118. The Organizing Quiz with Shawn Lemon

INTERACTIVE EPISODE: Take the quiz now and review with us!

Joining me on today's episode is THE Digital Organizer, Shawn Lemon. Shawn started The Digital Organizer back in 2013, after working for Apple, training people on how to use their products. The Digital Organizer partners with forward-thinking businesses to create streamlined, effective, and easy-to-use digital organization systems. I'm grateful to Shawn for taking the time to share his wisdom with the Labeled Organizing audience!

In this episode, we talk about his Organizing Quiz and how well (or horrible!) I scored on it. Shawn walks me through his process, discusses working with clients, and gives me tips on how I can improve on my [digital] organizing skills. 

For more information about today's episode, click here!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

So I've been doing organizing for over 15 years now. And one thing that I have learned from clients is that many people believe that if you're an organizer, especially a professional organizer, that you just know everything and you have it all together and there's nothing you can't do. And here to support the fact that that's not true is Sean Lemon from the Digital Organizer. Hi, Sean.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Thank you for joining me. I know it's been a long time in the making, and so we finally put it together, and I'm excited to see you. And I'm excited to talk about your organizing quiz that I took on your website. And I do want to say that I failed it. Oh so the quiz is how organized are you? And apparently, when it comes to the digital world, I have a lot of work to do. So I'm just curious when you talk to people, are there some potential clients that feel like you do everything, or do they know that you specifically just work with the digital aspect of organizing?

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Um, I don't think I've really had too many people ever ask me for physical organization except for their desk cabling. And so we call that cable management. So making cleaning up the desk, getting all those cables routed together. So instead of being a rat's nest uh behind their desk or even on it, uh clean that up. So we used to do that for a while. We don't anymore. But uh being that I rebranded to the digital organizer and not, well, a few years ago, uh, it's that's really helped clear that up.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Well, I do have one question for you. As far as physical physical organization, how do you think you fare? Do you feel like you're a pretty organized guy? Do you feel like there are certain areas of your of your home that you would want to work on?

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Yeah. Yeah, I would love to have someone come in and organize my house. Well, I think of of all the places that you would and could store digitally. For some reason, my perfectionistic self gets really intimidated in physical spaces. And with the ADHD, like the chaos like that in a physical space really is overwhelming. So um I have a pottery shed. I love making pottery on a wheel.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

And um, and so my family helped me insulate it, but I had like hung up all of these hangers and everything, and and so I had like little stashes of where things would go. So it was organized in a way, not in containers, but just in different spaces with like hooks and nails and and things. And so all of that had to come down to have it insulated, and then I had to put it all back in by myself. I had help pulling it out, but not putting it back in. And I feel like I almost had a panic attack twice, trying to figure out that space. And it's just like I don't have spaces to put things and don't know where they should go. It's like I know that certain things should be grouped together because I do all of this together, but where where do I put it? I don't know why. It just is overwhelming. And so my office can be similar to that. It's it's pretty clean, but I have papers. I like papers to track what I'm doing right now. I'm doing a lot all at the same time. So then I digitize what I need to and I trash all the paper.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Okay. Well, and as we get into today's episode, I know that you are gonna be such a great resource for me because even though I feel like I'm pretty good at the physical organizing aspect of it, I do have some issues with the digital world. And so we'll get into that with your quiz. And what I do want to offer the listeners today is that if you're listening to this and you're at home and you want to work on this with us, you can actually go to thedigitalorganizer.com. I believe the quiz is in the top right hand corner. Is that correct, where it says take the quiz? Yep. And if they want to pause the episode and go do that and then come back, you can certainly do that. For those of you who are listening to this podcast, you can actually go to YouTube and you can watch us go through this. I'm gonna read off my scores, but you can certainly see that I have a lot of notes here and a few things that I want to ask you in terms of each category. So for those who paused and came back, you will notice that there are four different categories. You talk about email, files, passwords, and task management. So I'm gonna start with my best score, which was email. I scored a 70 out of a hundred. And so I think my now is that good? Is that decent? Or where do most people fall?

