Episode 43: The Deliberate Mental Shift You Need To Make That Stops The Bad Habit Of Over Organizing

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs, and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, everyone, this is Julie, and today I want to talk to you about the deliberate mental shift that you need to make that will stop the bad habit of over organizing. So when I was a little girl, I hated Saturday mornings with a vengeance. My mom would wake us up and she'd proceed to hand us this little white index card. It was filled with the day's chores, and sorting socks always seemed to land on mine. It was annoying as hell. The whole family's worth of socks would be in one big basket, and it was my job to sort them and match them all. And no matter how fast I went, it just. It always took forever. So when I found myself as an adult sorting my kids socks, I was like, how can I stop doing this forever? Turns out I could. But it didn't mean handing the chore off to the kids. It was about me thinking differently about socks. And I promise you, this is gonna come around to your business here in a little bit. So what did I do? Like, how did I shift my thinking to figure out a way to eliminate this? So first, I bought each kid a different brand of socks. So it was like Adidas for Evan, Nike for Ellie, Hanesaway for Eden. And then I found this, like, cute shoe bench for the front room. And the seat opened up and it had like, this big storage underneath the bench seat. And then I literally just dumped every clean sock into the shoe bench. I didn't match them, didn't do anything. So instead of folding socks, matching socks, putting them away in drawers, right? I just kept a pile of unmatched socks in a storage compartment right next to the shoes. So whenever the kids would go outside, they'd run to the front room, open the bench, grab two of their brand of sock, put it on, put their shoes on, and go. And then I got even smarter as time went on. I had a little basket for the dirty socks. So that way when they came in, they took off their shoes, they would take off their socks Throw them right there. And I just bought enough socks to have that bench so full that every kid had way more than enough. And the whole thing just like became this self contained system. Grab the basket of dirty socks, wash, dry, throw them back in the bench. And what used to cost me so much in time and aggravation was virtually eliminated. And what did I do? I made a mental shift for from socks are clothes to socks are part of shoes. That's all I did. And it completely changed the game. So I'm calling this deliberate mental shifting. Because there are so many things in our lives and in our businesses that we just assume we need to do. We don't stop and observe how maybe social pressure or, you know, quote the normal way to do something might actually be flawed or altogether unnecessary. In fact, in just one of my latest blog posts, I explained how I mentally shifted the idea of a morning routine because it wasn't as productive as I thought. So if you were to go through your daily tasks, I bet there is evidence of what I would call over organization. Matching socks is an example of this. It appears organized, right? It satisfies our ocd. It's also a complete waste of time. So here are some ways that maybe in your business which you might be over organizing and like tricking yourself into thinking that you're being productive. So have you ever created a complicated filing system on your Google Drive or in your inbox, even though you know that after a few weeks you won't be able to stick to it and eventually the downloads folder or your inbox will look like a bomb went off, right? Or maybe you create a new system on Trello or Asana or some other project management program. You think that it's going to solve your issue of disorganization, forgetting that just three months ago you did the same thing all over again and then didn't stick to it? Maybe you've created like 17 Google calendars, all with different colors and labels to try to keep track of every task and in what's happening in each hour. Or maybe your content strategy plan includes turning all your podcast episodes into, you know, a minimum of 85 different quote memes for Instagram because you're supposed to be everywhere all the time, right? Or when it's time to create a course or write a book or do any of that important work, you find you're spending 95% of your time working on the outline. Okay, so some of you might be listening to me, you know, talk about that list and be like, oh my gosh, that's me. That's me. Others of you might be laughing, be like, no, there's no semblance of over organization in my life right now. Even if that's true, the principle of mental shifting that I'm about to show you is still important to understand because I find that the most disorganized of people tend to revert to the strictest of systems and rituals in an attempt to control their distracted mind. So, and it also, like, stands to note here, you may not notice this sort of rigidity in your business, but you, it might be showing up in other areas. So, like, raise your hand if you're the kind of person who gravitates towards diet methods that include like, cleaning out your fridge and buying all the new foods, and then you organize them in your fridge, and then you weigh and track your calories or your macros or whatever, and you create this whole new system. And it's almost like an adrenaline high when you get started or when you go to clean a room in your house, do you get lost in one drawer and then three hours later, you're now organizing old photos by year? Okay, so that kind of behavior is another example of this sort of our brain is, is just like trying to find control. And the key to spotting this behavior in your business and in yourself is to look at where you feel the most out of control. Because we are wired for symmetry and order. And so when we feel the opposite of it in our lives and our businesses, we tend to grab onto any methodology that promises to put it all back in order. Because you want that feeling of control. It's a powerful feeling. But most of the time what really happens is the control that you want over that issue doesn't really actually end up in your