Defining Housework: A Missing Operational Definition

I really love Lillian Gilbreth’s focus on efficiency for the American home. I’d like to think I’m picking up where she left off. After the war, “men took back their jobs.” But did it ever occur to you that women worked at these factories and there were dual income homes before the war? It had not occurred to me.  I wanted to be home but some women wanted to be at work, working in their uniqueness making a paycheck. Now that the soldiers had returned to work, more women were home, the big packaged food companies marketed to her about how to make her life easier.  

Past Mistakes

In the past science has just determined the definition of housework and completed their studies based on it. And human nature is to do the household tasks of your gender, as you saw displayed growing up.  But there’s a new sheriff in town and I asked the public how they defined housework and I am so excited to publish my findings. In conducting studies in the past they also used a convenience sample group for their studies; like all college students.  This gave skewed results. 

In one study, they used married couples with children. This also resulted in what I call “He said, She said” about who is doing what housework. And who is doing more. That convenience sample was ok in the 80’s because that was roughly 60% of the population; married with children. But now? Married with children only represents roughly 25% of the population. My sample groups will be large and mimic the US Census to accurately reflect the general public.  I want to be able to focus on teaching efficiency for all genders, all ethnicities, and all family compositions. Because I want a single mom, a multigenerational home, or a nuclear family to learn how to get organized, leading to productivity, that reduces household work.

1 Problem 1 Product

It’s easy to want to solve one product for one problem but there’s an underlying problem. This is how people try to start to organize often. I used a child getting ear infections as an example. The first infection, one product for one problem. But then too many infections and now we need to look at the underlying problem. When you look for one product for problem, you get in this cycle of decluttering to organization and back to decluttering but you never get to move on to productivity because the skill of organization has not yet been learned.  

But just like getting a celiac diagnosis, you must modify your environment to achieve your desired goal. The Productive Home Solution teaches you to declutter, organize, and modify your home. The Paper Solution® teaches best information management practices. The Sunday Baskset® provides a system to optimize all your household manager responsibilities.  The first time around decluttering and organizing can take some time but then it’s just maintenance. New milestone, then you modify your environment again but you don’t have to learn the skill all over. You just apply it to the new phase of life you are in like a new baby, home, job, or milestone birthday.

The Mission

By now you may have heard Organize 365® is decluttering all work related products and services as of December 31, 2025.  This will allow more time to focus on universal application of the systems Organize 365® offers. I want to answer what is essential housework? How can housework be most efficiently optimized and operationalized? How can we all do less housework? And I plan to focus on testing and disseminating results from studies about systems and methods in the marketplace and in academia. Here’s to the next chapter of Organize 365®.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Sunday Basket®

• The Paper Solution®

• The Productive Home Solution

• Sign Up for the Organize 365® Newsletter 

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!