SPEAKER_02 5:14

It is pretty decent. I mean, the majority of people who are taking this, it's pretty low. I mean, we're definitely under 50%, I'd probably say on average, just because it's uh brutal out there for people who come across this.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Okay. So my specific issue is that I still have a really, really old email that I had for probably 10 or 12 years. But back before Dropbox and some of that digital cloud storage, I actually would email myself items that I wanted to keep. So now I have this old email, my new email. And then every so often I'm prompted to either, you know, go into the old one, it's been hacked, or I've got to change a password. And so I'm just wondering for someone like me that has probably three current emails that I'm working off of between personal, business, and then miscellaneous. And then I've got like this old stuff, even though I scored decent in the email category, I still feel like I have so much to go through. Like, what would you suggest that I do in terms of that old email? Do you just kind of go back and quickly salvage whatever you can, or do you actually go through a process of making sure you don't forget or leave something in that old box?

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Yeah, that's a great question. So it kind of varies of how we approach this client to client, because in some cases, people are just unwilling to delete anything. And then we have other people who are just like, just get rid of it. If it goes, if if I lose something, I lose something, let's move on. I don't want to deal with it. So you have pretty much those two polar opposites, or most of the people that we're working with. So if you would want to keep everything, you could use a personal Gmail account and say import all of the email from this account into here. And that's just in the free gmail.com um settings. And so you can pull all that in. You'll want to archive everything out of the inbox so it doesn't take that messy inbox and put it into your fresh one. Um, but if you want the historical content, you can do that. But you're probably gonna want to clean out a bunch of junk from there first. And so um I'll get to that in in a little bit. I have a I have some videos that I can share with you of a tool that you can use that's really cheap that can help turn this into minutes instead of days.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Okay, wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

So yeah. Um, but otherwise, you know, you might want to use a tool uh to download the con the attachments from those emails. And that way you can get them all out and save them and you can go through them bit by bit. You can use AI to point it at that folder and say, hey, I want you to go through and look at all of these and label them and organize them for me. And that way it starts some of that sorting process for you. Um and then get rid of the account. But first, which you'd want to check and see if there are any receipts and things like that that have come through that you may want to change uh ahead of time.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Okay, wonderful. That's really good to know to hear that I could do something like that. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 8:21

What route would you take for that? Would you just let it go or save everything?

SPEAKER_00 8:26

What would I do?

unknown 8:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Well, so sometimes I will actually block off a period of time because you know, I've heard people say over the years that it's good to, you know, tackle a task all at once. So if you're gonna do scanning, shredding, whatever it is, yeah, to go ahead and get everything set up and try to do it all at once. I try to spend a block of time and work on it. But then again, when you have, I think on your website it said something about what, 128 emails a day that some people will get. And so when you think about, okay, if I block off three or four hours to work on this, I may only get through one or two days worth of emails at best if I'm doing it manually.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

So that's where I do need help because I feel like I can't keep up with the, you know, the apps that come out, all these different, you know, programs that can help you. And so, like you said, we'll get into that a little bit later. But I'm excited to hear that there is a solution and I'm not a lost cause.

