Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.
This episode is airing in early August of twenty twenty four. Sarah is going to be interviewing Amanda Jefferson, who is a decluttering expert.
In particular, they're going.
To be talking about digital clutter and how we can get a grip on the various forms of digital cluttering in our lives, how we can maybe limit what comes in and organize what we need to keep. So, Sarah, how is your digital clutter game looking these days?
Eh? I think most people would expect my digital systems to be better organized, and they actually are, particularly saving of various files as well as photos. But I will say I tend to rely on redundancy, Like if I put a decent descriptor on something and save it in a bunch of places, including like sometimes emailing it to myself, I generally can find almost anything I need, so I
haven't felt totally motivated to fix it. But then I'm also sometimes like disgusted by it all, like oh, this is saved, and this desktop folder in this place in Google Drive and also this. I'm like, I just want to start fresh and not migrate the contents on my laptop and like start over. But it is also very hard to build your kind of laptop universe from scratch,
so I don't know. Maybe we'll learn about in this interview, which I have not conducted as of this intro, But I'm super excited because I have so many questions for her. But maybe she'll know some tools to selectively migrate things from like one device to another.
Yeah, now, I'm sure she's going to have all sorts of useful tips and tricks.
Amanda is a.
Decluttering expert for both digital and physical stuff. She works in the Greater Philadelphia area, so I know a lot of people will want to check her out. Yeah, my digital clutter, it's I would say similar to you. I don't have a problem finding things that I need. I can almost always find an email, find a file. I don't save things with any particular order. I just save a lot of stuff, even on my desktop, that which is fine. It's so the desktop looks ridiculous on my
primary working laptop. But I actually have two laptops because people may recall, laptop number one is from twenty sixteen and doesn't have the capacity to run things like Zoom and squad Cast where we record, and Microsoft teams and things like that very easily. And so I wound up with another laptop, assuming that my twenty sixteen one was going to die some sudden and horrible death in twenty twenty two when I bought the other laptop. That has
not happened. It is continued functioning. It just not for a lot of sort of higher tech modern things. So I've been slowly migrating things onto the new one, but not everything. And so a lot of my files are on the old one, but like different things are on the new one, and it's fine.
Interesting like the Mac dump it all, because I feel like whenever I get a new Mac, they're like, would you like to dump everything from your old Mac. And I'm like, fine, be grudging that. No, I wouldn't. I don't know.
I wouldn't do that because a lot of it's junk. I mean a lot of it's garbage. It's just or even if it's fun, it was I mean it was notes from like a recording session in twenty eighteen, Like I don't really need that, or it was some random article I wrote in twenty twenty, and I'm not going to ever deal with it again. I mean, there's no reason to dump it per se, given that it doesn't take much space. But I wouldn't migrate it onto a new active thing.
I don't know. I guess that's I think, well, we're going to get deep. But I feel like that is a mindset of abundance and not scarcity. You're like, I can make that again, It's fine. I can read another article, like I kind of cause I do like every single day. No, that makes sense. And also photo storage, which seems to be like a big preoccupation. I'm like, AI, seems like it'll be so good at that very very soon if it isn't already that like I am not going to do it myself.
Yeah, So all my photos made it onto my new phone. So I had this other issue with I had an old phone and then a new phone that I got in June, and migrating the information through my Apple was more complicated than it should have been for various reasons that were primarily my fault.
But whatever.
Eventually I was able to get the photos over to the new place, but not any of my apps, which you know, I've been slowly putting them back on as needed. My contacts came over, so that's really all that mattered, the contacts and the photos.
I could rebuild everything else as I need it.
But the photo thing, I mean, I have thousands and thousands of photos. I pay for extra storage. I haven't really gone through and deleted a lot of the ones that are dupes or eyes closed or whatever. Sometimes I do, but I haven't really bothered to put much of the effort into it. But I've enjoyed seeing Apple's photo widget on the new phone that they pull up videos where they've pulled together, you know, a theme like visits to Cape May over the.
Years and I're like, oh, this.
Is so cute, or like visits to the Zoo over the years, or portraits together and it chooses like two of my kids, and every time the two of them are together, they've out. So clearly the AI is pretty good at this point that they can create an all Ruth and Henry photo album just through like knowing their faces of the things. So I don't know, I feel like we're not going to need much in terms of searching on that or labeling.
Well, I'm excited for this interview and hopefully she can help me with my migration issues and maybe some easy ways to keep things a little bit more organized. Excited, All right, Well, let's hear from Amanda Jefferson. All right, Well, I am here now with Amanda Jefferson of Indigo Organizing, and we are going to talk all things digital clutter. So welcome Amanda. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell our listeners a little bit about you.
Hey, I'm so excited to be here. Yes, I'm Amanda from Indigo Organizing. I help people conquer digital clutter and reclaim their productivity, and I do that in a bunch of different ways, one on one coaching with people, I have some online courses. I have a club called the Get It Done Club, and I have podcast myself with my co host book for you called the good enough Ish.
