I’m normally known as being efficient, in my life and business. I even had a boss once ask me if I was quitting because my office was so clean and organized.
But the last few years of being an entrepreneur, certain things had gotten out of control.
I had over 30,000 images and videos on my phone, and tens of thousands more on my computer.
The downloads folder on my computer was close to 3,000 documents – many of which should have been organized and put into the appropriate folder in Dropbox. And some of them just needed to be trashed. My client files were all over the place.
I knew I had to do something, but it all felt so overwhelming.
So, I broke it down into small steps and acknowledged it wasn’t all going to get cleaned up in a day (or really, even a month).
I tackled all the small folders first – cleaned those up, threw away unnecessary files and renamed and organized files and folders so that they made sense and I could easily find them in the future.
Albeit small, getting this task done first gave me the satisfaction of being able to “check it off” my to-do list. It also gave me the motivation to keep going.
For the 1,000’s of images and videos I have, I first uploaded everything to the cloud –so I could have a larger view of the images to decide which ones to keep but also to keep them safe.
Then I committed to deleting 100 images or videos per day from either my computer or my phone. It’s a slow process but there’s only so much time in the day! Any time I take new pictures or videos, I sort through them at the end of the day, only keeping the ones I want or need.
As far as folders for projects, products and services, I’ve always had a system, I just lost track of it in 2019!