The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 205: How I Stay Organized

Today, I am diving into how I stay organized in my business and in my personal life. Over the years I have learned a lot of tips and tricks for keeping everything organized while continuing to build and scale my business. I will be sharing some of these things with you so that you can stay organized in your own business while continuing to grow.

How I Stay Organized

By: Melissa Lin

Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. We are just about to wrap up quarter two, I cannot believe how quickly 2022 has been flying by. I feel like so many of my clients, friends, and family also feel the same way too. 2022 feels like it has zipped by. 2020 and 2021 felt like they were slowly going along and this year has been going faster than I could have imagined. We are already about halfway through the year, so I hope you had an amazing Q1/Q2, first half of the year. We are getting ready for Q3 in about a week or two, and then of course Q4 to wrap the year. Today I want to chat about how I stay organized with myself, with my business, and things behind the scenes. As I've scaled my business to a 7-figure coaching business, I've needed to learn how to stay organized and help my team also stay organized. If we were not organized everything would just be running around in chaos, and I cannot run a business in chaos. Some thrive in chaos, but I definitely do not. I don’t feel that it can really support you as your business scales.

One of the reasons why it's been easy for us to scale the business is because of how things run behind the scenes and because of how organized we have everything. Did it look like this when I first started in 2014? Definitely not. It has taken us a few years to figure out the right organizational tools and systems to use and things like that. It has also taken time for me to figure out how I want to be organized and how I want things in the business to be in terms of processes and operating procedures and things like that. One of the things I love helping my clients with is showing them how they can do that with ease. I wanted to record this podcast episode because I get this question all of the time, how do you make it look so easy? How do you always look so calm in your business? It is because of the structure that we have. It really, really supports me and makes things really easy. This structure gives me a ton of flexibility in my personal life and also in my business. So we're going to be digging into all of that today. We're going to chat about some of my daily activities that help me stay organized, some of my favorite tools that help me organize, things that you can start today to be more organized, and so much more.

My Daily Organizational Activities

First I want to get into some of my daily activities that help me stay organized. One of the first things is a lot of pre-planning. If you follow me on social media you may have heard me talk about this before. I pre-plan my days. I have specific days of the week where I do certain tasks for my business. This really helps me stay organized and stay in the flow when I’m doing these activities. I get distracted very easily, so if I'm able to do some of the same tasks in one day I'm able to stay in the flow and be more productive. One of the first things that I do at the beginning and end of every day is pre-planning my day and my week. On Sunday nights I’ll look at my entire week and see what's coming up. I make sure I feel ready and that I'm really prepared for it. I prep for all of my client calls, podcast episodes, interviews, and anything else coming up because I always feel things are much more manageable and doable with a plan in place. The night before I will take a look at my next day and all of the tasks that will happen. If I have a big project I want to make sure that I have enough time to really complete that project or to divide it up into smaller tasks so it feels more manageable.

I want to share a few of the things I do throughout the week so that you can get an idea of how I like to break my week up through these different days that I have. I have three different activity days. Sometimes I will combine two into one, but I'll never do all three in one day. The first is a CEO day. On my CEO days I do all of my CEO activities. These include team meetings, reviewing email sequences for next quarter, taking a look at the back end of the things, preparing for our next launch, looking at our current programs and how they’re performing, and looking at company metrics. A lot of these CEO activities happen on my CEO days. I will typically have at least two of these a week. I like to have my biggest CEO day on Monday and then another CEO day towards the end of the week.

I also have something called coaching days, where I coach my clients. These are the days that I will do my group coaching calls, my Mastermind calls, and my private coaching calls. I will do all of my calls on certain days of the week and certain days of the month. I will always give myself at least one entire week off of coaching calls, if not two weeks off, so I do a lot of batching. Batching is also another thing that helps me stay organized. Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually my higher coaching days and I usually spend most of my day on coaching calls on those days of the week. This gives me so much flexibility because my clients can schedule out their calls for the next month a month ahead of time. Plus, I already know over a month ahead of time what my calendar is going to look like for the rest of the month and when I'm available. I typically only have five or six days of coaching throughout the entire month where I'm actually on calls.

