute and the University of Southern California, which highlights the mental health impacts of cognitive labor.

Join us as we explore how to have effective conversations about domestic responsibilities, the revolutionary question of "What do I want?" and the importance of Unicorn Space for personal fulfillment and generational change.

And join me as I extend an open invitation to you—to be part of the "100 Hours of Listening" initiative. Whether you're a friend, past client, silent listener, or a fellow professional, your voice matters. This isn't a sales pitch or a consultation; it's an opportunity for you to be heard, without cost or obligation, in a non-judgmental space.

Book a session here, come as you are.

GUEST INFO:
Eve Rodsky, Website | @everodsky Instagram | @fairplaylife  Instagram 

RESOURCE:
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MENTIONED:
“Cognitive household labor: gender disparities and consequences for maternal mental health and wellbeing” | University of Southern California + The Fair Play Policy Institute

Reese's Book Club 

Renée Brinkerhoff and La Carrera Panamericana Race | Website

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Transcript

Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.

Amelia: Welcome to Episode 86, “Home is the Most Important Organization with Eve Rodsky.” 

Eve Rodsky transformed a blueberries breakdown into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard-trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question. What would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? 

Her New York Times bestselling book and Reese's book club pick, Fair Play, a gamified life management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship, has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space, Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too -Busy World, Rodsky explores the cross -section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Described as an antidote to physical, mental, and emotional burnout, Rodsky aims to inspire a new narrative around the equality of time and the individual right to personal time choice that influences sustainable and lasting change on a policy level. 

Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Seth and their three children.

Amelia: So welcome to the podcast, Eve.

Eve: My God, I'm so happy to be here.

Amelia: Yay! So I joined your Fair Play facilitator program because someone posted in a coaching forum looking for support regarding partnership household negotiations. And this was a few years ago and I had no idea that the program existed and I signed up immediately. I'd read both of your books by that point and the facilitator program was actually the missing link for me.

It brought all of the topics that I coach on under one umbrella. And I just want to thank you for encouraging us all to do this essential work.

Eve: Well, I feel the same way about you, Amelia. I mean, you're out there and you're allowing us at the Fair Play Policy Institute to do things. Like, what happened today was there was a headline where the Surgeon General just announced that parenting is a stressor. And a lot of people - like CBS and other outlets - are calling us because we just had a study and we'll talk about that on this particular issue. 

And we wouldn't be able to do that type of groundbreaking research if we were always trying to make the case for why we have to empower men to step into their full power in the home so that women can step out into their full power in the world. And so that's why we needed the facilitators. Because at the end of the day, you are what makes this movement a movement. When people understand that there's context behind...

It's coaching with context. Because I think what was happening before people like you existed, and we know this because I interviewed a lot of therapists, we would ask MFTs, I would ask even licensed PhDs, psychologists, how much of the gender lens, how much have you heard about unpaid labor and invisible work, the sociology of the patriarchy, of how we control women's time - you these big themes that we can talk about. 

And typically, you know, what you hear is that, no, I've never been trained in those. That would have been sociology. I took psychology undergrad in my MFT program. We've learned about communication techniques, but not about anything about how cognitive labor, you know, falls on women particularly. And so how is that helpful?

If you go into a coaching session or a therapy session and you're told to use I statements, I remember that was happening with me and Seth before Fair Play. Use I statements. And I said, “Okay, I [f*cking] hate you Seth. That's an I statement.” So again, I'm just really, really, really happy to be collaborating with you.

Amelia: Yes, yes, and it is really, yeah, it's really hard to lead when that resentment, that irritation is underneath of it all and such a starting place. 

Well, I ask all of my guests to take a step back for a moment and think about what organization did or didn't look like for you during your childhood because it influences many of the things we'll talk about here today.

Eve: I love that question. I've heard you ask it before and it makes me laugh because it is exactly the origin story of Fair Play. When you grow up in a very chaotic household like I did, I was a parental child. So my mother was a single mother. My father left the family when my mother was pregnant with my brother. We moved to New York when I was three and to sort of a tenement, a Lower East Side area that we grew up in and it was my mother, me and my brother. 

