Category: Pat and Lorna Shanks

messydeskcartoon

Unorganized and Lost? Top 7 List for Getting Things Organized!

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messydeskcartoonA Top 7 List? Yep! Think of it like a checklist that will make it a whole lot easier and quicker to get to where you want to be – totally organized. Will this happen overnight? Nope. Starting is always the hardest part, so once you get going and gain momentum there will be no stopping you.

So let’s start…

1. Know what stuff you actually have. Until you know what stuff you actually have to organize it’s pretty tough to get organized. What is in that stack of papers at the end of your desk? What files did you put in that folder? Are any of them still pertinent? Take inventory, it’s worth the time.

2. You may find the trash is the place you end up storing most of your stuff. Keeping unimportant stuff is a part of the “I may use it someday” syndrome. Don’t get caught up in that, there’s no easy cure.

3. Clean up your physical stuff. Having an organized home and office is in itself a step towards finding yourself. A cluttered environment creates a cluttered mind.

4. Choose an electronic system for organizing and storing all your files, website links, cool social media posts, and contacts. Find one that makes sense to you. Choosing a system “with all the bells and whistles” that you find way too cumbersome to use will not get you anywhere.

5. Develop a system for your errands. Much time gets wasted running around instead of going on one organized trip with a plan of attack. While you may be thinking that planning your errands is a bit overboard, it can be really simple and fast to implement with so many benefits. Keep your brain free for creative stuff, not what you need to pick up at the grocery store.

6. Create a To-Do System. It goes without saying that focused action is way better than constantly figuring out what you need to do next.

7. Let go! Let go of all the stuff in your mind that is best kept in an organized system. Use your mind for the cool stuff… creating, learning and expanding your possibilities!

Use what feels right to you and Get Started! 🙂

Rafting

Even When Things Go South… Being Organized Helps You “Go With the Flow”

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RaftingLife… our reality… we make plans and then assume everything will go that way. While it seems like it would be cool if that always happened, it wouldn’t bring the same excitement and surprise we get from the way life really works. Yes, it’s true, life doesn’t always follow the well-ordered plan we have for it. And that’s Cool!

However, at the same time, the feeling of being adrift and at the mercy of so-called “circumstances” is not a very empowering place to be.

So… enter the best of both worlds. Surprises can be fun, empowering, happy, sad, scary, frustrating, and so many other things. Yet, no matter what, they are what makes life interesting. If, however, you are organized… it is so much easier to “go with the flow” and ride life’s surprise roller coaster with your hands in the air and the biggest smile on your face.

How does that work, you ask?

Here’s a little Top 5 List for being organized that will get you on your way…

1)  Understand what you’ve got… that stack of papers on your desk, the websites you visit, the amazing posts you’ve saved (somewhere), the books you’ve read. Understanding what information you actually have is a massive first step.

2)  Trash, delete or vaporize everything you don’t need or use. Holding on to things you don’t use just weighs you down. It takes up space in your mind and in your life that you could use for something much more interesting :).

3) Put all the rest of the stuff into a system that best suits what it is you’re storing. For all electronic stuff there are a multitude of software systems that can handle that type of information very well. The cool thing is you get to choose which system to use; the one that is in sync with your brain and the way it organizes things.

4) Now that you have your “chosen” storing system, the next step is to set it up so you can find things super fast and easy. If you have to use too much brain power to retrieve stuff it kind of defeats the purpose of organizing it in the first place.

5) Let go! Everything you’re trying to remember… where things are, the cool websites you’ve seen, people’s names and contact info… let go of it all. Free your mind!

The secret to riding life’s surprise roller coaster? Get all of that “stuff” out of your head, put it in a system that makes sense to you and in a way you can find it, then free your mind! Only then will you have the flexibility to roll with life’s ups and downs and still come out looking like a rock star!

busy_person

Busy…? Create Systems and Drop that Nasty Word from Your Vocabulary

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busy_person-300x300Have you  ever apologized for not following through on something because you were “so busy”? Be it a family member, friend, business associate or customer… it conveys to them that perhaps they aren’t that important to you… and you have other things that come first.

Yet we’re pretty sure that we’ve all been in this scenario… family time, important time-sensitive projects, and day-to-day business activities… all at once! So we’re not lying to others when we say we’ve been busy, and the stress of it can be totally overwhelming.

The cure for this situation? Systems!

While you are working to get your project completed, the other activities in your business start falling behind. But they don’t have to. If you set up systems to handle your regular business activities they can happen almost automatically.

Write down the activities you do in one day, then do it again the next day, and the next, and so on. After a few days you should be able to discover which activities you do over and over again… on a regular basis. These are the activities that you can and should systematize.

If these activities can be completed automatically for you, or if the time to do them can be cut to a fraction of the normal time, wouldn’t that be beneficial? We believe it is.

Some activities that we’ve developed systems for:

  • Blog Posts – We write a few when we have time and then have them scheduled to come up in our blog on specific dates.
  • Twitter – We schedule certain Tweets in advance to be posted at a later time or date.
  • Article Writing – Our system for writing articles at times also involves outsourcing, which is another way to get things done faster, better, and with the least amount of effort on your part.

These are some of our examples. Think about it… what can you systematize?

disney-cartoon

Reuse, Repurpose and Repackage – Disney Style…

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Start with great content and then reuse, repurpose and repackage it for greater leverage and increased market reach. This is something that is known to work exceptionally well in the information marketing world.

Now it’s been discovered that it has been working very well in cartoons too. Cartoons? Yes, cartoons. Disney has successfully been using this concept for years, yet very few people realize it.

It’s motivating to see a successful, mega giant like Disney successfully implementing this concept. It makes it so clear that repurposing works. Why start from scratch on every new project when reusing, rerpuposing and repackaging existing content can be done quicker, easier and with a lot less effort?

Don’t believe us? Take a look at the video below to see how Disney has successfully reused, repurposed and repackaged its cartoon content.

Please click the image below to start the presentation.

(Duration: 3 min, 28 sec)

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