Ep.23: Organized Hoes Live Longer
If you have 5,000 emails in your inbox right now, this one's for you.
If You Don't Have a Calendar, You're Insane
How do you have a meeting and not have it in your calendar? How do you have a morning check-in and not know what time it's at? How do you forget about something that is literally scheduled?
Everything should be in your calendar. Time blocking. Meetings. Admin. Everything.
And if you're finding yourself late to shit all the time, it's probably because you don't actually know when things are happening. Add buffer time before your events. If your meeting is somewhere other than your computer, add the drive time as its own calendar event so you're not scrambling last minute.
You should be 15 minutes early to everything. Period.
The Secret Morning Hack
One of the best things you can do is get on before anyone knows you're working.
Log on 30 minutes to an hour early. Go on Do Not Disturb. Knock out all your admin, clear your emails, prep for your day. By the time everyone else shows up, you're already ahead.
Nobody is pinging you. Nobody is pulling you into something. You're just getting shit done in peace.
And here's a related move that sounds unhinged but actually works: if you're drowning and you can't catch up, take a "sick day" that isn't actually a sick day. Mark yourself as out. But work the entire day without anyone knowing. You will be shocked at how much you get done when people aren't constantly coming at you.
If you work in an office and can't just quietly do this, bring it to your manager. Tell them you want one day where nobody knows you're working so you can actually move the business forward. Any decent manager would say yes to that. And if they don't? You probably shouldn't work there.
Your Inbox Is Disgusting
5,000 emails in your inbox is the equivalent of 5,000 pieces of paper on your desk.
You wouldn't let that happen physically. So why are you letting it happen digitally?
Here's what you're going to do:
Go through the last 7 days of emails. Think about the categories they fall into. Awaiting response. Action needed. Travel. Whatever fits your work. Create labels for those categories. Keep it to 5, maybe 10 max. Don't overcomplicate it.
Label everything that's currently active and relevant.
Then select all. Archive everything else.
You didn't delete anything. It's all still searchable. But now your inbox is clean and you can actually see what matters.
Start every day like this. Label. Archive. Delete the junk. End every day with a fresh empty inbox.
One of us was sitting on emails from 2017 before finally doing this. Eight to ten years of hoarded emails. Gone. And life has been crisp ever since.
If you're in the thousands on your work email, you're definitely not doing well with your personal one either. Because you're not even prioritizing the emails your livelihood depends on. People miss important shit all the time because of this.
That's not organization. That's hoarding. Stop hoarding emails.
Your Goals Should Connect
You should know your business plan. You should know what you're doing this quarter. You should know when your quarter ends.
Take your annual goal and break it into 12 monthly pieces. Then break those into weekly actions. You're not going to know exactly what December looks like when you're planning in January. That's not the point. The point is you know what you're doing this month.
If things shift, you adjust the next month. But at least you're moving in a direction. The trajectory is forward. That's all that matters.
Do Not Run a Meeting Without an Agenda
If you are running a meeting and you don't have a timed agenda shared with your team beforehand, you suck.
People need to know what they're walking into. Meetings with structure are productive. Meetings without structure are just group suffering.
And while we're here: take 10 minutes before anything, to prep. Review your notes. Get your brain organized. You don't have to read from a script, but knowing what you want to cover means you're never the person who shows up and says "sorry, I'm so unprepared."
Being prepared is a choice. And choosing not to prepare and then panicking about it? That's a you problem. Get your shit together. You're a fucking adult.
Organization Literally Keeps You Alive
Stress is the number one killer. Organization reduces stress. Therefore, organized hoes live longer. The math checks out.
Think about the people you know who are constantly overwhelmed. Constantly saying they're stretched too thin. Constantly drowning.
A lot of the time, when you look at their actual workload, it's not that they have too much. It's that they're too disorganized to manage what they have.
Meanwhile there are people running multiple businesses who are less stressed. Not because they have less to do. Because they have systems. They prioritize. They delegate. They organize their time down to the hour.
We all have the same 24 hours. If your day isn't organized, you don't have a time problem. You have aN ORGANIZATION problem.
You Don't Have to Be Naturally Organized
Neither of us came into this wired for organization. It was trained. Bit by bit, over years.
Voice recording notes. Writing things down. Learning to delegate instead of trying to control everything. Asking people who seem to have their shit together what they actually do.
If you're a control freak, you need to hear this: you cannot be organized at a high level without delegating. It's not possible. You will always be the bottleneck.
Delegation is a whole other episode. But for now, just know that the version of you that tries to do everything alone is the version of you that stays stressed.
Work Organization Bleeds Into Everything
The systems you build at work: calendars, labels, goal frameworks, prep routines, will naturally start showing up in your personal life. And when both sides are organized, you get so much more out of everything.
So clean your inbox. Use your calendar. Prep before your meetings. Set goals that connect. And stop drowning in chaos you created yourself.
Because if your day isn't organized down to every hour, you still have more time in a day. You're just not using it.
