Today is National Clean Your Desk Day, and what better way to start the year off than by cleaning and organizing your desk?
Join me as I ask C.Lee Cawley, a professional organizer, all about organizing your desk.
Click here to view the show notes and resources!
Kendra Corman:
Welcome back to Imperfect Marketing!
I am so excited to be bringing you this special episode on a Monday in honor of National Clean Your Desk Day. I was able to get C. Lee Cawley on this episode, who is a professional organizer with nearly 20 years of experience!
She’s actually a certified professional organizer, I don’t wanna mess that one up. And she shares her knowledge through e-books, classes, courses, coaching, and she has a course called the Paper Cleanse, which I am dying to take. And she also has her Tip Tuesdays, which is really what warmed me up to her.
So welcome!
C.Lee Cawley:
Thank you so much for having me, Kendra.
I’m thrilled to be here, especially to celebrate National clean your desk off day.
Kendra Corman:
Yes. I really need to clean my desk. So that is on the to-do list after our chat today. We are recording this in advance, but I am so excited to hear some of your tips.
So as I was mentioning, one of your Tip Tuesdays that I had signed up for was, you were talking to somebody about finding her vital documents. She knew they were hiding in different places, which I think all of mine are too, but as she was going through the paper, she’s like, “all right, well, let’s file all this stuff away.”
And your response was, “no!”
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah, yeah. I say trash it, don’t stash it, because the real key ingredient with so much of that is that people will file things away, but not make decisions on them. And I don’t want you filing it unless you’re referring to it.
And we’re all in different stages and ages of our paper life, right? So I’m older and I find… Older people tend to be much more paper-based.
My daughter’s 24, she doesn’t even own a printer, right? Everything is digital for her. She does her job remotely without a printer.
I can’t imagine. I need to write things down. I need to see it in tangible form. And so I respect that people do have reference files, but if you’re not referring to it, it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s just, hiding it in your filing cabinet and why make all that effort? It’s a lot of effort to file, so yeah, I’m always encouraging people to trash it.
Don’t stash it, or at least really look at it with critical eyes.
Kendra Corman:
That’s great. Yeah, because I would say nine times outta 10 I go online. I was just actually looking at some receipts that I have in my box of receipts for the business.
C.Lee Cawley:
Mm-hmm.
Kendra Corman:
And I needed to look something up. Well, I went online, right?
C.Lee Cawley:
Right.
Kendra Corman:
Costco, Kroger, like all of them. I can pull those receipts up online!
C.Lee Cawley:
Kendra, so that’s exactly what I tell my students. I’m like, how? What’s the easiest way to find this information?
And for some of us, I call myself a digital dinosaur. By the time I’ve logged in, remembered my password, gotten to the portal, figured out which, where to go…
it’s faster for me sometimes to find that stuff in paper, but if Kendra, I’m organized, I know exactly where to put my hands on that paper.
So if you can find it online then I applaud you for that ability and I would encourage you, that helps reinforce the fact that you don’t have to hold on to some of those things that you don’t have to file it away because you have the proof within an online portal.
So that helps reassure you that you know that, that you can find it when you need it. And I think that that’s the key to organization, right? Trusting that we can find what we need when we need it.
That’s really what sums the whole thing up.
And so when people feel disorganized, like the example of vital documents, right? You need to find, you know, now if you’re traveling abroad, your passport has to be good for six months.
So you really need to be forward thinking about that. They’re not gonna let you on the plane to go abroad if it’s expiring in two months, and you’ll be like, “but it hasn’t expired yet!”
You’re outta luck. Right? So, what do you need If it’s already expired, then you need your birth certificate. You know, so many hoops of fire. So feeling that you have control of the paper instead of the paper having control of you is what I wish for and hope for, for everyone.
So yeah, that’s, that’s a huge part of it.
