What she is doing WORKS. And she offers it all for free. Yes, there are the tags at the bottom of every email, enticing you to buy buy buy.

Do you have a television? Do you have shows you love to watch? Do you pick up your television in a fit of rage and throw it out the window whenever you see a commercial?

be a grownup. Don't take the "baby" talk personally. Use her advice if it helps, buy only what you really want to buy, and don't blame others for making a living, or for YOU choosing to sucumn to the commercials and buy everything.

No body is forcing anyone to buy anything. If you want the info/help, it's free for the taking. Deleting testimonials takes less than 5 seconds.

And since when is making money a crime? Maybe it's a crime when it's a woman making the money doing 'woman's work'???

It sickens me that people feel the need to follow this woman, giving her their precious money… I too thought I'd try her feather dusters that she and her crew absolutely swear by… they do NOT work! I swear I have MORE dust after than before starting with them!

Whats more, she has capitilized on someone else's idea!

I have mixed feelings about Marla Cilley and that's the way it's going to stay.

I signed up for her service and used material from her emails, radio show, etc., to motivate me to improve my home life, and it absolutely worked.

Every so often, I would be a little creeped out by the excessive product placement, sexist/right wing undertones, and of course, being addressed as a "baby". HOWEVER, I continued to be subscribed because it continued to help me. Plain and simple – I was paying nothing for this service, and it was useful. Should I really expect more than this? Should I expect her to run her business exactly the way I would run mine? For the price I was paying, how could I complain? As long as it continued to be helpful to me, that outweighed any minor irritations.

I find her extremely emotional displays a little jarring and I dislike that I feel she presents that she is not making a great deal of money from her business. Sometimes, t his irritates me enough that I feel a combination of jealousy and righteousness and yes, want to cut down the tall poppy. However, I get the impression she is not overtly lying about her business income, so in terms of deception in business, hers is very very tame. So, I realize that it was the jealousy fuelling the righteousness, a desire to have a successful business myself, envy that in the group I lead they would never allow me to speak so loosely and paint such inaccuracies about my personal gains from the group (They are mostly men and I am a woman, so this set-up means they will constantly challenge me). Then I remember that even though Flylady's members are mostly female, she is still a female too and that does mean that in general, both females and males will automatically try to reduce her power and authority to lead. I decide that I have a right to feel a little annoyance, but overall feel proud of Marla for soildering on so successfully after so many years.

It's been a few years, and I am starting to approach graduating from Flylady, though I haven't completely unenrolled quite yet.

I have never bought any of her products, I find they are overpriced for what they are. However, I am not morally against it, and if I ever decided something she sells would be useful and a great price, I would certainly consider buying it from her. This may be unlikely as I have mentioned I will probably graduate/unenroll in the not-too-distant future. But one things's for sure, I have a profound (though a little begrudging) respect for the extremely successful, certainly not perfect but certainly not horrid, businesswoman extraordinairre, Marla Cilley.

Perennial Flybaby in Hillsboro, Oregon

Posted By Christine, Portland OR : November 8, 2007 2:21 pm

###I think there are many other places one should go to get appritiation, I mean come on, self esteem people! IT IS GOOD! And you should not have a bug making you feel better about yourself, in my opinion!
I am very aware not every one is a middle aged house frau on , or in need of anti- depressants, or new housecleaning items.
That would be a statistical impossability. But I believe the writer was stating a average, nothing wrong with that! But that said, I agree if she did see a open end in the market selling to those who have to scrape and save their "mad Money" for months, to buy her products, it is really quite ingenoius when you come to look at it, it makes the woman who buy into it feel better, and she gets a thriving business!!100 years ago this would have not happened!

I hit the door at the end of the day, and thank god– there's the meal for my family that's ready to go, because when I opened my morning email, one note said: "toss in a load of wash" which I did in 2 minutes while my tea was brewing, and another said "what's for dinner tonight?" and I pulled the frozen stuff out of the freezer and dashed off a couple notes about what needed to be picked up on the way home. Then it was off to my full-time job at the University.

I can run a national project because these gals are thinking *for* me, about something I'm not that interested in (housekeeping, cooking). I need my house running great, so I can excel in my professional field. And I sure don't want to make a list about it–and why should I? These generous people are helping me out for free!

I've never bought a thing from their shop, and I don't really do more than the basics, and ya, sure, I roll my eyes at the gushy language, because I'm an analytical type of person, so that's not my personal style– but scientists do engage in systems-thinking, and do identify problems (the damn house) and then DO experiment and try anything that might actually solve a problem, and, boy, this works for me.

Here's the great part– all the 'cognitive space' that used to track all the details of daily life is now available for bigger and better things, because a little auto-email pings me a reminder. No worry I'll forget it. No writing down, no nothing. Just select-all and delete.

Better yet, now my weekends are free of chores, paperwork, and laundry and available for backpacking, kayaking, skiing, and trips with friends. That's a pretty big pay-off for enduring a little purple prose.

So why does this reporter have such a beef with the Flylady? The tone of this article was ridiculously cynical and unnecessarily nasty. Having been an email member of the Flylady group for over three years, I can assure you that Flylady has actively helped more people, with less thought of herself, than this reporter is ever likely to.

And if she and her company are making a profit – how does that make them different from any successful small-to-medium sized business? They are selling actual goods, and as such, are not defrauding anyone. What was the real purpose in writing this article?

Weird, nasty article. Really quite poor reporting.

Clearly Ms. Hauser does not understand the system. Perhaps she herself is so organized as to not need helpful reminders about how to structure one's day, but not everyone is so blessed. The FlyLady works particularly for people who do not have an innate sense of order and don't know what to do next sometimes. Marla Cilley shared her system for over-coming the fact that she was easily side-tracked, to the benefit of countless people. The reminders coming through out the day are obviously most pertinent to people at home who may have gotten side-tracked by their computer, but even for people like me who check their email after a long busy day, the reminder to do my bedtime routine, laying out my clothes for the next day and checking my calendar is helpful.

As a business owner, I readily accept Cilley's explanation for the business side of her service. She sends out reminders and advice for free to over 400,000 members and fields countless emails. That means that THOUSANDS of people find her encouragement helpful. That also means that in order to keep up with all those people, Cilley needed help. Everyone has to get paid. Everyone has to eat. I don't begrudge her selling useful tools at fair prices that support her teachings of cleanliness and order. Yes, some of them are kitschy and tacky. So, I don't buy them! Frankly, I find her advertising less offensive than most anything else that I encounter on the internet and it's REALLY easy to delete.

One thing I noticed in this article was the lack of interviews from members. Perhaps it's because we Flybabies are such a cultish, brain-washed lot that Ms. Hauser felt conducting interviews would be a waste of time. There may be a better reason for such unbalanced journalism that I am missing.