Podcast The good enough Ish Podcast. Well, how did you get into all this digital organizing? What is your professional background? And I guess let our listeners know, we're always interested in kind of what stage of life are you in? Are there kids in the picture? Or just tell us a little bit more about you? And where are you? By the way, So.
I'm in Westchester, Pennsylvania. I actually don't think I live too far from Laura. She's in this same general area, I believe, yes, absolutely m hm. So I lived just outside of Philadelphia. I have one daughter, she's twelve going on thirty five, and I have dogs, cats, a home menagerie here. We live in beautiful Westchester. My husband is Chile and so we could call Chile home away from home.
We go there once a year. And I got into this because, so what I do now has absolutely nothing to do with what I used to do, which was
I was in consulting corporate world nonprofit leadership. I was the executive director of a nonprofit in Philadelphia, and while I loved the work, it was also a really long commute, stressful fundraising goals, people management that wasn't necessarily sort of my bag, and I was sort of looking at alternative ways of living my life making an income, and so I got very intrigued by this idea of becoming a professional organizer. And right at that time, Marie Condo started
training people to be con Mari consultants. So I sort of embarked on a secret mission to go to New York get trained by Marie and her team in Japanese translated. And that was eight years ago. And for about four or five years I helped people with their physical stuff. I guess maybe about six years or so, and then I just became the elephant in the room, just kind of became everybody's tech. It was just like, oh great, you know, thank you so much. The house feels so
much better. But do you ever help with emails? Do you ever help with photos? Like I'm completely overwhelmed. And as I get older, I'm almost fifty, the knees are getting a little bit more, you know, crotchety, it's harder to get up and down. So I just super interested. I'm a tech nerd. I love anything that has to do with tech and problem solving and figuring things out. So last fall I decided to sort of like hang my hat with physical stuff and try the tech world.
And it's amazing because there's not a lot of people out there doing this. So I've got clients in Israel, the UK and all over that are now working with me to help simplify their digital life.
That is so cool. I did not know you were Condo trained. That was like a I think that was on one of my someday maybe lists at one point to go ahead and get that training done. But I also think I've moved on from that idea. But I'm I love that you did it, and I love the idea of applying Marie Kondo like concepts because I have I love her. I mean, how can you not digital stuff? So this is getting even more exciting for me to
talk about all this digital clutter. So I get logistically, a career wise, why you pivoted to digital clutter and also why the demand would be there. I totally see how as we get our physical spaces more under control, or maybe even as we don't, we still care about what is going on in our digital realms. But I guess some people might ask, you know, who cares. They might say, like, you know, it doesn't matter it's not physical, it's not taking up any space, Like, why not just
have everything haphazard? I can search for whatever. Tell me about how do you find or how have you learned about how digital clutter impacts people and why do you feel like it's important.
Well, you know, there's not really a ton of data out there right now about the huge impact that it does have on us. There has been a lot of studies about the impact that our physical clutter has on us, but the Cleveland Clinic just recently came out and said digital clutter has probably about the same effect because it's so UCLA had actually done a study years ago that there was a relationship in women between the number of belongings that they had and their cortisol levels, their stress levels.
So there's actually a direct relationship between the amount of stuff that you have and how you feel. And when we're talking about digital stuff, we're talking about magnitudes of like tens of thousands. When I hear from people, they're like, it's so common for them to just be like, oh, I have one hundred thousand emails, I have forty thousand photos, and it's just I think now more than ever, it's unrelenting.
And now the marketers have learned that, like they can get our attention more if they text us, and so now they're texting us, and so we just have these
notifications that are coming at us from all sides. And there's also some data that shows that we spend fifty five minutes a day looking for things, and a lot of times that is the email, the document, the kid's health assessment that you need for the summer camp and it's overdue for a week, and you just spend your time feeling so frazzled because you can't put your hands on the thing that you know is somewhere, but you
just don't know where. So I see that stress taking over my clients all the time.
So I hear it kind of in two ways. One is not being able to find things, and number two is just the sheer, I don't know, annoyance of having the clutter itself, like whether that is a desktop that is covered with stuff, as Laura has actually talked about in our intro, I believe, or whether it is just like having a Google Photo account where you keep getting those emails that it's two full. Not that I would know anything about that, right.
I think for a lot of people, it's just like they don't even know what they don't know. They're just like, I don't even really know where my photos are. I don't know if they're backed up. I think they might be in Google Photos. I think they might be in Apple. I think I might be paying something extra, but I'm
not quite sure because we're sort of handed these. You know, our phones are like fifteen hundred dollars supercomputers that we're walking around with than our hands every day, but we don't really necessarily know how to use them to make our lives easier, which they absolutely can. So people just sort of shrug their shoulders and say like, I don't know, I don't really get it, so I guess I won't really figure it out, you know. And so that's where I come in.