Kendra Corman:
So I’ve been in marketing and advertising for 15+ years. It makes me sound younger. And when, when I say 15+, I heard, that’s what I was told one day.
And, yeah, I mean, I love paper. I live for paper. My world is paper, right? And… And so, yeah, but the, the paper controls me for sure. Yeah.
Now we’ll have a link, so you were talking about vital documents. We’ll definitely have a link to your free vital emergency documents guide on what you’ll need, how to store it, so you’ll be prepared in case of an emergency, which is really important.
So we’ll go ahead and have a link to that in the show notes. So be sure to go and request that from C.Lee.
So, again, paper controls me. and I am cleaning my desk for national Clean Your desk day, I should clean it more often than that, but I’m a horizontal organizer, right?
That’s what I was told I am. I like to have things in piles and spread out, and you don’t even wanna know what you can’t see behind me on the floor here.
What, are some advice that you give to people when they are, when they love paper like me and are horizontal organizer?
C.Lee Cawley:
So one of the, one of my POPs, and I call them a POP because it’s a Primary Organizing Principle, is that horizontal is hidden and vertical is visible.
So imagine if you will all of your papers, right?
Horizontal. So what you’re doing is if you have various piles, I’m guessing Kendra, that each of those piles are thematically based, right?
This might be a project, a home-based project, right? These might be client acquisition information. This might be vacation planning.
So if that’s the case, I’m gonna encourage you to take each of those subject based, thematic based groups and put them in a simple file folder. I like one that is open on two sides and closed on two sides.
And so then when you are focusing, and I know you use a full focus planner, so focus is something you aspire to, we all aspire to, is that then you say to yourself, “now I’m working on my client acquisition project.”
Maybe you’ll even set a Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes and you’ll pull that one thing out and put it in front of you, right?
So you won’t have the distractions, you’ll be able to trust that your other papers are grouped in the themes and subjects that you have assigned them. But they will be in their tidy little project folders or, you know, action, active project is what I call it.
And you can tuck those away and they can be in a box or in a, you know, vertical file sort, whatever’s easier for you. Again, vertical generally tends to be easier to deal with.
That would be what I would encourage you to do. So instead of having all of it spread out, kind of distracting you, right? You can see it in your peripheral vision. I want you to just focus on whatever project you’ve got going on at that moment that you have prioritized.
And again, I know that you are working as we all are on prioritizing our schedule and study, letting our schedules prioritize us. And I think you’ll find you’re gonna be a lot more productive if you try that.
And it’s literally like a $10 investment in office supplies.
Kendra Corman:
I like that. If there’s any specific products that you recommend, let me know and we’ll go ahead and put those in the show notes too.
But I will say for sure that I can see that definitely helping because it works sort of like email, you know, when you’re sitting at your desktop, what is the first thing that they tell you to do? It’s turn off notifications on your computer so that you’re not distracted.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yes.
Kendra Corman:
And those other piles of paper and so they start thematically, and I can tell you that the mess behind me is thematically organized.
C.Lee Cawley:
Right.
Kendra Corman:
But if I have to do a video or a web meeting or something like that, I have to clean that off. And then it’s no longer thematically organized, and then it’s like a hot mess, and then I end up reprinting or looking for it again or whatever it happens to be.
C.Lee Cawley:
Right.
So I’m gonna encourage you to organize those into kind of active projects. Right?
And as been business owners, we have probably twice to three times more active projects than like a stay-at-home mom or someone who manages the house, cuz we’re managing our house.
My washer just died. So now I, my new active project as of this morning is sourcing the new, you know, washing machine.
But I’ve got all of my other projects, you know, students, marketing, planning for 2023 blogs.
So if you can compartmentalize those things, I think you’re gonna find that. Then you’ll be able to put your hands on it, because some of them overlap, right? Blogs, marketing, you know, go hand in hand.
What am I promoting? What do I wanna talk about?
So then you have those two folders in front of you that you can cross reference.
