Ep 52 | Organizing your home office

Annie: I'm Annie.

Leah: And I'm Leah

Annie: And this is Lactation Business Coaching with Annie and Leah, where we talk about the smart way to create a compassionate and professional private practice.

Leah: Let's dive in. Well, hey there, Annie.

Annie: Hey there, Leah. How are you today?

Leah: I am doing pretty good. I'm looking forward to our talk today because as a Virgo, organizing is top on my list, even though I might not always execute my wild and exciting organizational dreams. I think about them all the time. I have a weird, I don't know, horoscope/sign things. I am so much supposed to be a Virgo in so many ways, but somehow, I have this other side of me that revolts against all things Virgo. So, I love organization. I love making things look neat and tidy, but I also don't always execute them. So, it's always helpful when we get to talk about these things. I'm telling you, every time we have podcasts and we talk about something, I'm all renewed energy and excitement about it. So probably this weekend, my home office is going to be super organized because today we're talking about organizing your home office. What are your thoughts and your feelings?

Annie: You are! I have feelings. I am an up-holder. That is my tendency and so everything has the right
place. I believe that it is possible to discover the exact right place for every single thing in my house, and then I make my family crazy because I will be like, oh, I found the better place for this thing and then I'll move it and I won't tell anybody. And there've actually been times where I've moved something to a better place and then forgotten. And then I'm like, where did it go? And then I will find it and I'll be like, oh, that is the best place for that. That's a good idea I had. But yeah, I'm a little ... I don't know what the word is for it. I just really like things to be the way I like them, and it's not so much about being organized. It's more about like... I mean, I do like organization, but it's more like I just like everything to be tidy.

Leah: Well, you know, they say outer order brings inner calm and I totally resonate with that even though again, I don't execute on it all the time. I can totally sense that when I look around my workspace and it feels all jumbled up and everything. I can definitely tell it impacts my focus for sure, because the little Virgo in me starts going, wouldn't it be cool if you had a whole little file system for those papers that you threw over there? And wouldn't it be so cool if you organized all your pins in colors and what type of pin they are? Wouldn't that be really cool? And let's go on Amazon and let's look for little magnetic pin holder things. That's totally where my brain goes. So I strongly feel that that outer order brings inner calm thing is a real thing. And I know that it's something I keep in the back of my mind as I go to work, sometimes meaning go to work like in my workspace that oh, it might be helpful if I actually tidied up a couple of things first before I got started so that it would be nice and calming for my brain. Do you feel like that? Can you have a noticeable impact on your focus and concentration when you have that kind of more chaotic workspace?

Annie: Yes and no. I'm looking at my desk right now and I'm like, okay. I have my little area. I have a little decorative area that has a cactus that my friend gave me and it has a little another succulent that my younger daughter gave me. It has a little Shrinky-dink shark because sharks are my favorite.

Leah: Are they really? I don't think I know that about you. Sharks are your favorite.

Annie: Yeah, sharks are totally my favorite animal. Talk about an animal that puts everything where it's supposed to go. You go near a shark; it's going to decide exactly what to do with you. But I have this little area and I have this beautiful, felted doll of a mother holding a baby that Amanda, my admin who's been on the show, she gave it to me for the holidays and it's so lovely. And so all those things, they belong in that corner, but then also my phone is over there. There’re some papers in my filing cabinet that I haven't dealt with or my filing. I have a little thing mounted to my wall. I don't have a cabinet, but I'm supposed to deal with them. I can actually live with that as long as things are in the place that they're supposed to be, where mentally I'm like, okay, it's there. If there were papers, I would have to put them out of my sight, but I don't necessarily have to organize them and deal with them in the moment. I do have messy areas, like my desk drawer is a disaster and I don't care because the things that are in there belong in there.

Leah: Yeah, you have to see it. You don't have to look at it. It's not in your eye, in front of your face. Yeah. Yeah. So are there things... you know, most of us - well not most of us, maybe a lot of us have a home office versus office space that we separate from our home space. And I know a lot of us especially in the pandemic time maybe even utilizing that office space even more so. I know for me, that meant that I actually had to move my office. My office is actually in my closet, which sounds so crazy, but it works. It totally works for me. That's what we're doing right now. But is there something that is kind of outside the box that you've done for having a home office?

Annie: This isn't so much an organizational thing as it is helping my mind do things. I think about this is about papers. So, papers have to move a certain way through my space as they get dealt with. This is things like the main piece of paper I have to deal with are like letters from Aetna. Please I just want to be paperless or EOBs from my insurance company. I'm like, can I just check that box? I don't want this coming in the mail. So much paper. So those things, the first thing they have to go into this little hanging thing and that's where I know it has to be scanned or it has to be shredded. So, then they have to go down. Underneath it I have my scanner on top of my shredder.