Yeah, and you're bringing up the cost of all that data and all those millions of items, Like it's true at some point that storage is not free, and so maybe there would be a financial benefit from addressing your digital clutter as well, although I guess, yeah, it depends on the scale.
Yeah, well, there's even an environmental aspect to it too. I mean, there it shows I read a'sistic the other day that was something like, we don't reference ninety percent of the things that we save three seconds after saving them. And so those photos of the ardvark at the zoo that your kid took seven years ago, they live somewhere. They live on a server that's being cooled in some sort of server farm somewhere. So all of that it has it takes up space. You know.
Yeah, that's actually fascinating to think about as well. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to get into your brain dump method. I love methods like this. I'm super excited to learn a little bit more about it. So we're going to tackle that as soon as we get back. Okay, all right, we are back, and we've kind of I think established, or Amanda's established, why it's important to think about our digital clutter and how it can impact us in various ways.
So now we're going to get a little bit I think, into the how do we actually tame this clutter? And we're going to actually talk about a number of specific scenarios and I think that part will be really fun. But first, Amanda, it sounds like you have kind of an overarching method that you call the brain dump. Can you tell our listeners all about this method?
Sure?
So my work is really at the intersection of tech and productivity, and so it is really figuring out how to harness the cool tools that are out there to declutter not just our inboxes and our files, but also our minds. So my love language is Google spreadsheets. So when I was working with my clients and really helping them, you know, they would come out was so overwhelmed. I have a million things to do. I can't figure out
where to start. I taught them this thing that I call the Focus method, and it kind of comes from the idea of kN Mari in the sense of like does it spark joy? And something I talk a lot more about, which is is it fun and easy? Is it something that you really enjoy doing and something that you're really good at? And if it isn't, can we find a way to sort of declutter it out of your life?
Right?
So the focus method is an acronym and the F stands for finish it. So that is just things like it might be something that you absolutely love to do, like gardenings, so let's keep that on the plate and let's do that, or it could be you really just need to take the cats to the vet and you just need to finish that. Right. The O is outsource, So is there a tool, a person, an app that
can do this for you? So I love grocery delivery, for example, saves hours of time, and so I outsource it to the lovely people who bring my groceries to me. Cut it is just don't do it at all? Right? Are you the leader of the girls Scouts and you kind of secretly dread it and you really wish that you had never signed up? Is there a way that you could get out of that? Uncomplicated?
Is you?
And I am the queen of over complication? So uncomplicated is really just about how can you make this simple? So, say it's the holidays and you're dreading decorating your entire house. Could you just put like a wreath on the front door and call it a day? Right, something really easy? And then the S is scooch it, and that is can we move this down? Do we need to be renovating our kitchen in the middle of a busy graduation season?
You just have to be careful with the scooch because a lot of us tend to scooch and then scooch and then scooch and then scooch right, so you have to kind of decide is this a strategic scooch or is this just something that I'm procrastinating on. So I'll stop there in case you have any questions about the actual focus and then I can talk about a spreadsheet that I help people use to actually brain dump and use the focus tool.
Well, first I would suggest changing, you know, since I am the authority on your method. I'm just kidding, but I'm like, scooch. It could be like schedule it or someday it. So you're either like giving it like a specific timeframe or you're like, nope, it's going to be like a someday like nebulous thing. So sorry, I just had to share my brainstorm while you were talking because scooch was a funny word, although it actually is very memorable because scooch is like a good image.
Where were you when I was trying to think about good words for the focus method?
I love that. That's so good.
I'm using that.
That's my unplanned contribution. But the method sounds really interesting, although it sounds more like a life philosophy. Then it does a digital decluttering strategy. So I'm super excited to hear kind of how that relates to your brain dump method and then your approaches to the digital clutter itself.
Right, So what I have people do, and you can actually go to my website into go organizing dot com and you can download the worksheet and the Google sheet and all of that, and I'll walk you through it. But then what I have people do is I have them go ahead and brain dump all of the different tasks that they have on their brain into this Google
sheet and they can assign a category. So I usually assign the four categories that my co host Brook foury uses in her planner, which is home, work, self and others. And you'll just brain dump everything and you'll ask yourself, does this park joy? Is this fun and easy?
Is it a should?
Is it something that I want to do in my life? And then you can there's a little drop down and you can identify is it an F, is it a O, et cetera. You can put the date that you're going to work on it, you can put the exact next step. Because a lot of times we'll say things like something I have on my mind, this launch a YouTube channel. Well that's not like a task, that's a huge project, right, So what's the first step that you're actually going to
do and when are you going to do it? And then it gets fun because you can sort the spreadsheet by the priority, by the category, by the date, and so you get the power of this sort of little digital powerhouse to help you sort your brain and what
you can see. You know, I have some clients that are super type A that are like, Okay, I did the spreadsheet and everything is priority one, everything is finished, and it's all due you know, next Friday, and there's seventy five of them, so it's like, okay, let's reevaluate, right. So it just really gives you a picture of like what is truly mathematically possible?