Yeah, no, I think you’ll find that that’s a lot more productive. But again, I love that your kind of system is based on imperfect marketing, right?
Good and done is better than perfect and none, right? That’s just precisely your, and that’s why we were, we knew we were gonna get along great.
I find that so many of my clients in the past and my students now want it to be perfect, and it prevents them from getting started. And, you know, I’m always saying just get started. Good and done is better than perfect and none, because perfect is absolutely unattainable.
So yeah, that’s another kind of key ingredient, POP, Primary Organizing Principle, that I say over and over again to students.
Kendra Corman:
I always tell people, progress, not perfection, because it’ll get you a lot further. And I have a guest coming up on the show in early February, and one of the his things is he can beat you to market.
If he’s in your same industry, he will beat you all day long in your marketing because he can get to market faster with everything because he’s not striving for perfection. He puts out good quality stuff, but it’s not, you know, perfect.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yes.
Kendra Corman:
And he’s okay with that.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah. I think we need, I think so many of us are overachievers, right?
We’re always A+ students top of the class, and one of the things I’ve definitely learned in this online space is that B+ Is still gonna blow people’s socks off. We might know that it’s not our best work, but they’re looking for C average stuff.
So if we give them B+, they’re gonna be thrilled, and learn. And you know, so not that we’re cheating our clients, we’re not, but B+ is just as good as A+ cuz it gets them the results that they need.
So, yeah, striving for B+ is always, is my goal, is one of my goals for 2023.
Kendra Corman:
There you go.
And my word of the year is no. So I’m working on that because I think if I sign up for less stuff, I’ll have less piles. At least that’s my intention.
C.Lee Cawley:
I love that. So I am doing, every year I do word of the year exercise with my students and followers. And right now that’s exactly what we’re doing.
And so my word of 2023 is going to be bloom. Not grow or build, because I like the connotation of bloom in that it’s a living organic thing.
And other synonyms for bloom are flourish and prosper, and I feel like that’s going to suit me well. So yeah. I love that you’ve chosen the word no.
that’s a yes,
Kendra Corman:
I need to embrace it.
C.Lee Cawley:
Powerful word,
Kendra Corman:
Well, I don’t use it pretty much at all. And so I told my scheduling assistant, I’m like, “we’re gonna embrace the word no.”
And she’s like, “thank goodness, cuz you don’t really use that word very often.”
And I was like, “I know.”
So we’re working on it, but I think it’ll, I think it’ll be good and I think it’s really gonna help me move forward.
But what now?
So today is National Clean Your Desk Day.
C.Lee Cawley:
Mm-hmm.
Kendra Corman:
So when people are working to start cleaning your desk, what tips do you have for them?
C.Lee Cawley:
Hmm. I have so many tips. So one of the things that I think is important is to literally clean the desk off.
And so in my course, I encourage my students to have, I call it a collection container. And the things that are currently on your desk are probably the most important, the most recent.
So to collect all of the most recent stuff and seriously like, clean the desk. Get out your, you know, wet wipe cuz you know, your surfaces. Think about what’s on your desk. I feel that so often, people have tchotchkes and framed photos.
I’m like, you can look up, you’re working from home. You can look up and see your husband. You don’t need a framed photo of him on your desk. Right?
You know, I really want people to look at their desk from a fresh perspective. One of the things, Kendra, that I find so few people have is good lighting at their desk.
And especially because so many people are still working from home, they’re still using the makeshift situation that they came up with desperately in March and April of 2020.
If work from home is gonna be your new reality, or even your part-time reality, I really want you to invest the time and energy to get a supportive chair, a good surface and some excellent light.
I often found over the years that so many of my clients would be working at their dining room table. Partially because they can spread out, and also because there’s often like a chandelier, some light over the table.
Or you know, or it’s in one of the front rooms that has great, you know, open windows. And so thinking about where your desk is often is important too.
