Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Business First Creatives podcast. Today I wanna talk about organization. Last week on the podcast, my guest was Ashley Shuler, and the title of that episode was The Cost of Disorganization. And so in today's episode, I thought I wanted to talk about my lack of organization, but over the weekend I had an epiphany.

I was talking with a few of my business friends and I realized I actually have a good dose of organization in my business, and I'm not talking about what I do on the system side of my business. Because in my CRM setups, I help people centralize, organize, and automate the client experience.

But it turns out it's not that I'm not organized, it turns out that all I have to do is put shit where it belongs. Like I have an organizational system that I just don't use.

So it's not about creating the system that organizes my business, it's about creating productive habits that keep my business organized. And I know you're like, mm, Colie, isn't that the same thing? Let me give you an example. So recently I was asked to submit my speaker bio and a headshot for a speaking engagement that I have next month.

It is the Birth Symposium hosted by Birth Becomes You. Um, it's an online symposium where all of the topics are related to birth work, whether that's doula or photography. Okay, I'm getting off track. It should have taken me minutes to submit a headshot and give them a bio. But I don't have those two things together somewhere that's easily accessible so that I can use them every time I wanna submit things.

And guys, I have to submit a speaking bio and a headshot for every instance where I apply [00:02:00] to be a speaker and also when I'm a guest on someone else's podcast. So like, these are things that I should have at my fingertips, but yet what I have to do every single time is come into my folders on my computer and go into my Colie James folder and find the headshot that I like.

Um, digging through all of the ones that I would never give anyone anymore, to get to the current ones. So like, why don't I just clean up that folder and only have the latest, greatest headshots that I want to send out currently? Then I have to go into my notes app. Yes, guys, that is where my bio is. Now my bio is actually in a lot of places, but the Notes app is where I put it so that it would be easily accessible on my phone in case I ever had to give it to someone, and I wasn't on a computer.

Now the real disconnect guys in my business, I think I get lost between organizing things locally on my hard drives and then organizing them in the cloud in something like Google Drive. I haven't gotten into the habit of once things are downloaded onto my computer because who has a downloads folder that is just fucking out of control?

I mean, my downloads folder is such a shit show, there are no words for it. But what I should be doing every time I down some download something is I should take it out of the downloads folder and put it somewhere that's useful. 

So for example, for this podcast, when I'm done, I'm gonna download the video from Riverside and I'm gonna upload it into Descript.

Do I need to keep a copy of that video on my computer? Nope. Not really. But is it gonna live in my download's folder until I finally go clean it out? Yep. 

Same thing with the podcast graphic. I'm gonna go into Canva. I'm gonna create the graphic. I'm gonna download it to my downloads folder, and then I'm going to upload it into Airtable [00:04:00] so that my podcast manager and my virtual assistant have access.

But what I should be doing with the file that I downloaded is moving it from the downloads folder into a folder called Podcast Assets. And guys, guess what? I actually have a folder already labeled that way on my computer. I also have a folder inside of Google Drive for those same types of files. But once I download them, and I upload it to Airtable, which is probably the highest priority of what I need to do with that file.

I am not doing the other things that would help me stay organized. Just a few weeks ago, I went onto Instagram and I started uploading a graphic for every single episode so that I could put them into a story highlight.

Well, I couldn't find all of the graphics that I had created, so I had to go to Canva and basically download all of them again. And then I put them on my phone, and then I shared them inside of an Instagram story. Guys, I have so many random downloaded files that I don't need. I hope that's not the case for you, but if it is, why don't we think of some habits?

Why don't we put some some ideas into place that would help us stay a little bit more organized with the assets that we have in our business? 

So if you need help, what I would highly recommend is that you schedule one hour on your calendar either this week or next week, and you just sit down to look at the organizational structures that you already have in your business, see if they need to be improved upon, and if that isn't your issue, write down some standard operating practices.

Write down some habits that you can create so that every time you do something in your business, you are organizing at the same time. All right, guys. [00:06:00] That's it for this episode. See you next time.