126. The Digital Crossover

Sometimes our mind gets tripped up when we try to convert our "physical" life over to digital. In this episode, I give a few tips on how to make that transition smoother, as well as how to organize your time while doing it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

I've been thinking a lot more about digital organizing since I had Sean Lemon on the show. And for those of you who haven't listened to that interview, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to that. At this point, I can't remember how many episodes ago it was, but it was probably four or five. So it is a recent interview. We just did it about two weeks ago. But I've been thinking about how I scored on his organizing quiz. And I'm not bothered by it because I do know where my strengths and weaknesses are. And digital organizing has always been a problem for me because I love physical paper. I talked about it in the interview that I love physical books. So when a lot of people were going to Kindle and doing audiobooks, for me, I was like, I really just want to hold a paperback book in my hand on the beach. Or if I get a hardback cover, I can sit there and read through it in my home. And having that cover in your hand for some reason just makes a difference. And I think some of it is because you have the textures of the cover, right? You've got either like a really soft matte finish or you have the embossing on the front. I worked for a publishing company. Um, actually, I worked for two publishing companies, but the first one I did more of an administrative role. But the second one that I worked for, I actually did book layouts. And so with editing and actually being part of putting a book together and working with authors, it just gives you a different perspective when the book actually arrives, when it gets printed and it arrives in the box and you're actually pulling it out and you're checking it for errors. So I think that's just really stuck with me over the years. And again, I grew up in a time where we didn't have the internet. I didn't even use email until late high school, early college. We just, it wasn't part of our world. And so with that said, one thing that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to move a lot of my papers to Dropbox. That is just kind of my preference as far as storage. I also use my files app with pictures. I still have a shutterfly account, but it's kind of a hodgepodge. Sometimes I'm just trying to save stuff and I'm just trying to get it to where I have a digital copy, and it doesn't really matter to me where it is, as long as I know that if something happens to the physical copy, then I still have the option of either reprinting or accessing it through one of my cloud storage options. But the problem is that when you're so used to working in the physical world and you're trying to cross over into the digital world, sometimes there's a little bit of a disconnect. So what I want to focus on today, and this is going to be a short episode because I want to try to get shorter episodes out quicker to you guys. Part of the feedback I've received is yes, we like the longer format sometimes, but sometimes we just want the quick stuff. We just want to know what to do today so that we can spend some time. Now, the 10-minute tasks are great. If you haven't done a 10-minute task, you can go back and pick one. But at the same time, it's not just about setting a timer and working for 10 minutes. It's actually doing smaller tasks that may just take you two or three minutes. But once you're done with it, your mind can relax and you can say, okay, that's done. And part of it is just trying to figure out how to set up your systems so that it works, so that you can actually cross over from physical stuff to digital stuff if that is your goal. And I do encourage a lot of you who have a lot of pictures, who have a lot of important documents to get a digital backup, even if you don't want to get rid of the physical one. Because if something does happen, God forbid, and your home floods or there's a natural disaster where there's a tornado or a hurricane or a fire, then you don't want to have to worry about trying to replace every single item that was important to you by going to, you know, the DMV or the courthouse or trying to contact friends and family. Hey, do you have a copy of that picture? Et cetera, et cetera. So with that said, today I want to talk about how if you can get your physical space to match up more with the digital space and you label them the same way, then it's going to be easier to transfer from A to B. And this is something that Sean and I did not talk about. And it wasn't even anything that I thought about at the time. But since that interview, I have been thinking more about how I can do better because I did fail his quiz. And I think part of my problem is that when you don't actually hold on to digital items, it's harder to figure out how to categorize them sometimes. Sure, I could upload a piece of paper that's from my son's school and I can put it in a folder that says school. But sometimes we're wanting to do more specific folders. And once we get everything uploaded to the digital space, it becomes very cluttered if we try to organize it after the fact. So what I have started doing, I have started taking smaller project boxes, and I've been taking my label maker and I've been labeling them subfolders. So if I'm doing my songwriting and say I've got scratch pad notes