So many times people would have their desks tucked in the basement. Well, it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s lonely. I’d rather you have a smaller situation.
If you’re gonna work at the kitchen table, that’s great. Just have a little portable you know, desk caddy that has the supplies you need that you can take and tuck away when it’s time to have a meal.
So looking critically at your desk, I think is one of the key ingredients. Collecting all of the things and not worrying so much about the backlog. Right? You may never get to the backlog.
I just had an old client unearth a box that was like “Susie to sort”, and I had dated it September, 2017. It’s been a long time, and you know, there might be some gems in there.
I think she was going from one job to another, which is a hectic time. She threw it all in a box, “oh, I’ll sort that.”
She’s moved that box to a new home now and, when.
I’m, going a little off tangent, but when it’s the case and you see something like that and you think, “oh no, I can’t possibly sort that”, I’m gonna challenge you to get the timer on your phone out, turn the timer on, and see how long it really takes you.
I can almost guarantee you that something from over five years ago. She, and I challenged her. I’m like, “see how long it takes you?”
She hasn’t done it yet, but it won’t take that long because so much of that is timed out. It’s it, you know, that is one of the beautiful things about waiting a long time. Is very little is still timely, but the things on your current, your desk now are what need to be addressed.
So those are just a couple of my tips. Really, truly clean the desk. Look critically at what you have.
You just need a good light source.
You know, some pens, scissors, your electronics, your charging cables, you don’t need tchotchkes. Maybe a plant. I’ll allow a plant, but you know, really you don’t need all of that other stuff.
Maybe a fidget toy. And so that when you are at your desk, you can be productive.
Kendra Corman:
I love that, and I love admitting to the fact that you might not get to the backlog.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
And that’s okay, cuz it’s the backlog and clearly it wasn’t that important, otherwise you would’ve figured out a way to get to it, right?
C.Lee Cawley:
Right, right. And I’m like, is your mortgage getting paid? Have they turned off your lights? You know, if you’re getting to that stuff, there might be some important stuff in that, and that might be for retirement.
It might be, you know, but I want you to, to take control of the current papers so that you feel that you are on top of it.
That you, you know, the beautiful thing is, it’s interesting, Kendra, cuz. And I think you probably feel the same way.
It’s not that I’m passionate about paper. When I was actually organizing, I would prefer a closet or a pantry over paper, cuz you could get much bigger results in much shorter time, right?
The transformation was much more tangible. Paper takes a long time. If you’re doing paper correctly, you have to look at every piece of paper, which is very time intensive.
But what I am passionate about when people get the paper under control is that it’s a much bigger transformation in their life.
They are able to take control of their finances. I had a student who realized that she really could retire early. She had been avoiding looking at all of her financials and, but once she was able to gather them all together, she was able to meet with a financial advisor. She couldn’t meet with a financial advisor cuz “he was like, tell me what your numbers are.”
She had to capture that information. Once she actually met with him, she realized she could probably afford to retire sooner than she thought. Like,
Kendra Corman:
wow!
C.Lee Cawley:
That’s freaking powerful, right?
Kendra Corman:
Really powerful. Yeah.
C.Lee Cawley:
And so, you know, I’ve had students that have started a nonprofit volunteering, going on vacation. That’s real.
You know paper improvement leads to life empowerment and it’s so very powerful. So yeah. So that’s what excites me. Not really you know, making sure you know where to find last year’s W2. Well, it’s important. Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
I think that it takes off a lot of the stress.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yes.
Kendra Corman:
You know, too, because when I come in and I see this pile, I’m like, I already start my day on a negative, if that makes sense.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
Whereas if I came in and it was clean and shiny, that it would just be an entirely different mood for my whole day.
C.Lee Cawley:
And it helps with the prioritization, right?
Because there are the must dos and there are the want dos. And let’s be realistic. We may never get to the want to dos because the must-dos, you know, now I need to find a new washer.
As of yesterday, I didn’t.