Then I have content days. These are days where we’re creating content, such as podcast episodes, creating blogs, working on new captions, creating more trainings, and making reels. Anything new in terms of content happens on a content day. I like to do my content days on Fridays because it's a fun way to wrap up the week. I love creating content. If you’ve ever seen my social platform or listened to this podcast you know we put out tons and tons of content because I love creating it and adding value. That is a quick glance at how I like to break up some of my week. I love to pre-plan, and all of this is pre-planned inside of my Google Calendar.

The next thing I like to do everyday is to take a look at my priority list. I always have a running list of all of our big projects. Inside of our Asana board we label things as high, medium, and low priority so we know which is the most important to focus on. We only have so many hours in the day, so we want to be focusing on the things that are most important to us in the business. I love brainstorming new projects and adding them to my big list, however not all of them can happen this week or this month. We definitely get to create priorities and keep those priorities in mind.

One of the next things that is really important to me is having a place for everything, including items in my business. These include my assets in my business and all of the things that we've created. I've been in business since 2014, so we have created so many things and have so many assets. Having a place for everything, the physical things that we have, all of our tasks, all of the projects, and assigning dates to them is important. It's something that really supports me. Anytime I have an open loop, if there is something if that hasn't been addressed, it will keep me up at night. Sleep is so important to me, so I cannot have an open loop. Everything needs to be closed or else it'll keep me up or I'll wake up in the middle of the night and need to make a note on my notepad. I have to get things in my calendar or at least assign them into Asana so we have it in mind and we can set priority and dates to it. Let's say, for example, I have this podcast episode and I want to record it, but it wasn't on my calendar. It would continue to be in my head and not out on paper. As you start to grow your team, you need to have things out on paper or digitally out somewhere visibly because your team members cannot read your mind. That's something I learned my first year as I started hiring team members. For me, everything had always been in my head, so it definitely was a learning curve for me as I needed to put everything out there when I started hiring team members. We now have over a dozen team members, so everybody needs to be able to see and access certain things. So, being able to have it out somewhere allows us to assign dates and assign things to everybody and closes that loop. I love closing those leaps, I pre-plan my weeks, I always have a priority list, and then I also make sure that I have a place for everything.

My Favorite Organizational Tools

Now let's get into some of my favorite tools that help me stay organized, both in my personal life and my business. The first tool is called Asana. It is an amazing project management tool. There are tons, find one that really fits you. Most of them can do just about the same amount of stuff. Asana is a great tool, Trello is very similar, Monday, Clickup, and Notion are some other ones as well. Asana is one I've been with for quite a few years. We use Asana for so much in the business. We use it for planning out future projects, assigning tasks, and making sure that the team and I are on track for those tasks. There's tons of reporting and data you can collect from Asana as well. We have everything in there in terms of the bigger project and also all of the smaller tasks that come in with that project. What's really cool is as we've continued to grow the business we've utilized these tools and they’ve really served us and made things easier for us. So, for example, we have templates for every podcast episode we record. I go and record my episode and then it gets handed to the next team member and the next task in that project gets taken care of because we can see everything inside of Asana. It’s a really cool tool and I highly recommend it. Asana is for task management, team management, and making sure we’re on track for things.

The second tool that we utilize is Airtable. Airtable is a tool that we use more as a bank for our business. It houses a lot of our assets in the business. We have a huge content bank, a scheduling bank, all of our graphics, all of our assets in there. It’s also our client bank and our lead tracking bank. We track all of our programs and how they're doing inside of Airtable. It's a really, really cool tool, it's basically an Excel sheet on steroids. There's so much that you can do with it. There's a free version of both Asana and Airtable, so I would definitely recommend hopping into those.