Right. I love that. I love the idea. I still am like a little lost on like how that exactly relates to digital cluttering. To me, that is like you're using a really cool digital tool to clean up life kind of stress over like overwhelm of tasks. But I still there's so much value in that, Like I love that idea. I'm all about like making lists and the idea of having a list where everything lives in one place is going to be easily referenceable from every single device,
and that's sort of ale. That is hot. I love that.
Yeah, well, I think to me it relates in the sense that so, like I said, my work is sort of at the intersection of tech and productivity. So some of the productivity tips that I have aren't necessarily always going to be about tech. But it's about decluttering your mind. And it's about not just digital decluttering, but also organizing. It's about how can I use the tools that exist
in this world to actually make my life easier. And so the average everyday person might not think, oh a spreadsheet, like how is a spreadsheet can possibly make my life easier? And this is one of the ways that I demonstrate how it can.
I totally love that, And actually there might be a decluttering aspect of it now that I think about it, because people have a tendency to try a whole slew of different tools and then they end up with to do lists in five different places. They have it on to do list, and they have it in an email, and they have it on a sticky note, and the idea that actually, you know what, we're just going to have one place, and it's going to be a very simple place. A Google sheet that like really doesn't take
a huge on ramp to master. I think that's beautiful. There's some simplicity there, so very cool.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun and it can be your master lift. It doesn't have to be, you know, I don't think people are going to be able to reference a Google sheet every day, but it's just kind of like maybe quarterly it's like, ah, my brain is on fire, let me like get all this down, and then when you get a sense of what you have to do next, then it gives you a good place to start.
Yes, And the fact is that it's like searchable and sortable. It's really really fun. Have you seen people do cool things with like color and I don't know, how have you seen somebody's look And what is the highest number of lines you've ever seen on somebody's life Google sheet?
Me, I've seen like one hundred and twenty five. So I went in there the other day actually added like a whole bunch more rose, you know, formatted rose, because I was like, oh my gosh, people have a lot on their plate, right, Yeah, And I think it's very similar to sort of what we do in con Mari when we pile all the clothes on the bed.
It's like just that shock.
Factor of seeing like, oh, this is why I feel the way that I do. This is why I feel so stressed out because my brain is trying to process. It's like that joke when they say like my brain has too many tabs open. My brain has one hundred and seventy five tabs open. That's why I feel the way that I do.
And then do you instruct people to look at it at any specific cadence like once a week when they're doing weekly planning or is it more just like it's there for when you need it and feel called to look at it or add to it. Yeah.
I think a lot of times when people do it the first time, they really do use it as sort of a real guide of like, Okay, let me organize this so that I have ten things that are priority one and I'm very clear on what the next steps are, and then when I get through the it's like, okay, what are the next ten?
Right?
So, usually my clients will use it as a tool, maybe for a couple of weeks, until they feel like they have clarity, and then they can kind of set it aside and then maybe quarterly they'll come back to it.
Very cool fun aside, one of my friends actually has a daily planning method on Google Sheets where she will kind of like list out basically kind of keep a time record. She has her like top task for the day on there, and she even cuts and pastes like a photo of the day into her Google Sheets, so they become this beautiful life record. So shout out to Kay, who is one of my good friends as well. Now, but yeah, her method is super cool. I could see
that meshing super well with yours. It's like you've got your long term and then you've got your short term, and you could have an all Google Sheets life system if you really wanted to.
Oh my gosh, it sounds like Kay could definitely be a kindred spirit of mine.
One hundred percent. All right, Well, we're gonna pivot into some common now. We're going to go back a little bit out of the like corraling every priority and into the like different digital realms that people tend to struggle with, because there's a lot of themes that come up over and over with in twenty twenty four, as this is being recorded where people just feel like they have a
mess and cannot get a handle on things. So let's start. Actually, I'm adding one I just thought of as I'm doing this. Let's start with kind of like the most perhaps hated or obvious of all email. So, how do you help your clients that have incredibly unwieldy inboxes? What are your philosophies around email? And yeah, I'm super interested in how condo what a per email?
So the thing that I do first with my clients is help them divide their email into better buckets. So about sixty percent of people use Gmail, so most of the clients that I'm seeing are using Gmail. And Gmail
has this really cool feature called price already inbox. So instead of when you log into your email you see this huge blob of emails that it's really not clear, like what's important, what needs attention, it will divide it into four categories, which is sort of It starts with the important and unread, and then you can have starred, then you can add your own little section which I always have people add action needed, and then it has
the everything else. And I help people understand sort of how Google works, that Google is basically, Gmail and mail in general is kind of this assistant that you've just hired and you're trying to train them on how you want them to handle your mail. So a lot of people don't even understand, like, oh, that little flag there that means that Google thinks that this is important. But if I click that, then I'm training it to tell
to know that that email isn't important. Right, So we go in and we just sort of understand the basics of like, let's actually look at your email in a totally different way. Let's do a little bit of training and tell Google this is important, this isn't important. Let's create an action needed section, Let's create an online order section.