SPEAKER_02 9:31

No, not at all. And there's absolutely a solution. I mean, first off, just hearing that you're opening up these different tabs for that, you could just use an email app. So are you using Mac or Windows?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Windows.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Okay. So you can use Outlook, they have a mail app, or you can download a third-party one. I like uh Spark. That's the one that I use. And you can uh you can add all of your different email accounts to that one app, and then it pulls everything in so you can have a unified inbox. And then you can also with Spark say, Don't send me notifications about this, don't put this one in the unified inbox so you have that Hotmail account if you need it, but it's not showing up and you're not seeing all of that at the same time. So using something like these strategically can be really nice. And then you can download Spark for your phone as well, and then it'll sync all of those accounts across. So when you check one, it checks all of the others. But it makes me think since you did do some cleanup and you are still opening that Hotmail account, when I first started this business 12, 13 years ago, um, I had a new Google Workspace account. And so I I wanted to have it separated and I said, okay, I'll go ahead and forward all my personal email to this because I own the business. I'm just going to keep it all there. Um and so the new email was coming in, but then I found that I just had to keep searching back and kept going in my old Gmail account or my old iCloud to find stuff. So that's why I went in and I imported all the historical mail from those accounts into my Google Workspace. So I had one unified inbox. Everything was just forwarding there. So it's very easy to check and stay on top of. And then um, and I still had the uh history as well. And so that way I didn't have to check any of those other accounts. So that may be something um that some of you want to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Okay, awesome. Let's go on to my next best score, which actually things went downhill from there. For task management, I scored a 20 out of a hundred. And that was my second best score. So this is how quickly things changed. So email, I kind of had it together, kind of. Task management, and I can't remember specifically what the questions were. I just know that like most people, I've got all of these different things going on. I have maybe, you know, I have different workflows for different things that I'm doing. So if I'm working on a creative project, I may have 12 apps that help me get that creative project done. But then with labeled, I may only have, you know, two or three. And as far as timing everything, and when do I work on this and when do I schedule that? And so I guess what kind of issues do people run into with task management? And why do you think I scored so low?

SPEAKER_02 12:27

Well, I would say it's probably that you don't have, like it's not very clear what you should be working on all the time and where to go to be able to track that stuff. So that's the majority of those questions, is is, and all of the questions are really how effective is it to actually do what you need to do in email, to do in files, to retrieve them, and for for uh task management or project management, like what are you supposed to be working on? And and do do the other people who are working with you know how to get that? Um so that's probably why you scored that way. But uh you're I think in the same boat of so many people because we're living in this digital age where well, now it's all digital. Like we're expected to keep our calendar, our to-do lists, all of our files, everything digitally. And even kids in school aren't really taught how to really navigate all of this stuff well. We're not taught project management, we're not taught uh digital filing systems or managing multiple email accounts or anything like that. And so it's like the the frog in the pot. It just keeps getting hotter, and all of a sudden you're like, my gosh, this is cha chaos. It is I I think that's why so many people are in this boat. And unless you nerd out on this stuff and want to figure it out, then it's a struggle for a lot of people, and you you use it for the purpose that you're you're sitting down to do it with. But otherwise, you know, there you go. And the biggest mistake I'd say people make with project management or task management is storing their tasks in too many places and a bunch of stickies, or you just keep going from app to app to app, you know, not picking one, that's the biggest problem. And it's usually not the app, it's you. And so figuring out how, like, I have to commit and I have to be able to say no and and just say, I'm just gonna put it here. I'm gonna wait. And I'm gonna walk over there and I'm gonna write it down, or I'm gonna use this app, even though I don't really like it right now.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

And I think part of my problem is that I was around 16 when the internet came out. And so I think for a lot of us, you know, mature people, we were so used to having a physical calendar and writing things down. I know for me, I have always been a paper person. I like holding real books. And so I think for me, I struggled when a lot of people got their first Blackberry, you know, I was still writing things down. And then when I finally got a Blackberry, everyone's like, oh, well, now we've got this thing called an iPhone. And so I feel like I have always been a little bit behind because I still love to write things down. And I think it is good because I am a visual learner and I do feel like I remember more if I have it in a notebook. But the problem is that I almost always have my phone, but I don't always have my notebook. So as far as the keeping everything in one place, what is your favorite app? I'm curious, as far as task management goes. If you could just pick one.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

If I could only pick one, I would use Apple's Reminders app. I'm an all Apple guy. Um, if I was on Android, I would use Google's reminders or Google Tasks. Okay. Because it's so easy. I can just hold down the Siri button and say, Remind me when I get home to put the milk in the refrigerator.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