The third tool I want to chat about is another big one I use every single day, which I'm sure you've heard of. It’s Google Calendar. I love it because it's something that I can share with team members and my partner and it really helps me stay on track. If you are not on my calendar, you do not see me. Everything gets put on my Google Calendar, it really helps me stay organized. I love to color code things. I also have various calendars within my calendar so that I can really see what gets to happen. There's a lot of cool drag and drop functions you can do inside of Google Calendar. There’s also a task list inside of Google Calendar you can add in. There are a lot of cool functions. If you're more of a pen and paper calendar person, amazing. You’ve got to find what's going to work for you to help you stay organized. For me, however, anytime I've had a paper calendar I never went into it. I always have my Google Calendar open on my iPad right next to me. It's always open, so it runs my life. Find the tools that you're actually going to utilize that are really going to serve you and support you in your life. Again, if you're like me and never went into your pen and paper planner, it's most likely not going to support you.

Becoming More Organized

Now that we’ve talked about some of my daily activities that help me stay organized and some of my favorite tools, I want to give you a few things that you can start today to feel and be more organized. So, the first thing is completing tasks and putting things away as you go. This is both a life and business item. For example, on each of my client calls I take notes of what my clients and I are covering, any action steps for my clients, due dates, that sort of thing so that I can help hold them accountable and have notes for the next session as well. To help me stay organized, I file all of my notes right away after the call has been completed. This is also so my team members see this because we run a lot of group programs and we have multiple team members that also need to see some of this information so that when they support the client next they know exactly where we left off. I always make sure to finish that task and close the item off. If I finish up a client call but then don't go file my notes away it is something that always gets put to the back burner and stays as an open loop for me, and you know I don't like those open-loops. Complete tasks and put things away as you go. It just makes everything feel more manageable for me.

The second thing that you can start doing today is just cleaning the space around you. I've noticed, especially as we’re getting ready to move into our new home that we're building, that the cleaner things are around me, the less cluttered I feel and the more organized I feel. There’s a saying, “how you are in one area of your life is how you are in all areas,” and it's true. If you feel that the room you’re in is clean, everything else is also going to start to feel that impact, so clean the space around you. I know that anytime my space feels clean and decluttered I am always a few points happier and don't have as much anxiety.

The next thing is something that I had mentioned in one of my daily activities that I do to really help me stay organized, and that is spending time at the end of each day prepping and prioritizing the next day. I will typically spend around 15 to 20 minutes looking at what's on my calendar for the next day and making sure that I have items prepped. This can include writing out any tasks that need to get done. Then I review it all again in the morning as I get my work day started so that I know exactly what will happen as I jump into things.

I would say the last thing that you can start to do today is if things are starting to feel overwhelming or unorganized, start to break things down into smaller tasks. I know that a lot of the time a lot of us want to get so much done. We have all this drive and we want to hustle and be able to get 10 hours of work done in 7 hours, but sometimes it’s just not doable. Break things down into smaller tasks so things feel more doable and manageable. Be realistic about the timeline and the size of the project you're working on. Inside of our Asana, my team and I have all of our bigger projects broken down into smaller tasks. It makes everything feel more doable and it also makes it easier to replicate. If you're getting ready to launch your next program, for example, break it down into smaller steps. Start with planning your launch and mapping out all of the important dates, then move to creating your graphics and writing out all the things that need to happen before your launch. These include your emails you’re writing, your check out page, your application page, any social media graphics that you need. Then move to prepping all the things that happen during your launch, maybe a workshop, or a training series, or some other type of conversion events. Then, what are all the things that happen after your launch? These can include onboarding clients and turning check out links off if it's an open-closed model. Instead of one big project of launching your program, start to break things down into much smaller projects that happen before your launch, during your launch, and after your launch. Then you can even break those things down into smaller tasks as well. It makes everything feel so much more manageable, I promise.

Today we have touched on so much. We have touched on my daily activities that help me stay organized, some of my favorite tools, things that you can start doing today to be more organized, and so much more. We are already getting ready for next week's episode and cannot wait to share it with you. We will see you next week in another brand episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast bright and early next Monday morning.

Topics we cover include:

Dividing tasks
Dealing with distraction
Becoming organized in your business

And so much more!

Times to check out:

(09:13) Daily organizational activities

(15:16) Assigning priorities

(19:17) My go-to organizational tools

(24:54) How you can become more organized today

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