Let me teach you how to drag and drop, And we just kind of learned those basics, and then usually at that point they're like they actually will say to me like this is fun, this is really cool, you know, and they start getting their labels colored and all of that kind of stuff, and then usually I'll just instruct them to kind of bite size it. One of the fun things that you can do is you can search. I learned this tip from Laura may Martin, who is Google's in house productivity expert who just.
Wrote a book and former best of both World's Guests just a few weeks ago.
Oh that's right, I forgot about that. I think that might have even been why I reached out. And she wrote a book name called up Time, and she has a little tip of searching in the search bar the word unsubscribe, and then that will actually show you all of these newsletters that you can unsubscribe from, and you can mass delete and mass unsubscribe and all of that stuff. So usually with emails, that's where we start. Like I kind of say to my clients, is almost like clean
before you cook. Like if you're going to cook a big meal and the kitchen is a mess, don't go in and just start cooking. You clean the kitchen up. So let's get your email kind of cleaned and organized, and then we're gonna start cooking.
And inbox zero yay or nay.
You know, I don't feel particularly passionate about in box zero. Interesting, I'm usually at like inbox thirty.
Okay, it's like one screen kind of a situation, correct, right, I get that.
I think some people are you an inbox zero person?
I am, I mean, I don't live at inbox zero daily. I probably live more. Actually I live anywhere from inbox zero to inbox like four hundred, and I do like massive cleanouts. The reason I like to periodically get from thirty to zero is it tends to be once I'm at that thirty piece, I'm just procrastinating those things and if I just bulldoze through it, I can deal with it, and I probably should once it's been sitting there for weeks. So I do. I love my inbox zero.
Yeah, it can be very satisfying. I use an email tool called Superhuman, and when you get to inbox zero, it shows a beautiful image, so it's very satisfying.
I love that. All Right, we're going to take another quick break and then we're going to go into the next digital behemoth that everyone complains about or talks about. All Right, we are back. We have tackled email, and now I'm going to guess that you hear a little bit about people's photo collections, am I right?
Oh? Yes, it's funny because I know you're a physician, so I'm sure when you're out in the world people are like, hey, can you look at this rash? Or like my shoulder is hurting. In my case, the people will be like can you look at my phone? And he help me figure out and photos is usually a lot of the cases with that, and again it's just people just not understanding where do these live and what is the cloud? And are they being backed up? And
are am I own photos? So usually it's just trying to get to an underst standing of helping people understand the basics. So for example, if you have all Mac stuff, knowing that your photo library on your Mac should match your photo library on your phone, and then we can work with them to declutter if you have two different like mismat if you have an iPhone and a PC, those are kind of mismatched, so like how are we going to be saving things every backing up on Google Photos?
Helping people learn that you can use the smart tools that exist in these things like facial recognition. So many people don't know that you can actually find like pictures of your dog that way, or pictures of your vacation in Spain based on the date that you were there
and things like that. So teaching them kind of the one oh one and then also helping them have a bite sized goal to work towards so some people will say, like, I want to organize my photos, which is a really big task, but like, what if you just make a
photo album of your trip to Paris this year? Right, and there you get the opportunity declutter and find favorite photos and move things into folders and you kind of get in the groove and in the momentum of it, and then you can move forward and be like, oh, okay, well how about a photo album of last summer? And my favorite tool for photo albums that is so it's like the Southwest Airlines of photo albums in the sense
that it's so easy as chat books. I'm sure you've heard of them, Like they you don't have to do the landscape and the portrait and the captions and the formats. It's just one photo per page, delivered to your mailbox and it's so easy.
I like that. So maybe like instead of saying, oh, I have to have every photo corral, you're like, I do a seasonal chat book every season and I call it a day. I think with photos, people get very in the weeds about like perfectionism that I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I think AI will be able
to clean things up. So nicely at some yes, very soon point that our efforts like, oh that one's blurry, let me delete it, Like that's just misplaced effort when you have like fifty pictures or something like that.
Right, my favorite app is called the cleaner Kit app, and it's really cool because it will delete your duplicates. It will delete screenshots, but it also will if you took fifty pictures of your best friend in front of a tree, it will be like, this is the best one. Do you want to delete the rest? And that's exactly like, let Ai do the work for you.
That is amazing. Cleaner Kit. So does that work with iPhone or it just works on your phone?
I believe it works with all phones. I could be wrong because I am an iPhone user. I and most of my clients are iPhone users as well, but I think.