And so there just wasn't enough people or time to keep everything from not falling through any cracks. So I would say that for me, the hardest part of organization wasn't the fact that there were dishes in the sink or that we didn't have, sometimes we didn't even have access to running water or the utility would be shut off. It was the fact that rent - and mail - are still the things I think about a lot with organization. What it was like to see piles and piles of mail Amelia, just lining up. And so when I was in second grade, or no, Ms. Hornstein, so when I was in third grade, I started to open my mother's mail and to organize it in piles because we had an eviction notice on our door.

And it was very, very hard for me to see that eviction notice and think we were gonna have to evacuate and leave our house. And so as a child, I wanted to control the chaos. And so I started to help my mother and remind her to pay her bills. So for me, when I think about organization or the lack thereof, it comes up a lot with bill paying in mail and just the metaphor and also the actual image in my mind of what that pile of mail looked like.

Amelia: Thank you so much for sharing that story and reflection. And it leads me to where I want to start in terms of mental load and time choice, because I am part of an industry that basically sells productivity, efficiency, especially in the home, right? I see time choice as a deep desire for women.

Eve: Right.

Amelia: And that small step of helping your mother organize the mail created space for her. And I would love for you to just kind of define this big topic of time choice and see, tell us why you see it as a core issue for everyone.

Eve: Correct.

Yes, that's a great question. So I think what was really hard for me when I started. This project of Fair Play started in 2011. And as they call research, “me search,” right? This was after - I tell this story many times - Seth sent me the text, “I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries.” I break down in my car, not understanding why everything was falling on me, why I had become the default or the “she fault” for literally every single household and domestic tasks for my family.

And not understanding, Amelia, that I was living a statistic that I didn't know either, which is that women shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. And the why of, “Why is this happening to me?” evolved to understand a very, very big concept, what you're talking about. 

So at first I thought I wasn't productive enough. Maybe I had ADHD, maybe I'm just… I grew up in a single parent household, so I don't know how to involve Seth. Every excuse for why I broke down that day over the text that Seth sent me, “I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries,” which encapsulated the fact that I was doing it all for my family, was an excuse that was blaming myself. Until I started to understand, and this again, why I love your coaching, the broader context of what was happening to me. And here's the rub.

I put my researcher hat on and it turns out that the thing we're talking about today has a name. And it's been talked about every decade, pretty much since the industrial revolution. It's been called the second shift. It's been called the mental load. It's been called invisible labor. But my favorite term is just a term coined in 1986 by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels. And she coined this term “invisible work.” That women shoulder all the invisible work of house organization, home organization, and child rearing because it's trillions of dollars and hours globally. 

And when you control women and how they spend their time, you control power. So the opposite of controlling time is time choice. And so what I understood was that part of controlling time choice is forcing women to be complicit in their own oppression, right? 

To take pride as one neuroscientist said to me, “You all wanna take pride in wiping asses and doing dishes. How great for you? Well, that gives me more time for my tenure and my golf game.” So we become complicit in our own oppression and we decide to use our time the way patriarchy tells us to because it's just easier and we don't even realize it's happening to us.

So once you can sort of take that lid off things and understand that fundamentally, this is not about who takes out the garbage. Fundamentally, this is not about who drives your kids to school. It's not about who's helping you. It's not about delegation. This is ultimately about the end of the day that as a society, we've chosen to view women's time as if it's sand, as if it's infinite. And we've chosen to guard men's time as if it's diamonds, finite.

And if you don't believe me, right, you can just look everywhere. You can look at what happens when women enter male professions. The salaries automatically go down. It's happening with flight attendants right now. There's articles showing that flight attendants, mostly women, are homeless. They can't afford their rent. They're making less than, you know, dog trainer, dog walkers. So we start seeing occupational segregation when women enter male professions or are in their own professions like teaching, the salaries are low because women's time is just less valuable. 

We see health systems say things, as you know, Amelia, because you're involved in maternal mental health and physical health, that we say things to women like, “Breastfeeding is free,” when it's really 1800 hours a year. And so we just continue this cycle of helping women devalue their own time. And we have to break that. And once we do that and understand that women's time is diamonds. It's finite, extremely finite, just like men's time. Then we can start building a movement from the ground up where garbage is taken out, where a home is organized, where you do know who's opening the mail - the important things - but it's within the context of what you and I were talking about in the beginning, the context of Fair Play. And that's again why we need the facilitators. We need people who have both the ability to help people get that garbage taken out on time and the bills paid on time, but also understand the context of why it didn't happen in the first place.