hands. It's now locked into the rigidity of a new routine that now takes time to keep up with that you don't have time to do. So let's unpack this with one thing that we all have, which is an email inbox. Okay, so let's deliberately mental shift our inbox. So there's an understood belief for most people that says, you know, an inbox zero is organized. So we laugh, we joke, we talk about the little red notification on our phone that shows, you know, 700,000 unread message, unread messages. But we all feel a sense of stress when we open up a disorder disaster of a Gmail inbox, right? We feel out of control. What if there's a message I'm missing? Okay, some of us at first Glance may launch into a three hour long research project looking at new apps and tools, methodologies to organize your aimbox. And by the way, we probably also doing this during our sacred time. If you haven't listened to my podcast on the 15010 time. It's natural for these kinds of things to happen because when we set aside time to clear our mind for the important work we want to do, it also creates this like beautiful empty arena for every worry and insecurity and problem to come rushing in. So anyway, maybe we, you know, we get stressed about our inbox, we set up Unroll Me, we create filter rules, we have, you know, 85 new folders to organize everything. But three weeks later you're annoyed. Why? Because Unroll me caught some of your favorite emails that are now going into that folder and you want them in your inbox and your zillion folders. You're not really keeping up with it as well as you thought. It's time consuming. The filter rules of caught messages that you needed to see and now you just have this dis. Ease and like nervousness that you're missing stuff because of your system. So time to think of a new system and then around and around and around it goes. So this is, this causes so much additional work and mental bandwidth because in our attempt to get something under control, we reach for systems that are over organizing us, that are taking time and bandwidth to keep up with. So let's deliberately mental shift about Gmail. Okay, Here we go. Truth 1. Gmail is powered by Google, right? Which means you can buy like virtually unending amounts of storage for gmail for like 10 bucks a month, right? So the truth is you don't ever have to delete an email. Never. You just archive it. And if you need to find it again, Gmail is also powered by the company that makes the best search query on planet Earth, right? The Google search. So you can just search with any one keyword and chances are it'll pull up whatever you need. Okay? That's the truth. Which means you don't have to delete emails and you don't have to hyper organize them at all because you have the best search tool on planet Earth. It's way, way, way better than any of the folders you could possibly come up with. Truth number two, there's really only one folder you need in your inbox and that's action needed, right? A folder that tells you, hey, answer these emails, right? So once they're answered, boom, archive them. Long ago in 1992, your inbox was the action needed folder, right? But those times have come and gone. So how about each Morning you take 3 seconds, scan your emails just on the first page, move the ones that need your attention into action needed, and then archive everything else and then choose a non sacred time to go through your action needed folder from bottom to top. Okay? That's truth number two. Truth number three. You know the crazy inbox is bugging you and mentally you want it to feel clean. So just file email bankruptcy, okay? Right. Look at the first one or two pages of your inbox, put a few of the emails that are action needed, and then make a folder called email bankruptcy, take your entire inbox and throw it in that folder. It'll just be there, right? Chances are if you don't have to go and look at it for six months, you're not missing anything important. So archive the folder, archive all the emails, don't delete it. Remember, truth number one, unending amounts of storage. Right. What am I doing here? I'm rethinking the idea that I need to like delete stuff to keep my inbox clean. I don't. I'm rethinking the idea that I need a million folders. I don't. And I'm rethinking the idea that I have to sort all 15,000 emails before I can have a clean inbox again. I don't. Right. So this, you could literally throw all your emails into email bankruptcy, create an action needed folder, sort your emails as they come in into action needed and archive everything, knowing you have a search and you have storage. It could be done in 20 minutes and then you're done. But not only that, not only is your inbox clean, but now when new messages come in, you don't have a complicated system to manage them. It's literally archive or action needed. That's it. And then you can go into your action needed folder once or twice a day and answer them. And for those of you guys who have other people in your inbox, just make an action needed folder for each person and that solves that. So the idea behind this is train your brain to hate systems that take more time than is necessary and it'll help you stop over organizing things when you feel out of control. Even if it's something like, I don't know, a content strategy plan that at first glance seems to make sense. Maybe it doesn't make sense for you. You know, if you're busy creating scheduled posts that get no engagement, just stop doing them. Like rethink it. Rethink why? You know, sometimes just acknowledging that you feel out of control about something is enough to get your brain to stop and realize that it's a bad idea to cling to some golden system that's going to be too hard to maintain. Right? Because your processes need to work naturally with your personality, with the way you do things innately, and they should never consume more resources when your goal is trying to leverage time. So have a great day, guys. I hope that helps. I hope that helps with your inbox. I hope it helps with organization. For those of you moms who had an aha moment about socks, I'm really glad. Appreciate you guys. Talk soon. Bye. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com, podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.