So that sounds awesome, very cool. Do you have a preferred digital storage place that you recommend for people or do you kind of consider them all created equal, like Amazon versus Google versus Apple, et cetera.
Well, I'd like to choose tools that are a little bit more agnostic to the actual sort of software company, because everybody has their own things, so I Cloud wants to sell you their drive. Microsoft wants to sell you their drive. Google wants to sell.
You their drive.
Right, I like to use something that's like Dropbox that's a little bit more agnostic, so that if tomorrow I decide I don't want to have a Mac anymore, I want to have a PC, it's a lot easier to transition between those things, especially if you have mismatched software. So if you have like a PC and an iPhone, then you're going to want to have something like Dropbox because iCloud drive is going to be really clunky to use.
On your computer.
So I usually try to meet people where they are based on the software that they have. You know, I don't want to be like, oh, this seems to be working fine for you, but let's move you all the way over to Dropbox. But a lot of times they're getting frustrated and experiencing a lot of friction because they have mismatched companies that they're trying to make friends, and those companies don't want to be friends. They're competing with each other.
Very interesting, I like that awesome, Well that's photos. I feel like maybe we've made a few people feel better and I'd say that name of that Apple one more time cleaner kit app, cleaner kit app. That sounds like very useful information.
And I can send you a link for your show notes to.
Loll Yes, definitely, Okay. The next thing I have on here is notifications, And this I think is interesting because this isn't just like data and it's not just like, oh, our screen doesn't look pretty, but this is like fragmentation of our time and attention. But it's also coming from the digital realm, and I think it's also so fascinating. I mean, I'm guilty of this myself. Like, if something is defaulted to notify me, how many times do I have to be annoyed by said thing before I'm like
turn that off? You know how to do that? Like I'm not eighty years old. Well, and that's not even fair. Many eighty year olds are probably very good at managing their iPhone settings. But like, I can do this, but yet I don't. So how do you help your clients with notifications and maybe turning their phone into a less intrusive device if that's something they desire.
Yeah, it is like a matter of just sitting down in the moment and doing it. Or when you get that notific being like, ugh, I don't want to hear from law and Taylor Loft, you know anymore. And then just clicking and you realize that you can actually press and hold click options and click turn off. You don't even have to go into the notifications. You can just tell it right then, I don't want to perceive notifications at all ever from these people, right, so you can
turn that off there. But that's some of the things that we recommend that people do. We have the Get It Done Club that meets three times a week, and we give them a list of like, here's some of the things that you could do during this and one
of them is change your notifications. I have a lot of clients who while I'm talking to them, they'll look at other Apple Watch like every three seconds because it's like New York Times, CNN, AT and T like the fragmented attention is insane, right, and they're like, oh, this watch is driving me crazy, not realizing. So a lot of times I'll be like, let's go into your notifications
right now and turn it off. I'm one of those like now or never type of people, like let's just get it, and they're like, oh wow, and just turn on your watch so that it's literally nothing but like phone and text or just phone.
Right.
Yeah, I think about the specific things you want to know about, and then you can also make use of those focus modes so that like maybe during work hours, like you don't even get your texts or whatever it is that you need to regulate. I'm all about the do not disturb during podcast recording sessions or else. I don't know how I could focus.
So yeah, I know I've got that on right now, but.
I didn't know about the press and hold. So that's huge because I always just go to settings notifications and like toggle it off. So that's super cool. So when an actual notification pops up, you can press and hold it and you'll get the options to get rid of it.
Yes, it's either a press and hold or it is a like swipe. Actually it's a swipe. It's a swipe left. So I just got this text from Sunnyside, so I swipe left, I click options, and I get the choice of turn off all messages notifications for this particular message.
Amazing. Does that work for app notifications as well or just text messages?
I don't know. I think it should. Let's see, this is an app notification. Yes, options, I guess it's it got the same thing.
That's huge. Okay, so hopefully everyone's listening. An even easier way to when your phone annoys you to nip it in the butt right then and there, all right. The last realm we're going to talk about is calendars, because digital calendars are so useful and yet they don't always
play nicely with each other. And I will admit I'm like a very weird person and my rule my life calendar is actually paper because I find it easier to integrate all the various digital calendars that feed into me, and I've like given up on like having one digital place and instead I'm like, well, if it's in my actual paper one, then I've acknowledged it's real. But I
am weird. So for those who prefer digital for their kind of master calendar but might be dealing with like the soccer calendar and the school calendar, and one's on Outlook and one's on Gmail and whatever, how do you help people clean this up? I find this very challenging.