Amelia: Yes, and I also see it kind of woven through my life and so many listeners who are in the sandwich generation where we're caring for children and caring for our parents, our loved ones, and that's another area where women are often shouldering the brunt of the work and are underpaid or not paid at all.

Eve: Yes.Yes.

Amelia: So I love that you've established the Fair Play Policy Institute. And recently, the Fair Play Policy Institute has collaborated with the University of Southern California to gather even more data, right? This is ongoing because we need the stats. People believe the stats. can show that the impact of the inequitable distribution of cognitive lever falls primarily on women. 

And the first set of results came out and they showed that this invisible work of noticing what needs to be done, anticipating the needs of others, that pre-planning, the thinking step, is significantly associated with all measures of mental health and wellbeing.

Eve: Yes. Can I take you on the road because you just did a beautiful job of summarizing the whole study? Yes.

Amelia: Yeah, and I can't wait for even more information to come forth because listeners, we see it in our own lives. We feel it in our homes. Yet to be fair, right, we're all looking at our households and wondering how to have these difficult conversations. So I love that you say start where you are. What would you like to share with listeners about how to have a collaborative discussion with a partner or a housemate? One conversation at a time is how this changes.

Eve: Yeah. I love that question because first of all, I think it's really important that you put how to have the conversation with your partner in the same sentence as the USC cognitive labor study. And I'll tell you why, because we need the big data to show us what's happening to women and their mental health. And we also need the practical solutions. And so what Fair Play does is it tries to provide both. It says, “It’s not your fault.”

We're all in situations where we can't communicate about these issues because if we could, we would have already. If we could have conversations about laundry and who's anticipating the needs of what your fall wardrobe will need to be for your kids, whether it's boots or umbrellas or backpacks, if we were able to do that, then the cards, the Fair Play cards wouldn't be so triggering. 

I wouldn't have thousands of DMs a month with people talking about how the cards feel to them because they're just household tasks laid out in cards. So why does just having a card that says laundry or mail or garbage or school lunches, why does that make people cry? Why? Cards Against Humanity doesn't make people cry. 

It makes people cry because it feels futile to a lot of people. They wanna change something in their personal life, whether it's with a roommate, whether it's with a partner, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband. But I will say that a lot of what I do is centering women married to men because as we said earlier, this is a time choice issue that's very gendered about how we treat men's time and how we treat women's time.

So typically this issue comes up the most for women who are married in married partnerships with men. And it's obviously worse after kids because for those of you who've heard us talk before, Fair Play is a system. There's a metaphor, but there's also a literal card game. It's both, and it's the metaphor of who's holding the cards. It could be you against the cards, but it's also actually a hundred cards. And there's 60 cards in play if you don't have children, if you're a roommate or a boyfriend situation or even platonic, you know, roommates or polyamorous people have used the cards. 

And then you add 40 cards if you bring children into the relationship. So I think just understanding that if you add 40 cards, you're adding double the work you've ever been used to doing in your entire life to your plate when you have a child. I think that alone should hopefully feel freeing to people for why they would ideally have a conversation before they have children. A lot of people come to it after [they have children] though, Amelia.

Amelia: And it makes sense, given the original comment you started with, with the Surgeon General's report out today.

Eve: Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. Very highly stressful. But the problem is, because there's so much love associated with the relationship of bringing a child into the world, people seem to think that love relationships shouldn't be said in the same sentence as organizational relationships. 

So then I would ask people, well, what are you expecting if it's a love relationship? Because in an organizational relationship, I wouldn't walk into your office and say, “Hey, I work for A Pleasant Solution. So I'm gonna go, I don't really know how to answer you. I'm gonna go ask my boss what I should be doing today. And I'm just gonna wait here until they tell me what to do.” 