Leah: Gotcha.

Annie: They both stay plugged in, but they're in the corner. So then if I want to scan, I slide everything out. I pull out the shredder, I put the scanner up on my desk and then the papers go through the scanner through the shredder and then they've moved down in a way.

Leah: They're done. Oh nice!

Annie: They have to go that way. They have to move that way. I don't know, it's not really out of the box, but it's more like that's how I remember. Oh, and then also, there are things that if there's something that doesn't have to be scanned, but just has to be shredded, that goes in between the scanner and the shredder and the scanner kind of holds it in place, but I can't see it cause it's in a corner, so it doesn't exist until I pull out the shredder and I'm like, oh, some things to shred.

Leah: Fun job that my kids love is shredding paper. Oh my gosh. They ask me all the time. Do you have anything we can shred? I don't know, go to the mailbox. I'm sure there's something we can shed. Yeah. I think that's awesome to have a system for how things flow in and then flow out because you're going to have a lot of things, whether that be papers or just other office kind of things that are going to be coming in and out of your office. I know for me, when I had to move into my closet and create a closet workspace for me, one of the things I did, I'm sure you guys have seen this in your clients' homes is the little three-tiered basket thing on wheels. And I got that and that's kind of my organizational setup for having my office supplies with me, but also my teaching stuff for my virtual visits. And then I have a little system for my papers because I take notes in my visits and so I have them scanned into my EHR platform. And so, I'll stack them up at the bottom and then I know, okay, I need to go and after there's several there. I'll go use my fancy fast scanner and boom, boom, boom, scan them all in really quickly. But I've had to really think outside the box when it comes to my little closet space and trying to make this space work for me.I know when I had my big office downstairs, so nice. Now it's been taken over by my sixth grader. He looks like a king. He's in this giant chair cause he's in a really nice office chair. I'm like, you look like you're living the big life here, buddy. He's some CEO in virtual school, but what's really nice that I had down there that I loved was I took one of the walls and I got one of the really big calendars. The one that does a whole year at a glance, and you could write on it with dry eraser. That was so amazing to have that in front of me to really look at the whole year as a picture. Then to see where I needed to move things and then I could put notes about goals I had on there and stuff and that helped me stay so organized because I'm very visual. So just having a calendar say on my phone or something, because I can't see the next two months, I'll forget things are coming up and I won't pay attention to them. So, it was really helpful for me from an organizational standpoint is I can scan that calendar. It's kind of always in front of me and I knew, oh, we have that thing coming up. You know what? I need to put some tasks that need to come happen the next couple of weeks to get ready for that thing coming up.
That's something that for me has been super helpful over the last two years where we've just been busy and had new projects and podcasts and Deeper Dives to work into my schedule and things that I need to not always on the top of my mind, but I need to make sure that I'm getting my tasks done for them. So I love having that big 12 month calendar. I wish it could be reusable. That was the only thing I hated. It seemed like such a waste because I threw it away at the end of the year, which was not the most fun, but I'm trying to find one that's more sustainable that I can keep up and use year after year because it was really so helpful for me. Do you have anything visual other than your little decorative area? Do you have anything that cues you visually for work in your workspace, or are you not so much visually driven as I am?

Annie: I'm not as visually driven as you are. I mean, I think a lot of that though has do with the fact that I live in such a small space compared to, and actually by New York City standards, we have a huge apartment. So we're very lucky to have what we have, but I really don't like a lot of stuff out that doesn't have to be out and so I do try to keep some... my desk is right next to my bed. And so I don't want too much work stuff out where I can see it because I also want to be able to quiet down at night and be able to transition to sleep. I keep my computer on my desk and I am pretty good at not pulling it out. I don't really use it at night in my room, because this is for sleeping, but it's hard to have it right there. So, I don't have a big calendar and I do actually - big surprise - like technology. So I actually find myself more helped by apps. I use an app called Click Up. That is where I organize everything and it does help me see things big picture and granular and being able to stay on top of appointments. I would love to have a big calendar. And we were just talking before we started recording about what date is our next Deeper Dive? And we had to like pull up our digital calendars and then we realized that the zoom link in the calendar, the zoom link that we have is not the same zoom link that other people are getting. And so I'm like, Oh my gosh, what happened? I've got to fix that. And so you know, there's a downside to that technology because it can get messed up. But sometimes you think I'm going to buy this thing and it's going to make my life better. And I've certainly done that with technology solutions and I have done it with things. I'll think that this one thing that I saw is going to change my life and it's going to finally make me organize, I'm going to buy it. And then I'll use it, but not totally, or I forget that I bought it or it's the same kind of thing that I have. I forgot what I thought this was going to do for me. So I do try to be more minimalist because I've found over the years that I'm just not going to be a person that's going to implement some kind of amazing system and I'm okay with that. It's better for me to just throw stuff away that I don't need. And that's how I keep organized.