As of today I do and we have a back load of laundry cuz my daughter’s home from London, but now I can prioritize something else is gonna have to fall down.
So it’s almost like I take my active project folders and shuffle them and sometimes it’s just like, what’s due tomorrow? If it’s a tip Tuesday and it’s Monday, that’s gonna filter to the top if I haven’t done it in advance.
And of course, you know, if you can batch that is so much more efficient. But sometimes people don’t have the ability to focus for a long time. That’s why the Pomodoro method can be very powerful.
Are you familiar with the Pomodoro method?
Kendra Corman:
Yes. I love the Pomodoro method and I have my little Pomodoro clock on my desk. I got it off of Amazon. It’s,
C.Lee Cawley:
That’s actually a timer, which you can see the time.
Yes. That’s a, you should definitely put a link to the time timer in the show.
Kendra Corman:
Oh, I will do that. I will do that. So a link to time timer.
But I love the time timer because it shows me visually how much is left. And it’s super easy to just turn it to the 25 and then turn it to the five when I get my little breaks.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
And I love living for my breaks and getting them through my Pomodoros, and it makes sure that I don’t get on a tangent for a long period of time too.
C.Lee Cawley:
Right. And also kind of knowing yourself. I had a couple of students, same thing, and 25 minutes was just too long.
Kendra Corman:
Mm-hmm.
C.Lee Cawley:
I’m like, you can make it 15, but if you’re doing, you know, if you’re doing 15 minute chunks and getting things done, that’s powerful.
Right. So much of organizing is exercising your decision making muscle, right? It’s like being a personal trainer for paper or stuff versus for your body.
We’re just teaching you how to make those decisions a little bit more decisively, a little bit quicker, and trusting yourself. So much of this is just trusting your own decisions.
People are like, “oh, what if, what if. What if”, right? But the burden of it is so much bigger than the “what if”, it’s kind of a balancing act.
If you can realize that holding onto those things that you may never be able to put your hands on because you can’t remember where you’ve put them, whether it’s scissors or staples or paper, is so much more burdensome than maybe having to recreate it.
Or you know one of my students like, “are you really telling me I can get rid of all of my product manuals?”
And I say “yes, because unless that product is now like over 20 years old, I can almost guarantee you that there is somebody on YouTube that can tell you how to change the time on your stove or whatever it is that you need to accomplish.”
Change the batteries in your smoke detector, and that’s gonna be a lot faster and easier to understand than finding the manual. Reading the manual.
No, wouldn’t we rather just have some good looking guy on YouTube? Show us how to do that? Absolutely.
Kendra Corman:
Yes, I would Google it if I needed to, even if, even if I know exactly where that thing is, I’m still gonna search for it on Google.
C.Lee Cawley:
Because it’s much faster.
So that’s, I mean, and I think the part of it, again, I’m gonna refer to myself as a 59 year old, right? For so many years of my life, that wasn’t an option, right? For, so, you know, my parents, that’s how they did things. And if that’s how I was taught then that’s how I might refer back to. But now we have so many more options.
And that’s one of the other things I als also want to reassure people is that your parents probably never taught you how to manage paper cuz they never had the amount of paper that we have in our lives today.
It’s mind boggling. It’s something like we get 400 pounds of junk mail a year, it’s
Kendra Corman:
Wow.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah, so, you know, your parents never had to deal with that.
They would get, you know, the Good Housekeeping magazine, a postcard from Aunt Betty and the electric bill. It’s nothing.
We are inundated with information in all manners, but also in paper form. So yeah, so don’t, don’t be too hard on yourself if you have a paper organization issue because your parents never taught you how to deal with it.
And neither do they teach this in school, right?
Kendra Corman:
Yeah.
C.Lee Cawley:
So you know, I think that it’s important to, to give yourself grace about that.