You know, it's it's as simple as that. I can create lists, I can invite other people to those lists. The those basic to-do apps have gotten pretty robust, and and you have a quite a bit of features. You don't want to use this for business, but for all of your personal stuff, you can handle a lot. I have a groceries list, a Home Depot list, and other things like that that I add it to. And I'll say, Oh, add those light, add the dining room light bulbs to my Home Depot list. And it's on there. So that's what I like best. Um, but then people will often put notes in there as well. And so I use the notes app for notes, but that's actually kind of like scratch paper for me. I don't like to rely on notes. Um, and so that's where filing comes in, but we can get to that.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Sure. So yeah, that brings me to number three, which is files. And I scored a 15 out of 100. So I know. You're like, Sarah, we're gonna have to have an emergency session after the holiday. So here's my problem is that again, I used to email myself all of my important files. The other thing is that I'm very attached to Dropbox. And so when I'm working on something on my computer, and the other thing is my computer, I have I'm at the point now where I'm at very little storage, which I know a lot of your clients deal with. So what I will do is I will start to work on a project and it'll say, okay, you're running out of storage. And so I will immediately start panicking and I will either try to upload to Dropbox, or I still have a flash drive where I start pulling everything over to this flash drive, emptying my trash bin, and then restarting my computer and then just crossing my fingers. So I'm assuming that you I'm assuming that you have a better method of what I'm doing as far as files are concerned.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

Yeah. So if you're dealing with a space issue like that and you're moving files around, I would imagine these projects are probably podcasts. They're media related. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Yes, they are. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

Okay. So we can we can deal with this two different ways. If you just have a full hard drive, you can put all of those videos on an external SSD. So solid state drive. So we have the old hard drives that we grew up with that spin and they're kind of loud and they were constantly failing. And now we're in a new place where it's not like that anymore as much. Um, so you can get an SSD, they're relatively cheap, and that's where you can use that as a working drive. So you think of this as your media drive. And so get all of those podcast videos, audio files, all of the stuff that is maybe part of your work in the specific workflow, and move it on to the flash drive. Okay. And that's kind of your working drive. Because you may want to pull from old historical pieces as well when you're when you're doing creative work. So it's nice to have that. But I want all of my finished stuff in Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever one that you whatever you like. So having that app installed on your computer and allowing it to stream the files instead of mirror or download means that you can see every file that's stored in Google Drive or Dropbox, but it's not taking up space on your machine. Okay. And if you double-click on the file, it downloads it on demand and opens it up, which is usually pretty fast. So that's what I do. I've got, you know, uh probably 700 gigs in Google Drive, and I have a 500 gig um laptop, and uh, and a good bit of that's pictures, but there's so much more um in in Google that I just don't have synced because I rarely ever use it. I just want to have it just in case.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

So I'm assuming that once this is set up for someone, it is it becomes a well-oiled machine. Where now everything just goes on that one drive, and I can turn around later and pull to Dropbox, but for the most part, I know that this is going to be in one place, and at least I can organize it there. And then, like you said, I can just stream it when I actually need it.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

Yeah, and some of the stuff, like for um for an ideal workflow, I guess the process that I would do is I would want to take all those files and move them onto an external drive and kind of organize them as you go. And when you drag it onto the external drive, once it's finished, you have two copies of it, which means you need to delete the one on your internal and you need to empty the recycle bin or the trash on a Mac to get that free space back. So you can go through that, that starts freeing things up and just get all of the bulk out of the way. And then um you would want to go through. We've got a process where it's like the first thing is look and see what you can delete. Delete as much as you can, then archive. And then we move that stuff aside. And then we want to organize. And what you have left, once you get all the other stuff and you move it into an archive, is very little. And that's when you want to start organizing. Because you say, Oh, you know what? I have some financial files, I've got stuff for labeled, I have, you know. This and that, and it's not nearly as many categories as you would need if you were doing an archive or if you were trying to organize absolutely everything that you have in one file system.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