It is challenging, and usually I just have people kind of go all in on one place, so I check everything on my Google calendar, and so I have my personal email, I have my work email, and they all feed into so that I can actually see my personal and my work calendar kind of overlaid on top of each other. And then I subscribe to the cheerleading calendar and the school calendar, and I have all of those pulled in as well, so that I can see all of them at one place, and I can toggle on
and off if I want to. But I have a lot of people who will like be in their Apple calendar and then add something there and then be confused about why it's not going over to the Google calendar because they added it under their Apple iCloud. So a lot of times it's just like a basic understanding of like where does this event live, where is it coming from, and how can I get this one calendar place all
set up so that I am truly seeing everything. And so that's a lot of the heart of a lot of the issues that I deal with my clients is just not like a clear understanding of concepts that are fundamental to making these things work, like the difference between the leading or archiving, or what is the iCloud and
what you know, all that kind of stuff. So usually it's just them sharing their screen and me digging in and figuring out, Okay, where is all this stuff and how can we get it all in one place.
That's awesome. Yeah, it's true, and it can become super confusing because if you've got these old legacy calendars and let's say one is syncing with iye caount, but like your Google is pulling in your eye clouds, so you think that the Google has that calendar directly, but it's actually like indirect and then you end up with like duplicates and anyway, I can see why sometimes you probably need to drill down and actually look at it. But
this also seems like a solvable problem. Like if you actually sit down and you're like, Google calendar is my main thing, and how do I need to get all my things into that probably doable with the exception of I know, some corporate calendars don't sink because of privacy issues, right, So that.
May be a case where you kind of have to have your personal calendar that has everything going on, and then you have your corporate calendar. But a lot of times there is like an export import that needs to take place. I had a client that was sort of accidentally putting a lot of stuff on her Apple calendar, so we just did an export, imported that all over to Google Calendar, and then she was forbidden to ever put anything on her Apple calendar again.
You know that everything else stayed in the same place, so beware. I guess we're saying, or you're saying, amazing, Well, this has been super useful. I think there's been some nuggets of gold in this conversation in terms of ways to make things easier that really don't take that much time. So thank you for that. Before we get to our Love of the week, where can listeners find you?
So they can find me at Indigo Organizing dot com. And they can find me also on my podcast website at goodenoughish dot com.
Amazing. All right, Love of the Week, I will go first to let you like process your thoughts because I
had my planned. I think one of my my favorite digital uses is just group texts, Like I don't know how I would have stayed in touch, and I don't do social media, so group texts to me are like curated, like these are the people I actually want to have these conversations with and I have different ones for like different realms of life, Like I've got like my college friends and my running friends and my like trying to get pregnant in twenty twelve friends, and like my family
and whatever. And I realize how much joy it brings me to be able to share different things in different contexts and kind of be able to keep up with these threads of people in that way. It works really really well for me. So super simple. But that's one of my favorite uses of modern technology. Oh, I love that.
I was just fortunate to do a wellness retreat in MAYORCA a couple of months ago, and I met twenty two amazing women and we're now on a WhatsApp group chat together and we just had a zoom reunion yesterday because we were able to coordinate it on this chat. And it's like sparking so much joy, it's amazing love.
That is that your love of the week or do you have another one?
I have another one. So my love of the week is the Apple Reminders app, specifically the shopping list function.
I use this all day long.
You know, I have my Apple Watch, or even if you don't have an Apple Watch, you have your phone. You can just say to Siri, like, hey, Siri, add milk to the shopping list, and it will add milk to the shopping list. Not only to the shopping list, but it'll actually categorize it under dairy. And so you can say, add bread to the shopping list and it'll
categorize it underbreads. And then that list is shared with my husband, so when he goes to the store, if I haven't had a chance to make a list yet, usually everything that we need is already on that list. So my love of the week is my reminder's shopping list.
Amazing and so easy to just add the minute you see something's used up, so I can see how incredibly useful that would be. Yes, Well, thank you so much for coming on, Amanda. This has been so much fun and I am like excited to put some of this stuff into play myself. Awesome.
I was so great talking with you. Thank you for having me.
Well we are back.
Sarah did a great interview there with Amanda Jefferson about digital decluttering, how we can get control of the digital clutter in our lives. Lots of useful tips and tricks there.
So this week's question, this listener writes in. I wonder whether, while keeping your own children's information private, you guys could talk about general approaches to helping kids with learning disabilities, finding tutors, deciding whether and when to switch schools, helping your child with dealing like they are feeling like they are stupid or behind. Also, how do you deal with
feelings about this as a parent. This person is an English professor, and so, to be truthful, it's been a little bit surprising, and she says a bit of a hit to her ego to have a kid struggling with learning to read. So, Sarah, what was your response with that one? That's super interesting about the early reader thing. I think I might have expected my kids to read on the early side, because lore has it that I
did and my husband did. But Nope, most of them have not, and at least one of them has needed some very formal extra assistance learning to read. I have one child with ADHD, and I will say as when I read this every single time that I have sought some sort of professional help, I was like, so glad I did that.