Leah: I wonder for you with the space that you have, working in a home office, of course we have gear and supplies and things like that. How do you keep that organized, or do you have a certain method for that? I know my husband, much to his dismay, I took over our downstairs closet, which was like where the vacuum and all the jackets went and everything. And he's like, when are we going to have this closet back? I'm like, check with me in 30 something years, because I can't imagine that we're going to have all this stuff out of here. So we had to kind of hack space, take it away from other things. How are you managing gear and just stuff you have to have for the work that you do?

Annie: I can't keep anything that doesn't fit in my scale bag. And the funny thing is my husband does lighting and camera for film and television. You want to talk about somebody who owns gear? He's so organized and I'm like, you should make videos of yourself organizing your stuff because it is beautiful to watch. So he keeps all of his stuff in ... actually, well, one of the places where he keeps all of his stuff. He also has his own dedicated storage for his bigger equipment, but he keeps a lot of stuff in our garage and he will empty out the entire garage. Everything is all over our driveway. We have a garage for our apartment that we rent and it's in our building, which is very unusual for New York City. We do not keep our car in there. That would be crazy. Why would you keep a car in a garage when you could put stuff in it? He pulls everything out and then he puts it back in and he puts it in order of how likely it is that he would need it. So anything that he is not going to be using goes in the back. So he's like, okay, this is holiday decorations for the family, or this is my winter gear and it's May. That goes in the back and anything that's going to be likely to be used frequently goes in the front. And so my scale bag, he incorporates that and sometimes he hangs it on a hook for me. Sometimes he puts it on a shelf so he always makes sure that my scale bag is where I can reach it. And then I have a little box that has my backup PPE in it and things like my backlog that doesn't fit in my bag. I just make sure that's with the stuff that doesn't get hidden and he's pretty good about that, but I also try to follow that rule of 'if I need it, it needs to be nearby and if I'm not going to use it, it can go in storage. If it is going to be going somewhere where it's not accessible, I have to think, do I actually need this or want this? And if I don't, then it goes away. It gets donated to a thrift store or taken... I take a lot of books. I end up with a lot of books. They go to the book swap in our neighborhood. So I do try to be good about getting things out that just came into my life and then don't get to be used.

Leah: You move on because they create that clutter, which doesn't bring that outer order. So I definitely agree with that and I try really hard to keep our space as minimal as possible, the stuff I'm keeping because you can go crazy. And if that was one, here's a piece of advice. Don't buy all the things because we bought all the things in the beginning and I still have stuff that we bought like 10 years ago that we've never used. I'm like, what do you do with this? I try to give it away to everybody. I'm like, do you want these random something-something? I can't figure out what to do with half the stuff that we bought back then. So there definitely is some real benefit to having a minimalist mindset when you are working from home, no matter how big or small your space is. That outer order will create that inner calm. So I hope that each of you have taken some ideas and can put them to giving yourself some of that outer order so you can work in a nice calm space and I hope that you will also join us for our Deeper Dive. We're going to be with Rachel O'Brien on April the 14th. I really look forward to this talk. We've had Rachel on once before, and it was super fun and I can't wait to have her again.

Annie: You can register for the Deeper Dive with Rachel and also access our vault of past Deeper Dives. Either you can sign up for one at a time, or you can get a subscription and get a little discount and never miss a Deeper Dive at learn.anniefrisbie.com/lactationbusinesscoaching for our memberships, and we're really excited. It'll be 3:00 PM Eastern time. Everybody who registers in advance will also get the recording and then the recording will be available. You can also buy our first Deeper Dive with Rachel is also available. So we're going to build on what we talked about, cause we totally ran out of time with her.

Leah: It was such a good talk.

Annie: She has a super cute office and she has fun little things in the background that she actually showed us at the last one, so you'll have to show up to see that if you weren't there. So until next time, it was great talking to you, Leah.

Leah: Yes. Yes. Take care and enjoy your outer order.

Leah: Thanks for listening. To learn more about our monthly deeper dives and how to support our podcasts for as little as $1 a month, visit lactationbusinesscoaching.com. Don't forget to leave us a rating and hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.