You really shouldn't do that because in the end, like when I'm making pottery, I'm using a few tools, I'm using other things, and the rest of it, like I'm bringing it inside, or I have other places to store things permanently. That's not in my main workspace. And I want your normal filing system to be your workspace where you can find whatever you're looking for in seconds. So, and then from there, once you've cleared out all that space and you have a good workflow, I would want to download the files directly to my hard drive, edit all of them from there, move them onto the external to archive, and then make sure that there's a copy in the cloud as well. Um, and then trash it off my main machine. So we got a copy in the cloud, we have a copy on the external drive, and we keep our internal storage space freed up, but I don't have to carry that drive around if I want to go to the coffee shop and edit.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Okay. Wonderful. So would you recommend? Because one thing I started doing with the podcast is that all of those episodes, obviously being media files, would take up space. And so I would just, you know, I had a labeled organizing podcast file in Dropbox, but then I was just shooting everything up there into that folder. Well, then once we got closer to a hundred episodes, I'm like, wow, how am I gonna go through and find? So now I actually have a system where I have subfolders based on, okay, episodes one through 50, you know, and and now I know, okay, that's the subfolder. And then when I actually label it, I'm label it labeling it by number so that it goes right down the list. And so I feel like now I'm at a point where I've learned the hard way. So do you recommend that once you have a good system, you just start, you really focus on moving forward with that new system and then you focus on the cleanup of the old stuff later when you have time, or do you feel like you should try to get caught up as quickly as possible so that everything looks clean as you're adding stuff to it?

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yeah, I would say um pause and then do the archive maybe a little later, unless you've just got the energy and you want to go for it, then go ahead. I mean, I'm not gonna stop anyone from working on their archive, but I would say the majority of people who work with us, they're pretty limited on time and so and have been avoiding this project for a really long time. And so what we want to do is make sure that we get it done as quickly as possible and efficiently, and we're not just wasting our time. It's just like, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze? Like if you have a huge archive, it it would be really nice to have um organized. And I would put those in bigger chunks, and as I'm feeling inspired, then I will go into a chunk and chunk down even more, do some more trashing and things like that. And so when I'm in the mood, I'll go and do it. But otherwise, I'd say focus on what you're doing right now, and the majority of your energy needs to go into that because I like it when you rename your files, the active files, to something that actually makes sense and is, you know, has a date on it and things like that. And that can be a little bit tedious. I would much rather you spend your uh tedium energy over there than I would on the archive, because you're not gonna have that many files left. And if you think about um organizing or cleaning, say your kitchen's a mess, you clean it, it's gorgeous. What are you doing? You're telling the rest of the family, keep the kitchen clean.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

That's right. No one touches anything.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Yeah. So, so, so you are naturally inclined to want to really keep up with that. So getting your main filing system uh cleaned up really fast is important. Yes. And then being thorough about it because you don't want to just dump things in. You don't want to go through that pain again. And also, when you see a folder that's named perfectly, top to bottom, it's not okay to drop an unnamed file in that folder. Your future self is gonna be like, dude, what were you thinking, Sarah? That's right.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Your standards are higher.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

Your standards are higher. And because there's a standard in your naming convention, you know how to name it. It's gonna be the date, it's this, you know, and maybe you put a category on there and then you describe it. Okay. You know, that's it. I want to know what a file is by reading the file name, not opening it.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Yes. Well, and you just gave me a really great idea for this afternoon because I do have a few hours this afternoon. I can work on it. And when you said chunk, that made me think that I do have a ton of folders in Dropbox. I probably have 35 that are alongside. And I would say probably 25 of those I don't use often. I use the creative, the podcast, you know, the maybe the top three or four. So when you said that, I thought, you know what? I could get it down to where I've got three or four files on the side that are large, chunky subjects, and then honestly, not even go into some of those other ones until I feel energized to actually sort through them. I can just kind of push them to the side, and that's a really great idea. So let's go ahead and move on to passwords because I there have been a couple times where I was gonna jump ahead and tell you something, and I'm like, wait a minute, that probably falls into the password category. So my password score is embarrassing. I got a 10 out of a hundred.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Oh no.

unknown 28:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

So let me just tell you, and my listeners will probably, you know, pick up on this too. I used to say that the email to contact me was labeled organizing at outlook.com. And then one day it was, okay, if you want to contact me, it's labeled organizing at gmail.com. When I tell you I could not, for the life of me, get into that email. I was blocked in so many ways. There were so many, like it was such a fortress. I had I had to abandon that email just because of the password. And the problem is that I try to have a similar password for a lot of different things. And then maybe I stumble across a site that says, okay, it has to be 12 characters. And maybe the password I'm used to is 11. So I'm like, okay, what am I gonna add to this? And then it just, so I'm sure I don't even have to tell you how badly this has affected my life. Because again, when you have a business and you're like, hey, everyone, this is my email. It's on my business card. And now all of a sudden you can't get in. Like, I mean, what what is the main thing that people should learn about passwords? And do you have a solution that will help to where you don't even have to think about it?

