|
Organize Visits WIth...Marla Cilley - The Flylady
by Christine Vick
  I warned our IT guy that the FlyLady was going to crash our website. “Nah,” he assured me, “we’re fine.” An hour after Marla Cilley sent an e-mail announcing Organize magazine’s launch to her entire subscriber list, our system went down. Luckily we got right back online, but I had to explain Cilley’s popularity to our technical staff.
FlyLady and Company, Inc., headquartered in Brevard, N.C., set up shop in December 1999. (The “FlyLady” moniker is Cilley’s online identity, chosen because she was once a fly-fishing instructor.) An Internet-based resource that encourages women to create and maintain order in their homes and lives, the FlyLady’s wisdom can be accessed directly through her website (flylady.net) or by registering for daily e-mails that assign tasks, provide reminders and encourage members through testimonials and Cilley’s “musings” on topics such as perfectionism, being prepared and wearing lace-up shoes. The e-mails aren’t for the semi-committed—today I received 10. (Hint: Opt for receiving the FlyLady’s once-a-day digest.)
Cilley’s office is in an unassuming strip mall on Brevard’s main street, but the atmosphere is all southern hospitality. Her 24 employees are friends who lunch together, watch football together and even travel together. The relationships in the FlyLady office were forged through years of turning a fledgling e-letter into a bustling multimillion-dollar business that was recently profiled in Fortune magazine.
At the center of the enterprise stands Marla Cilley, 52, warm, down-to-earth and willing to weigh in on any topic. She’s a woman who lives what she believes.
- Joyce Dorny, Editor-in-Chief, Organize
  It’s hard to imagine that Cilley ever needed organizational help. Her daily e-mails encourage nearly half a million subscribers (and counting) in more than 70 countries to get their lives and homes in order, and the testimonials Cilley receives each day from readers prove her message is powerful. Yet the FlyLady claims she wasn’t “born organized.” And in 1999, when she was Brevard’s newly elected county commissioner, she felt overwhelmed by her daily tasks. “I wanted to get the clutter and the chaos out of my life,” she recalls. “I wanted to feel more peace and less stress.”
 Cilley had made prior efforts to organize. When her now-grown son was five years old, she began following the Sidetracked Home Executives (SHE) program devised by “The Slob Sisters,” Pam Young and Peggy Jones, which uses a 3 x 5 inch card filing system that tracks a daily, weekly or monthly chore. When the chore is complete, that card is pulled and placed in the back of the file. Cilley remembers thinking one day, while examining her 500 cards stored in an 18-inch tray, “I can’t do this to myself.”
 FlyLady followers know keeping the kitchen sink clean is one of her system’s core principles, and it started with a simple request from Cilley’s husband, Robert, a North Carolina district court chief judge. When the pair married in 1996, they promised to always be honest with one another. “Bob told me he was having a problem with dishes in the sink,” explains Cilley. “He told me how he just needed one side of the sink empty. So shining the kitchen sink was a gift to him.”
Keeping her kitchen sink shiny for a month taught Cilley the importance of developing regular cleaning habits. “The kitchen sink is gleaming at you. You’re in shock that you’re not behind the eight ball when you get up in the morning,” she says. “You’re happy. The countertops get cleared off because the sink is pretty. You don’t dare put a dirty dish in there, and before you know it, the dishwasher is empty. Cleaning the sink is contagious to the rest of the kitchen.”
Christine Vick
Christine Vick is a Senior Editor at Organize.
|