Right? I mean, I know that that wouldn't work for you. It's not gonna work for people. So people understand that in any other organizational setting, you don't just sit around and say, “I'm your helper. I'm just gonna do whatever. As long as you give me a list, I'm good.” No.

But in the home relationship, because there's supposedly this love situation, instead of getting explicitly defined expectations, those are the three words I'm wanting for the conversation - explicitly defined expectations. Instead of those three words, they're replaced with my worst three words that literally make me cringe every time I hear them. And I'm sure that you do too, as somebody who specializes in organizations and coaching, is that we're gonna “figure it out.”

So I understand that it could feel stressful to think, okay, this is an organization, but unfortunately I'm here to tell you your home is an organization. And so you have two choices. You can have explicitly defined expectations that's gonna give you that time choice that you need and help for you, or you're gonna “figure it out,” which means that everything will default to the “she fault.” 

So I think the most important thing is if you understand that. Then you can come into a conversation saying something like, “It hasn't worked in the past because I've been a verbal assassin. I've been giving feedback in the moment.” 

Typically, that's how I do things. “Pick up your clothes. Why is this on the stairs? Pack your backpack, whatever it is. Take out the garbage, right?” That's my sort of nails on the chalkboard communication style. And understand that we're not asking people to start a conversation, Amelia, we're not.

We're asking them to shift the conversation because we're all already communicating about domestic life. And we're doing it in this “figure it out” moment of, like, complete and total stress, feedback in the moment, unproductive conversations when emotion is high and cognition is low. 

So I think if people start to understand, “Hey, we're communicating about domestic life. I know you don't think we are, but we have been and it's happening every day and we're vomiting on each other all over the place and no one knows what's happening and it's complete chaos.” 

I wanna shift how we talk about the home. And maybe if we can start to think of it more as an organization, then it would be you and me figuring out how to be partners in this organization as opposed to me treating you like an intern where you have no agency in this organization. I want you to be my partner and have organizational agency.

And I just need for that to happen in a way that feels safe for both of us. So maybe we do it over coffee or let's go get dinner or In and Out burger, or let's do it on our anniversary, but let's plan to have this conversation when it can feel safe to us. That's sort of what I'm looking for as people approach this topic.

Amelia: Yeah, I love that analogy because it makes it so visible, right? I don't want you to be my intern. That's not what we signed up for here. Yeah.

Eve: Yeah, yes. Yes, yes, exactly.

Eve: Yeah, like we took vows as partners and partnership really matters to me. And you can't have partnership without recognizing that we're partners in an organization. And yes, it sucks. It's not sexy to think of it that way. But what's been happening is because we're not thinking about it that way. We're just getting by and we're figuring things out on the go. And that just hasn't been working for me. 

So I think you really can aim the problem on the cards, on the tasks. You can blame me. You can say this annoying woman, you know, said I have to talk to you about this for my mental health, because otherwise I'm going to be sick. You know, just blame us out there because we will keep, you know, banging down your door to say it's never too late. It's never too late. It's really never too late to have a conversation, to have the conversation shift. Yes, the shift, not the start. It's already started. Exactly.

Amelia: Yes, yes, because the conversation is happening. It has. Well, I just want to share, you mentioned the weight of the cards and I have actually seen someone tear up around the Unicorn Space card.

Eve: Yeah, yeah.

Amelia: And I just wanna say that like a lot of my coaching work involves helping women unlearn the standards and expectations they've been taught growing up to learn self-compassion and kindness around home management, task management, time management. And I often say the question, “What do I want?” in any situation is the most revolutionary question a woman can ask.

Eve: Yes, yes. Yes, I love that question so much.

Amelia: Yeah, because it actively re-centers us in our own lives and to know that women are tearing up about this card Unicorn Space to have that time choice, the pursuit of passion and creativity. I'd love to ask you kind of why is it a win for other people when a woman gives herself permission to be unavailable, to burn guilt and shame and to use her voice?

Eve: Such a beautiful question. Again, I love how you frame a lot of these issues again, which is why you're good at your job. 

So yes, there's a card in the Fair Play system that's called “Unicorn Space.” And I wrote a whole second book about it because there was so much research we left on the table. And what that card indicates of the 100 cards is that you get one and your partner gets one. And it's permission to be you - outside of your roles. 