SPEAKER_02 29:31

Yeah. I hate passwords. It's just I literally I hate passwords, pass keys, all the things that you know, the two-step verification stuff. It's so frustrating. And so you asked earlier what's my favorite app, and then you clarified to task management app. So I was gonna fire off one password. I cannot live without one password. And this is the this is the name of the app. It's the number one and the word password with no space between. Um using one password doesn't work because you can't use special characters on this webpage. You can't have more than 16 characters, and that you know, the rules are all over the place. It's it's insanity out there.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

So the one password app is absolutely crucial.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

Because some of us use Safari on our phones, but we use Chrome on our computer. But then we, if you're more tech savvy, you have multiple Chrome profiles, whether you like it or not. And then your passwords are spread across those different Chrome profiles, and each one of them has its own set. And then you've got Safari on your computer too. Maybe you've got Firefox, and it's just like you can't just use one password app because it doesn't sync across absolutely everything. Um well, at least one of the browsers. You can with one password. So you can add it, you can add the one password extension to every Chrome profile you want if you have those, to Firefox, Opera, whatever you want. And you can have it on your phone. And it's one system that syncs across all of them.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

And it creates my passwords for me. So it fills in this randomly long generated password so I don't have to remember it. And then when it asks me to set up two-step verification, I said, great, sure. And it shows me the QR code, and I go up to one password and say, scan that QR code, and it adds the code to the one password. So it never has to text me. It just fills in the two-step code from my app. And then it says, hey, download a you need to set up a pass key. That's going to make things so much easier for you. If you have a pass key, save that to your device. And one password can capture that too and sync it across all of your devices. Otherwise, if you download that pass key on your Mac and you didn't do it on your phone and it's asking for the pass key, and you're like, what is a passkey?

SPEAKER_00 31:55

Yes. Well, and my biggest fear, I have trust issues when it comes to passwords because I feel like, okay, if if all of a sudden I set up an account and you know, whatever is my password thing creates a 20 alpha numeric thing that I'm never, I mean, I'm not supposed to remember it. That's the whole point. But I'm afraid I'm gonna lock get locked out in a very different way. I feel like all of a sudden, if something else chooses a password for me, then I'm never ever gonna get in that account again. But what I've learned the hard way is that when I try to control it, then I'm not gonna be as, you know, I'm just not gonna remember every single thing. And it was different when you only had a password for maybe logging into your, you know, your work account and your email.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Your AOL.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

You know, 20 years. Your what? I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Your AOL.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

That's right. That's right. That's right. And as it's dialing up, you can sit there and think, what's my password? My ABC123 password that we all, you know, shared when our friends came over. That's the thing too. And and one thing I've noticed is that my son is 12. And with these kids, they don't have the same problems that we have because they were born into this. And I feel like they pick up on things quicker. They, you know, they're in touch with all of the new apps and and how to do things. And so, you know, maybe I'm just talking about myself here, but I've also heard a lot of my clients say, there's just so much coming at me, and everything is so new. And then again, you've got to sign up for something, you have to try to maintain all of this. So, um what I'm assuming when people work with you, because again, just like with physical organizing, someone can call me out or they can do a DIY. Now I'm fine doing a DIY because obviously I do this for a living. There are a lot of people who consider themselves handy or they pretty much know what to do. They just want some advice. You have given me a lot of good advice, but again, I don't have the time because I want to be out there creating. I want to be thinking about episode ideas. I also have clients. And so just like people hire me and they say, Here are the keys, I'll be home at five. You know, I just want to come in and have a beautiful pantry. What is it like for people to work with you? Like if somebody just says, Hey, I I want this done in two or three days, what does that look like when they just hand everything off to you? Like what does that feel like?