where I've written on receipts or index cards, I want to put those in a project case where I can scan them as a group, or I can make copies of them just so that I have one piece of paper instead of three index cards. So if I use that as a subfolder and I put writing notes or songwriting notes, and that's a project case, then when I go to Dropbox and I create a folder that says songwriting and a subfolder that says songwriting notes, then when I go to scan those items and it says where do you want to save them to, then I already know. I already know that from the physical label I put on the physical project case, I can turn around and upload that. And then it does its little spinning thing where it says, okay, uploaded a folder. And then if you want to go in and double check, you can. For me, I've got all of my Dropbox folder set up pretty accurately to where once it says yes, this is uploaded, I trust it. Because over the years I have gone back in and I've said, okay, did that actually make it to the folder? And now it's at a point where it's like, okay, I'm pretty confident it made it to the folder. If it's something like a legal document or my son's birth certificate, or maybe a picture that is from my grandfather that I haven't scanned yet, those are the types of things where it's like, okay, I know that I need to make sure that this actually got uploaded. And you can double check those things. But for the most part, most of the things you're gonna scan, once you have a good system in place, you know it's there. Say it was a piece of notebook paper that you just scratched a recipe on, but you have a copy of that recipe somewhere else, or it's something that you googled, or you know the actual person who created that recipe and you can find it again. Maybe you scan a copy because you want to be able to find it later from your phone, but then at the same time, you can turn around and shred the physical piece because you know, okay, this isn't that important. It may be a recipe that I like, but I also know where to find it again. And so I don't need to keep the physical copy. So then you turn around and shred it. Now I used to have a project box that said to scan, and then I would have another project box that would say to shred. But I found that I really got tripped up in that quote unquote assembly line of work because sometimes I would see the boxes and I would think, okay, do I want to spend my time scanning or do I want to spend my time shredding? And the reality is once I'm done scanning something, the shredder is right there. And I'm not saying that it's so obvious that I've never done it before. It's just I have tried different methods over the years. Sometimes I don't feel like standing there and shredding stuff, especially with my shredder, you have to do it like two or three pages at a time. Sometimes it's midnight. I don't want my shredder making noise. Sometimes I do want to keep something for a little bit and I do want to go back and check. And so I had a project case that said to shred. And whenever I came back to it and then I shredded all those documents, I had an empty case that I technically could put more stuff in once I scanned it. But then there were times that I would scan something and shred it immediately. So now I have a system where instead of putting stuff aside to shred later, I just lay it on top of my shredder. And it doesn't bother me because if I get up the next morning and I see it, then I just shred it and then I'm done with it. So I hope for you that if you're somebody who has trouble crossing over from the physical space to the digital space, that it will help you to actually organize yourself to where you're labeling things the same in both spaces. Now, there are times that you just have a big pile of old papers that you're like, okay, this is all of my kids' old schoolwork and it's going to take me forever to go through and make subfolders. I assume that Sean Lemon would agree with me that you just scan that entire stack into a folder called school. If you have a whole pile of school stuff and you don't know what your subfolders would even be, then just create one big folder that says school in Dropbox or whatever iCloud file system you have, and then just literally go from A to B. Don't worry about organizing the subfolders unless you know that someone is going to ask you for all of that later. Hence, if you do homeschooling and you're part of a program that says, yes, we actually do need to see the items that you've worked on in your curriculum, that's when it may be beneficial to create subfolders if it's just an archive. Like Sean Lemon said, you create an archive folder. And as you are moving stuff over into that archive folder, you're not so much worrying exactly where it goes. You are taking care of more of the immediate problem that you don't need it cluttering your current workspace. And so I think for me, once I started scanning and shredding and creating these subfolders, then I had a few extra boxes, physical boxes left over, where I could put stuff in in big categories and label that. So I hope this episode was helpful. Please make sure to subscribe to the bonus content. The minimum contribution is only $3 a month, and you have access to all previous bonus episodes that I've recorded in the last two and a half years. Please make sure to follow us on YouTube at labeled organizing, as well as Instagram, labeled organizing. Thank you so much, and I will see you in the next episode.