So just to give you some context, Amelia, I've been doing qualitative research since 2011. And that's what's so beautiful about USC is that now they're getting… We're adding quantitative research with really fun statistical regressions and stuff to our models (or whatever they call it). I'm forgetting what the researcher called it, but yes, with a lot of quantitative research, but the qualitative research was showing that women, when we would ask them, I would ask them - I was hearing from them, “I don't feel permission to be unavailable from my roles.” 

So then I would ask women, “What do you feel permission to be, in general?” And so the typical thing we heard was that they - women - felt permission to be three things: parents, partners, professionals. So that's the three P's. 

So when I would ask women, “Well give me a day where you can tell me the most important thing you did that day, outside of those three P's.” Most women I would say, and I would still say most, again I don't have the quantitative answer, but I would say it's probably a majority or supermajority of the people we've surveyed said that they could not answer that question.

They did not remember a day where the most important thing they did that day was outside of those roles. 

My cousin, actually, I was on her podcast yesterday. She talks about joining a softball league and hitting a home run and that being the most important thing she did last week because she showed her son that she could do it too. Because he's also in baseball and how important it was for her and her team to get into the next round of the playoffs. So there are women who are modeling this. 

But I think it's an important piece of homework, and I'd love to hear from your listeners, our listeners, people who are listening to this, tell me your answer. Are you one of the people who can't answer that question because [you’ve] been stuck in this permission to be unavailable? Or is there some beautiful thing you wanna share with us that we can now inspire other people? 

There's a woman named Renée that I think about a lot, Brinkerhoff. I wrote about her because she told me that she felt that as a parent, partner sometimes professional, she helped her husband and his company, but really was a stay-at-home parent, 56 years old - feeling incredibly stuck with Adam Grant would call “languishing” - back to the Unicorn Space, not having that beautiful space that's mythical and magical for you. 

It doesn't exist, like a unicorn is fake, it's not real until you conjure it. And then she says that, she tells him the story of how, again, all the Fair Play cards are falling on her. Her family - she was defined by the cards - how well… So people would say, “I love how well you wrap gifts. I love that amazing casserole or whatever meal you made. You're so thoughtful.”  Which is another card. That's the card that's called, like, In-laws and Parents Management. You are an unbelievable organizer. That's Calendar Manager, right? 

So she said her life was being defined by the cards, and even the compliments she was getting were defined by the cards. So she decided that that wasn't okay for her anymore. She didn't want her life to be “compliments defined by the cards.” And so she says to herself, “I'm stuck.” So she starts thinking about what “unstuck” would mean for her. And that was speed.

So she ends up fast forward to renting a Porsche convertible, a vintage Porsche convertible in Mexico. And she found a navigator and she entered herself in a race called the Carrera Panamericana, which is a race around Mexico where you can place. It's this long distance, like a really, really fast race car driver race. And she places in the race. She was one of the first women ever to place in the race at 56. Well, if you cut to...

Amelia: That's incredible.

Eve: Cut to her now, she's 68 and she's been a racer on every single continent. She's the only person to ever race in a custom car in Antarctica. And she also raises money for child trafficking and other amazing things. But the coolest part, Amelia, is her daughter, who's now her manager, who said to me, “I only knew my mom up until 10 years ago, as defined by me in relation to what she did for me. And knowing her as a human being, has changed our entire relationship and changed my dreams too.” 

That is what we're doing this for. Not just for us. If you don't think it's important relationally to be outside of those three Ps, I'm telling you, for the people watching and the next generation, you have an obligation to do it.

Amelia: That's really it, right? When I am working with individuals or with couples, right? We're talking about generational change.

Eve: Yeah, generational change.

Amelia: And it's just, I don't know, it chokes me up. And yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering when and where it's going to happen for me, you know, I think the key is just to start today and find those small moments of time, shift the conversation in your home, as you're saying, Eve, and make it happen because it is essential to our own wellbeing, as well as the children that we're modeling for.

Eve: And again, why I'm here is, because the facilitators - what you're doing -  is such an important part of the puzzle. Because we see it, I wrote about this in Unicorn Space that people are 66% more likely if they have an accountability partner to do something. And it goes up to something like 99% more likely if they have a “success partner,” which is somebody who sort of steps with them into this journey. And so I do think it's really important. It's very hard to do on your own.