I could have done it even sooner. And I do feel like, yes, there are times that you want to let kids struggle and I really don't want to be like a snowplow parent to make you know, oh, my kid has to win every single thing and come out on top every time and make everything easy. But you have to figure out where that line is and when it starts to be crossed, to figure out when they
would benefit from extra help. And then one thing that helps me is to remember, well, why do all these professions exist because lots of people need them, because it's really really common to need extra support in various things. So in honor of this question, I came up with a list of various services I've used with kids in the past. And I'm actually surprised at how long it is, but I'm going to read it. So we have done private psycho educational testing. We have hired a psychiatrist, we
have worked with a reading specialist. We've had a behavioral tutor at work with one kid, I reading tutor, a psychologist, a speech therapist. Well that's actually newer, but that's okay, still on the list. And then I have switched to school. So that is a lot. And by the way, don't try to guess which kids which you might even be wrong, you probably are wrong. So keeping that part private, I've used a lot of resources and I have yet to
regret a single one of these interventions. So I feel like if your gut is telling you that your kid needs more support in an area, than you should go for it and be happy that they are available. Now, I say this from a place of privilege, and I know that a lot of these took throwing significant money at the problem, and not everybody is able to do that, and that is terrible. I will say for my job, I know that they're a lot of times. You can get a lot of these resources in a low cost
manner if you qualify for them. It just takes longer and perhaps more legwork, which again is a shame because some of the people that need it are going to be less equipped to find it. But the school system does have a lot of this kind of stuff, from testing to extra tutoring, and they in general are kind of obligated to meet various needs of kids. So if this is not something you're able to attack from a private standpoint, then there are still probably a lot of
resources to investigate. And I'll say that I do think pre kids me would be surprised to hear this list would she even judge post kiss me for this list. I don't know, maybe, but you know what, she'd probably be surprised about a lot. So there we have it.
Yeah, I would say, you know, we've definitely used tutoring as well, and there's lots of places you can find tutors these days. You can use them online, especially if you're talking about I mean, I think this is a younger child, so that may be less of a good option for there, but as your kids get into middle school and high school, you could avail yourself of the world of online tutors. So we have definitely used online
tutors for math. We have used them for writing help, which is theoretically I'm a professional writer, but sometimes people take it better from other experts, not your parents. We've done foreign language tutoring, which actually there's a world of options there, as you might imagine, I would definitely recommend looking into that. You can often find reasonably cost people who live in countries where they would speak whatever language your kid is studying, So look into that as an option.
And because more of this is available online these days, especially for older kids, the costs in many cases will be over a range, and so you can choose the range that meets with your budgetary needs, and it might be more flexible as well, because obviously, if you are driving a kid to a tutor, that takes time out of your day and their day that they can't be
doing something else. But if it is online tutoring, maybe it could be a little bit later, and since you don't have to drive there, it might be more you know, it might fit better with a busy family schedule. But we have not regretted trying tutoring in the situations where we thought it would be helpful.
So definitely that.
Now the ego part, because Sarah I didn't talk about that, but let's address that one, because I mean, I think one of the upsides of having lots of kids is you very quickly see that they aren't you, like I think we might know that all intellectually. It can be a little bit harder, perhaps if you only have one child to understand that this kid is not an extension of you in really any way, shape or form, like
they are their own person. And because I have five kids, I can see the how different all of them are from each other and from me and from Michael. And maybe there are sometimes little bits that you can pick up like, oh, I recognize that little thing from me or from a grandparent or whatever else, but it is mixed with ninety five percent other.
Stuff that is just all them.
So given that this is an entirely separate person from you, it is not anything to do with you being an excellent English professor whether your kid can learn to read, because they no doubt have other things that are awesome that they can do and reading is maybe a little bit more challenging for them. But maybe they can do
something that would have been harder for you. So maybe just think about, like remind yourself of what your kid does really well, Like you are a straight A student and your kid gets mostly be's well, oh well, but maybe he's really awesome at soccer, has a very close group of friends that he's managing those relationships really well, like very social. Maybe he reaches out to other kids, like he's always the one who finds that kid on
the playground who needs someone to play with. Maybe he's incredibly polite to the older people in your neighborhood, Like there's something that your kid does awesome and that would be great to focus your whatever parenting, like need to feel like your kid is great on that and then just really not talk about the other part quite as much. I mean, get in the intervention if you can, but there's really no point in harping on I got a's
why are you getting bs? I mean, that would just be awful to even like have that in your brain. Most of the time, like focus your ego on what you are doing and on the fact that you have an awesome relationship with your son, who is a different person from you.
I guess if that makes sense. Yes, And for every perceived deficit that is different from what yours are, they may have a perceived talent that's different from what yours are. And that's kind of part of the fun of seeing how they turn out and like being ready for and appreciating those differences. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah has been talking with Amanda Jefferson about digital decluttering. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.