Kendra Corman:
Yeah. No, I definitely think it’s important to do that, and I’m definitely going to start with a collector and then go through it and, and organize it a bit here and see what I can do and make happen because yeah.
I’m getting buried under paper, on all like four sides of me. So definitely need to do it. So I’m super excited to have you talking about it.
Now, I know you have a course called the Paper Cleanse.
C.Lee Cawley:
Mm-hmm.
Kendra Corman:
Tell me a little bit about that and who it’s for.
C.Lee Cawley:
Absolutely. So the paper cleanse is my one month course that takes people kind of from the chaos to clarity by providing a step-by-step solution to help them finally declutter their piles and curate their files for a lifetime of paper organization.
And I also do this with no scanning needed. So my, it’s for someone pretty much like me, someone who is paper-based, a digital dinosaur. If I scan something, it’s like it’s disappeared into the ether, right?
If I already know where it is electronically, like, you know, I know how to find some things in my computer, that’s great. Some things just if they, I always say to people, if it exists electronically, you don’t need to print it out necessarily, but if it comes as paper, Is scanning, it may or it may not be the solution for you.
It takes a very organized person to scan and label and categorize. I think that’s a lot of effort and again, people are scanning stuff that they’re never gonna refer to again.
Oh my God, it’s so much work. So much
Kendra Corman:
it is
C.Lee Cawley:
work. So the paper cleanse is Exactly that. It’s a cleanse for your paper, so that you can prioritize the important items and also capture memories.
Memorabilia is a category that I feel is… often what I see people, it’s like you don’t have to take an action. It has nothing to do with taxes. And yet the memorabilia is kind of some of the most important paper, right?
Kendra Corman:
Mm-hmm.
C.Lee Cawley:
Cause it speaks to our memories. So we deal with that. It’s been really wonderful. It’s a system that I’ve used as an organizer since 2005, and it actually created the system for myself when we moved into our home.
We had lived in England in Fellows housing, my husband taught at and got his PhD at Cambridge University. And we kind of went from that to like all of a sudden being homeowners and roofs and sidewalks and lawns.
And I had, I was just like, oh, I have no idea. I had to come up with a system to help manage it all.
And then I realized that the system is able to, I can teach it to everybody. Everybody. It resonates with everybody on different levels. We all have different amounts of paper, we all have different priorities, but you can apply the framework to everyone.
So it’s been, it’s been a, a lot of fun. And I know people like paper fun, but it is, it is great when people have huge breakthroughs.
I had a student in my spring class who got rid of 250 pounds of paper.
Kendra Corman:
Wow.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah. And, and you know, he said, “I finally realized that I’m never going to refer back to it.”
You know, and sometimes you need to be in an age and stage where you realize that your priorities with, you know, the few decades of life you have left are not about going back to those papers.
So yeah, that was, that was pretty powerful.
Kendra Corman:
That’s very powerful. I love that. I love that story.
And I think it’s so important to get the paper under control, especially, you know, with as much as we’re dealing with.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah. It’s, yeah, you know, something else I have that your listeners might be interested in is I have a little pdf that’s 12 types of papers to toss today.
And it’s just going to give them just again, a dozen different types of paper that they can look at and say, “okay, yeah”, you know.
Manuals could be one of them. Manuals is one of them because it’s about trusting that you can get rid of it and not need it. So I’ll definitely that’s at Cleecawley.com/toss so you can include that in the show notes as well.
Kendra Corman:
we will have that for sure too because I think, I think it’s so important and I think not keeping stuff that you don’t need is truly the secret.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
Because I think if I looked at the source of most of my paper mess, it’s stuff that I’m keeping that I don’t need, and it’s ultimately, it’s burying the stuff that I do need, which is the problem.
C.Lee Cawley:
Right? Yes. You know, it’s so interesting. I had a a client. Again, in the financial world.
And I walked into her home and she literally had piles of paper, like knee high in different piles. And I’m like, well, what’s that? And she’s like, “oh, those are my financial papers that need to go into binders.”