We're here for you. That's why this is a movement. We don't want you to feel like you are isolated or alone because it can feel hard. My cousin, the one I was talking to yesterday, the one who isn't a race car driver yet (even though I could see her being one). She's a Softball player. But she has six kids and she's in an Orthodox Jewish community. And when she started to break out of that community and to do things for herself people said to her, “Well, there's no way that Beth would really want to be a boxer. Why would she do that? She must be having an affair with her trainer, right?” Or whatever it is. 

She was basically saying that her whole community is defined in relation to how many children you have, what type of caregiver you are. And when she started to do things for herself, people did start shaming her. So it's not always so easy. 

You think that people… It's a spa day. What are you doing? Nobody likes somebody who says, as you said, “I wonder how I'm gonna feel about this.” Or your magic question, “What do I want?” It's very hard because when you say, “What do I want?” That's a boundary and people don't like boundaries. So this is not gonna be people cheering for you in the corner. Some will, the Amelia's of the world will, I will, but you have to recognize that some of what we're saying is still subversive. 

Look at what's happening in the political rhetoric of trying to force women back in the home. Take away our birth control. We're hearing politicians say that women's only use is to take care of children. Postmenopausal women should only be grandmothers. So it's not going to be easy to push back. This is subversive stuff, Amelia, we're talking about.

Amelia: It is. It is, and it’s totally worth it.

Eve: And worth it, exactly.

Amelia: Anything else you'd like to add or share before we wrap our conversation today?

Eve: I think I just want to end on one thing… I'm a lawyer, I work in behavior design. You want people to stop at a stop sign. You pass a law. You know, I look at things through that. And so why do I need to work with coaches… I think that I just want to end on the fact that for me, because I'm not a psychologist, I'm someone who works in behavior design, I just want people to adopt the solutions, because I know they work. 

But it is important to understand your WHY. And I just wanna be very clear that happiness and mental health are not the same thing. So I wanna give people the gift of not saying my WHY is I wanna be happy or I want my kids to be happy. I wanna drop that for women and say what I learned that was so helpful to me in researching my second book was that mental health is really having appropriate emotions at appropriate times and having the ability and strength to weather them. And so just, if you know that, it's giving yourself a lot of grace, because most of our emotions that are appropriate are gonna be anger, rage, resentment, just being pissed at everything, and that's okay. But we have to be able to weather them, and we're gonna weather them.

So whether you wanna weather it by doing the binge watching, the doom scrolling, the edibles, the mommy juice, the wine? Or do we wanna weather it through some of this long-term generational change? Be the Renées, be our own race car drivers, right? That is what I want people to understand, that having emotions like rage and resentment, those are not gonna go away if you do what we're telling you. It's just you're gonna have a better umbrella.

Amelia: Love it, love it, yes, that emotional resilience and emotional tolerance, that is what will lead to that healthy relationship and the lasting difference for couples, partners, multigenerational households, just a space that is healthier and well. For sure.

Eve: Thank you.

Amelia: So what's one, it can be a creative way, one way that you employ organization now as an adult?

Eve: I think the most amazing thing about organization is understanding that that word can mean so many different beautiful things. But at the end of the day for me, it just means that I have expectations over assumptions. That's it. So I use “organization” defined like that in everything I do. 

What is your expectation of me? I don't want to assume. And if we bring that to - whether the expectation is that the keys should be in the drawer, or that the groceries need to be put away right when they come in, or that my child has to sit down to do their homework before they get screens - that is all organization. 

So it doesn't necessarily mean, and as you know this from Amelia, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to have a sock drawer that has like bows in it, right? Or that everything is rainbow color coordinated. No, it just means that you're trading assumptions for expectations.

Amelia: Love it. Thank you so much for your time today, Eve.

Eve: So good to be with you.

Outro: Hey y'all, share the love. Remember, if you've had at least one valuable takeaway from this episode, someone else will too. I'd encourage you to share it with like-minded folks and suggest they follow the podcast too. I truly appreciate your time and I don't take it for granted.