SPEAKER_02 34:49

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's it's not something that you can just hand off to someone because so much of it, it's like, how do I know whether this is something I can I should keep or not? There's so many documents, there's so many things in the digital space that it's just like everyone feels really differently. It's it's I think it's easier in a physical space. You take all this stuff around and say, hey, is there anything you want to trash, delete? It's much more obvious and fast. And with digital, it's not so much. But we have tools that can really speed, speed things up and a whole process to go through it. And so um our work is done with you. So you can work with us, hop on a session, we get a ton done all at once, and then we kind of send you on your way of like, here's what you can do from this. Now, if someone really wants to say, okay, I know I can do that, I don't want to do that. Can you do it for me? Then that is definitely open for discussion. So we've done that for plenty of people to say, okay, yes, if you want, like, you know, we'll set up a system, they can privately share their password with us and things like that, um, so we can get in and do our thing um quickly. But we need to get a plan from them to find out what even makes sense um and what does your life look like and and how should we deal with these things? So that's what it looks like. But we do have a really systematic way of going about it. So and we ended up taking that, and I've recorded lots and lots of videos of different examples of in this situation, this is what you want to do. And to get your email under control, we'll use this. And here's a couple of different options. If you're open to paid, watch this video. If you're open to free and and you're want to do a little more work, you just don't want to have to pay, then go this route. So that's called um my get organized resource library.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

And so I've got I've got a bunch of resources. So, like for this episode, I want to give you a files organization um walkthrough. So it's a PDF that has a bunch of videos attached, actually in that PDF, so you can click on it and watch the examples of how you should go through this process of identifying what you can delete, archive, separating. What does archiving look like? Because we have a couple different ways we like to archive. Okay. You know, then organizing. And so we take you through that process, all that's in the PDF. And then when you sign up for that, I have some emails that I'm gonna show you some videos for how to organize your inbox and use this tool called clean.email to make that insanity that you were talking about earlier go away really quickly, where it identifies all thousand subscriptions you have for that email. That's not a joke, that's really common actually. And say, I want to keep these. I don't want to have to even select all the ones that I want to delete. I just want to select the ones that I want to keep. And then it gets rid of all those subscriptions for you. So there's some really neat tools that you'll get um in the first couple of emails from me. And then I offer um a really steep discount on the resource library. So if this is something you're like, I love this, I want to overhaul my stuff, I don't want to pay someone to do it. I can feel good about this, then you're gonna get a pretty sweet discount for that.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Okay. So where will my listeners go? If they go to your website, where what exactly do they need to type in or look for?

SPEAKER_02 38:18

Yep. You're gonna go to thedigitalorganizer.com slash labeled.

unknown 38:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Okay, perfect. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything else that you want to tell my listeners, knowing that the majority of people who listen to labeled organizing are very busy, overwhelmed, they're not sure where to start, and we often do like 10-minute tasks on the show.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Just giving people small bite-sized things. As we leave today, can you think of a 10-minute task that someone could do as soon as they, you know, hit stop on this episode and they can go do it before they run errands or get ready to leave for the holiday weekend?

SPEAKER_02 39:04

Yeah, I would say create a folder called archive and stick it on your desktop.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

Go through your files, go through the things on your desktop and look at the things that are not relevant in your life right now. And just start tossing them in there.

unknown 39:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Let's get that out of your main space. That way you are left with a few items that you need to organize. And don't try and overthink this. Don't try and create some massive perfect system because in the end, we've only got so much going on in our lives. And that may be, you know, we may have 10 categories, but you can at least see what's left and say, okay, I'm gonna create some of these folders. Let's make them bigger buckets, and you can toss them in there. And then when you got the energy, you can chunk that down even more.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Okay, wonderful. All right. Well, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

You too.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

For all of you, if you're not already watching on YouTube, please go to YouTube labeled organizing. Thank you, Sean. I hope you will come back on again, maybe closer to the holidays. We can talk about another stressful time. And I will see everyone in the next episode.