Why?
“Well, because they have binder holes in them.”
I’m like, but this information is changing every day, right. You know, what you invested, especially in our current economy. But she was a single woman who was retired and that represented her whole life.
You know, how she was going to function as a retiree, and I realized it was the insecurity about the financial situation that made her feel that way.
And what we did was, she had eight major accounts. We had one piece of paper with the 12 months of the year and her eight accounts, and every time that paper came in, she just jotted down, “okay, you know, my TIAA CREF went from 40,000 to 30,000. Now I see.”
And she could see her net worth her investments on a month to month basis.
That was really the information she needed to capture. All she had to do was open the envelopes, get the big number, and if she started to see like a real trend, then she could look more closely at, “oh, do I need to re diversify? Do I need to change this up?”
But it literally took all of those piles of paper and reduced them to one 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper, and she was able to capture that information.
It was about trusting that she knew the information. So, but she needed permission, right?
Kendra Corman:
Yeah.
C.Lee Cawley:
And so I think that’s part of what my course gives people, is the permission to look at it from a different perspective.
So yeah. Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
I love that. I think it’s so powerful to, again, to take control of paper and not let paper control you. As I look around and look at all the paper controlling me right now.
But I think it’s, again, cuz I, I love paper. I do. I truly love paper.
And then I know I read one of your Tip Tuesdays on to keep or get rid of books, because I have a humongous book stash and I love to read.
And when I read business books, I don’t read ’em on my my Kindle.
C.Lee Cawley:
Hmm.
Kendra Corman:
I read my more leisurely books on my Kindle and my business books, I love paper for those. And yeah, there’s a lot that I’m not going back to.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah. And it’s also trusting yourself. You know I think the minimalist had the 2020 rule, and this is from a decade ago, but their concept was if it takes less than 20 minutes, or, if it costs more than $20, less than 20 minutes, something like, if you could always read by that book, right?
Like it’s an abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset. And maybe rebuying that book and reading it with fresh, not what you highlighted when you started your business 20 years ago, or a decade ago.
But looking at it with fresh eyes might make more powerful if you do that, read that book. Books are hard.
I understand books are like, friends. Books are not cheap if we’re investing in them, but you know, I think so much of with books is giving them, if you can give them to the right people.
As an organizer, I’ve read literally every organizing book ever to come out. I’m in an organizing book club, but it gives me great pleasure to give those books to newer organizers and say, you know, this is one where you’ll really get a lot of information.
I’ve absorbed what I need and I’m letting go.
And the other thing is, and this is what I need to tell many people, is just because you buy the book You actually need to read it to get the information. You can’t just get the information by osmosis, by owning the book
Kendra Corman:
I have a few of those books.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
Not many of them, but a few of those for sure.
Yeah, no, I think it’s, I think that that’s, again, another really powerful insight. So when you’re looking at your books, or whatever it is, whatever your paper or organizing problem is, I think it’s key to look at it from a different perspective.
I think that’s what’s really important, you know, and as the new year has started and we’re, you know, looking at turning over new leaves and probably trying to get more organized as we go, I think it’s really important to take that fresh perspective.
Now, this podcast is called Imperfect Marketing.
There’s one question that I ask all of my guests, and since you have moved from a actual physical organizing business, to an online business with your paper cleanse course and your eBooks, and your online coaching to help people, organize their lives.
What’s the biggest marketing lesson learned that you have?
C.Lee Cawley:
So I would definitely think that the biggest marketing lesson I’ve learned is connecting with people through email and consistency.
So I’ve been doing my tip Tuesdays now for over five years. People read them, and that’s wonderful to know that, you know, I’m not just pushing things out into the air, it resonates with them.
People come back to me and say, “oh, I did that.”
And that consistency is very powerful. So I think that it costs nothing to be consistent except for time and energy and planning. And because I say it’s Tip Tuesday, right there it is in your email inbox at [8:00] AM every Tuesday morning.
And you know, I’d say it’s about 80% tips and 20% promotion because I am a business person. I need to pay for this lifestyle.
But even when it’s promoting something, I think that people are like, “oh, I didn’t know that you offer a closet clarity compendium. Wow, I need to switch my clothes over.”
Fantastic. Right? Because we always have new people coming into our world and we think, oh, I’ve talked about that before, but somebody new in my world hasn’t heard my retail email tip.
So, you know, that’s the other thing is, and even if you had heard it before, maybe you didn’t do it the first time, you heard it, but it bears repeating.
So I think that it took me, I think four years before I ever repeated an idea in my tips, cuz I
Kendra Corman:
Wow, that’s a lot of tips.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah, there’s a lot of tips.
So yeah, so I think that that is for me, Kendra, the imperfect email tip that I would have is being consistent.
And I’m not a big social media person. It doesn’t come naturally to me. And, you know, I like social media, but it’s not how I really communicate with my people.
So, I liked the emails and being able to talk to them and, hearing back from them, like, you know, about the word of the year, I’m asking ’em like, tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.
And I’m getting some great replies throughout the first of the year. So I think that that’s a lot of fun. So that would be my.
Kendra Corman:
I think that that’s great. I think, I love the fact that you found consistency helps, because I’m sure you weren’t getting replies necessarily, like the first couple of times you were sending out your tip tuesday.
It takes time to build that up.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
And yes, 80% value added, 20%, you know, selling, which I think is a great rule to do. And the reason the reason it is, is because you’re still not selling, you’re adding value.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
And these are people that have been following you and are ready for the next level.
C.Lee Cawley:
Yeah.
Kendra Corman:
And so they want to buy from you and the service that you’re offering because it does add value. And they might not have been ready the first time around. Or they forgot about it.
C.Lee Cawley:
And especially with people who are disorganized, it’s a lot, you know, you think, “well, I can’t take on a course. I can’t take, can’t even read an ebook because I’m so overwhelmed.”
But there’s always a tipping point, and we never know where that tipping point’s gonna be for any of us. You know, when I was working in people’s homes, the tipping point might be my mother-in-law’s coming to visit. Oh my gosh. Right?
Or, you know, we’re having a, we’re moving, it’s, you know, situational, new baby, new marriage, new home. And I think that that’s also true with people in this realm.
Where’s the tipping point? And taking some of the ideas and then realizing that if you can put them together cumulatively, you’re gonna get a lot bigger results, a lot quicker.
So, yeah, it’s a lot of fun, what we do.
Kendra Corman:
I think that that’s great.
And again, I would strongly encourage you to sign up for C.Lee’s tip Tuesday. I get a lot out of it. Again, I’ve read her Tip Tuesdays on books, on organizing papers, and not filing the ones that are all the way at the bottom, right?
Because what I couldn’t find it to begin with, so filing it doesn’t make it referenceable, right? Because I probably am still not gonna remember that it’s there. So I love that.
And so in honor of national Clean Your Desk Day, definitely clean off your desk, put it in a collector and sign up for C.Lee’s Tip Tuesday.
I’m super excited that you took the time to go through all of these wonderful, actionable tips with us and my audience and everybody who’s listening, because I think it’s really important as part of what we’re doing to move ourselves forward to be more productive.
Yes. Having your paper at your fingertips is gonna be important. Or not having it at your fingertips, cause that’s the way you like to do it, so.
C.Lee Cawley:
Exactly. Well, I really appreciate you having me on. It’s a great time of year for a fresh start and you know, celebrate that clean desk and get more productive, Absolutely.
Kendra Corman:
So thanks again for joining us for another Imperfect Marketing episode. If you got something out of this, I’d love it if you would go ahead and rate this and subscribe it wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’ll see you soon on another Imperfect Marketing episode.